Those imaginative, creative and liberated thinkers behind Shepparton’s annual art festival deserve congratulations and should be encouraged.
They crack open what exists and allow us to see ingrained ideas and thought processes from a fresh and, often, wholly new perspective.
Beyond persistence — the festival is Victoria’s longest running event of its type — these imaginative souls show us there is another way.
Yes, everything we do, enjoy, suffer and profit from is something we have created, and so it can be done differently.
Those driving the Shepparton Festival are simply reminding us that because something ‘is’, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
An artist friend spoke to a district service club a few years ago and, unsure how he was going to introduce art to what was a group of practical and pragmatic people, he talked about art being foundational.
He pointed to the clothes they were wearing, the cutlery on the table at which they sat, the tractors (many of them were farmers) they ploughed their paddocks with and the cars they had arrived in, explaining that in the first instance, these things were simply art; that is, lines on paper or a thought in someone’s mind.
However, the essence of the festival is about more than lines on paper, as driven by imagination, it crosses and recrosses lines and makes us wonder whether our personal centre is really holding or not.
But it is bigger than that, as the imagination we witness here in Shepparton is the key to resolving many of the difficulties and challenges the world faces.
Imagination without courage is just another tried and tired idea; an idea that manifests itself as the war in Ukraine, driven by many things, among them the idealogical madness of corporations seeking huge profits and those individuals seeking power and who find some bizarre pleasure in seeing others conform to their perverse machinations.
Imagination enables us to see how we could disband our military, abandon suspicion, doubt and the fear of the other, replacing those negative values with friendship, peace, co-operation and collaboration.
Yes, the world is trapped in a forever looping cycle created by a distorted sense of capitalism that sees massive profits for the military-industrial complex arising from the twisted idea that safety, security and happiness come when we subdue another.
Governments, for ideological reasons, lead us down the path of fearing the other, when no-one is necessarily better or worse, just different.
The Shepparton Festival illustrates to us that fear based on difference is without substance and those behind the annual festival have been showing us that there is another way. Yes, we can do things differently, throwing off the iron-like straitjacket of violence and the status quo to replace it with the comfy coat of friendship and co-operation.