I had the privilege of being invited by Dr Natalie Williams to give a keynote at the Women in the Creative Arts conference held at ANU’s School of Music during 10-12 August 2017. My fellow keynote speaker was Prof. Cat Hope, Head of Music at Monash University whose talk, ‘Stepping Aside: Gender equality and privilege in Australian music culture’ provided a comprehensive overview of recent data and an assessment of strategies for diversity that can move us towards true gender equality in the arts. The conference was a fantastic gathering of artists, arts facilitators and academics from around Australia and elsewhere. The event built on a strongly synchronistic wave of attention focussed on issues of gender equality in music with the publication in the previous week of two important reports: Catherine Strong & Fabian Cannizzo’s Australian Women Screen Composers: Career Barriers and Pathways commissioned by APRA AMCOS and published by RMIT, and Sydney University’s report by Rae Cooper, Amanda Coles & Sally Hanna-Osborne Skipping a beat: Assessing the state of gender equality in the Australian music industry. APRA AMCOS’ response to the findings of the Strong/Cannizzo report can be found here.
Here’s more or less what I said. (for discussion specifically on quotas, see pp.11-13)
Liza Lim: Luck, Grief, Hospitality – re-routing power relationships in music (2017).pdf
& here are images of the powerpoint slides:
ANU keynote powerpoint slides (images)
& for inspiration, please watch: ‘Soldering a Noise Instrument’, Yorkshire Sound Women Network workshop led by Dr Elizabeth Dobson and Nina Richards, University of Huddersfield, 2016. Video by Angela Guyton
Also see: All Girl Electronic 2017 a programme of free workshops and mentoring in music software, composition and arrangement, recording, production and performance (Western Sydney)
Liza Lim 