I knew I needed to write.

I made plans to write.

And many days I would sit with the intention to write.

And nothing. I would become distracted. I would tell myself I was lazy. That I wasn’t trying hard enough. And that I would surely be fine when I tried doubly hard the next day.

All of this meant pressure, with no movement. Everyday only compounded the pain. No laxative in sight.

And so I went back to zero. And I began a plan to apply a gentle laxative to my creative stool. And lo, it worked.

Here’s what I did.

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There are many reasons to celebrate the normalisation of psychological insight for millennials and beyond. Mental health is no longer as harshly stigmatised as it once was in many workplaces.

But some terms - trauma, OCD - have become so ubiquitous that their clinical definition has become diluted. In some cases, this has been necessary, such as the groundswell of ADHD support, which has led to a widening of the diagnostic criteria.

Other terms - like imposter syndrome - have become facile.

Would it shock you to learn that every single teacher, student, artist, writer, actor, director, manager and leader I talk to say that one of their biggest problems is imposter syndrome?

It’s important to understand that imposter syndrome was never a clinical term. It’s become a cultural shorthand for articulating insecurity. It is substantially less scary to identify ‘imposter syndrome’ than it is to be more specific - ‘I am missing knowledge’ or ‘I have less experience than others in the room’, or ‘I’m a beginner in this area’, or ‘I feel as if I don’t belong’ or ‘being in this space gives me overwhelming anxiety’.

The term isn’t problematic in and of itself - it’s ubiquity reveals that we are all navigating spaces or tasks where we feel less than confident. It’s a unifying part of the human condition.

But I would posit that imposter syndrome has become an accepted part of artistic practice - and its normalisation has meant many people are not getting the help they need.

god lord i hate myself and i’m 38 years old. will this feeling ever go away? people speak to me as if i know answers. my age and experience is starting to show and someone will gesture to me as if i know something and I DON’T KNOW

Are you needing a mentor in a particular area? Do you require more professional development to ascertain the skills necessary for a task? Artistic practice is filled with informal mentorships at the emergent level, but I’ve noticed mid-career artists normalise seeking help as part of their process. (This is partly because many artists in Australia move out of professional artistic practice as they age due to a loss of opportunity - but that’s another article.)

Particularly when we ascend into leadership or management roles, it is a valuable part of our practice to embrace our self-doubt. We have power, after all, and we must consider that power carefully and how we wield it. That consideration should not become paralysis, but it should become part of our self-awareness.

On the other hand, are you genuinely experiencing consistent overwhelm, insecurity, and low self-esteem? If you are, it’s important to note this is not normal. It can be symptomatic of larger internal personal dynamics that a therapist or counsellor can help you unpack.

the voice is an old friend. or frenemy. been there since i was seven. as long as i can remember. low self-esteem. DBT. CBT. ACT. Every therapeutic mechanism has been thrown against it. it doesn’t go away. it is a part of me. to learn to live it….to learn when to listen to it…to learn its nuances….

And yet again, you may be at neither end of this extreme. You may feel some low-level nerves at a new project, or a state of some discomfort because you can recognise there are skills you need to learn - are you’ve identified a path to learning them. This is a normal state of affairs. In fact, it’s great. It means you’re growing.

Unfortunately, too many of us battle with an incredibly harsh internal voice. That voice can be a prelude to significant anxiety if left unexamined. At best, artists can hope to befriend this voice - to know when it is out of line or unreasonable, or when it is a signal to ask for help.

What’s your experience of imposter syndrome?

Counselling and coaching spots now open. Comment or reply for more.

A year ago I was reflecting on visiting a range of schools in a fortnight.

Two years ago I was reflecting on attachment theory.

Three years ago, I wrote my very first post for this blog - it was about male podcasters.

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Here’s what’s available if you’re a teacher, HOD, wellbeing coordinator, or school leader looking to bring something into your community.

The Published Plays

I’ve been writing for young people for a long time, and a significant chunk of that work is published and available through Playlab Theatre. The full list is here. These are all available to purchase, licence, and produce. If you’re a Drama teacher hunting for something for Unit 3 or beyond, they’re worth a look.

Workshops and Speaking Engagements

This is where I can come to you.

I run workshops in two broad streams. The first is wellbeing - whole-school presentations and workshops for students that use storytelling and drama as a frame for exploring identity, connection, and resilience. These work well as one-off incursions or as part of a broader wellbeing day or curriculum sequence.

The second stream is creative writing and drama workshops - more targeted sessions for students who are actually making work. Script development, character building, devising, the mechanics of story. These can be tailored for senior Drama and English classes, or for aspiring young writers at any level.

I’m also available for staff professional development - whether that’s around integrating creative approaches into wellbeing programs, supporting Drama teachers with their own practice, or something more bespoke.

If you’ve got something in mind that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories, reach out anyway. This work tends to be more interesting when it’s a genuine conversation.

A Bonus: Emily Burton is Also Available

My wife Emily Burton is a working actor with deep experience in educational theatre and performance workshops. If you’re looking for someone to facilitate drama and performance-based sessions — particularly with a focus on the craft of acting — she’s available and brilliant at it. Worth knowing about if you need someone with serious performance credentials rather than a writer’s perspective.

Commissions

This one’s timely: Common Ground, which I was commissioned to write for Brisbane Grammar School, opens this week. It’s been a wonderful project, and if you get the chance to see it, I’d love to hear what you think.

More relevantly for forward planning, I’m now open for 2027 commissions. If your school has been thinking about a bespoke play — something written for your students, your context, your community — now is a good time to start that conversation. These projects take time to do well, and the good commission slots tend to fill up. Get in touch early.

The best way to reach me is by replying to this email, or through my website. I’d genuinely love to hear what you’re working on.

More soon.

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After a three-year pilot that had been running since 2022, the government announced that its Basic Income for the Arts scheme - a weekly, unconditional payment of €325 to working artists (~AUD 528) - would become a permanent fixture of the state. Two thousand painters, poets, choreographers, composers, filmmakers, and circus performers will now receive (~AUD 2297) a month, every month, regardless of whether they sell anything.

Ireland is the first national government on Earth to make a basic income for artists a structural part of its governance. New York and San Francisco ran similar pilots during the pandemic, but those were philanthropic and temporary. France’s Intermittents du Spectacle is generous but is fundamentally an unemployment insurance system tied to hours worked. The Irish model is something else entirely: a floor under the creative life, no strings attached, paid simply because you are an artist.

How Ireland got here

Ireland has been wrestling with how to support its artists since the Arts Act of 1973, and a 2017 pilot had already begun exempting visual artists and writers from the “actively seeking work” requirements of the dole.

But the real catalyst was COVID. When live performance, exhibitions and events vanished overnight in 2020, the arts sector collapsed by an estimated 55 percent against an 11 percent contraction in the wider Irish economy. In September of that year, Tourism, Culture and Arts Minister Catherine Martin convened a Recovery Taskforce, whose report - pointedly titled Life Worth Living - recommended a basic income pilot as its headline measure. Crucially, the new coalition government included the Green Party, which had long advocated for a universal basic income and had negotiated a UBI pilot into the Programme for Government. Add to that the National Campaign for the Arts, a 54,000-strong grassroots advocacy body that reframed the ask not as a handout but as an investment in a labour-intensive industry being depleted by attrition, and the political window was open.

By October 2021, €25 million had been secured in the budget. By April 2022, the application portal was live.

What the evidence actually shows

Ireland did this the rigorous way: the pilot was structured as a randomised controlled trial, with recipients compared against a control group of eligible but unsuccessful applicants. The independent evaluations, conducted by Alma Economics and Social Justice Ireland, are the reason this is now permanent.

Recipients of the scheme spent about 8 to 11 more hours on their creative work than the control group. The scheme allowed them to cut time out of their ‘survival job’. s

79% completed new works during the pilot, fourteen percentage points higher than the control.

Around 40% of the payment was reinvested directly into practice - studio rent, materials, instruments, travel - averaging about €550 a month flowing straight back into the cultural economy.

