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The Creative Nation Cultural Policy: Will it play in Australia Street?

Assoc. Professor Chris Nash

Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway 2007
Australia

email: C.Nash@uts.edu.auAbstract

Assoc. Professor Shirley Alexander

Director, Institute for Interactive Multimedia
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway 2007
Australia

email: S.Alexander@uts.edu.au
Abstract
The Australia Street Archive is an NPRF-funded project in interactive multimedia with CD-ROM and WWW outcomes. It is concerned with the expression of Australian collective identities (national, ethnic, class, gender, etc.) and diverse cultural heritages in the construction and use of domestic space, and their relationship to the physical and biological environments. The project closely documents (using recorded interviews, still images and archival material) a sample of houses and gardens chosen from st reets literally called 'Australia Street' across the country.

The project is an ambitious one that sits squarely within the aims of government cultural and communications policy as set out in Creative Nation. It has raised many issues with respect to this policy, both technical and conceptual, which this paper will address using the Australia Street experience as its prime reference point.

The narrative strategy of the project prioritises audio-visual literacy over written literacy and aims to achieve a richly nuanced, open-ended narrative structure that challenges audience pre-conceptions about the range of Australian collective identities while at the same time presenting material which is familiar to them in its individual iconography. The WWW version of Australia Street will include also a facility for collaborative authorship over time and space with members of the community.

Following discussion of issues arising from this strategy the paper will discuss the likelihood of achievement of some of the creative and cultural aims of the Creative Nation policy.

Keywords
Nation Cultural Policy, Australia, CD-ROM

Introduction

The Australia Street Archive project was first devised in 1992. It was conceived as the pilot project for the Nation Project which was established in the same year as a joint venture between the University of Technology, Sydney and the Australian Museum in the lead-up to the Centenary of Federation in 2001. The Nation Project is a research and publication project concerned with issues of Australian social identity (national, ethnic, class, geographic, gender, etc), diversity of cultural heritage and the ir relationship to the environment. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Library and the National Museum are Associates of the Project.

The Nation Project aims to stimulate widespread public discussion embracing universities, cultural institutions and the general community about issues of contemporary social importance. It is designed to combine innovative, cross-disciplinary academic re search with outcomes in media and museum public programs[1]. Originally the media outcomes were conceived in mainly television form, including use of live satellite video-conferencing from diverse museum and community locations for museum public programs . The rapid development of funding opportunities for multimedia products encouraged us to move more quickly into new media technologies than we had originally thought would be feasible.

Creative Nation

The Nation Project sits very comfortably with some of the major aims of the Australian Government's Creative Nation cultural policy[2], announced in October, 1994. It is concerned with issues of national cultural importance[3], involves content, media an d computing specialists working together to produce specific outcomes[4], fosters collaboration between universities and cultural institutions[5], and is committed to using new and existing media to promote wide-ranging public engagement with debates abou t cultural identity and heritage[6].

The Creative Nation policy has another plank which is going to have fundamental and far-reaching ramifications for Australian cultural production. For the first time in Australia's history a major sector of Australian cultural endeavour - multimedia - ha s been tied intimately into economic policy7. This integration is fundamental to the various initiatives that the government has taken to support the development of multimedia, and has several dimensions.

Firstly, the Prime Minister personally has a strong belief that the confirmation and international projection of an independent, multicultural Australian national identity is an essential precondition for the future development of the Australian domestic and export economies[8]. The government sees the development of a workforce and society skilled in the use of on-line multimedia technologies as an important component of a successful industry policy for the next century[9]. All of the various funding i nitiatives for multimedia - Australia on CD, the Co-operative Multimedia Centres and the Australian Multimedia Enterprise - involve one-off or seed funding for programs that are expected to become self-funding from commercial and non-government revenues[1 0].

Last but by no means least, Creative Nation aims to establish a lucrative export industry in multimedia goods and services that will be free of government subsidy or tariff protection and hopefully (eventually) will outstrip the traditional big Australian export earners[11]. Amidst the exultation within the arts and cultural sectors over the government's initiatives, there has been little comment on the significant departure from previous policy that this 'free trade' position implies. It amounts to a c omplete acceptance of the free trade position promoted by the US government in the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations[12] that cultural goods and services should be treated the same as any other commodities for the purposes of international trade, and sho uld not be protected from the 'discipline of the international marketplace'.

