MR DONEMAN:
I will ask Lisa to come down. When we work with young people - just on the issue of copyright, by the way - the rule of thumb, because it's so intensely complex is just assume if you put anything on-line the copyright disappears. The Internet is a global medium and there are countries that receive the Internet that are not signatories to the Bern Copyright Convention, like India for example which has a middle class that buys T-shirts, of about 250,000,000.

There's nothing in law, international or domestic law, that stops an Indian entrepreneur downloading your image and using it as a stencil for a T-shirt. There might be a problem if they sold it here, but there's that huge home market. So you do have rights and copyright does exist, but essentially as I understand it copyright laws are built for objects, for the transference of objects, and when we talk about a virtual commodity, a lot of that law doesn't seem to kick in any more.

There are things that you can do in the meantime to actually minimise the risk of people ripping off images or sounds. You can muck around with the compression, with the size of the images, in order to make them very difficult to reproduce once they were expanded and blown up and put onto a silk-screen or what have you.

A straw poll - I'm surprised nobody has done this yet. I have been to a few conferences where people do this. I will ask you to put your hands up if these categories pertain to you, but just have a look around the room when you do at how many people in the room as a whole put their hands up. It's difficult to do with the raked seats, but I will start by asking people to raise their hands if they consider themselves regular users of e-mail. Just have a look around the room as well.

Okay. Hands up still if you would say that you have access to the Internet at work. Okay. Hands now for those people who have access to the Internet at home. It's a different group - it's interesting. Can we just do that again - work, home. Who produces work, creative work for the Internet? Okay. Finally, who would say that they would spend on average more than 2 hours a day logged on? Let's just do those two again. Who produces for the Internet? Who spends more than 2 hours a day on the Net? Okay. Derive your own conclusions from that; it was a bit of a warm-up really. It's interesting.

What I have got here is about 15 minutes of speech altogether. I plan to read some of that and then we'll do a bit of a surf through the Perfect Strangers Web site. Not so much just to show Web pages but talk about a couple of the projects that those sites, those pages discuss or pertain to. But first just some written words.

I began to write this speech sitting against a corrugated iron wall at Mara Bore, an Aboriginal out-station 120 kilometres west of the Warlpiri township of Yuendemu which is about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, the most central town in Australia, and itself some thousands of kilometres from my east coast home. It's an area called the Tanami Desert and it's vast. Most people who live out here are Aboriginal and most speak their mother tongue as a first language ... Arrernte, Warlpiri, Pitjantjatjara and so on.

Contact, the organisation I have just left, is collaborating with Quantum Cooperative Multimedia Centre, the organisation I have just joined, on a young men's cultural exchange. We brought with us 12 young men and six older artists of Murray and non-Murray backgrounds. There has been dancing and singing, storytelling, hunting, politics, tycho, Internet, video and kangaroo cooked under the ground and served bloody - Hannibal-style as they say. This is not a meat and this is not a country for weak stomachs.

Around me at Mara Bore and a little below in the almost trackless mulga and spinifex plain where the horizon sweeps around 360 degrees in a vast, flat arc they say it takes you about half an hour of walking before you're hopelessly lost, a little bit longer without water and you're delirious. This is one of the most remote places on the planet. But not so, after all. This out-station, as part of a movement among indigenous Australians to return to traditional ways and the land itself, the core of their reality, is owned by the Warlpiri through the agency of the elder Rex Jappanangka Granite, insofar as any Warlpiri owns anything.

Mara Bore has a solar-powered microwave transmitter-receiver attached to a common Telstra phone box, much the same as you would see in a city street. Uncle Rex is Internet capable - or at least would be if he had paid his last phone bill - and as for remoteness they say Kintore is the really remote spot, but when we were in the Tanami media building in Yuendemu we video-conferenced with some of the Kintore mob by satellite and it didn't seem so far away.

Incidentally I heard just the other day that it's likely that Imparja TV which is owned by a television station which is owned by CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, is about to expand its satellite footprint such that it covers the entire continent.

