Parking the Info Van,Parramatta,1995: locality and relationality in media practice

The Info Van

For around a decade from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s a yellow transit van toured the Sydney suburbs of Holroyd and Parramatta (Figure 1). ¹ From its first appearances, the van made frequent and regular appearances at community events and gatherings. Initially, the van itself had been borrowed from a similar, recently de-funded service in the inner city. After being re-funded the inner city service took back its van, and the Holroyd-Parramatta group bought its very own vehicle in late 1985. This move ‘out west’ from the inner city was an extension of services that were already established in other parts of Sydney from the early 1980s, such as one which was running at the time from Manly Community Centre in the Manly-Warringah area of Sydney’s north and another in Balmain, established in International Women’s Year, 1975 (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1989: 5). This push for a local mobile information network can be seen as emerging from a ‘community organizing’ movement which seized the new cultural forms of information distribution proliferating at this time such as intranet and bulletin board systems (Reinecke, 1984; Kubicek and Wagner, 2002). Emerging in Western Sydney and in Holroyd-Parramatta in the early 1980s, this movement was consolidated through the collaborations of employees at local libraries, citizens advice bureaux and social workers who saw the potential of these new means of sharing information within and between local groups. However, the cultural form in which this was to manifest initially was not as information moving virtually from one place to another via terminals attached to mainframe computers, but began as a call for the workers themselves to move out of their established locations and institutions. The Community Information Service’s philosophy was to literally go into the streets, distributing printed information and leaflets at local events and gathering places (Figure 2). This principle of mobility was central to the group’s earliest indication of how they were to achieve their aims, as they were at that stage: ‘the only service in the Holroyd and Parramatta areas able to specialize in community information provision with the great advantage of maximal flexibility and mobility in its methods’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1986: 2, emphasis mine).

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Figure 1.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Info Van way back, 1991

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Figure 2.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Wanted! Community Information

Quickly known simply as the ‘Info Van’, the Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service was incorporated in 1984 and officially launched at a local shopping mall and Parramatta Town Hall during Community Information Week, October 1985 (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1986: 2). The service had been funded through the second triennial stage of the Western Sydney Area Assistance Scheme (WSAAS). The establishment of the WSAAS was an election promise made by Labor Premier Neville Wran in 1979 to provide area-based services in areas of greatest need, which would in turn be determined on criteria developed internally by Western Sydney councils from a mix of demographic profiles and social needs indicators (Fulop et al., 1988: 339). While the results of the national census of 1986 would not have been available to the WSAAS in the early 1980s when it was making the decision to fund the service, its findings clearly supported the argument growing louder at the time: Western Sydney in general, and the Holroyd and Parramatta local council areas in particular, experienced profound relative economic disadvantage. The Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) developed by Australian Bureau of Statistics from its 1986 Census of Population and Housing were first published in late 1988 and show that during the mid 1980s, Holroyd-Parramatta area showed very strong patterns of disadvantage relative to the rest of Australia and to greater Sydney. Developed by combining and weighting several key factors evident in the census, such as income, education and skilled employment, these indexes for the first time mapped relative advantage and disadvantage across Australia’s nearly 30,000 Census Collection Districts (CDs) (roughly equivalent to a city block of 250 households). Of the 72 CDs located in Holroyd and Parramatta local council areas, with a combined population of 43,379, only ten (14%) were measured as relatively advantaged (above the Australian median of 1000), while the remainder (86%) were measured as relatively disadvantaged (below the Australian median of 1000) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1988).

While the aims of the WSAAS were broadly redistributive and addressed such spatial disadvantages, one of its most important aims was to shift the balance of decision-making towards community-identified issues. This new way of making decisions about what to fund more locally relevant was achieved by mobilizing a tripartite structure comprising state government, local government and community interests in planning and assessing applications. This structure was designed intentionally so that ‘no single sector could prevail without the support of at least one of the other groups’, and thus ‘no two groups formed a “natural alliance”’ (Fulop et al., 1988: 339). This shared power structure effectively worked to undo some of the entrenched top-down and centralized power relations in the community sector, at least at the beginning of the scheme.