Only time will tell whether Creative Nation comes to be seen as a Trojan horse for user-pays free market economics within the citadel of public funding for cultural endeavour: certainly it has not been widely recognised as such so far. But apart from a d iscussion of ultimate goals, there is also a question to be asked about strategy - about whether the government's policy initiatives address the issues confronting multimedia production at the screen face, as it were. This paper will return to that quest ion after outlining the Australia Street Archive project.

The Australia Street Archive

The Australia Street Archive takes the three Nation Project themes of social identity, diversity of cultural heritage and their relationship to the environment and applies them to the ways in which Australians have designed, constructed and used their dom estic space - their homes and gardens. As a sample from an arbitrarily selected set, we chose a sample of streets from those streets across the country literally called 'Australia Street' (we expanded our definition of 'Australia' to include Austral, Aus tralie and HMAS Australia, and our definition of 'Street' to include Avenue, Road, Close and Downs, in the last case to include the Austral Downs cattle station in the Northern Territory). The sample was chosen to reflect a diversity across a range of fa ctors including geographic terrain and location, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, size of land holding, architecture and flora and fauna.

Research

Our initial sample size was twelve streets, from which we wanted to select two homes. We leafleted those streets, and got good publicity for the project in local and metropolitan newspapers, which led to a satisfying response of individuals and families contacting us to participate in the project. From among these responses we then did a further selection to reflect a range of family types, ethnic backgrounds, age, etc.

Once the participants were chosen, we visited their homes for a period of about eight to twelve hours, where we photographed using 35mm transparencies the interior and exterior walls of the homes, furniture, ornaments, plants, outbuildings, etc. We took between 150 and 250 transparencies per location (including the surrounding street and community), ranging from wide shots to close-ups and including some shots of the inhabitants in a variety of activities and locations.

We recorded (using professional analogue equipment13) between ninety and one hundred and fifty minutes of oral history with the principal inhabitant(s) of the home, discussing the origin and meaning attached to the furniture, ornaments, plants and other o bjects in their houses and gardens. As you can imagine, this has given us an extremely intimate view of these people's domestic circumstances, including information about their familial relations, their emotional lives, and the relevance of factors like gender, age and social class in structuring their lives and relationships.

At the same time we have had a team of researchers with expertise in social and cultural history researching contemporary and archival records in local, state and national libraries and collections, local councils, community heritage groups, trade unions, etc. We also had a biological researcher surveying plant and bird life in the localities. The material they have been collecting is being assembled in photographic, graphic and textual form to be included in the program as part of the social and enviro nmental context for the experiences and decisions of the household inhabitants.

Publication

The first iteration of the Australia Street Archive is to be a multimedia CD-ROM of curriculum materials for tertiary students in Australian Studies. A second round of funding has been secured to mount an Australia Street Archive site on the World Wide W eb using some of the materials prepared for the CD-ROM in a program designed specifically to take advantages of the characteristics of the Web.

Audio-visual Narratives

Both the CD-ROM and WWW products have been conceived as primarily televisual programs. In other words, we want the users to interact with the computer screen as an audiovisual interface, rather than as an electronic print medium. This has presented chal lenges for both media, CD-ROM and the Web, because they each have specific strengths and weaknesses in their capacities to deal with sound and image. The Web in particular is very restricted in its audio capacities. From the outset we conceived of the t wo products as being distinct and complementary: the Web site was not designed as a 're-purposing' of the CD-ROM material. However, because we were looking to maximise the non-written aspects of the Web site, and because the research and recording of pri mary sources for the CD-ROM have established the foundation for both products, we will deal with the structure of the CD-ROM first .

As we said above, the primary sources for the CD-ROM are visual (photographs and scanned images) and aural (recorded interviews). These are being edited into short sequences of between about fifteen and ninety seconds duration. The sequences consist of a soundtrack based on an edited segment of interview combined with a series of images relevant to the content of the soundtrack. The images have been selected, and where necessary reframed by cropping, so that they fit into a structured narrative sequenc e that is visually appealing and informative.

The grammatical principles guiding the selection and sequencing of images are the same as that used in film production - mise-en-scne and montage. Mise-en-scne refers to the point of view and framing of an image, montage refers to the juxtaposition of images going from one shot to the next. We have approached the still images as if they were single shots in a filmed sequence and used them to construct a narrative in conjunction with the sound.