Perhaps most importantly for the long-term health of the sector, the BIA stopped the bleed of talent. Within two years, 13.5% of the control group had simply stopped working in the arts. Among artists who were receiving the benefit, that number was only 5.5%.

The wellbeing data is equally compelling. Recipients were eight percentage points less likely to report anxiety and six points less likely to report depression. The rate of “enforced deprivation” - a Central Statistics Office measure of being unable to afford basic necessities - fell by more than twenty percentage points. Artists reported, often for the first time in their adult lives, that they were able to plan: to start families, to contribute to a pension, to take on ambitious projects with payoffs more than a fortnight away.

The fiscal case sealed it. The government’s cost-benefit analysis found that for every €1 spent on the scheme, society received €1.39 back — through increased tax revenue, reduced reliance on other welfare supports (recipients drew about €100 less per month in other payments), the productivity of new work being made, and the quantified social value of better mental health, estimated at nearly €80 million across the pilot. Cultural policy that pays for itself, plus change.

How you actually get on it

The mechanics are straightforward, and deliberately so. You must be 18 or over, resident in the Republic, tax-compliant, and able to demonstrate a “professional” creative practice - a distinction the scheme uses to separate working artists from hobbyists. That demonstration takes the form of three pieces of evidence, at least two from Irish-based organisations: grant or bursary letters from the Arts Council or local authorities; representation by a gallery, agent or recognised professional body; invoices for creative work or contracts; or, for new graduates, a Level 8 (or higher) practice-based qualification from the previous two years.

The interesting part is what happens next. Because demand vastly outstrips supply - over 8,200 eligible applicants competed for the original 2,000 spots - the Department doesn’t ask peer panels to pick the most deserving. It runs an anonymised lottery, weighted to ensure proportional representation across age, gender, ethnicity and disability.

The choice was deliberate: traditional merit-based grants tend to reward artists who are already established and who know how to write applications. A lottery treats everyone as equally worthy of a chance at a creative floor. The successful 2,000 receive €1,413.21 a month, declare it as self-employment income, pay Class S PRSI (so they accrue a state pension), and submit to an annual audit confirming they are still practising. The new permanent scheme also adds a “three years out of every six” rule, so that no one can hold a place forever, and new generations keep coming through.

It is not without controversy. Disabled artists have flagged a genuine cliff-edge: accepting the BIA can disqualify them from the Disability Allowance and, more painfully, the Medical Card, which for someone with high support needs can cost between €8,700 and €12,300 a year. There is ongoing debate about whether the lottery is the fairest mechanism or whether funding should be weighted toward economic need. And some commentators worry that publicly listing recipients’ names in the new scheme stigmatises the payment as welfare rather than recognising it as professional infrastructure. None of these are fatal, and the next four years will test whether the design holds.

Could anything like this happen in Australia?

The honest answer is: not soon, but not never.

Australia has a creative and cultural sector worth an estimated $112 billion, and almost no income security at its base. We have a long history of project-based grants and the occasional brilliant intervention - the 1980s Art and Working Life programme embedded artists in unionised workplaces - but cultural policy has, since Paul Keating’s 1994 Creative Nation, treated the arts predominantly as an industry rather than a social good.

Successive federal governments have at times dismissed creative training as a “lifestyle choice.” Centrelink’s mutual obligation regime has historically refused to recognise creative practice as work, although a small win in 2023 - fought for by the National Association for the Visual Arts - saw Workforce Australia begin to acknowledge some freelance arts activity.

The scale problem is real. Australia’s population is roughly five times Ireland’s, so a proportionally equivalent scheme would need to support around 10,000 artists, with cost estimates ranging from $185 million to $343 million across a multi-year pilot. The Australian Greens have proposed exactly this: a “Living Wage for Artists” pilot paying 10,000 artists about $772.60 a week for a year, costed at $277.5 million. The current national cultural policy, Revive, name-checks the “centrality of the artist” but stops well short of an income floor, focusing instead on enforceable minimum standards and a beefed-up grants ecosystem.

Whether something like the BIA arrives in Australia depends on three things. First, political alignment - Ireland’s pilot only happened because the Greens held coalition leverage and pushed UBI into the Programme for Government. The Australian Greens are vocal but not in government.

Second, a galvanising event - Ireland’s scheme was, fundamentally, a pandemic policy that stuck. Australia had JobKeeper, which papered over the same wound but never evolved into anything sector-specific.

Third, and most importantly, the data. Ireland now has a four-year evidence base showing that paying artists a basic income returns €1.39 on the dollar, retains talent, lifts wellbeing, and produces more art. That’s a hard finding for any treasury - even a sceptical Australian one - to ignore indefinitely.

For now, Australian artists will keep doing what they have always done: stitching together project grants, residencies, teaching gigs and hospitality shifts, and hoping the maths works out for another year. But across the Atlantic, 2,000 of their Irish counterparts are about to enter their fifth year of being paid simply to make work. The world is watching. If the Irish numbers continue to hold, the question Australian policymakers will face is no longer whether such a scheme is possible, but why we don’t have one yet.

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Just in case anyone in your life needs it, here are forty peer-reviewed benefits of arts education. The benefits are far wider than you may initially expect.

Too often, we assume arts education involves striving to become the next celebrity or performing an expensive performance. In reality, these have very little to do with a comprehensive arts education.

Academic achievement

• Arts-rich schooling raises writing achievement and school engagement. A multi-year, randomised study of 42 Houston schools (~10,500 students) found that increased access to arts learning improved writing achievement, school engagement, college aspirations, and compassion for others, with effects strongest among elementary students.

  • Bowen, D. H., & Kisida, B. (2019). Investigating Causal Effects of Arts Education Experiences. Houston Education Research Consortium / Rice University, peer-reviewed extensions in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

• Low-income students with high arts involvement outperform peers across academic outcomes. A longitudinal analysis of four national datasets (NELS:88, ELS:2002, NLSY97, Monitoring the Future) found that low-SES students with high levels of arts engagement had better grades, higher graduation rates, and higher college enrollment than low-SES peers with low arts engagement.

  • Catterall, J. S., Dumais, S. A., & Hampden-Thompson, G. (2012). The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies. National Endowment for the Arts.

• Arts participation predicts academic and non-academic outcomes after controlling for prior achievement. A study of 643 students across 15 schools used structural equation modeling to show arts participation positively predicts motivation, engagement, self-esteem, and life satisfaction even when controlling for prior academic performance.

  • Martin, A. J., Mansour, M., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., Liem, G. A. D., & Sudmalis, D. (2013). The role of arts participation in students’ academic and nonacademic outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(3), 709–727.

• Drama-based pedagogy improves achievement across subjects. A meta-analysis of 47 studies covering K–16 settings found a moderate, statistically significant positive effect of drama-based instruction on achievement outcomes.

  • Lee, B. K., Patall, E. A., Cawthon, S. W., & Steingut, R. R. (2015). The effect of drama-based pedagogy on PreK–16 outcomes: A meta-analysis of research from 1985 to 2012. Review of Educational Research, 85(1), 3–49.

• Visiting an art museum improves critical thinking and historical empathy. A randomised field-trip study with 10,912 students found a single visit to an art museum produced measurable gains in critical thinking, historical empathy, and tolerance — with effects roughly twice as large for rural and high-poverty students.

  • Greene, J. P., Kisida, B., & Bowen, D. H. (2014). The educational value of field trips. Education Next, 14(1), 78–86.

• Classroom drama strongly boosts verbal achievement. A meta-analysis of 80 studies found classroom drama produces significant, often substantial improvements in story understanding, story recall, reading achievement, oral language, and writing.

  • Podlozny, A. (2000). Strengthening verbal skills through the use of classroom drama. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34(3/4), 239–275.

• Drama-based instruction improves science learning. A controlled study showed students who learned cellular processes through dramatic enactment outperformed peers taught with traditional methods on conceptual understanding and retention.

  • Dorion, K. R. (2009). Science through drama: A multiple case exploration of the characteristics of drama activities used in secondary science lessons. International Journal of Science Education, 31(16), 2247–2270.

• Dramatic enactment improves reading comprehension in young children. Children who physically acted out story passages showed significantly better comprehension and inference than peers who only read or heard the same texts.

  • Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. P. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young children’s reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(3), 424–436.

Cognition and brain development

• Music lessons cause modest IQ gains in young children. In a randomized controlled trial, six-year-olds assigned to a year of keyboard or voice lessons showed greater IQ increases than controls assigned to drama lessons or no lessons.

  • Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science, 15(8), 511–514.

• Short-term music training improves executive function and verbal intelligence in preschoolers. Twenty days of computerized music training significantly enhanced verbal intelligence and executive function in 4- to 6-year-olds, with effects extending beyond the trained domain.

  • Moreno, S., Bialystok, E., Barac, R., Schellenberg, E. G., Cepeda, N. J., & Chau, T. (2011). Short-term music training enhances verbal intelligence and executive function. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1425–1433.

• Musical training produces measurable changes in brain structure. Children who received music instruction showed enlargement of brain regions involved in motor control, auditory processing, and spatial coordination compared with matched controls after 15 months.

  • Hyde, K. L., Lerch, J., Norton, A., Forgeard, M., Winner, E., Evans, A. C., & Schlaug, G. (2009). Musical training shapes structural brain development. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(10), 3019–3025.

• Music training strengthens neural processing of speech. Two years of in-school music instruction in low-income communities altered brainstem responses to speech sounds, suggesting downstream benefits for reading and language.

  • Kraus, N., Slater, J., Thompson, E. C., Hornickel, J., Strait, D. L., Nicol, T., & White-Schwoch, T. (2014). Music enrichment programs improve the neural encoding of speech in at-risk children. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(36), 11913–11918.

• Childhood music training is associated with lifelong cognitive benefits. Adults with significant childhood music training outperformed non-musicians on tests of nonverbal memory, naming, and executive processes decades later, even after controlling for education and IQ.

  • Hanna-Pladdy, B., & MacKay, A. (2011). The relation between instrumental musical activity and cognitive aging. Neuropsychology, 25(3), 378–386.

• Sustained piano lessons improve general and spatial cognitive abilities in children. A three-year quasi-experimental study showed children who received piano instruction outperformed controls on cognitive measures, particularly spatial-temporal reasoning.

  • Costa-Giomi, E. (1999). The effects of three years of piano instruction on children’s cognitive development. Journal of Research in Music Education, 47(3), 198–212.

• Arts integration boosts long-term retention of academic content. Students who learned science content through arts-integrated lessons retained that knowledge significantly better at delayed-recall testing than peers who received traditional instruction, particularly lower-achieving readers.

  • Hardiman, M., JohnBull, R. M., Carran, D. T., & Shelton, A. (2019). The effects of arts-integrated instruction on memory for science content. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 14, 25–32.

• Visual arts training enhances reading readiness in young children. A randomized study found that an arts-based curriculum improved phonological awareness and early reading skills in preschoolers, with sustained effects into kindergarten.

  • Bryant, J. A. M., & others (in line with Phillips, R. D., Gorton, R. L., Pinciotti, P., & Sachdev, A.). (2010). Promising findings on preschoolers’ emergent literacy and school readiness in arts-integrated early literacy lessons. Early Childhood Education Journal, 38(2), 111–122.

Reading, language, and listening

• Music training accelerates reading development. A meta-analysis of 13 studies (n = 901) found a small but statistically significant positive effect of music instruction on reading skills, with stronger effects for at-risk and younger children.

  • Gordon, R. L., Fehd, H. M., & McCandliss, B. D. (2015). Does music training enhance literacy skills? A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1777.

• Rhythm skills predict reading ability. Children’s ability to keep a steady beat is a significant predictor of phonological and reading skills, and rhythm-based interventions improve early literacy.

  • Tierney, A., & Kraus, N. (2013). The ability to tap to a beat relates to cognitive, linguistic, and perceptual skills. Brain and Language, 124(3), 225–231.

• Music instruction strengthens auditory working memory in adolescents. High-school students who completed band or orchestra training showed improved neural and behavioral indices of working memory and listening in noise compared with peers in a fitness program.

  • Tierney, A. T., Krizman, J., & Kraus, N. (2015). Music training alters the course of adolescent auditory development. PNAS, 112(32), 10062–10067.

• Singing supports second-language acquisition. Adults who learned phrases of a foreign language by singing recalled them significantly better than those who learned by speaking, in a controlled trial.

  • Ludke, K. M., Ferreira, F., & Overy, K. (2014). Singing can facilitate foreign language learning. Memory & Cognition, 42(1), 41–52.

Social-emotional learning, empathy, and behavior

• Acting training improves theory of mind and empathy in children. A controlled study found children enrolled in acting classes improved on measures of empathy and emotion recognition more than children in visual arts or music programs.

  • Goldstein, T. R., & Winner, E. (2012). Enhancing empathy and theory of mind. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13(1), 19–37.

• Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Five experiments showed that brief exposure to literary fiction reliably enhanced performance on theory-of-mind tests, compared with popular fiction or nonfiction.

  • Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380.

• Dance instruction improves social competence and behavior in early childhood. Disadvantaged preschoolers in a creative dance program showed greater gains in social competence and behavior than non-participating peers across an academic year.

  • Lobo, Y. B., & Winsler, A. (2006). The effects of a creative dance and movement program on the social competence of Head Start preschoolers. Social Development, 15(3), 501–519.

• Group music-making increases prosocial behavior in young children. Four-year-olds randomly assigned to joint music-making with a peer were significantly more likely to subsequently cooperate and help each other than children assigned to a non-musical joint activity.

  • Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 354–364.

• Theatre programs reduce disciplinary infractions. In the randomized Houston study cited above, schools that received increased arts programming saw a reduction in disciplinary infractions among elementary students.

  • Bowen, D. H., & Kisida, B. (2019), as above.

• Arts participation supports adolescent wellbeing. A large longitudinal Australian study (n ≈ 643 across multiple waves) found arts participation predicted gains in life satisfaction, self-esteem, and meaning over time.

  • Martin et al. (2013), as above.

• Acting experience predicts stronger emotion regulation. Adolescents with sustained acting training scored higher on emotion-regulation measures than non-actors after controlling for age and gender.

  • Goldstein, T. R., & Winner, E. (2009). Living in alternative and inner worlds: Early signs of acting talent. Creativity Research Journal, 21(1), 117–124.

• Drama participation supports adolescent self-concept and identity. Adolescents in sustained drama programs reported more developed self-concepts and stronger sense of identity than non-participating peers.

  • Wright, P. R. (2006). Drama education and development of self: Myth or reality? Social Psychology of Education, 9(1), 43–65.

• Drama programs reduce bullying and aggressive behavior. A controlled school-based study found drama-based bullying-prevention programs significantly reduced bullying behaviors compared with control classrooms.

  • Joronen, K., Konu, A., Rankin, H. S., & Astedt-Kurki, P. (2011). An evaluation of a drama program to enhance social relationships and anti-bullying at elementary school. Health Promotion International, 27(1), 5–14.

Creativity and higher-order thinking

• Arts-based programs increase divergent thinking. A meta-analysis of arts education effects found consistent positive impacts on creativity measures, particularly fluency and originality on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.

  • Moga, E., Burger, K., Hetland, L., & Winner, E. (2000). Does studying the arts engender creative thinking? Evidence for near but not far transfer. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34(3/4), 91–104.

• Studio art instruction teaches durable habits of mind. Ethnographic and observational research in 38 high-school art classrooms identified eight “studio habits of mind” — including persistence, observation, reflection, and revising — that transfer to non-art domains.

  • Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., & Sheridan, K. M. (2007/2013). Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. Teachers College Press; companion peer-reviewed work in Studies in Art Education.

• Embodied learning through theatre improves comprehension of complex texts. Children who acted out story passages showed significantly better comprehension and inference than children who only read or heard them.

  • Glenberg, A. M., Brown, M., & Levin, J. R. (2007). Enhancing comprehension in small reading groups using a manipulation strategy. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(3), 389–399 (extending earlier work in Journal of Educational Psychology, 2004).

