At our artists' residency, we've been talking together a lot about our work (the content of it - what it is and what we'd like it to be and how to make it better) and we've been talking about our processes.

There are creative people in film and television and theatre who work towards the content while ignoring the fact that the process is, in some cases literally, killing them. They work too hard, they're stressed, they're competitive, they're jaded, they've forgotten why they wanted to do whatever it is they're doing in the first place. And who can blame them. More than half of Australia's professional artists earn less than $10,000 a year from their work. The least well-paid? Dancers and writers.

On a film set or in a theatre, there are quite often people who aren't being paid at all. Costs are cut, "internships" are created and young people enter the workforce believing it's a privilege that they're there at all. I subscribe to the ArtsHub newsletter. I subscribed because it claimed to be able to provide me with information on jobs in the arts industry. Distressingly, the field depicting "wage" is often left blank. There are endless entries boasting of "great opportunies for hardworking dedicated professional people" etc but there are some actual paid jobs. Most of them are full-time grant writing positions for struggling arts organisations.

The question of why we devalue the arts so much has been addressed by people more equipped than I. Personally, I think it has something to do with this idea that art exists on a sliding scale of importance with "saving people from famine" up one end and "having fun with costumes" down the other. People think artists are doing a fun job that they love. Why would I pay someone to dance? People who dance well look like they're really enjoying themselves. Why would I pay someone to DJ at my opening night event? Hell, it's free to push "genius" on your iTunes playlist and hook it up to some speakers.

Here's the thing: some of the best art looks easy. Uttering the words "foregone conclusion" or "one fell swoop" or referring to something vanishing "into thin air" is easy. It feels natural. I don't mean to project too much but I'm sure that when Shakespeare invented these phrases they felt new and different and he thought about them rather more than we might when we mention them in staff meetings or emails or when we haven't slept a wink, we're up in arms, we're on a wild goosechase or we're eating a meal fit for the gods. It looks easy because it's good. That doesn't mean Shakespeare didn't enjoy writing, I'm sure he did, but a lot of people enjoy their jobs. That doesn't mean they'd do them for nothing.

Also, on the sliding scale of "saving people from famine" to "having fun with costumes", it's pretty difficult to position the arts. Does it help people? Does it provoke people into thinking constructively about society? Does it entertain us? Is it one step away from a self-important cringeworthy school play? When you think about it though, this instinct to place jobs on a sliding scale isn't so stringent when it comes to other professions. Where do we position a swimming pool cleaner? A motivational speaker? Is it easier, perhaps, to see that those positions have a function?

There are studies that prove that the impact of the arts on society is profound, and all you have to do is be moved or challenged or provoked by an artwork or a piece of theatre or television to suspect that. Our industry doesn't reflect that. We're stuck in a pattern of self-abuse. And no, not the fun kind. We cut corners and make sacrifices and get stressed because in the narrative of "saving people from famine" versus "having fun with costumes" there's room for upward mobility in the form of martyrdom. We made this film on the smell of an oily rag and nobody got paid and everybody got sick and nobody's rights at work were respected and none of us are friends anymore but it might just become a big hit and our rags-to-riches story will be our own "saving people from famine" story because we saved ourselves and each other and believed in our own ideas.

The trouble is: did you? If you got the end result you wanted (a great film, a sublime painting) by disrespecting yourself and your friends and your own artistic processes, did you really get the result you were after? Perhaps you did. To paraphrase The Third Man, Switzerland had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Whether it's an exploitative process or an inclusive and engaged one, nobody wants to earnestly construct a cuckoo clock when some wanker down the road is in post-production on the industrial revolution. Picking your way through all of this while under pressure and facing deadlines is difficult.

So we're enjoing a chance to think about these things without those pressures. It's difficult. Meanwhile, I'm very aware that our artists' residency at Bundanon is being shared by dancers. Who look like they're enjoying themselves. Like Shakespeare did.

 ... and if you're thinking "too much talking and not enough pictures", well, here's an update. 

It was bring your kid to work day at Bundanon today. These guys came. That is all. 

Welcome back to the Standing There website, which has been up the back of the dance hall looking at its feet for too long while everybody else drinks punch and slides across the floor in their socks while singing the piano solo at the start of Old Time Rock n Roll.

Well. Enough of that.

Standing There Productions has been having some fun of our own in the past month.