There are some interesting points to note about these narrative sequences that we are constructing. The first is that in a conventional film or television documentary about a person's home and their life in it, there would be extensive visual coverage of the person concerned, and probably lots of 'talking head' interviews where the viewer would have a chance to 'read' and interpret the speaker's facial expression and body language as an aid to the interpretation of their story and personality. We have n ot done that because we want to focus on the material objects in the house and garden as a primary source for interpretation. So rather than using the images of walls, furniture and plants, etc as what are called 'cutaways' to illustrate the story, the n arrative burden of which is carried by the talking head, we are constructing sequences out of images of those objects to carry the storyline. This approach thrusts considerable responsibility onto the soundtrack also for carrying the meaning and maintain ing audience interest.

The second navigation structure will be a cross-indexed reference section organised by subject, location and theme. There will be limited amounts of textual commentary available at various points in the audio-visual sequences. The aim of these brief com mentaries will be to indicate issues and conflicting points of view that might be relevant to the interpretation of the material.

Production Issues

At all points in the photography and sound recording we have placed top priority on the achievement of high production values. We have used professional photographers and experienced interviewers, the image editing is being done by a film editor, and the sound editing by a radio producer. We selected these staff on the basis of their skill in their chosen media, and not on the basis of previous experience in multimedia production. Our guiding principles were We have had a computer programmer working with these staff to handle the computing aspects of the production and we are shortly employing a graphic designer to handle graphic screen design. Leading the project are Shirley Alexander, an educational develo per/technologist with a computing science background and eight years experience in multimedia production, and Chris Nash with twenty years experience in radio, film and television production.

For each location we are using about thirty minutes of sound taking about forty megabytes (at 8 bits and 22 kilohertz) and images taking about 30-40 megabytes. Instead of the twenty-four locations that we were planning to cover originally, we have cut ba ck to seven or eight locations14. If the material we are providing for each location was viewed in continuous linear fashion, it would be the equivalent of a thirty minute film documentary. In non-linear interactive mode it will probably run for many ho urs.

From this account it will be clear how intensive our production process has been. In linear terms we are editing word-by-word and image-by-image the equivalent of eight half-hour film documentaries, and we are then cross-referencing them sequence by sequ ence to each other in ways that will maintain audience interest sequence by self-selected sequence. In film terms the editing and post-production alone would usually take two years fulltime work.

It should also be clear from this why most CD-ROM multimedia products are of such low quality and interest to audiences. They are conceived as relatively cheap alternatives to existing media products, and have inadequate conceptual and financial investme nt relative to the goals of the exercise. Our experience is that multimedia requires all the skills and investment of traditional media, plus the added investment required for designing and producing an engaging interactive dimension to interlock with th e other narrative components.

The CD-ROM

Our goal is that viewers will be drawn into the subject matter and will follow the navigation pathways intuitively, drawn ever onwards by their interest in the unfolding stories of these people's lives as portrayed on their walls and in their gardens. Ob viously the material and its narrative structure cannot be merely descriptive, but necessarily involve interpretation about the important factors affecting these people's lives. These factors are strongly influenced by their emotional relationships withi n the home and the larger social conditions of their time and place.

On the CD-ROM there will be two navigation structures linking the content material. The first will be an intuitive one governed by hotspots in the photographic image (always in the final image of a sequence and sometimes in others as well). The cursor w ill indicate that a particular object in the final image is a hotspot that will lead to other sequences by changing form when it passes over that object. Clicking on that hotspot will commence the sequence associated with it. There will also be hotspots and buttons offering the opportunity to branch out from this location to its broader geographic and temporal context, or to follow up common themes such as crime, gender, ethnicity, etc. with other locations.

Using this approach the user will enter the program at the street level and select a house. This will initiate an short introductory sequence of about one minute which introduces the location and the major themes informing the producers' interpretation o f that site (eg family structure, age, ethnicity, class, etc.). At the end of this introduction the user will be able to choose from among the hotspots in the last image to move into and around the house and garden. From the street level the user will b e able to pull back to the regional and national levels to select other streets, or move laterally following certain themes to other related streets, or out into the surrounding community of that street.

Fragmented narratives

In making a linear film documentary from material such as we have, it would be relatively easy to balance the different factors in the narrative and to be confident that a nuance conveyed at one point would affect the viewer's interpretation of material a t a later point. But because there are multiple pathways through the material, the authors can never be confident the viewer is aware of any material other than the opening introductory sequence for a given location.

