COMMUNITY
GRACE MCQUILTEN // FOUNDER OF THE SOCIAL STUDIOA while back, I was working with AMES Australia – a migrant
settlement service helping isolated women learn English in their
home. I started to get more interested in the ways we can support
the settlement of newly arrived migrants, and their pathways into
further education and employment.
Starting The Social Studio was very much a community
effort. It wasn’t just me going, “Right, I’ve got this idea – let’s
make it happen.” It was really talking to young leaders from
those different refugee community groups; local artists and
designers; people in the fashion industry; people in the education
and training space, and working out how we could make a
fashion studio that would also provide training and employment
opportunities and pathways.
Most social enterprises have a social purpose or mission at the
core of what they do, and that’s the primary thing that drives
them. And then, in some way or another, they’ll operate some
kind of trading enterprise to generate revenue that supports
that core mission. But there’s a really wide spectrum, from
very commercial-looking businesses that might donate their
proceeds to charitable causes, all the way through to not-for-profit
organisations that have a really small trading aspect to what they
do, and that might fund a program they run. The Social Studio sits
somewhere in between.
There’s a saying that most social enterprises, if they were to do
things retrospectively, wouldn’t start at all, because it’s just so
chaotic and tricky and there are so many challenges involved.
But once you do start, the rewards of being involved make it so
worthwhile and exciting. The people I’ve met, the friendships I’ve
formed, and seeing the creative outputs from all the talented
artists and creatives involved in the studio has just been wonderful.
I haven’t had any kind of signature or handprint in terms of the
creative side of The Social Studio – I’ve just been witness to it.
With community work, it’s really important that the communities
themselves are engaged and active agents in what you’re doing.
So, rather than going in with a perspective of, “I’m going to come
and help this particular group of people who may be experiencing
barriers or difficulties or marginalisation,” it’s better to think,
“How can I work with this community to empower them to come up
with their own solutions for the barriers they’re facing?” Because
ultimately, they understand the issues better than anyone else.
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WRITING + PODCASTS
BENJAMIN LAW // SCREENWRITER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHORGrowing up in our household, books were never considered a waste of
money. It’s not like we had Joyce and Proust and Virginia Woolf lying
around, but there were a lot of kids’ books. Whether it was devouring
those readers you brought home in primary school, or Roald Dahl and
Paul Jennings, I’ve always had a voracious appetite for stories. It was
how I really connected to things on a very fundamental level.As much as I hung out in the library and the bookshop, I also spent
a lot of time at the newsagents. Keep in mind that most of my high
school career was pre-internet – the dial-up world was just starting
when I was about 15. For me, magazines were this sudden access
to another world. Australian television was very Anglo and British
and white, whereas magazines – like The Face that came out of
London, for instance – were really multicultural, and the aesthetics
were amazing, especially for a suburban kid like me. I never thought
I wanted to be a writer until I started reading those magazines.
A lot of people ask me, “What was your first big break?” I don’t think,
at least for me, that that thing really exists. I knew very early on that
just because I studied creative writing at uni, it didn’t mean that
doors would open up and I’d become a writer all of a sudden, and I
was quite scared about that. I was really proactive about finding work
experience at a street press. Later, I started writing for and then
editing the student magazine at university. It was probably those two
things together – as well as writing for a magazine called Voiceworks
that came out of Melbourne – that really gave me the chutzpah to be
able to approach places like metropolitan newspapers for work, and
then eventually glossy magazines, including frankie.
Everyone does and should struggle with an inner critic, especially
when they’re starting out, and anyone who says they don’t are either
lying or sociopaths. When I went through my university degree,
I didn’t necessarily blitz it or anything like that. There were some
subjects where I only just scraped through. It’s funny that I’m a TV
screenwriter now, because when I did screenwriting for the first
time, I just passed. The stuff I produced was so bad.
I think a lot of writers oscillate between crippling self-doubt and
this completely unwarranted high self-esteem that borders on ego.
There’s never a comfortable middle ground. It’s just like, “I am shit,”
versus, “Oh my god, how dare you call me shit?” But I also think you
harness that in the work, because when you think about it, you sit at
the desk, or you stand at the desk, or you sit in bed and write, and
every sentence is wrong until you make it right....................
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