Community Cultural Development (CCD) Projects
Twenty five years of experience
Merrill Findlay has engaged in community cultural development work for more than twenty-five years on both sides of continental Australia and in Melbourne, Victoria, where she established the small cultural development and community futures organisation, Imagine The Future Inc (ITF). She is now focussing her attention on communities in inland NSW.
Current CCD projects
Merrill's current CCD interventions include a music-theatre production, Saving Kate Kelly, about Ned Kelly's sister Kate who drowned in the Forbes Lagoon; community writing workshops for country folk and indigenous groups in inland New South Wales, including the forthcoming Kelso Possum Skin Cloak Project; the Paul & Hettie Wenz Project to conserve and extend the literary legacy of French-Australian writer Paul Wenz and his wife Hettie Wenz; The Creek Project which responds to the degradation of the Lachlan River and its tributaries; and the Forbes Arts & Culture Working Group. She is also contributing in a pro-bono capacity to an indigenous community initiative, the Hunza Wear Project, in the remote Hunza Valley of northeastern Pakistan to provide impoverished women with more sustainable livelihoods.
In developing the theoretical framework for her more recent projects Merrill draws on her academic research in the fields of environmental philosophy, narrative theory and cognitive science for her Masters in Social Science by Research.
 Praxis in the 1980s
Merrill's earliest formal CCD initiative, The Gascoyne Project, was undertaken way back in 1983 as Artist-in-Residence in northwestern Western Australia. This pioneering residency was funded by the Western Australia Arts Council, the WA Department of the Northwest and Carnarvon Shire Council.
Outcomes included a new dark room for community photographers, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and a coffee-table book to commemorate the Shire's 100th anniversary, Carnarvon: Reflections of a Country Town (Shire of Carnarvon, 1984, ISBN 0-9529109-0-3). The book included photographs and edited oral histories documenting the region's diverse cultural heritage.
The Fairfax Walkabout Travel Guide recommended Reflections of a Country Town as follows:
Anyone needing more information on the town should read Merrill Findlay's outstanding book Carnarvon: Reflections of a Country Town. Findlay was Artist-in-Residence in Carnarvon in 1983 and, as a professional photojournalist, she captured the spirit of the town in a way that few local histories do.
On her return to 'the Eastern States' Merrill participated in the emergence of the community arts networks in NSW and Victoria, conducted workshops for the Community Arts Resource Centre in Melbourne and wrote a working paper on community arts praxis for the Victorian Ministry for the Arts.
 The resulting monograph, Why Document? Working Paper No. 9, was published in book form in July 1986. In it Merrill investigated the arts practices of William Kelly, Geoff Hogg, Beatrice Sheehan, Tom the Street Poet, Neil Cameron and Les Gilbert. She also wrote a chapter about her own praxis.
Why Document? will soon be available as a pdf file at this site.
1990s Praxis: Imagine The Future
Merrill initiated and engaged in a range of community cultural development and community futures projects in Victoria in the 1990s through Imagine The Future Inc, the small project-based organised she established in Melbourne in the late '80s.
Her ITF projects include the world's first ecoversity which hosted many seasons of sustainability forums in the 1990s; a series of events exploring the past, present and possible futures of Timor Leste with Melbourne's East Timorese refugee community entitled East Timor: Towards Peace, Prosperity and Self-determination incorporating a Youth Ambassador Training Program which culminated in a tour of North America; the community e-journal Redreaming the plains, which incorporated the Homelands Project and Habitus: Sense of place, a collection of contributed stories about living on Victoria's basalt plain and other plains aorund the world; Painting the Future Real with its interactive possum skin cloak; and Re-imagining your Neighbourhood with communities in Western Melbourne, including Sunshine.
Also see Merrill's fiction and non-fiction.
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Page last updated 18 March, 2008. Last updated 20 June 2008. |
