Even in fledgeling nations like East Timor, there's a strong case for including arts coverage among news priorities.
If the headline above has induced you to read this column, then you and I probably hold certain truths to be self-evident; namely, that reporting on and reading about the arts are worthwhile activities. In some countries and cultures, though, these truths are harder to defend.
I was recently invited to speak to a group of five East Timorese journalists visiting Australia as part of a program run by the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre under the Aus-AID funded Australian Leadership Awards. The request was to talk to the journalists about why it’s important to include arts stories in their mainstream media reporting, and at first I was baffled by the question. After all, arts stories have been part of the daily Australian news diet since I first began reading the papers over three decades ago, as inevitable as stories about sport, politics and the weather.
But when you’re the newest nation on the planet with one of the lowest GDPs, one of the highest birth rates, one of the lowest literacy rates and one of smallest media sectors in the world, perhaps your news priorities are justifiably different. In the three decades that I was happily munching on my muesli and reading theatre previews, film reviews and profiles of musicians, in East Timor (population one million) the death toll from conflict, disease and hunger was climbing to almost two hundred thousand.
And in the decade since the East Timorese gained independence, they have had to contend with more civil conflict, political instability, drought, famine and the ongoing possibility that their new nation will become a failed state. So in the midst of these pressing problems, why bother reporting the arts in the Timorese media?
Here are the three strongest arguments I could muster:
Firstly, although most artists have very little formal political power in our society, some artists do have great influence. It’s important to hear from those people so that we can understand the nature of that influence and learn from their experiences. In East Timor, poetry and song played a powerful role in the independence movement, inspiring people to continue the struggle for freedom against those who had brazenly stolen their political autonomy.
Post-independence, the Dili-based community theatre company Bibi Bulak (Crazy Goat) has done heroic work with limited resources, entertaining traumatized Timorese and helping them grapple with social problems like domestic violence and the spread of HIV AIDS.
An example relevant to both our nations is Balibo, the 2009 Australian feature film about the five Australians newsmen killed in East Timor in 1975 whose murderers have not yet been brought to justice. Most Australian politicians tried to ignore this story for many decades but soon after Robert Connolly’s film came out, the Commonwealth Government finally authorized an Australian Federal Police investigation into the five deaths. More recently, an Indonesian screening of the film flushed out a former soldier who finally admitted publicly that the men were murdered.
Balibo has been a striking example of how art can influence politics, and it leads to my second argument for reporting the arts, because artists are often the people asking pointed questions about who has power, who deserves to have power, and how that power affects common people.
In East Timor, musicians have written and recorded songs about how the new nation’s controversial policy of having two official languages (Tetun and Portuguese) has impacted on a younger generation educated in Bahasa Indonesia and therefore shut out of many jobs in the growing Portuguese-dominated civil service.
In Melbourne in February twenty thousand people, led by a large number of professional musicians, marched in the streets to protest against state government liquor licensing policies which threaten to shut down many live music venues, ruining livelihoods and curtailing cultural diversity - and the politicians were listening.
And finally, artists and the work they generate are often important contributors to a sense of community, of shared experience, history and language, and can thus play a role in the process of nation building. Timorese writer Naldo Rei, whose memoir Resistance was published in 2008, calls himself ‘a storyteller for (my) people. I carry their stories like heavy stones, forgetting nothing’. Artists often hold the key to our collective memory, providing moral leadership with an authority based not on political or military power but on their vision, their wisdom and their humanity.
If Timorese journalists are interested in serving “the public interest”, then surely it is in the public interest’s to read stories about those creative people who often ask the most difficult questions about the past and imagine the brightest possibilities for the future.
Sian Prior is a Melbourne-based writer and broadcaster, and has made several trips to East Timor to report on the arts, tourism and language policy.
The eight-week "Editorial Leadership and Security in Timor-Leste" program was funded by AusAID under the Australian Leadership Awards (ALA) Fellowship Program.