Once established, and as an endorsement of the community ownership of the WSAAS priorities, the Info Van service ran with a strong volunteer and resident base. The founding coordinator Anna Russell noted in her report on the first year of the service’s operation in 1986 that the service began by targeting shopping centres where there was no established formal information service, such as a Citizens Advice Bureau (Figure 3). The Info Van distributed information with ‘an overall emphasis on alerting people of their rights and presenting a range of possibilities so that the individual has some choice of service or approach’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1986: 2). Via the local council as a starting point, the Info Van sought and provided information in response to community members’ inquiries with ‘[s]ocial security, health, children’s services, leisure activities and transport the major areas of inquiries and leaflet provision’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1986: 3). Information was provided in community languages where possible and a bi-lingual Spanish language worker working jointly with Granville Multicultural Centre was joined by a Turkish-speaking volunteer in the first year of operation (Figure 4). Each site visit was for 3–4 hours at a time and Russell commented that: ‘Characteristically, those taking pamphlets take several, if not a whole bundle. Many users are clearly contact people within a local network and tend to circulate resources around’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1986: 3, emphasis added). Apart from distributing information, the van workers reported on other roles, not strictly within the information and referral service that they were funded for, that they undertook when on site visits and set out to provide: ‘short term counselling if needed; filling in forms and documents, particularly in areas of low English literacy; [offering translation and interpreting of documents and facilitating inquiries through the presence of volunteers who speak] Arabic and Spanish’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1988: 6) (Figures 5–7). In the late 1980s the service reported that it had identified a need for expanding the ways in which it engaged with communities and would be applying to WSAAS for funding for an ‘Artsworker’ position:

The Project involves the employment of an Artsworker to initiate a range of creative activities and events in consultation with local residents around issues affecting their lives, e.g. employment, health, income etc. The emphasis would be on utilising ideas and skills from within the community while introducing new and varied possibilities through other specialist artists. The need has been identified and raised at the Holroyd and Parramatta Community consultations (WSAAS). (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1988: 8)

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Figure 3.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Initial leaflet

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Figure 4.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Multilingual Qs & As

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Figure 5.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Cartoon on cover of 4th Annual Report

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Figure 6.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Info van with people asking questions

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Figure 7.

Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc.: Community Info locations

This position did not eventuate apparently, and it was not until the WSAAS was itself threatened three years later in 1991, that the organization again raised the possibility of an arts-related position. Instead of applying to WSAAS for this position the 1991 annual report mentioned that ‘[f]unding for 1992 will include will include submissions to the Department of Community Services for ongoing funding, and to the Australia Council [for the Arts] for development of a new Cultural Development project’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1991: 12). The implications of this shift towards cultural development and arts-based practices is discussed in the next section.

Community as practice

The organization has grown over the past 25 years in scale as well as shifting roles. Starting out as a ‘community information’ provider, the organization now acts as a media and arts production and training hub for Western Sydney. This shift was most explicitly signalled in a name change in 1992 to ICE. In 2010 new multimedia studio-equipped premises in the Parramatta Central Business District paralleled the local council and state government’s ‘repositioning’ from the early 2000s from manufacturing to a discourse of creative economy. In 1985, the organization described itself as: ‘assist[ing] and … respond[ing] to local community information needs … resourc[ing] organisations and groups and … assist[ing] in the development and extension of local networks’ (Holroyd-Parramatta Mobile Community Information Service Inc., 1986: 2). More recently ICE has described itself as working at ‘the intersection of arts, culture, technology and community … across Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most culturally diverse region’ (ICE Annual Report, 2008: 4). ICE’s community activist origins, and the flexibility of its small structure, allowed it to quickly move into networked and digital media production, and it has been recognized as a possible model for combining community arts and creative industries in a post-broadcast era. ²