For starters, we're artists in residence in one of the most beautiful and inspiring places in Australia at the moment. Once upon a time, Australian artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd lived and worked on a farm on the Shoalhaven river in New South Wales. The property is called Bundanon, and they left it on trust with the Australian government so artists and members of the public could access the same space they found so inspiring. And it really is. 

We've been getting a lot of work done here. Working together, too, with the time and space to think through every element of what we're planning but with the projects as our motivator rather than one of us having to be somewhere or all of us having to make a decision while doing twelve other things.  We've been getting the giggles, disagreeing, floating stupid ideas, having them ridiculed and then riding that ridicule through to a healthy kernel of what might become an idea.

And then there's the other stuff.

It's funny what happens to you here. You start to see connections across networks of things that you wouldn't have noticed before. You notice that nature mimics itself. The river mimics the sky and the clouds mimic the tidal patterns of the water. The plants mimic the animals and the animals mimic each other. A wombat is a kind of sideways koala but its bent back elbows are like the strong, sequined arms of a fat blue tongue lizard in the sun. Wombats have an impressive family history, too, going back to prehistoric times and you can tell that, looking at them, and once again you feel like everything's part of everything else and looking a rock wallaby in the eye is as much a conversation as small talk in the post office.

You don't only see connections in nature though. You see connections in what you read and what you see and what you think. You read an article about evolution and an article about the internet and an article about, I don't know, how to cook a muffin and it's like cells pairing up and multiplying under a microscope - fragments from one idea float over towards another and then they slip as though by accident into each other and suddenly they're something new and tiny and if you give it time they might turn into something else.

Arthur Boyd did paintings of the rocks that surround us here, and the river, and the bush, and he felt that landscape was very important. His paintings weren't just about the bush and the river though. They were about religion and politics and power and fairness and barbarism. At the moment, in Australia, this is an interesting place to be, because the whole circle-of-life we-are-each-other business is a day-to-day reality, while our political lives are being shaped in an agonising tight-rope walk performed by people who - whatever else they might be - are treating our political system with the kind of respect that makes democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the worst system in the world except for all the others. 

And so while the political machinations of the election seem, in many ways, a thousand miles from here (would a wombat have a preference for a particular system? Would a rock wallaby care what happened to the seat of Hasluck?)... it also feels like it really is the right place to consider the stimulating questions that are being raised by what's going on in Canberra. 

Bundanon feels like a place where you can be wrong. You can have someone explain something and you can say "oh I get it, I was wrong" more easily than you can when you're in the city and you're half way through something and the phone rings and it's someone to tell you they think you're wrong. 

I like challenging myself and being challenged here and it's interesting to see the same thing happen to the political status quo. I hope, in this ongoing political drama, that people can admit to doubt and ask the right questions and not hedge their answers and so far that's been enjoyable to watch.

Today, we went into a bookshop in a tiny town called Kangaroo Valley. The bookshelf was fantastic and was run by a man in a knitted jumper reading a book and holding a long piece of wood in his hand. The piece of wood was so that he could move a door stop back into place after someone came into the shop without having to get out of his chair. It was a dual-use stick, actually. It was also so he could change the dial on the music player without having to get up and do that either. 

In the bookshop, there was a collection of old photographs. Not in a book. Just personal photographs someone had bought in an auction of a deceased estate. They were black and white. Loads of them. I found one - it was a photo of what looked like what used to be a town. Sparse, burnt trees and a flat landscape that went on forever, with melted-looking buildings and clusters of people wandering through it. Standing in the kangaroo valley bookshop full of hot coffee from the cafe down the road, I didn't know what it was. I turned it over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written "atom bomb". How this apparently original slightly-cracked photo of an utterly destroyed town (Nagasaki? Hiroshima?) ended up here, with those two horrific words on the back of it, I can't tell you.

I think what Bundanon is best at is perspective. When you have perspective, and peace and quiet and time and space, you can think constructively and imaginatively and you can stand in a bookshop with your hand over your mouth and have all afternoon to think about why.

A version of the following appeared in a recent edition of The Big Issue Australia, which is an excellent publication you should immediately go and buy from your friendly local vendor (who is, at this stage in the year, probably much colder than you are). By way of catching up, however, here is a recent column of mine written from inside an airport:

Airport TV

I was at the airport recently and it occurred to me that for some people – stopping over on their way somewhere else – their entire experience of Australian culture consists of whatever is on the telly in the airport during the couple of hours they’re hydrating between flights. What was on TV the day I was in Gate Lounge 12? A news story about a rogue wombat on the loose in Melbourne.