One of the reasons we did this trip was that Chris Lee, my colleague at Quantum, who will manage the Quantum Indigenet program has a brief to develop multimedia and on-line skills among indigenous communities, both in the towns and in the bush. I won't say much more about the indigenous program at Quantum because Chris will actually be in town shortly at the LITA conference and he is better able anyway to represent what is happening with that project. I will mention it later but I won't go into detail about it because it's a whole story in itself.

I think I'm here today on the strength of my work and that of my partner, Ludmilla Doneman in youth and community arts over the last 10 years. What may be most interesting about that for this symposium is the way the work evolved in choosing so-called multimedia and the Net.

A definition note on this word "multimedia" - let's just say I mean what the journalists mean, nothing specific. For functional purposes just think of it as a kind of amorphous grey mass of hissing, squawking, wires and glass, electricity, interactivity, e-mail, computer screens, colours, a lot of stuff going backwards and forwards, pornography - that kind of thing.

When it comes down to it you know what multimedia is by how you use it, not by the way it's described to you. You know multimedia by multi mediating, or doing it. Thus the first and crucial issue is the issue of access. Ludmilla and I started work in youth arts and cultural development when we codirected La Boite Youth Theatre in Brisbane in the eighties.

P-i-e-d-i-e-p-a-b-a-o-b-c-c-d-b-c-e-s-y-e-s-e-d-q-y-n-q-e-c-c-q - that's when the acronyms started. Confetti grants for feel-good work, piece them together and make yourself a company. Skim here, trim there, rob Peter to pay Pauline, flying on the smell of an oily rag, working insane hours and loving it for a while. That's how we put together Contact Youth Theatre 7 years ago and started in with serious indigenous and cross-cultural work and a whole new forest of acronyms, and also started finding support from non-arts youth agencies like education, transport, health, social services and so on.

It's exhausting in this country to work in such a field. Malnourished is quote "underprivileged fraction of a privileged minority" which is what our theatre industry really is and at the same time trying to remember some kind of commitment to social change, social justice, community benefit, equity - pick your acronym. It's exhausting and we have seen a lot of people burn out.

One of the things that kept us going and helped us survive was that indigenous and migrant communities or any SB communities - if you prefer the acronym - as well as the youth services sector, all of which speak different lingos and have different perspectives - forced us out of our arts ghetto. On the one hand we had Murrays saying that art was just a part of life after all, a kind of way of being, and on the other hand we had social workers and educators saying that art should operate on or affect life or it's useless.

So we dropped eventually the word "theatre" out of our name, not because we stopped using theatre; on the contrary Contact almost always uses drama work in some way in its projects, it's just that we were doing a lot of other things as well. The multimedia work was as well as, not instead of. Now the organisation is just Contact Incorporated and it is becoming a kind of brokerage for young cultural workers, a kind of incubator for cultural work; not too choosy about its tools and using anything that isn't nailed down.

Over 7 years Contact's work has been a platform for a number of new groups and networks including ... Aboriginal Corporation, Queensland's first all-indigenous professional contemporary theatre company, Youth Arts Queensland, the state's peak youth arts and cultural development network, Digitarts, young women on-line led by Lisa Burnett and Perfect Strangers, a site on the World Wide Web. This is what we have now. We will come to it in just a sec. Just a note about that. All of these influences have converged, to use a term, rapidly and recently over the past year or so, and much of it is mirrored in the early pages of Perfect Strangers. Perfect Strangers, Digitarts and Contact itself are now housed in a new youth centre in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley called Grunt, which in itself is part of a broad based community project called Making Space.

Grunt is 1 year into a 3-year pilot period and houses office, studio and exhibition spaces and an on-line telecentre which is used for training, projects and public access. The telecentre is there so it's being used. Its presence in the building means that artists and young people start to incorporate it into what they're doing. After all, after the substantial set-up costs are covered - and that's an access issue again - it's a very cheap medium to use day by day.

So this is - if I do this can you still hear me? This is the contents pages - the contents organise these four areas ... minute when I said it reflects what we've been going through. I mean, I notice just in caching some of these pages earlier that some of these early GIFs are like 120 K's or whatever - for those of you who know what that means, whereas some of the later work that Lisa has done, the GIFs are like 10 K's, you know, which basically means they load about ten times as quickly.