Recently Moores has pointed to the ways in which an expanded field of media studies beyond abstracted and disembodied analyses of content ‘calls for an appreciation of media uses as place-constituting activities’ (2012: 46). Drawing together the rich intertwining of spatial and mediated experience in Certeau, Ingold and Meyrowitz among others, via his own reflections on the role of media in modernity, Moores points out that media in everyday life do not ‘replace’ place, but radically expand the possibilities of interactions within situations. This observation is useful to take with us into the field when researching mediated community and contestations of place. Looking at the current ‘how’ of ICE – while it is fundamentally different from the distribution of community information in the form of photocopied pamphlets on social services, tenants’ rights and leisure activities during its inception phase, it does continue many of the initial aims of the Info Van. The brief historical reflection on the framework of practice developed in the ‘Info Van’ era outlined above helps draw out some lessons from the way in the organization has continued to ‘do’ community within a tension between mobility and locality. A key factor here is the ways in which the organization’s practices socialize information by bringing different actors into critical relationships by using media to move across domains usually kept apart. Ultimately, I suggest both the Info Van and the media arts models, as taken up by ICE, pluralize the putatively singular location of ‘Western Sydney’. This approach of ‘doing’ community can be contrasted with attempts to ‘know’ community. The mediated practices of the Info Van/ICE as an organization involved in a series of information ‘exchanges’ across a 25-year history, points to a series of negotiations and struggles around flows of information and knowledge outside of established media institutions. ³ The organization continues to contest, as Morley has put it, ‘the ways in which virtual and material “geographies of exclusion” operate in conjunction’ (2001: 440).

As Raymond Williams pointed out in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1985: 87–93; recently published in a revised version by Bennett et al., 2005), the term ‘culture’ contains a multiplicity of meanings. This multiplicity is key to understanding the struggles over arts as activism and industry that play out daily in any engagements with arts policies and funding pressures in a highly politicized environment. Culture can be at one and the same time an enumerated object and a practice, a reified ‘thing’ and a ‘whole way of life’. Sometimes operating as a double-speak, in which culture is spoken about in the latter terms when actions are actually oriented towards the former, culture can also be a term in which excluded or marginalized meanings are smuggled across the borderlines when powerful actors are looking the other way. In ICE’s case, located where and when it is, imperatives to ‘map’ the west from the outside, addressed via a model of disadvantage, have continued alongside struggles to resist such a disempowering vision and make an urban place homely by highlighting its richness and diversity. These negotiations are present in many ‘community arts’ projects, and this focus here on ICE aims to provoke similar studies of other organizations and situations, rather than to finalize such a debate. The implications of this critical perspective on ‘culture’ as a field of mobilizing yet conflicting practices can be seen more clearly by understanding these struggles through the lens of the ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki et al., 2001).

As noted by Hawkins in her 1993 book From Nimbin to Mardi Gras, the discourse of community arts has worked since at least the 1970s to frame social action in terms of grassroots recognition and planning of a community’s own culture through a Williams-esque imagining of culture as ‘ordinary’, as a ‘whole way of life’. The political challenge felt by practitioners within the field is that culture is increasingly framed as a domain of domestication and capitalization that is at odds with the alternatives promised by ‘culture as process’ model. As the first CCD worker at ICE during the 1990s, Annie Pfingst, commented – precisely when the organization shifted its self-definition from ‘information sharing’ to one of ‘community cultural development’ – the transition between the 1980s and 1990s orientations of the organization was actualized through arts processes:

It kind of has a historical trajectory that comes from those early days of community organisations being involved in arts, taking up arts and culture as a process of practice. A process of intervention, if you like. (Interview with the author, August 2011)

Yet as Nikolas Rose pointed out in a 1996 article titled ‘Death of the social’, published in Economy and Society, the coincidence of community cultural development discourse with the wider retreat of the state from the social in the early 1990s contributed to the operation of new techniques of governance at increasingly downsized, minute scales:

Until recently, the apparently ‘a-moral’ language of the market captured most attention in debates over changes in welfare – privatization, competition, financial calculation and so forth. But contemporary political rationalities also think in terms of another language which is just as important, which is highly morally invested and which intersects with markets, contracts and consumption in complex and surprising ways: ‘community’.… All these seem to signal that ‘the social’ may be giving way to ‘the community’ as a new territory for the administration of individual and collective existence, a new plane or surface upon which micro-moral relations among persons are conceptualized and administered. (Rose, 1996: 331)