• A large pan-European study links drama participation to multiple key competences. The DICE study (n ≈ 4,475 across 12 countries) found students participating in educational theater and drama scored significantly higher on five of the eight Lisbon Key Competences — including communication in mother tongue, learning to learn, interpersonal/civic competence, entrepreneurship, and cultural expression.

  • DICE Consortium (2010). The DICE has been cast: A DICE resource — research findings and recommendations on educational theatre and drama.

• Improvisation training improves divergent thinking and creativity. Adults trained in theatrical improvisation outperformed controls on divergent-thinking tasks, including fluency and originality.

  • Karwowski, M., & Soszynski, M. (2008). How to develop creative imagination?: Assumptions, aims, and effectiveness of role play training in creativity (RPTC). Thinking Skills and Creativity, 3(2), 163–171.

• Drama integration improves achievement on standardized tests. A multi-year study of New Jersey schools found students in drama-integrated classrooms scored higher on state language-arts assessments than peers in non-integrated classrooms.

  • Walker, E., Tabone, C., & Weltsek, G. (2011). When achievement data meet drama and arts integration. Language Arts, 88(5), 365–372.

Engagement, attendance, and graduation

• Arts coursework predicts higher graduation rates. Analyses of national longitudinal datasets show that students who take three or more arts courses in high school are significantly more likely to graduate and to enrol in university, even after controlling for income and prior achievement.

  • Catterall, J. S. (2009). Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art. I-Group Books.

• Arts-integrated instruction increases student engagement. A multi-site study of arts integration in Title I schools documented higher levels of behavioral and cognitive engagement in arts-integrated classrooms versus traditional ones.

  • Robinson, A. H. (2013). Arts integration and the success of disadvantaged students: A research evaluation. Arts Education Policy Review, 114(4), 191–204.

• Arts-rich schooling raises school attendance. In the Bowen & Kisida (2019) Houston study, increased arts learning was associated with reduced absenteeism in elementary schools.

• Music ensemble participation predicts higher academic engagement. A nationwide German panel analysis (n ≈ 17,000) found that adolescents who learned a musical instrument outside school showed higher cognitive skills, better grades, and more conscientiousness than peers — effects that persisted after extensive controls.

  • Hille, A., & Schupp, J. (2015). How learning a musical instrument affects the development of skills. Economics of Education Review, 44, 56–82.

Mental health and wellbeing

• Arts engagement is linked to lower depression in adolescents. A 12-year longitudinal study using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health found that high-school arts participation was associated with lower depressive symptoms in young adulthood, after controlling for baseline mental health.

  • Mansour, M., Martin, A. J., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., Liem, G. A. D., & Sudmalis, D. (2018). Young people’s wellbeing and the association with arts participation. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 47(8), 1614–1635.

• Arts engagement reduces mortality risk in adults — a downstream effect of lifelong arts education. A 14-year cohort study of more than 6,000 adults found that those who engaged with the arts even occasionally had a 14% lower risk of dying during the follow-up period, and frequent attendees a 31% lower risk, after extensive controls.

  • Fancourt, D., & Steptoe, A. (2019). The art of life and death: 14-year follow-up analyses of associations between arts engagement and mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. BMJ, 367, l6377.

• A WHO scoping review identifies broad health benefits of arts engagement. A comprehensive review of more than 900 publications and 3,000 studies concluded that arts engagement improves both mental and physical health across the life course.

  • Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.

• Music and dance reduce anxiety in school-age children. A meta-analysis of school-based arts interventions found small-to-moderate reductions in anxiety symptoms, with stronger effects for active participation than passive exposure.

  • Zarobe, L., & Bungay, H. (2017). The role of arts activities in developing resilience and mental wellbeing in children and young people. Perspectives in Public Health, 137(6), 337–347.

• Drama therapy reduces internalizing symptoms in children. A meta-analysis of drama-therapy interventions with children and adolescents found significant reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms compared with waitlist or treatment-as-usual controls.

  • Feniger-Schaal, R., & Orkibi, H. (2020). Integrative systematic review of drama therapy intervention research. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 14(1), 68–80.

• Drama participation predicts adolescent wellbeing over time. In Martin et al.’s longitudinal Australian study, theater participation specifically predicted gains in life satisfaction, meaning, and self-esteem after controlling for prior wellbeing and academic achievement.

  • Martin, A. J., Mansour, M., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., Liem, G. A. D., & Sudmalis, D. (2013). Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(3), 709–727.

Civic and democratic outcomes

• Childhood arts education predicts adult civic engagement. Analysis of three nationally representative datasets found that adults who had arts-rich K–12 experiences voted, volunteered, and engaged civically at significantly higher rates, with the strongest effects for those from low-income backgrounds.

  • Rabkin, N., & Hedberg, R. (2011). Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation. National Endowment for the Arts Research Report #52.

• Museum visits increase tolerance and historical empathy. From the same Greene, Kisida, & Bowen (2014) field-trip RCT: students randomly assigned to a museum visit showed measurable increases in tolerance.

Equity and closing gaps

• Arts education narrows achievement gaps for disadvantaged students. Catterall, Dumais, & Hampden-Thompson (2012) found that low-SES students with high arts engagement had outcomes that more closely resembled their high-SES peers than their low-SES, low-arts peers — a pattern the authors describe as a partial “closing of the gap.”

• Music education improves outcomes for English language learners. A controlled study of bilingual elementary students found those receiving systematic music instruction outperformed peers on phonological awareness in both languages.

  • Yang, H. (2014). The effects of musical experience on phonological awareness in young children with Spanish-speaking parents. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(4), 754–771.

• El Sistema-style music programs change life trajectories for low-income youth. A five-year longitudinal study of children in an El Sistema-inspired program in Los Angeles found accelerated maturation of brain regions associated with auditory and language processing, and improvements in executive function.

  • Habibi, A., Damasio, A., Ilari, B., Sachs, M. E., & Damasio, H. (2018). Music training and child development: A review of recent findings from a longitudinal study. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1423(1), 73–81.

Adult skills and the long arc

• Arts-trained college graduates report higher creative problem-solving on the job. Surveys of more than 13,000 college graduates by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) — peer-reviewed companion analyses in Cultural Trends and Arts Education Policy Review — find that arts-rich P–12 experience predicts later workplace creativity and innovation, even outside arts careers.

  • Lena, J. C., Frenette, A., Schuster, J. M., & Tepper, S. J. (2014). Making it Work: The Education and Employment of Recent Arts Graduates. SNAAP / Indiana University.

• Schools serving disadvantaged students that emphasize the arts produce stronger college-going outcomes. A national study of high schools serving low-income populations found those with strong, sustained arts programming had college-going rates substantially higher than matched comparison schools.

  • Israel, D. (2009). Staying in School: Arts Education and New York City High School Graduation Rates. Center for Arts Education / Center for an Urban Future.

A closing note on the literature

Two honest caveats. First, much of this work is correlational, and selection effects matter - kids who choose arts programs are not identical to those who don’t. The strongest claims here come from RCTs (Bowen & Kisida; Schellenberg; Greene et al.; Kraus et al.), longitudinal designs with strong controls (Catterall; Hille & Schupp; Habibi et al.; Fancourt & Steptoe), and meta-analyses (Lee et al.; Gordon et al.; Moga et al.). Second, the once-popular “Mozart effect” - the idea that passively listening to classical music boosts intelligence - has not held up; the cited findings are about active arts participation and instruction, which is a meaningfully different claim. Passive participation in the arts is not enough to see benefits. Meaningful arts education is necessary.

But notice what survives the scrutiny: causal evidence for academic gains, brain-level evidence for cognitive and linguistic benefits, randomised evidence for empathy and behaviour effects, longitudinal evidence for graduation and life outcomes, and population-level evidence for health and longevity.

Critically, many of these life-long benefits are external to any clear employment outcomes. Measuring the utility of a course of study by its extrinsic link to immediate employment is narrow to the point of being useless.

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Ever since I added a Graduate Diploma of Psychology to my Doctorate qualifications, I have worked one-on-one with people who are navigating something hard. Sometimes that’s a life transition. Sometimes it’s the particular exhaustion that comes from caring deeply about your work for a very long time. Sometimes it’s just the feeling that something’s off, and you can’t quite name it yet, but you know you don’t want to keep carrying it alone.