This has created some exciting issues for us in deciding on the content of individual sequences so as to avoid repetitiveness and allow for accumulating depth of perception, and at the same time take very little for granted in the audience's prior knowled ge at any particular location. We are doing this by identifying a limited number of interlocking themes for each location with which we are nuancing as many sequences as we can, to the point where material that is purely descriptive and unrelated to the themes is being discarded.

Our educational goal is not to be didactic or reductionist in interpretation, but to open up complexities of awareness and understanding by using the medium's excellent capacity for cross-referencing and juxtaposition. This capacity is one of the reasons we have chosen to present the research materials on multimedia CD-ROM, and not only in television documentary form. The challenge of creating richly nuanced, meaningful narratives in non-linear, fragmented but cross-referenced form was one of the main c reative challenges that attracted us to the medium for this project.

In the great majority of CD-ROMs this capacity has been employed in encyclopedic mode, with a two-dimensional approach to truth and falsity and a book-index model of cross-referencing. The better products, such as Myst and the Cosmology of Kyoto, use dif ferent narrative devices to avail themselves of the richness available through the extensive cross-referencing. Both of these products use an extensive geographic iconography to enable the audience to associate particular information with distinctive loc ations. Movement from one piece of information or experience to another uses the metaphor of physical movement through a landscape as if the viewer were walking. As you move through the fictional locations you learn new information relevant to the quest on which you are embarked, including information about the purpose itself of the quest.

In Myst, that purpose quickly becomes reduced to a simple choice of which son is the villain, and despite the twist at the end that simple puzzle structures the grid into which all the information is slotted. In the case of Kyoto, the endpoint of Buddhis t transcendence is more obscure and nebulous, but for the informed audience the Buddhist world view structures the interpretation of the information as it becomes available through encounters with the various characters met while wandering through the cit y. There are many other aspects to Kyoto that are extremely interesting and groundbreaking, which we don't have time to deal with here, apart from mentioning the source materials for various encounters being drawn from the art and literature of Kyoto at about 1000 AD, the simple elegance of the screen design, and the beauty of the water-colour images used throughout.

In our project, we are attempting to extend the subtlety available to creative non-fiction film, radio and writing by exploring the rich opportunities for montage created by the extensive cross-referencing available in multimedia. While the iconography i s of necessity spatial, one can move through that space without having to imitate a walking tour. One can pass into new rooms without entering by the door, sequences include shots from separate locations, and the dominant concern guiding the narrative is not spatial realism but insight into the personal and social factors affecting the decisions about decoration and use of the home and garden.

An interesting issue in the design of fragmented narratives is the pressure that emerges to identify strong themes that will give coherence to the structure of the narrative. This pressure is both dramatic and intellectual. When a media text fragments a n individual's story (in this instance as represented in the decoration of domestic space) and then contextualises it within the social and temporal dimensions, it becomes possible to privilege either the personal or the social in the search for thematic cogency. This parallels tensions between the particular and the general as adequate or even appropriate levels of explanation. This is not the place to enter this debate, although when our project is completed there should be ample material for discussi on of these issues.

At this time we will simply record that we have opted for the individual household stories as the dramatic spine of the narratives, with extensive cross-referencing to the social context and where appropriate the addition of short written commentaries to raise questions where we think the audio-visual representation might be inadequate to the complexity of the situation.

Interactivity

If our first creative ambition was to explore the construction of fragmented audio-visual narratives, running a close second came the exploration of interactivity. For many so-called interactive products, the interactivity resides in the user making a si mple choice between a selection of options that are presented to them, which is about as interactive as turning the pages of a book or selecting a television channel.

In those instances where the program includes feedback to the user about the option they have chosen, by far the most common type of feedback is of the right/wrong, true/false variety. This is the case from the most crude, multiple-choice training produc t to Myst. Such feedback may certainly cause the user to reflect on their choices and perhaps come to understand why the author would prefer them to have made a different choice. However, it is based on a very two-dimensional, unproblematic concept of t ruth or fact, and as such lags a long way behind developments in epistemology over this century.

Products which reveal the motivation, preconceptions or prejudices of the user for them to acknowledge and explore are rare indeed, yet this is a much more valuable form of interactivity, especially from an educational perspective.