I’m concerned about the impact airport televisions might have on our tourist industry. Firstly, I don’t want to alarm anybody, but people watching Australian TV in airports probably think Australia is an American colony. The Australian accent is a surprise rather than the norm on television, with the notable exception of voiceovers in advertisements for hardware stores.

Not only that, but you’d be forgiven for believing Australia contains only of white people. Some of them think they can dance, some of them are waiting for a panel of judges to taste their marinade, and some of them are breaking up with each other on Home and Away, but if it’s cultural diversity you’re after, it’s usually left to SBS or Border Security to teach tourists what multiculturalism looks like in Australia. Unless you’re American, in which case: welcome home.

Soaps don’t help. It has rained in Erinsborough a handful of times in more than twenty years, which, as we all know, would usually lead to strict water restrictions and lawns that look like the bottom of a woolshed after a bush dance. But Neighbours isn’t about reality. That’s what the evening news is all about.

Someone who hasn’t met a real-life Australian might watch the news and deduce that every sentence spoken by an Australian is concluded with a word made up – no matter how it’s spelled – of four syllables. On the news recently, I was informed by the white Australian lady who came on in between the American TV shows that an Australian sporting team was “this evening heading ho-wo-wo-oe-ome”. The team was, I suspect, heading home, but the word had been extended in order to signal that the sentence had come to an end. At least, I think that’s what it meant. Either that or there is a place called Howowoeme somewhere in the world that’s currently hosting an Australian sporting team.

The one factor that sets my mind at ease in relation to the Australian airport-television viewing experience is that most of the people in Gate Lounge 12 that day were asleep. What this says about Australian television, I will leave for another day.

Erhem.

So some of us went overseas. Two thirds of us. That's a lot - percentage wise - so you can understand our absence from these pages and from the streets of Melbourne (we've been getting lots of letters).*

Anyway. We're all back in the one place now. None of this travelling through New York, London, Paris and Scotland seeing theatre and art and old friends including but not limited to Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Howlett and talented performer and crepe officionado Ellen Heyward.

Nope. Now we're back in business.

Business - at least for me - means writing various things including a weekly television column for The Big Issue Australia. It's fun! Not only does it mean I write regularly, but it means I am allowed to watch television and, when interrupted by somebody, bark through mouthfulls of food "SHOOSH PLEASE I AM WORKING".

Also, if you haven't read my article in Meanjin about contemporary theatre in Australia, you should probably get right on that. All the cool kids are doing it.**

As for Standing There as a collective, well, we're really looking forward to our artist residency at Bundanon in August. We have a bunch of projects we'll be taking along with us (it's a small bunch but we're proud of them - they get along well and almost always keep their limbs inside the car). After Bundanon, we will emerge from the metaphorical phone booth with our metaphorical superhero clothes on... up, up, and away.

I imagine.

Anyway, it's nice to be back and it's nice to reach out into the silent, deserted ether and speak to you, the absent, quite possibly non-existent contributor to the ongoing Standing There conversation. Have a cup of tea and help yourself to a biscuit from the tin. They might be a bit stale, but you're always welcome here.***

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* We haven't been getting any letters. Sometimes we get letters from the RACV about voting in their elections and one time we got a postcard for a guy called Steve. He seemed nice.

** I have no idea who the cool kids are, or what, if anything, they are doing. I do not mean to slander in any way the cool kids. I'm sure they're actually wearing beanies and sitting in bars drinking short blacks and listening to French pop music from the early sixties while conducting secret affairs and submitting poetry to the New Yorker under noms de plume.

*** Erm. There aren't any biscuits. Someone want to pop down the shops and bring us back some Arnott's assorteds? Be a love. Yes? Gah, bless yer cotton socks.

Tonight, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival begins. 

What this means is:

The streets are made of paper. There are flyers and posters plastered across every surface from Brunswick to South Melbourne. You can tell what month it is in Melbourne by what colour the walls of The Vegie Bar are. If you see muted blues, dark reds, purples and blacks in your peripheral vision, it's Arts Festival time. Bright colours? The Comedy festival is upon us. If there's a big heap of pastel and everything is bordered by a vine, there's a music festival on somewhere a couple of hours out of town.

'Convenience stores' in Swanston Street are about to become restaurants. You know those festering hot dogs and sausage rolls teenagers eat as a dare in exchange for a hundred bucks? Comedians eat those. Deliberately. For dinner. As the healthy option. It's that or a Mars Bar.