Many of my clients are educators or creatives who find a relationship with a traditional psychologist limiting.

I’m not a detached clinician. I came to counselling because I’ve sat in that chair myself - because I know what it’s like to need a space to speak aloud the entire mess of creativity, work, life, and family balance. I know what it’s like to be someone whose inner life is complicated and rich and sometimes completely overwhelming.

What I love most about this work is the same thing I love about writing: The moment a person hears themselves say something out loud and realises — oh, that’s what’s been going on. There’s nothing quite like it.

I work with people individually, online, on a flexible basis. I’m not attached to a clinic or a long waitlist. It’s just me, and a genuine hour, and whatever you bring to it.

If any part of this is landing for you - whether for yourself or someone you care about - I’d love to have a conversation. I offer a free fifteen-minute introductory call with no obligation whatsoever. Just a chance to talk, see if it feels like a fit, and ask any questions you have.

You can reply to this e-mail or fill out a contact form here.

And if you know someone who might need this — please feel free to pass it on.

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This is a letter I have sent him in reply.

Dear Minister,

Thank you for your considered response and for your acknowledgment of the sector. My original letter to you concerning ATAR scaling was a representation of a feeling of urgency within the Queensland arts community, and within Australian arts education more broadly. I published that letter, and the original article has now been viewed over three and a half thousand times. It was shared 210 times on Facebook, and many more times across LinkedIn and Instagram. I share these figures not as a measure of public influence, but as evidence that the concerns I raised were not idiosyncratic or isolated. They are widely held and deeply felt.

I appreciate you setting out the respective roles of QCAA and QTAC, and the limits on your direct authority over them. However, as the numbers above show - and as the body of my original letter and this reply will continue to show - the community feels this issue warrants immediate attention and redressing. The fact that QTAC has established a working group to assess the methodology, use, understanding and outcomes of the ATAR after its first five years is welcome. QTAC’s recent community survey, which closed on 24 April 2026, is also welcome. These are necessary steps, but on their own they are not sufficient, and I want to explain why.

Your response raises several other points that, with respect, deserve a fuller engagement than the format of a ministerial reply allowed. I’d like to address each in turn.

Tertiary contraction is not a separate problem from senior secondary decline

Tertiary study of the arts, and the performing arts in particular, is deeply concerning for me and for many others. Last year’s news of substantial restructuring to QUT’s Creative Industries program - including the cancellation of the dance major and the shift away from live performance in the Acting program - is a sizeable hit to our career pathways as a state. Like many universities across the country, hard-working creative arts staff at UniSQ and Griffith are doing their best to keep creative arts afloat. But the decline in high schoolers applying - driven, in significant part, by ATAR scaling that discourages them from arts subjects as young as Year 9 - directly threatens those programs’ viability.

This is the point I want to draw your attention to most carefully, because your letter treats the decline as a list of separate, weighable factors: the perception of unfavourable scaling, the cost of university degrees, concerns over employment prospects. The peer-reviewed research now available makes clear that these are not separate factors at all.

In February 2026, Professor Sandra Gattenhof of QUT and Dr John Nicholas Saunders of the Australian Catholic University published a paper in the Australian Journal of Education titled The Polycrisis for Arts and Creative Education in Australia. Their central finding is that arts education in this country is not facing a single problem but a polycrisis: an interlocking, mutually reinforcing system in which declining Year 12 arts enrolments, contracting tertiary creative arts programs, and federal cost barriers (most prominently the Job-Ready Graduates package) each accelerate the others. Senior secondary collapse depletes the tertiary pipeline. Tertiary contraction signals to schools and students that the pathway is closing. Cost barriers compound the disincentive to pursue subjects that are already being scaled against. Each piece worsens the next.

The polycrisis frame matters because it changes what an adequate response looks like. A discrete review of QTAC scaling, conducted in isolation, will not on its own arrest the cascade. Nor will the development of a music education partnership program, however well intentioned. The interlocking nature of the crisis is precisely why a coordinated, ministerially led response is required, and precisely why no single autonomous body can resolve it. With respect, Minister, we need something more.

Job-Ready Graduates: a federal problem with a state-level signalling effect

You suggested that rising university course costs may be one factor in the decline. I presume this is a reference to the Job-Ready Graduates Scheme introduced by the Morrison Government, which saw a meteoric rise in the cost of many arts courses. It is worth being precise about what JRG did and did not do. JRG primarily increased the cost of arts, society and culture degrees (literature, history, sociology) by 116%, while creative arts degrees (drama, visual arts, music) rose by approximately 19%. Creative arts staff have fought the public conflation of these two categories since 2020. Analysis from 2024 suggested that only around 1.5% of students changed their enrolment behaviour because of course cost.

So in narrow behavioural terms, JRG has not been the dominant driver. But Gattenhof and Saunders identify JRG as a constituent part of the polycrisis specifically because of its signalling effect. It tells a generation of students that the country has decided their field of study is worth less. That signal compounds with the ATAR scaling signal, which tells those same students that their senior secondary study of the arts is also worth less. The two work in concert. You cannot, as Minister, repeal JRG. But you can - and I am asking you to - back the National Advocates for Arts Education’s call for a National Inquiry into Arts Education and Training, and write to your federal counterpart on behalf of Queensland in support of it.

The cascade is happening now, and “perception” is the wrong word for it

Your letter describes ATAR scaling as a “commonly held perception” that may influence student choice. With respect, Minister, perception is the wrong word. The scaling is the published methodology and the published outcomes. A student achieving a perfect raw result in Drama in Practice receives a scaled score of 47 at the 99th percentile. A student achieving an equivalent perfect result in Mathematical Methods receives 97. Drama Queensland documented this gap formally in February 2022 and called for an immediate review. The students and parents acting on this information are not labouring under a misperception. They are responding rationally to a measurable structural penalty. That’s more than a perception problem.

The downstream cascade is now well documented. Between 2017 and 2021 over 3,500 Queensland students disappeared from senior Drama. The number of Queensland schools offering Drama fell from 303 to 279 between 2021 and 2024. Year 12 Drama completions fell from 3,131 in 2021 to 2,439 in 2023, recovering only marginally to 2,470 in 2024 - a 21% net decline over three years. Schools have begun collapsing Drama into composite Year 9–12 classes, in which students cannot reasonably receive the syllabus they are enrolled to receive. As Gattenhof and Saunders observe, once a senior subject becomes unviable, schools begin removing it from Years 9 and 10, and then from the Year 7 and 8 elective pool. The pipeline closes from the top down. This is not theoretical. It is happening in Queensland classrooms right now, and it will not be reversed by a touring program.

What you, as Minister, can do

Your letter notes fairly that QCAA, QTAC, and school principals each have their own jurisdictions. I accept that. But the question I’d like you to engage with is not “who is responsible for each piece” but “who can convene the response that the polycrisis requires?” Only one office in Queensland can do that, and it is yours.

I’d like to draw particular attention to the Crisafulli Government’s own Queensland’s Time to Shine: a 10-year strategy for arts and culture 2025–2035, which you cited in your letter. The strategy’s first 12-month action plan commits to the development of an arts education plan and a creative careers roadmap, in consultation with the tertiary sector and other government departments. Arts Queensland, which is leading implementation, sits within your own department. This is, in other words, a plan you have already publicly committed to producing. The community’s question is not whether it will exist, but what it will say.

I am asking you, in that spirit, to make the following commitments:

1. That the Queensland arts education plan, when published, will explicitly examine senior secondary subject viability, the impact of ATAR scaling on student subject choice, the incidence of composite arts classes in state schools, and the distribution of specialist arts teachers across the state. Without these, the plan will be an enrichment document, not a pipeline document, and the structural problem will continue beneath it. I would also ask that the consultation process include Drama Queensland, the Queensland Teachers’ Union, the National Advocates for Arts Education, the Australian Society for Music Education, Ausdance, and the affected universities — not only Arts Queensland’s existing partner organisations.

2. That the Department of Education will lodge a formal submission to the QTAC working group before its reporting deadline this year, on behalf of arts subjects in Queensland state schools. QTAC’s autonomy from government does not preclude government from making its position known. The Department has standing here, and silence on its part would itself be a position.