An awareness of community as simultaneously reified (as territory, as product, as sphere of regulation) and as a process (as politics, as a form of bringing together, and as shifting relations) gives rise to the need to inquire into how these orientations towards ‘the community’ are ‘bundled’ into practices, both material and discursive, which carry across and through a history of ICE. As Crofts Wiley et al. argue in a recent essay the ‘increasing complexity of social relations, mobility, and mediated connectivity … requires a new approach to the study of social space – one which … begins with what is happening on the ground’ (2012: 185). Emerging from the ‘mobilities paradigm’, this approach seeks to understand not ‘just about how people make knowledge of the world, but how they physically and socially make the world through the ways they move and mobilize people, objects, information and ideas’ (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 112). ‘Knowing’ and ‘doing’ community are both social and aesthetic. In drawing out these contradictions within the emergence of the policy moment of community cultural development, I point to the possibility of a different or alternative history, a contingent, messy and partial set of practices which contest technological determinism, yet acknowledge the material arrangements of practices along the lines suggested by the philosopher Theodore Schatzki (and taken up by Nick Couldry [2004] in his call to theorize media ‘as practice’).

Understanding media as social action requires bringing together human agents and materiality, uncovering wider practices and rules of activity by inquiry into the purpose of practices. Couldry encapsulates this method by pointing to the way that the ‘practice turn’ pulls these disparate elements together, while moving beyond privileging individual ‘agency’ (whether of human or non-human agents) as the end-point of practice: ‘actions are linked into a practice not just by explicit understandings but also by being governed by common rules and by sharing the common reference-point of certain ends, projects and beliefs’ (2004: 121). In short, practices are oriented towards or ‘anchored’ in specific ends (Swidler, 2001), and cannot be examined in isolation from human values. This is not a particularly revolutionary idea in social theory, but is one worth bringing into the discussion of practice, as Nikolas Rose indicates in an interview in Arena magazine with Mark Furlong in 1998. Rose suggests that discourse analysis is not ‘primarily an analysis of the text’ because discourses are intimately:

embedded in practices, as they lead to the emergence of regimes of truth, which are connected up with systems of authority, which are operated through very, very specific techniques. This, for me, is a very – if it wasn’t a devalued term – materialist kind of analysis, and indeed a very empirical one too. (Furlong, 1998: 91)

Study of media practices, particularly those at sites of contention and critique, has to take into account the significant shifts that have been enabled by digital culture, yet I would suggest the value-orientation of practices can be missed if one focuses entirely on technological change. The example of ICE brings into focus the expanded fields of community in the age of ‘electronic everything everywhere’ – within and across new relations of production, distribution and circulation. Despite such technological change, what Schatzki calls ‘teleoaffective’ structures which guide our daily practices are the ‘sticky’ residue of earlier historical formations (2002: 81–4). Media-oriented practices are made meaningful by ‘normativised ends, projects, and tasks [that] determine what is signified to [participants] to do’ (2002: 80).

Distinct from practical understandings, rules and general understandings, Schatzki therefore argues that ‘teleoaffectivity’ links discourse and action in practices.

Pluralizing community and mobilizing information are two key projects that emerge from the mediated practices under investigation here. In the case of ICE I wish to suggest that these purposes are brought together in practical terms: ‘exchange’ rather than ‘distribution’. The first is less concerned with information as a scarce and unevenly distributed resource, than what Thill has called ‘hierarchies of attention’ (2009: 538), that is the way that power and authority structures what is heard in communicative action, as no speech act is free from orderings of narrative and experience. Thill suggests, in a different context, that, by critically examining these structuring forces, storytelling as a process can be interrogated. Information exchange is not just a transportation of data from one place to another, but emerges through storytelling and sharing of experience within and across material and virtual geographies of exclusion. In an important analysis of community organizing methods as one way of shifting such hierarchies, Coles has described the exchange of stories within social movements such as the Industrial Areas Foundation as a means of cultivating horizontal relationships, rather than hierarchical ones, emphasizing practices of listening and travelling outside one’s comfortable urban territories. These practices of mobility are woven ‘into a deep alliance bridging differences’ (2004: 685). To illustrate this point, I wish to contrast two statements that appeared in an ICE annual report from 1997. These two quotes capture two related but distinctly separate ‘affective structures’ that are nested within the ‘doing’ of community. The first situates information as a scarce social resource, which groups struggle to ‘free’ from hegemonic forces:

Is access to information to be centralised and subject to monopolist or oligopolist control, or is it to be dispersed, decentralised and widely available?