"Know" is background infrastructure policy, as I mentioned; "Business" is a commercial area which we haven't developed much at all yet, but I'll talk some more about that in a minute, and "Pit" is the interactive area, the area for experimentation, the area for live on-line discussions and such. Just because Lisa and I both mentioned the Grunt project, these are just some pages from the early days when we were renovating this snake pit in the valley.

We did a project - we actually had Australia Council pages up before the Oz Council did too. We were quite pleased about that, although apparently they're full of inaccuracies. Some Grunt pictures coming down slowly. It's an example of just being able to use the technology because it's there. In this case we had to renovate this snake pit and turn it into a youth centre.

We had a digital camera and we had access to the machines already, so we simply documented that, made some pictures of before and after and etcetera, and it goes on-line as an archive and sits there at next to no cost forever.

When I said it's a broad based community project, it involves an interagency, the Brisbane Youth Interagency which includes about 60 members drawn from everybody that deals with kids in the CBD in the valley, in Brisbane. Everybody from the cops to the Krishnas - they all have an interest in it. It started its life as an idea for a drop-in centre, basically a safe, comfortable place for kids to go, especially when regular agencies were closed, and turned into something a little bit more proactive than that.

To give you, apart from anything else, just an idea of the neighborhood, the grunge tag is probably actually right to describe this building, certainly relative to what say Ngpartji have been doing recently. The CMC, the Queensland CMC will be having something to do with this too, and I'll mention that when I get back to the speech.

The valley is a run-down, sort of sleazy area. It would be a sort of St Kilda or Darlington, Redfern, Kings Cross sort of neighborhood. It's gentrifying rapidly but our end of the street isn't. It was the heart of some of the scams that went on during the pre-Fitzgerald period in Queensland - sex, drugs, gambling, SP booking, that sort of stuff. In fact we think Grunt itself was an SP bookies' den because there are about 37 phone jacks spread through the whole place.

This is an ISDN line, too, this is actually a quick connection we have got here. Okay, so various projects - and I just want to mention and go through a couple of these. Just have a look at Black Voices. This is a compilation of documentation of work that youth arts organisations have been doing with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people around the country, Contact in Brisbane, Yuriakin in Perth and Corrugated Iron Youth Theatre in Darwin. We will probably look at Corru Iron, I think. Each one has an icon point on the icon - point and click on the icon, off we go.

This is coming from a server computer in Brisbane. We didn't pay for the telecentre, we didn't pay for the machines and we don't pay for the band width for the Internet traffic that we use. Those came from a deal, first of all with a private sector Internet supplier in our neighborhood in the valley, and now there is some interest and involvement from Queensland University of Technology as well. They've basically given us old machines. They're perfectly capable of doing what we need them to do, which is low end Web construction work. They're a little bit slow and daggy, but on the other hand, they're free so who's arguing?

Corru Iron is likely to be one of our key organisations for the development of the Quantum's Youth Works program in the future, and I'll come back to that in a second. Yes, a project that they did called Heartbeat of the Earth, and I think it was an all-Aboriginal one, this one, and what we have is text and photographs from the production.

Also at the bottom of a lot of these pages there are e-mail addresses so that people can respond immediately to what they're looking at, and in a way it allows what is usually theatrical work in this case to have - to find an audience beyond what it finds accidentally or by circumstance, the people that happen to be in the town with the bucks to spend on that particular night. This one looks really good. The little hearts are nice.

I wonder why this is slower than it was outside. That's better, a little bit of patience. We were meeting with Corrugated Iron in Darwin fairly recently - eventually they're looking to set up a similar Grunt-type space, that is to co-locate a set of physical facilities with a set of virtual facilities that overlap each other, and it's not such a big deal. Eight in our case - eight 486 PCs which are now worth probably a grand each second-hand, if that, which anyway we got for free, and a server computer, a so-called gateway server computer that they are networked into and that stays on-line with the Net 24 hours a day, which is a slightly fatter, more expensive computer but nothing real flash. Then we have a digital camera, a scanner, we use Lisa's printer and Lisa's computers as well. So it's not a real expensive thing. You can do this on the smell on the oily rag.