In Australia Street, indications from user reaction to the material in editing has been that viewers react very personally to the material, and make an implicit or explicit comparison with their own current and former situations. This can take the form o f identification and approval or disapproval, dispassionate interest or active disassociation and dislike, with a broad array of responses in between. Such a strong emotional reaction to the content is rare in multimedia CD-ROMs, and we're hoping to capit alise on it in order to strengthen the educational impact of the material. The literature in learning theory that views learning as personal transformation or 'autobiographical imagining' is of particular relevance to this strategy.

Our major technique for doing this is to enable the viewer to create a scrapbook of sounds, images and text retrieved from the various Australia Street locations which we are suggesting they sort into a 'virtual Australia Street' comprising

We are also suggesting that they identify the characteristics of these homes that they like/dislike, approve/disapprove, and why. Through this technique we are hoping that users might recognise the wellsprings of their emotional reaction to the material.

To put this personal reaction in a social context we are also including for each subject family and home an indicator of their position on a range of demographic spectra such as age, employment, income level, family type, sexual preference, ethnicity, etc . Users will be able to situate themselves within the same spectra, and the various members of the production team will also have their demographic characteristics declared. In this way users will be able to draw some conclusions about the possible prec onceptions and points of view of the production team in selecting, editing and structuring the material, and about their own interpretation of the material.

Because CD-ROMs are a stand-alone, unconnected product, obviously these conclusions will be known only to themselves and any people they choose to personally communicate with. The Web site, on the other hand, is of its very nature linked across time and space to multiple anonymous users, and it is the potential that this affords for collaborative interactivity among users that prompted us to seek funding for a Web project of the Australia Street Archive.

The World Wide Web Site

As we said above, the Web site was conceived from the outset as distinct from the CD-ROM in structure and purpose, and certainly not as simply a means of easy distribution of the CD-ROM material. In particular we recognised the opportunity on the Interne t for communication and interaction across time and space about the content of the site as an opportunity for collaborative authorship of material relating to our sites and indeed for any other sites which our audience might feel stimulated to discuss.

Interactivity leading to Collaborative Authorship

From the very start we have attempted to build an active audience for the project among those who have assisted us or who might have an interest in the material. For example, we have tried to maximise the involvement of Local Studies Librarians in the mun icipal libraries in the suburbs we have been researching, as well as from the State Libraries and the National Library. This coincides with Australian Government policy to promote the use of public libraries and other public facilities as 'an essential c ommunity access point for the delivery of information' using electronic networks15. The National Library is a partner in the Web section of the project, along with the Australian Museum in Sydney, and both institutions are planning to mount temporary exh ibitions and public access kiosks to the Web site when it is launched.

Part of the Web project is to evaluate the interactive and technical possibilities of tools that could be used in conjunction with the Web site to enable communication among remote sites. We are exploring a range of tools that might facilitate the emerge nce of a network of active participants from dispersed locations around the country (and indeed the world), collaborating in the mounting of new information on the Web site and discussion and reflection on the implications of the material that is already mounted.

In evaluating the tools, we are identifying factors relevant to the variety of locations in which we hope that access to this Web Site will be provided. We want to provide tools that enable the non-technical user to communicate with other users, and to m ake this communication a public record by adding those communications to the existing narrative.

While MUDs and MOOs provide an opportunity for real-time communication between users, we are not pursuing them because of the unlikelihood that visitors to a Museum for example, will have the technical facility to use them. A second problem is uncertaint y of the number of concurrent users. The need for and value of real-time communication in a project such as this has yet to be determined.

We will provide a facility for communication between users using forms utility of the Web in each major section of the site. Users will be encouraged to comment on any aspect of the narratives or issues presented, they will be able to raise new issues an d to contribute a story about their own experiences in houses as they grew up and/or in adulthood. A Web Master will be employed for the duration of the museum exhibitions who will link these contributions which will thus become part of the narrative. W e are investigating ways of providing facilities for users to contribute in media other than text, which may mean arranging for a colour scanner to be available at exhibition sites.

Our hope is that the huge community interest in genealogy that local libraries have experienced in the last decade will spill over into the cultural history of their neighbourhoods when prompted by the connections being drawn between the personal and the public in the Australia Street project. We would like to see a network of individuals and institutions across the country pick up the Nation Project themes and use the Internet as a way of communicating about them.