Evenings are about to get dark earlier. It happens over the course of the festival. At the start, you can't believe shows start as early as six. It's still light at six! By the end, time has taken on a new dimension and you start thinking things like WOW, TIME IS AMAZING. WHY ISN'T THERE AN EXPRESSION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR THE FEELING OF TIME PASSING QUICKLY AND ALSO SLOWLY? MAYBE I WILL WRITE A THESIS ABOUT IT! YEAH! A THESIS! (Did I mention sleep deprivation has an effect on mental processing?) 

The other thing? From a hardened cynic like myself? The other thing is: it's so exciting. Walking through the autumnal streets - that little bit chilly but with the sun on your face - you don't know what you're walking towards. Good comedy is so fun to watch. Great comedy transforms you. Discovering good or great comedy before everyone else does? Delicious.

I'm hoping for some delicious.

Aren't we all?

Standing There Productions is shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the death of one of our most valued supporters and friends - the whip-smart, funny, generous and loyal Nicol Beechey.

 I met Nicol Beechey when some of us started a theatre company at  Melbourne University as part of Union House Theatre (although then, in ancient times, it was called the Theatre Department). Nic was the head technician whose job it was to make sure theatre shows were properly planned and managed to standards that ensured safety and efficiency. As a result, many people who worked in the theatre were terrified of her.

 We went to her for help setting things up. She gave us pages of notes, told us a thousand things that could go wrong, told us to communicate with each other and with as many helpful people as possible, and told us that managing expectations was a major part of producing a theatre show on the smell of an oily rag. She taught me a few more things over the years including:

 - If you're serving alcohol at an event, serve twice as much food as you otherwise would. People will have more fun if there's free food than they will if there's heaps of alcohol and not enough food. If you don't have the budget, halve the booze budget. It's worth it. 

 - Profit share (a method of making theatre where the cast and crew agree to work for nothing and share whatever the profit might be) is the least satisfying means of payment since slavery. There is no way everybody can walk away satisfied (see above, expectation management). It leads to arguments and presumptions and interpretations and disappointments and it's also lazy budgeting. You can do better than that. 

 - Tape it down. When Nicol came to see Greatness Thrust Upon Them, our show in the 2008 Melbourne Comedy Festival, she noticed I hadn't taped down the boxes that were on stage the whole time. I told her what I didn't like about the look of taping them down and she told me a way to fix it that fitted in with the creative problems I had with her practical suggestion. She said: it's the problems you don't anticipate that you're trying to anticipate.

 - The theatre experience is about the entire experience. From the difficulty your audience has parking their cars to how comfortable your seats are. It's worth thinking about, so if you don't have time to think about it, you should get help. Fudging it will fool nobody.

 Nicol Beechey's ethos - a no-nonsense aversion to shortcuts and to not thinking things through, while projecting an ethical and concise vision of what our company is - very much shaped The Really Useless Theatre Company and Standing There Productions. Several of us met thanks to Nicol Beechey and I personally wished I could more often get her into a room to frown at my short-sighted guestimations, roll her eyes with a wry smile upon hearing my excuses, and then sit down with me to figure out the problem and get the giggles about how I thought I could possibly get away with what I was originally proposing.

 Nicol met with me regularly over the years and with the rest of the Standing There team to brainstorm the problems that face a small company like ours whose success she had nothing to gain from but to whom she offered ongoing support and critique, often on this page. She came to our shows, wrote me emails in response to my entries on this website (she was furious once when she thought I had backhanded Laurie Anderson) and she emailed and called me frequently from Queensland, where she moved into a job working "with Shrek and Superwoman" at Warner Brothers Movie World.

 Personally, I had the privilege of knowing Nicol as a friend as well as a theatre genius. Beyond her competent can-do approach, she was warmly encouraging, loving, soft-hearted, and gorgeously funny. I placed Nicol pretty high up on my "List of People To Thank When You Win". I'm not sure what it is I was hoping to win (something televised internationally, obviously, where my speech was played off by an orchestra) but this is as good a place as any: special thanks to Nicol Beechey for all she's done for Standing There Productions and for her friendship and for making me flinch every time I see something on a stage that isn't taped down.

 Nicol Beechey was generous and wise and funny and creative and Standing There Productions has been so lucky to have been the beneficiary of her guiding hand. She will be dearly missed.