Ritchie making waves in backwater

Former prime minister Paul Keating once famously declared, only partly in jest but entirely at the expense of votes around Australia, that: "If you're not living in Sydney you're just camping out."

City-centric snobbery still rules the thinking of many of our political, corporate and cultural leaders who rarely think beyond the golden triangle of power between Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

Brian Ritchie, co-founder and bass player in alternative rock band the Violent Femmes, is quick to put that mindset into perspective.

"Or you could say if you don't live in New York, you're camping out by living in Sydney," Ritchie says. "You can always up the ante a little bit."

Ritchie has been camping out since 2008, when he and his entomologist wife Varuni Kulasekera moved from New York City to Hobart. Looking for a major life-change, the couple found Hobart was about as far as they could go around the world without starting to come back again.

He expected to live the life of a recluse, practising Zen Buddhism and playing the shakuhachi flute in between touring the world with the Violent Femmes, the Milwaukee folk-punk band behind the 1980s cult hits Add it Up, Blister in the Sun and Gone Daddy Gone.

Like many seeds blown by the wind, Richie soon embedded roots into the Tasmanian soil in ways that he didn't expect. His arrival coincided with plans by millionaire gambler David Walsh to build a new gallery, the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA), to showcase his extraordinary art collection.

Walsh also threw his weight behind a new summer festival of music and art instigated by the Salamanca Arts Centre in the waterfront precinct to help build a buzz ahead of the opening of MONA in 2011. Ritchie, who had a studio in the arts centre, was recruited to curate the first Festival of Music and Art (FOMA) in January 2009. Five years later, MONA-FOMA or MOFO and its winter version, Dark MOFO, have established a strong reputation for eclectic innovation and boosted Tasmania's credentials as a world-class cultural destination.

"I became deeply immersed in the local scene," Ritchie says. "It was probably the first time in my life I was really part of a local scene in an important way."

Blending international star acts with obscure, high-end art and local surprises across music, theatre, dance, visual art and new media, MOFO has tapped into a wellspring of local creativity, Ritchie says.

Tasmania, often portrayed as a backwater or financial basket-case, also presents a unique picture of cultural life outside of Australia's major cities. It's a topic that Ritchie will expand on in his keynote address at this week's Arts and Edges Regional Arts Australia summit and festival in Kalgoorlie-Boulder.

Ritchie says terms like "regional" or "provincial" often are used in a negative sense, which is ridiculous considering the global impact of regional musical styles such as Kentucky bluegrass, Chicago blues and New Orleans jazz, and of local cuisines from Emilia-Romagna to the Punjab.

"If you look at cuisine, most European culture is based on the concept that this region or that region specialises in certain things and has its own idiosyncrasies. I don't see regional as a negative term. It is something we should be exploring in a positive sense."

Living and working in Hobart, Ritchie says he started to learn about depth of hidden and under-exposed talent in society. "Culture runs throughout the entire community but a lot of the time it is not co-ordinated or unified, " he says. "(The festival) has unearthed some latent creativity and focused attention on things that were neglected."

Tasmania and other so-called regional areas were often self-effacing to the point of having an inferiority complex but the State's arts community has been more positive in the past five years or so.

"Sometime all you need to do is put a few runs on the board and have a few good-news stories to have people feel better, " he says.

Based on his own experience, Ritchie's prescription for regional-arts delegates at the Kalgoorlie conference is simple. "What a lot of these regional centres are going to have to do if they want to get some attention is to do stuff. We certainly don't have 100 per cent success rate. Some of it is hit-and-miss but we are doing it and that is the key to anything."

He says the excuse of not enough funding and other resources only goes so far. "You need money to do certain things and other things can be done with personal energy."

Exhibit A is the Violent Femmes, the band that emerged from the relative backblocks of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and without a history of other bands paving the way. The trio of Ritchie, Gordon Gano and original drummer Victor DeLorenzo started busking on the street as teenagers, attracted the attention of the Pretenders and things took off from there.

"If we had been sitting around waiting for money, we never would have got started, " Ritchie says. "You need money for an opera or to build a museum but whenever people say there is no money, they are really saying 'This is not a priority'."

Last year, Ritchie played acoustic bass on a national tour of The Reef, a film-and-music performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra created during a residency at Gnaraloo Station on WA's Ningaloo coast.

The inspiration for that could not have happened anywhere else, he says. "It was integral to the work. You can see it in the screen and you can hear it in the music. It was that spacious feeling that you could not get from making it in downtown Sydney."

It is just one example of art distinguished by its regional flavours, he says. Ritchie says many talented but unheralded Tasmanian musicians and other artists have cross-pollinated the work of big-name MONA-FOMA visitors such as John Cale, David Byrne, Philip Glass, Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman.

"A lot of these came down because they had never been to Tasmania and they wanted to come to Tasmania. One of the things that the regions can offer is novelty, new experiences and stimulation to jaded creative people."

Making art in the regions has its challenges but Ritchie believes a tipping point is at hand.

"We can't just have every creative person huddling and congregating in the major cities. For one thing some of these cities have very poverty-stricken ways of being creative. You need to have cheap rents, easy accessibility to venues and galleries and that is not happening as much in the big cities any more.

"We are reaching a tipping point where creative people want to live in what are considered regional areas. As that happens more and more of those areas are going to develop their own identity, quirks, trademarks and their own cultures."

For him, one of the greatest rewards from moving to Tasmania was soaking up the fact that people have more time for each other.

"I have relationships with hundreds of artists and with people who couldn't care less about art. In New York City I knew a lot of talented people but honestly everybody was so busy on their own thing that they didn't have time for each other."

The Arts and Edges Regional Arts Australia summit and festival is in Kalgoorlie-Boulder from October 16-19. Details: raasummit.com.au