Tolerance was a project that we worked on about a year and a half ago. The National Museum of Australia saw this site and were impressed with it. They were concerned at the time with putting up an exhibition based on the themes on the International Year of Tolerance and they were concerned that young people respond generally quite badly to static wall displays in museums. They wanted a so-called interactive and they thought it would be groovy if - yes, this exhibition is actually on in Brisbane, in Adelaide at the moment. I didn't know that. We should have sort of got to it. It's just finished, so you can't go to that - just after you don't go to the copyright thing.

They thought that would be good if that was designed and made by young people. They were impressed by the fact that all of this is designed, made and administered by young people themselves. So they commissioned us to put up some pages so that they could simply have just an interactive computer exhibition. They wanted to do two things apart from actually give it - make it so that it was interesting to young people themselves and that was to expand or to develop the audience beyond the walls of a museum that the exhibition happened to find itself in. This will be touring the country for the next couple of years.

But then they also wanted a conduit for young people who were seeing the exhibition in the flesh or in virtual space to feed back; either comment on the exhibition or feed in their own experiences, their own stories of tolerance and intolerance.

Yes, they were paid. What happened was that we took the money basically had handed it to a group of young people who then went and made a project with New Farm Primary School which is a school in a neighboring suburb to where we are, where there are more than 50 languages spoken, and work shopped this material with those kids, those primary school kids.

There is nothing real buttons and bells, real flash about this. It isn't high-end technology. We're not yet in the business of knocking people's socks off with the technology, but apparently it's highly effective in the actual exhibition. I don't know if we have time now but we could go - go to the feedback. So it's possible for you to respond to what you've seen in real life or in virtual space of the exhibition, tell stories, and those can be compiled and come back to the future viewers of the exhibition and archived for future reference in 10, 20, 100 years' time.

Some of the feedback from Adelaide has been particularly good so they obviously put it in a prominent place. When it played in Canberra - when the exhibition was on in Canberra it didn't - it received hardly anything in feedback, although in both places they're telling us that the exhibition - that particular exhibit is a big success with young people. They crowd around it. They want to use it all the time. This is what some of the people around Adelaide - young people around Adelaide have said about it. You can't read that, can you? Take it from me, they liked it.

Virtual Valley - the other thing about this was that not only could we pay the young people to create this - and therein lies a point that I want to make later about the private sector and earning your own money rather than depending on grants - but we could actually hire a person to tutor them in so-called CGI scripting, which meant that they were able to write forms to which you could respond into the Web pages, which was not a skill that they had available to them before that project. Those skills then are carried on into further projects.

This is a cultural mapping project that we did. Who paid for this? Yes, I think it was a project paid for by Brisbane City Council. It was basically a group of young people again who did some low-end tutorial work, how to write HTML, how to put up a Web page, how to do some basic graphics processing, how to use a digital camera - like that. They created alternative maps. It was a bit inspired by those tourist maps you get - you know, the heritage trail around such and such a place, that sort of notion. So they made young person's, young people's - they're highly subjective maps of the valley and there were some really fascinating discoveries that came out of that. This is the electronic version of this and there is also a paper version that was published, and it has been so successful that BCC - Brisbane City Council - want to employ or commission the company to actually work on a further virtual mapping, or youth cultural mapping by young people project next year. That will be a project called Plastic Valley, where we'll take the outcomes of this sort of exploration and use further technologies that we'll have available to us then.

There's one called stereo lithography where you basically cut a resin model, a life-size resin model to fit the precise dimensions of a model that you've created in virtual space. So we're looking at alternative streets capes being created and presented in gallery format around the city of Brisbane, thus allowing people to feed back - to envisage and feed back on ideas that young people have had about improving the so-called livability of Brisbane.