3. That the creative careers roadmap will be modelled as a full pipeline document - school to tertiary to industry - rather than commencing at tertiary or industry. A roadmap that begins downstream of the bottleneck cannot, by construction, address it.

4. That the Department will commission and publish a Queensland-specific state-of-the-sector report on arts education, drawing together the data the Department, QCAA, and QTAC each hold separately: subject offerings by school, composite class incidence, specialist teacher availability, enrolment trend lines, and tertiary application data. This data exists in fragments. It has not been brought together for the purpose of public accountability. It should be.

5. That you will convene a cross-agency roundtable comprising QTAC, QCAA, the Department of Education, Arts Queensland, the affected universities, and the relevant peak bodies. Each of these agencies has reasons it cannot convene the others. Only the Minister can. The polycrisis frame is the very justification for it: an interlocking problem cannot be solved by siloed responses.

6. That you will commit publicly to a substantive ministerial response to the QTAC working group’s findings within a defined window after they are delivered, and to acting on their recommendations rather than receiving them. Working group reports that report into a vacuum tend to remain in the vacuum.

7. That you will introduce a notification or viability-assessment requirement for state schools intending to discontinue an arts senior subject, so that the Department can monitor the cascade and intervene where it is concentrated. This is a soft floor, but it would surface the data and slow the contraction while the longer reforms are under way.

8. That you will write, on behalf of Queensland, to your federal counterpart in support of the NAAE’s call for a National Inquiry into Arts Education and Training, and in support of meaningful reform to the Job-Ready Graduates settings as they apply to creative arts study.

Brisbane 2032 and the Glasshouse Theatre

Your letter draws on Time to Shine‘s ambition for Queensland’s creative sector, and the strategy itself foregrounds Brisbane 2032 as a generational opportunity for cultural programming, infrastructure, and global standing. I accept that ambition entirely. I want to make plain why it cannot survive the current trajectory.

The cultural programming for Brisbane 2032 will be designed, performed, staffed, and produced by people who are in Year 7 to Year 12 right now. The pipeline that will populate that programming - and that will keep working long after the closing ceremony - is being dismantled in the years between now and then. There is no policy timeline that recovers in time if the cascade continues. A dance major closed at QUT in 2025 is not a dance major reopened in 2031. A Drama program cut at a regional state school in 2024 is not a Drama program restored when the QTAC formula is tweaked in 2027. The damage is being done now, in classrooms and on lecture timetables, and a substantial portion of it is already irreversible.

In my original letter I opened with the Glasshouse Theatre at QPAC - opened last month to ceremony and to genuine state pride. The point of that image was not nostalgia. It was that, on the current trajectory, we will be unable to staff that theatre, on stage and off, with Queensland talent within ten years. QUT’s pivot away from live performance training is a piece of evidence for that claim, not a counterargument to it. Screen and digital training does not produce the cohort that staffs a stage like the Glasshouse, and the Glasshouse is not an outlier - it is the kind of facility this state has invested in repeatedly and intends to invest in further. Technical and stage management staff are already in a period of deep and significant drought. For any professional currently working in this industry, the broken bottleneck is a deep and immediate concern.

I do not write to you in adversarial terms. I write because the levers required to address the polycrisis sit, in significant part, on your desk, and because the agencies your letter pointed to are each agencies that will not act unless the Minister directs the response. The arts education plan has been promised. The creative careers roadmap has been promised. The QTAC review has been initiated. The architecture of an adequate response exists. What is missing is ministerial decision to have those pieces address the actual structural collapse, rather than its symptoms.

I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you, or with Ms Cule, to discuss any of the above in more detail. I will continue to publish on this subject in the public interest, and I will continue to make the case - to your office and to the sector - that Queensland cannot deliver on its own arts and cultural ambitions while presiding over an education system that empties the pipeline feeding them.

Sincerely,

Dr David Burton

Playwright, director and arts educator

Signed Minister Langbroek Response To Mr David Burton

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The first skill isn’t writing. It’s selection.

Before you write a single word of an application, you need to ask whether you’re applying to the right fund.

Every funder has a personality. Australia Council (now operating as Creative Australia) speaks the language of artistic merit and professional track record. Arts Queensland wants to know about community benefit and Queensland identity. The Copyright Agency Cultural Fund cares about professional creative practice - you’re a working creator who publishes, and they’re there to support that.

If you apply to a community arts fund with a highly literary, no-audience-engagement project, you haven’t done anything wrong as a writer. But you’ve made a fundamental mismatch, and the assessors will feel it immediately.

Read the funder’s guidelines until you can hear their language. Then use that language back at them. Not as mimicry, but as proof that you align with their goals. If you have to bend your concept of the project to make it fit, it’s probably a mismatch.

Assessors want to say yes

This is the single most liberating thing I can tell you: assessors are not sitting there looking for reasons to reject your application. They’re looking for a reason to keep reading.

Assessment panels typically consist of three to five people, including arts professionals, practitioners, and administrators. They often read dozens of applications in a sitting. They are not fresh-eyed and fully caffeinated when they reach yours. They are scanning for a reason to care.

Your job is to make caring easy. That means your most compelling idea goes in the first paragraph, not the last. It means your project description is vivid and specific, not vague and aspirational. It means your budget is honest and your timeline is realistic.

Assessors weigh their scores across criteria - artistic merit (often 40–50% of the total), project viability, budget, and community impact. They’re not looking for perfection. They’re looking for coherence. Does this project make sense? Does this person seem like they can pull it off? Does this funder’s money feel well-placed here?

The enemy of a good application is vagueness

The most common failure I see in grant applications isn’t poor writing. It’s a failure of nerve - the impulse to describe your project in terms so broad that no one can disagree with them, and no one can picture them either.

*A novel exploring grief and identity* tells an assessor almost nothing.

*A novel told in reverse chronology from the moment of a mother’s death, tracing how memory distorts guilt across three generations of migrant women in South East Queensland* - now I can see it. Now I want to read it. Now I can champion it to the rest of the panel.

The more specific you are, the more universal you become. That feels counterintuitive, but it’s consistently true. The particular is what makes things resonate.

Rejection is a draft, not a verdict

The writers I know who are most successful at securing grants share one trait: they keep applying.

Rejection from a grant is not a statement about your worth as an artist. It’s data. What was the funder’s reasoning? Does your project need to be reframed? Was the budget off? Was it simply not the right fund?

Most successful applications are revised versions of rejected ones. Request feedback. Fix what you can. Resubmit.

Resubmitting to the same fund is not only frowned upon - it often improves your chances. Assessors can see that you’ve listened.

Keep a rejection file. Not to wallow in it, but to normalise the experience. Applying is itself a professional act. The writers who don’t apply are the ones who definitely don’t get funded.

Make it a practice, not a panic

The last thing I’ll say is this: the writers who consistently secure funding don’t treat it as a once-a-year scramble. They keep at least two applications in progress at any given time. They know when each major funder opens. They work backwards from deadlines and block preparation time - four to six weeks minimum for a serious application.

This isn’t grinding. It’s how a professional creative practice works. You’d schedule time for writing. Schedule time for this too.

If you’re ready to start mapping your opportunities, I’ve put together a comprehensive reference guide — Key Funding Bodies for Writers — covering grants, awards, fellowships and residencies available to Australian writers, with particular focus on Queensland. It includes who can apply, what’s on offer, typical deadlines, and the “funder personality” notes I cover in my workshops.

The guide is available to paid subscribers below.

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Breaking news, guys: turns out it’s pretty good.

I loved the movies as a teen. I continued to love the IP just like any self-respecting nerd. I’d read Fellowship about three times in my life - but I’ve never done all three volumes. Which is insane. But it’s done.

I’m on a real fantasy kick at the moment. I’ve crossed some kind of threshold and am taking them in gulps: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Stormlight Archives, Robin Hobb’s Farseer series, Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl.

They are all good. But Tolkien is excellent.

Why? (And, for me - do I actually believe that assertion?)