The aim is to facilitate reflection among participants about their own representations of social identity, cultural heritage and relation to the environment. It will involve an extension of the 'virtual Australia Street' to encourage participants not onl y to exchange information about their actual historical and contemporary situations but also to give expression to the factors that influence their sense of community and to explore the boundaries which they think define their identities.

Undoubtedly a lot of public contributions will be appear relatively trivial or inconsequential, but to prejudge their significance would be to prejudge the value of the new forms of anonymous communication that are emerging with the Internet. On the othe r hand, if the Web site prompts a similar sort of emotionally engaged reaction to what we have indications of with the CD-ROM material, then the Web site could be very publicly revealing indeed, in a way that the privacy of a scrapbook facility on a CD-RO M is not. It is the potential for collaborating on reflection about the meaning of the primary source material, including interaction about the points of view and presuppositions of communicants, that offers an extremely rich field for the evaluation of on-line communication as an educational and cultural medium.

The form in which this interaction about Australia Street takes place is impossible to predict. Likewise, we don't know how (or even if) the Web site will intersect with discussion of this material using other media, including telephone, radio, museum ex hibitions, faxes, etc. Already there have been several meetings of residents from the Australia Street in Newtown (Sydney) in an enthusiastic response to the project, and some of these residents may go on to collaborate in aspects of the exhibition at th e Australian Museum.

The attraction of the project to participating residents, local libraries and other contributors appears to be in the links it posits between subject matter that is external to the participants and therefore directly observable, but at the same time intim ately tied to their own sense of identity and personal history. In a sense, it offers the prospect of a window on other people's lives for comparison with our own, and certainly there is a tendency of viewers of the edited material to begin discussing it in terms of their own personal situation.

Perhaps it could be caricatured as an up-market instance of the Sylvania Waters genre. Whatever the judgement of different users, there appears to be a strong desire to explore other people's homes, which in turn provides an excellent vehicle to reflect on the factors influencing the make-up of one's own domestic environment, and the points of commonality in heritage, identity and relationship to one's environment.

Audio-visual Narrative

As a medium the Web site will not be simply instrumental, but will have its own characteristics formed at the interface of technological possibility and social practices. The technological possibilities at the moment are extremely limited - bandwidth res trictions make the Internet very much a print medium for time-effective communication. Images on the Web are used generally as either a graphic context for printed words or as single items such as photographs that are objects in themselves, rather than f orming part of a larger audio-visual narrative.

Selecting and structuring the audio-visual material for our Web site has provided particular challenges. Sound in particular is very slow to transfer on the Internet, and usually of brief duration and poor quality. At acceptable speeds of transfer it do es not compare with either the telephone or AM radio in clarity, and that is the minimum standard that producers could expect audiences to accept.

As we've outlined above, the soundtrack of oral interviews plays an important part in carrying the meaning of our material, especially with people's accents and speech patterns conveying nuances of class, gender, geographic location and personality, and t heir speech conveying their attitudes to the material they are discussing. We are evaluating different methods of conveying this oral material in print, using transcripts in conjunction with an optional limited availability of sound recording for interes ted users. Because transcripts are not recordings, and have a very different appeal to the user, we are also exploring the use of commentary written by the producers to supplement the transcripts. Such commentaries will give the material a different 'vo ice' from which the material is spoken (third person rather than first), and affect audience responses to the point of view and perceived authenticity of the material.

Image quality is much easier to maintain at lower levels of storage and transmission times, and so we will be using the photographs as the primary narrative vehicle, though supplemented by text and not structured in the same elaborate sequences as in the CD-ROM. Hotspots in single images will lead off to other images and pieces of written text.

As much as possible we will maintain the structure of the fragmented narratives from the CD-ROM. Such a structure fits very well not only with the hypertext links within sites with which Web users are familiar, but also shadows the intuitive browsing beh aviour of users randomly browsing the Web. In the latter sense it is more closely approximates normal Web behaviour than the tighter CD-ROM navigation structures.

As an extension to this we will include pointers to other related Web sites among the bibliographic references on our site. Not only will this add a richness of available material to users of the site, but it will help build the network of collaborating institutions and individuals which is a major goal of the project.

Implications for the Creative Nation cultural policy

Our experience with the Australia Street Archive project has raised some major conceptual and technical issues with respect to the multimedia strategy of the Creative Nation cultural policy.

