Is Community Creativity Any Less of a Career Than Professional?

I don't think creativity is a lifestyle I have to earn my way into. I think it's mine to choose, on my own terms — and that's a conclusion I've come to slowly, over close to five decades now.

A lot of it comes down to my dad's side of the family, who lived in a country town. I actually grew up on the Gold Coast in Queensland, which wasn't a country town by comparison, so I got both sides of it — the city rhythm I knew day to day, and the slower, more occasional version I saw whenever we visited my dad's family. Growing up around that second version kept my view of all this in check in a way it wouldn't have if I'd only known the city version of creative life. A country town still needs entertainment — people still want to be told stories, still want a show, still want something to gather around — but you can't do it as often or as constantly as a city can. The audience isn't there in the same numbers, the resources aren't there, the whole rhythm is slower and more occasional. Unless I'm wrong about that, but it's certainly how it looked from where I sat.

I was born in 1979, so I grew up through the 80s and 90s watching old Hollywood become the Hollywood everyone knows — and I've watched it slowly come apart since Covid, alongside the rise of streaming. Naturally, I caught the bug: I wanted to be an actor, wanted to be famous. I also wanted to be an animator, since I could draw well as a kid, with my sights set on working for Disney one day. I had real family support chasing that. But if I'm honest, a thought used to creep in every so often — not that these careers would disappear exactly, but more: if I lived in a country town, would being an animator or a graphic artist actually be a job the community needed? Would it keep a roof over my head the way an actual job would — the baker, the butcher, the person at the convenience store, even a teacher? Something needed regardless of what's fashionable, funded, or trending that year. A book called *How to Be Like Walt* — something close to a bible for me — put things into perspective, and my dad's line, "what makes you different" — the one I've written about before — sat right alongside it. Between the two of them, I found my own way of putting creativity into my life instead of betting everything on becoming an actor or producer and waiting for a career that might never show up. It's more or less how I've ended up living my version of a creative life.

I mention all that because it's the personal version of a bigger pattern I think has gotten lost along the way. Acting, directing, producing, music, art — these have existed for about as long as people have gathered in groups. Communities told stories and performed for each other long before any of it was a job title. It was just something people did, alongside whatever else they did to survive.

At some point, that shifted. Creative work became a profession — a full-time thing you could build a career and identity around, a lifestyle with its own culture and status. That shift isn't a bad thing; people deserve to be paid for their skill, and a working creative industry is genuinely good for a country to have. But it's worth remembering this version — the career, the lifestyle, the professional circuit — is a newer layer sitting on top of something much older. It's not the whole story of what creativity is, even if it's the version that gets all the attention now.

I think that distinction gets forgotten more than people realise. When people talk about the arts being "in crisis," they're almost always talking about the lifestyle version — the professional pathway, the funded companies, the paid roles. Rarely is creativity itself actually at risk, because it isn't. It's still happening in halls, backyards, group chats and community centres, the same way it always has, whether or not the industry version of it is thriving. The lifestyle can shrink or change shape entirely, and creativity keeps going underneath it — because it was never dependent on the lifestyle existing in the first place.

That changes what the conversation should actually be about. It's not "will culture survive," because culture was never really in question. It's "what does it take to sustain creativity as a full-time career, and is that reasonable to ask for right now, given everything else competing for the same support." That's a fair conversation. It's just a different one to "the arts are dying," and conflating the two makes the whole debate less honest than it could be.

It's also part of why I don't think AI showing up as a creative tool is the crisis some people are treating it as — but that's a big enough thought that it deserves its own post, not a rushed paragraph at the end of this one.