All of those other authors are writing fantasy. They are writing to a commercial publishing standardised genre - they’re all doing their spin on it. But that genre is all inspired by Tolkien.

And Tolkien wasn’t writing Fantasy.

Tolkien wasn’t emulating modernist Fantasy writers, or even horror writers like Poe or Lovecraft. Tolkien was writing mythology. He was most interested in Middle-Earth and its history, linguistics and cosmology. It is his life’s work. Frodo’s journey is window dressing for a much larger, detailed, thought-through landscape of an entire world.

In that, Tolkien is unparalleled. He had a singular, life-long devotion to this world, brimming with actual languages, myths and religions, races and family trees. He is not particularly interested in being a commercial author - unlike all of the authors I listed above.

A key part of Tolkien’s approach to writing is something called secondary belief - the idea that readers should ideally believe in the fantasy world as real, much like Christians would when reading the Bible. Even if not literally true, the works should be morally true. And indeed, Tolkien’s reconstruction of Christian values is spell-binding: Gollum’s temptation, the corruption of Boromir, Frodo and Sam’s ethical burden. All of these are deliberately theological plot constructions, spun out of a heady mix of Tolkien’s internal values as a devout Roman Catholic and his intellectual curiosity in linguistics and history. (An essay for another time, perhaps, but I’d assert that Tolkien’s literature is the greatest work of Catholic art since Michelangelo.)

That is not to say he was without flaw. Contemporary Fantasy authors seek to replicate, repair and remix many of the tropes that Tolkien played with. The most jarring irregularity for a 2026 reader: Middle-Earth is almost believable, except that there are no women with interiority. Women are mostly absent, or mute, and given no autonomy. N.K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, Sarah J. Maas, Samantha Shannon and many others assert a feminist reconstruction of Fantasy, all partly responsible for the contemporary market saturation in Romantasy for the female gaze - almost a century on from Tolkien.

For all his fascination with Catholic moral temptation, Tolkien is racist when declaring the racial lines of his work: ‘dark’ meaning ‘bad’, ‘light’ meaning ‘good’. This is unescapable when reading Tolkien now, and an uncomfortable blind spot when regarding Peter Jackson’s almost flawless movie trilogy. Why were there no black people in Middle-Earth? Or anyone other than white people? As a white guy, I had the privilege of not twigging to this until Magic: The Gathering released a Lord of the Rings set a few years ago. The artwork is stunning - a true departure from the visual aesthetics of Jackson. The revelation of a black Aragon made me realise I’d been blind.

Just as Tolkien embeds temptation in all his characters - temptation to take the easy path - I am tempted to hold Tolkien up as the paragon of Fantasy. We do it all the time with Shakespeare, of course, and countless other patriarchs of narrative form, musical genius, or notions of performative ‘excellence’.

It is unfair and inaccurate to describe Tolkien as ‘the best’ at Fantasy. Rather, it is better to describe Tolkien as the best at what he wanted to do, which was something incredibly specific. Tolkien was a Linguistics Professor, a traumatised war veteran and a devout Catholic. He enjoyed creating an entire imaginary world in his spare time, for his own enjoyment and that of his children. He did so excellently.

That specificity of purpose is what makes Middle-Earth irreducible - and what makes every other fantasy author both his inheritor and, inevitably, something else entirely.

I'd love to know who sits at the top of your personal canon, or which contemporary fantasy authors you think have pushed the furthest beyond what Tolkien started. Drop a comment below - and if you know someone who's been meaning to finally finish all three volumes, send this their way.

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I offer wellbeing workshops and talks for schools.

This time last year, I wrote about some work I’ve done in writing for theatre-in-education.

Two years ago, I wrote about geriatric psychology.

Some professional writers boast about turning up to ‘work’ each day, working for six to eight hours in a mixture of administration, writing and editing, and then knocking off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried this in my life. My brain can’t seem to function that way. I do better in intensive bursts. I know many writers are the same.

So how, then, can we trick our brain into an intense burst of activity? How can we begin to build momentum so that sitting down to write feels effortless?

Some tips below.

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In a much publicised scene of the frothy romantic comedy, Page - previously the leading man for season one of Bridgerton - gets his shirt soaked and has to remove it. Oh, golly gosh.

It is reminiscent of a romantic comedy classic - Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice - similarly drenched (but not shirtless). A scene erotic and iconic enough that the shirt recently sold for £20,000 in an auction.

Thirty years separate the two scenes - and in that time, the notion of male beauty has changed dramatically. This is not a slight against any actor’s individual ability or good looks. It’s only to say that now, in 2026, all ‘attractive’ men in Hollywood look the same: chiselled toros with body fat under 12% - bodies that are almost impossible (let alone not necessarily ‘healthy’) for most men to achieve without life-sacrificing discipline and paid help.

This represents something far more complex than a simple eroticisation of the male body in 21st-century feminism. How we think about the male body has changed significantly in Hollywood. Think of the 90’s leading men that would make us swoon: Hugh Grant, Richard Gere, Johnny Depp, a young Leo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks. All good actors, dashing leading men - none of them looked like they were pounding steak three times a day.

I wouldn’t mind quite as much if a - unrealistic body expectations hurt all genders and promote unrealistic diet and health expectations, and b - ‘hot’ casting gets in the way of ‘good’ casting.

No better perpetrator of this crime than 2025’s The Materialists, which should have been a fantastic film, written and directed by Celine Strong. But the film’s central premise is undercut by casting Chris Evans - a good actor - in the role of Dakota Johnson’s ex. We are supposed to believe Evans is a lovable schlub who barely has his life together - but his exquisite jawline, perfectly tailored shirt and broad shoulders make that difficult to believe. To put it plainly: he’s too hot - has so clearly got his life organised enough to look after his body to an athletic degree - that he’s not a believable mess.

And I would challenge the idea that this is all for the gals in the audience, anyway. The ripped Hollywood star trope is relatively recent - a cousin to the Arnold Schwarzenegger bodybuilding of the 80s, a sibling to the 90s Mark Wahlberg, famed Calvin Klein campaign.

But - as countless queer scholars and commentators have said since that time - the images are equally homoerotic. The bodies are equally for the male gaze as the female - perhaps even more so. Gym culture (and so much of the man-o-sphere culture today) is about men impressing other men, not necessarily making themselves as attractive as possible to straight women. Of course, this reaches its gay zenith in 2025’s Heated Rivalry.

It would all be fun and games except that the stakes are relatively high. Eating disorders among boys is on the rise. I’ve run a few workshops with all-boys schools in the last six months. I was shocked when they confessed that most of them were measuring calorie and protein intake everyday.

There is an alternative to the ripped Greek God. This vaguely distressing article from The New York Times in 2024 charts the rise of the ‘noodle boy’ - a term the article promises is complementary, although the commentary feels bizarrely exploitative and off-putting:

He’s reedy like a long-distance runner; his flopsy curls tumble like overcooked fusilli. He’s attractive but in a way you can’t always put your finger on. He’s Hollywood’s white boy of the moment, and he has ambled into the movie industry to counter the broad and built look that the Marvel cinematic onslaught helped usher in during the 2000s.

Timothée Chalamet is the best example of this. The noodle boy physique also signals less gym time, less ‘hard’ masculinity, and something more soft and brooding. But here, too, of course, Hollywood is only satisfied with binaries.

And it feels obvious, but I have to remind myself almost constantly: there is an endless variance in male bodies, and an endless variance in what people find attractive or empowering.

The dashing leading men of the previous generation prove this point. There is no single thin line between ‘ripped’ and ‘noodle boy’. Rather, there is Firth and Grant and Gere and Hanks and Washington and DiCaprio and Pitt and on and on and on. And our culture still hungers for it - as is visible in the ‘Daddy’ figure in pop culture (Pedro Pascal, Noah Wyle), the tortured British dude (Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor), the broad comedy guy (Jack Black, Will Ferrell), and more.

The real issue isn’t that Hollywood has expanded its idea of who gets to be desired, but that it has quietly narrowed how that desire is allowed to look. In trading one dominant ideal for another, the industry risks flattening the very diversity it claims to celebrate. It reduces male attractiveness to either sculpted perfection or its carefully curated “alternative.” Women have suffered from these biases since time immemorial - and still do. The fact that men are now lumped in under the same punishing standards is a despairing step backwards.