Firstly, it is very clear that the linkages between cultural content, the traditional audio-visual media and digital multimedia production are a very fertile and exciting area for exploration. Apart from anything else, the team collaborating on the resea rch and production is having a very exciting time bringing into collaboration their expertise and creative intuitions from different media. And the further we go in this project the more productive the collaboration becomes. Our decision to opt for spec ialists from the discrete media and disciplinary areas, rather than an experienced multimedia team, has retained for each medium - sound, image, text - its own integrity, from which to negotiate the advantages and disadvantages of different aesthetic opti ons. This vindicates from our perspective the government's vision of the need to encourage collaboration between new and existing media specialists.

However, it has quickly become apparent that many of the limitations confronting us are technical, and that the new media technologies are still very immature. Bandwidth bottlenecks and demand pressure on popular sites have effectively reduced most Worl d Wide Web sites to (at best) illustrated print products on the Internet. The storage capacity of CD-ROMs at 600 megabytes is extremely limited if the aim is to include sound and image of a quality that viewers have ready access to in traditional media. We have also experienced problems using various tools that weren't as consistent or flexible in their characteristics as they need to be for professional production.

It is clear that both CD-ROM and (especially) WWW technologies are at their most flexible and fertile when used for print rather than audio-visual texts (including still graphics and illustrations as print in the sense of picture books). It is very early days in the development of these media for audiovisual communication, although their future is clearly on that trajectory. For the moment, in all but print form the traditional media forms, enhanced as they may be by digital post-production technology, still retain substantial advantages vis-a-vis multimedia in the depth and breadth of options for creative communication.

The funds appropriated by the government for the multimedia initiatives in Creative Nation are seeding funds, with an explicit policy goal of multimedia production being funded on a purely commercial basis from the very near future. Our experience demons trates that the intensity of resources required at this stage to produce innovative products that even begin to approach the production quality and conceptual sophistication of traditional media products is very high, so high as to make it highly doubtful for the foreseeable future that commercial returns could be achieved on investment in innovation at the required level.

In the current context of the private sector multimedia industry being largely made up of small companies with no substantial research and development budgets, dependent on a continuing flow of commercial commissions to stay afloat, and the public sector content-holding institutions having limited discretionary funds after a decade of budget cuts, it is not at all clear where the substantial funds necessary for innovation in multimedia will be coming from.

In a sense what our experience is demonstrating is the flip side of the coin to the plethora of low-quality multimedia products that have flooded the CD-ROM market and the WWW in the recent past. The potential of multimedia is as a confluence and collabo rative development out of existing media. In order to retain the relative advantages of existing media while at the same time exploring the value added (to use a fashionable economic term) by new technology will require additional investment over and abo ve that currently available for media production. That investment is unlikely to come from commercial investment when CD-ROMS and multimedia on-line services have yet to achieve a viable presence in the consumer marketplace.

In forcing the fledgling multimedia industry into the marketplace before it even knows what it is, the government's free market strategy may be strangling the industry's chances of survival, let alone the innovation it wants to promote.

But to end on a more optimistic note, because it is such early days from a creative point of view the language and grammar of multimedia production is still very unformed and fluid. Over the next decade or so there will be a garden of delights to play in , exploring collaborative authorship of texts on the Web and the construction and interpretation of fragmented narratives using sound, image and text. If the funding mechanisms can be flexible and farsighted in their strategic thinking, then we may be in for a most exciting and productive time.

Footnotes

[1]
The Nation Project, proposal document, UTS, 1992
[2]
Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy, Department of Communication and the Arts, Canberra, 1994
[3]
ibid., p 3
[4]
ibid., pp 55-62
[5]
ibid., p 59
[6]
ibid., p7
[7]
ibid., p 55 ff
[8]
Keating, P., Speech launching Creative Nation, 18 October, 1994 pp 4-5
[9]
Networking Australia's Future: Final Report of the BSEG, Dept. of Communication and the Arts, Canberra, December, 1994
[10]
Creative Nation, op. cit., pp 55-62
[11]
ibid., p 56; Cutler and Company, Commerce in Content, Dept of Industry, Science and Training, Canberra, September, 1994
[12]
concluded in 1994.
[13]
We used analogue technology for photography and recording for two reasons: we wanted optimum quality from available funds, and for archival purposes we wanted both analogue and digital versions of the material.
[14]
Because of our emphasis on maintaining high quality in the sound and image, the 600 megabyte capacity of CD-ROMs has proven a decisive limitation.
[15]
Networking Australia's Future, op. cit.., p 54
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