(Barry Jones, Sleepers, Wake!, 1995, quoted in ICE, 1997)

The second illuminates the socially constructed templates within which information circulates, the framing and shaping of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ stories, and the feelings and emotions that push and pull this ‘information’ around, mediating its movement to and fro, prioritizing some stories over others:

I always was caught by the wolf news stories; tv, radio, papers. I am certain being afraid will only worsen the situation, instil fear into minds. I like to point out the possibilities, the dangers!! (ICE, ‘Holding the reins’, quoted in ICE, 1997)

The history of ICE abounds with examples of this second strategy, looking beyond ‘neutral’ information into questioning exclusionary representations and stereotypes about Western Sydney. One instance emerged very strongly in the 2000 ‘East of Somewhere’ exhibition, produced in partnership with the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (Figure 8). The project featured public seminars and forums featuring international and national speakers. The exhibition was also taken to community cultural heritage centres, music workshops and seeded the idea for the Sydney Arab Film Festival, which has been held annually since 2000 immediately following the Sydney Film Festival.

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Figure 8.

Casula Powerhouse and ICE: East of Somewhere

In response to a question about the role of ICE in developing East of Somewhere and other arts projects in the early 2000s, a former worker at ICE, Dave Trudinger, spoke to an increasingly transnational and translocal articulation of community during this time. This new imagination of flows and movements of people via arts projects describes the moving end-point of activities from community as fixed location to community as transnational process

I think the work of setting up the film festival, setting up … there was a ‘Jirrin Journey’ project which was, I guess, a test case of a really genuinely community-involved project that wasn’t about doing another mosaic, but was actually quite an innovative engagement with issues of cultural identity, migration, memory, history, and diaspora and … yeah. Place. (D. Trudinger, interview with the author, October 2010) ⁴

Employing this critical perspective on place, Amin Palangi, a film-maker working at ICE, in an interview conducted by Ilaria Vanni Accarigi in 2011, responded to a question about ICE’s work with communities within Western Sydney. While Amin is describing his relationship to the ‘place’ of Western Sydney, he also gives an account of his practical orientation to community:

Look, I think it’s – the issue is probably above or beyond just cultural production. I think there’s questions of class, race, power.… Yeah. I think there’s a lot of stuff that – I mean, what I found very interesting about Sydney is that the West is what the East is, sort of represented globally, and the East is what the West is, represented – which is this really interesting irony. And but, you know, it’s almost like the West and East is where – I mean, Australia, even the way it’s … I mean … Earth is a sphere, so there’s no centre for it. But the way even it’s on the map, the normal maps that are printed, it’s on the most eastern side of the world. Because I mean, the East is really – it’s a colonised term. It came out of colonisation. Wherever was East of England was East, and whatever was west of England was West. And the Middle East was somewhere in the middle. (Laughs). (Interview, August 2011, emphasis added)

Conclusion

I have raised the question of the orientation of critical cultural practices between two distinct moments in this organizational history, that of information distribution and that of community cultural development. These shifts are choreographed by arrangements of people, technologies and discourses. This tour through an organizational history has suggested four main points. First, that there is a structured teleology of practice that is continuous throughout the way the organization has undertaken both community-based information and media arts production. Second, that as an organization, ICE’s practices constantly build pathways that join with others to partake in multiple, horizontal (but not necessarily tightly geographically based) forms of action. Third, that the perpetuation of such local practices is constantly in dialogue with the ways in which the media environment in which we all find ourselves ‘houses’ us, and that it is the dispersal of media infrastructure that has fuelled a move away from a certainty about ‘knowing’ where ‘the community’ is located. This move has not lessened the importance of ‘doing community’ in place, in ever more mobile ways. Finally, I wish to argue that this history continues within the enduring practices of community inside the organization, which are constantly in dialogue with other discursive practices but are not able to be determined by them. Taken together with the affordances of everyday media access, this history demonstrates the need to understand continuities of values, of feelings, and of goals, alongside disruptions to practices through technical change. This is a step towards acknowledging communication inequalities which continue to persist despite the radical and rapid overturning of the ‘information scarcity’ model.