We don't censor anything. As my two-bob's worth on the pornography debate is that it's a non-debate too as far as I'm concerned. It's like any porn; it's just - it's mostly pretty boring and once people get over it they get over it. So I'm going to ask Lisa just to continue surfing - so if you're bored with what you're listening to you can at least look at something.

Do you know what the CMCs are? Is it worth me spending a minute just explaining where the CMCs come from and what they are? Yes? Okay. The CMCs are an outcome of the Creative Nation cultural policy which Keating laid down a couple of years ago. In that policy $87,000,000 was made available for the development of Australian multimedia. Some went to the Australian Film Commission, some went to the Australian Film Radio Television School and then there were three projects - three big projects.

One was called Australia on CD, which was a CD-ROM production project that is finished now. They're mainly geared for school-age audiences. The second was called the AME, the Australian Multimedia Enterprise, which is a kind of development bank, a bit like the Australian Film Finance Corporation for multimedia. The third was a network of so-called CMCs, or Cooperative Multimedia Centres, to be set up around the country and there is six of those that have more or less recently been put on the ground, with about 1.4 million federal dollars yearly for 3 years with generally matching or better funding from private sector or private shareholders which very often include the universities.

One I'm about to work for is called Quantum, Queensland and Northern Territory Multimedia and that's our stamping ground. The one here in Adelaide is called Ngpartji. There is one in WA called Imago, there is one in Sydney called Access, there is one in Melbourne called Emerge and there is one that is nowhere in particular, although supposedly headquartered in Brisbane, called Starlit. Each one is quite different in terms of what it offers its constituency.

I think I have got about 7 minutes more of this and then maybe there is time for questions - we'll see. Quantum Youth Works, which is the program of the CMC of the Quantum CMC that I'm working with now is unique among the CMCs. It is modeled on Contact's work and the Grunt Centre experience which themselves have been influenced by the Frontrunners and Chaos Pilots projects in Arhus, Denmark. It aims to locate at least some of its projects at the Grunt Centre itself, as well as a set of five regional nodes or access points in Queensland and the Territory, and possibly interstate.

So if you want to set up one of these things come and have a chat or get a card from me and we can talk about it. Youth Works targets a particular group - young people not entering or not succeeding in conventional education and training systems. Like the rest of the CMCs it sets out to bring together three streams: education training, the creative arts and commerce.

What this means to Contact's practice and that of other Grunt users is an introduction to the marketplace, a place we had only known before from the outside as critics or from the inside as consumers. We didn't know much about the marketplace as commercial producers or entrepreneurs. We were community arts workers, urban lefties chanting the mantra "access, participation, equity, empowerment". We were not suits, we were not corporates, we were not them.

But when we're talking about multimedia this isn't just ideology any more. These are real corporations, real people with real money and lots of it. They're everywhere you look because multimedia is everywhere you look from taxis, to bedrooms, to galleries, to government, to submarines, to zoos and to the moon. Multimedia and the Net, this grey amorphous mass is precipitating social, political, economic and cultural changes we've only just begun to imagine.

The printing press, the still camera, the movie camera, the video camera, radio, telephone, television, computing all rolled into one and spreading around the global telephone system like a virus.

A question arises: is it possible by virtue of its use of multimedia and the Internet to operate an organisation like Contact within the marketplace independent of direct government support - private sector community arts? Isn't this a sacrilege, some kind of contradiction in terms - because the opportunity is there? Some young people at Grunt are already starting to earn reasonable money by getting multimedia skills and the kind of performance-vis-arts-music background mix of most Australian youth theatre in quotes "practice" is a healthy stamping ground and incubator for new and eminently marketable talent.

Is this a sell-out, survival or what? One thing's for sure, public sector arts funding is drying up and has been in real terms for years. The confetti of grants is slowing and the confetti pieces are getting smaller. If community arts can't stand the heat it has to build a new kitchen, otherwise it will share the same slow demise along with so much else of the welfare state.

Some last thoughts about information technologies and community. I reckon you can think of information technology in two ways: first, as a quick, efficient and once you get or get at the hardware, cheap way of exchanging information; second, as a new form of interactive communication where people all over the world are creating new kinds of communities and cultural expressions.