‘Art should astonish, transmute, transfix’, Brett Whiteley once said, adding ‘one must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia’.

And, in recent years at least, in the crack between poverty and scraping by, as Australia’s arts and cultural scenes were stripped of the support necessary to enrich the nation’s consciousness—or even just brighten someone’s day. Creatives may be compelled to create, reflecting back our hearts, fears, desires and whimsies to the mutual benefit of the nation at large, but the nation’s representatives felt no such compulsion to fund it.