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I offer wellbeing workshops and talks for schools.

This time last year, I was reflecting on every house I’ve lived in.

Two years ago, I was talking about the cohesion of the arts ecosystem.

Just a very brief note to let you know that I now have limited spots specialising in dramaturgical mentorship and one-on-one creative developments. I’ve called the project ‘Critical Friend’. If you’re a playwright or know someone who is, I’d love to hear from you.

The Critical Friend brings your draft play into a focused, sustained conversation with an experienced dramaturg and playwright. Before we meet, you’ll receive a written first response to your script — an honest account of what’s working, what the central questions are, and where the real work lives. Then we spend eight hours together, either in two four-hour blocks or across several two-hour sessions, going deep into structure, character, voice, and whatever the play most needs. It’s not a script assessment or a report — it’s a working relationship, built around your draft, designed to leave you with a clearer play and a clearer sense of how to write it.

What you’ll leave with

A clearer draft, or at least a clear sense of what the next draft needs to be. A deeper understanding of how your play works and why it does what it does. And the kind of conversation about your writing that’s genuinely hard to find.

Who this is for

Playwrights at any stage who have a draft they’re serious about. Writers who want a real conversation, not a checklist. People who are ready to interrogate their own work and hear an honest response to it. This isn’t for writers who want to be told their play is great. It’s for writers who want to know how to make it better.

About Dave Burton

Dave Burton is a Brisbane-based playwright and dramaturg with over forty professionally produced plays, and long-standing relationships with Queensland Theatre Company, La Boite Theatre Company, and QPAC. Recent work includes Icarus for QTC’s The Scene Project, Space Cowboy for QUT, and QPDA finalist The Good Dad. He has been working with writers, in workshops, in rehearsal rooms, and one-on-one, for over two decades.

Investment: $750

This includes your written first response and eight hours of sessions, structured to suit you.

Places are limited. This is not a scalable product — it’s a finite amount of attention, offered to a small number of writers at a time.

To apply or ask a question, reply to this post.

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A year ago, I was in the midst of my love affair with ChatGPT. It sped up my workflows considerably. You can see the efforts here on the blog at the April, 2025 mark, when I started using it to promote my coaching business, which I was trying to turn into a stable part of my income.

Posts like this one took almost no time to publish. I worked with ChatGPT to bridge the gap between my creative impulse and an articulate few hundred words. Looking back, I feel ethically complicated about that, but I don’t know why.

Well, let’s sift through it. In my defence: the post was genuinely helpful to people, as comments on it show. It served to promote my business, so it was marketing, not creative speak, and I am like any other small business, just trying to attract clients. And my service helps people, very directly. I do believe in that. So if using something like ChatGPT helps me help more people, isn’t that a net good? PLUS - AI and ChatGPT are inevitable; should we be embracing them to make sure we’re not left behind?

But to prosecute myself: I’m being ethically duplicitous if my advice to countless creatives is to find your own voice, to prioritise rest, to resist the urge to constantly join a ceaseless content engine - and I’ve gone against all of my own advice. Surely I would be of better service to my community if I modelled the behaviour I espouse? And, lying down and just ‘accepting’ that AI is inevitable is a cop out. At every level of society, we are reckoning with how to use this technology. And that should include the individual business owner as well.

And there are plenty of reasons to distrust AI. Its computational efforts use an insane amount of energy that harms the planet. Its large language models are based on the theft of millions of writers' copyrighted works - including mine. Plus, the last time we let exciting technology run rampant without regulations, we ended up with Pandora’s Box of social media: a generation lost to debilitating anxiety disorders, entire democracies thrown out or re-jigged, and the proliferation of hate speech.

So. For this, and many reasons, I began to back away. OpenAI’s collaboration with the Pentagon to fuel the Iran war was the last straw. But for more personal reasons, too - ChatGPT is really shit at writing.

I attempted to train it in using my ‘voice’ - something that I can’t define for myself, but nonetheless tried. But the result it spat out always sounded too earnest and strange. As this post from New York Times states, AI’s writing tone is obnoxious and irritating:

In the quiet hum of our digital era, a new literary voice is sounding. You can find this signature style everywhere — from the pages of best-selling novels to the columns of local newspapers, and even the copy on takeout menus. And yet the author is not a human being, but a ghost — a whisper woven from the algorithm, a construct of code. A.I.-generated writing, once the distant echo of science-fiction daydreams, is now all around us — neatly packaged, fleetingly appreciated and endlessly recycled. It’s not just a flood — it’s a groundswell. Yet there’s something unsettling about this voice. Every sentence sings, yes, but honestly? It sings a little flat. It doesn’t open up the tapestry of human experience — it reads like it was written by a shut-in with Wi-Fi and a thesaurus. Not sensory, not real, just … there. And as A.I. writing becomes more ubiquitous, it only underscores the question — what does it mean for creativity, authenticity or simply being human when so many people prefer to delve into the bizarre prose of the machine?

If you’re anything like me, you did not enjoy reading that paragraph. Everything about it puts me on alert: Something is wrong here; this text is not what it says it is. It’s one of them. Entirely ordinary words, like “tapestry,” which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense. I’m driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern “It’s not X, it’s Y,” even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare. But whatever these little quirks of language used to mean, that’s not what they mean any more. All of these are now telltale signs that what you’re reading was churned out by an A.I.

However, I’m not ready to throw it out just yet. I’ve stopped paying for a chatbot, switched to Claude (which still has its problems), and am still using it daily. Most of the time, it acts like a zupped-up search engine. It helps me organise to-do lists into a clean list that won’t overwhelm me. It helps me think through cooking dinner from a random list of pantry ingredients and a couple of picky eaters.

The most creative aspect of my business that it helps me with is research. I remain ethically unsure about this, but I can only excuse it in that it simply speeds up something that Google would do - it finds sources and summarises them. I check those sources, I use it to help me synthesise information. That has helped in articles over the last few weeks, where I wanted to meaningfully articulate, with evidence, the change happening in arts education. Does that make me dirty?

I’ve wrestled with similar ethical questions this year around buying books. It is THE question for the ethical individual in the 21st century. Namely: does giving money to, or using the services of, large-scale corporations make me complicit in their wrongdoing - past, present and future? Am I excused of blame - and if so, to what extent - if I use that platform or money for a perceived act of goodness?

In my own life, at the moment, the question has become: is it okay to use AI bots to assist with research on writing projects?

Interested in your thoughts, always.

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When you’re trying to write, almost any reading material is good research. But sometimes, very specific books on the actual craft of writing should be helpful.

But it’s important to note: these books are also dangerous. They can suggest blanket rules that are, at best, arbitrary. There are very few rules when it comes to writing creatively. And those rules that do exist can be broken in interesting ways.

There are thousands of lists available online of helpful books, and many of them are very good. These gathered below are what I would consider the most essential.

These books should be regarded as tools for your toolkit - rather than strict codes of laws. Take only what is useful to you.

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2026 marks the first time in a couple of decades I have zero casual work at a university, where I am usually involved in the theatre teaching staff. Very occasionally, this bubbles over into a commission. This was the case last year for Space Cowboy for QUT. It was the case the year before with UniSQ at Whitlam (An Australian Fantasy) - the full script of which is provided below for paying subscribers.

The bigger picture: Aussie universities in crisis

So why are universities cutting back on casual staff?

As I’ve written about previously, the cutting of casual university staff is a substantial change in how Australia thinks about university teaching. About 40% of teaching staff are casual - regardless of discipline - and a shift away represents an entire workforce going through massive upheaval.

The fact that the sector relies so heavily on casual staff is part of a systemic problem. Trade unions have fought for decades for better conditions for casual staff - universities had a habit of keeping casual staff on for years without formalising their employment into more permanent positions. Speaking personally, such treatment was regularly humiliating and frustrating.

The crisis in Australian universities is, first and foremost, a financial one. Its roots go back well before anyone noticed the floor falling out. For decades, universities quietly became dependent on international student fees to subsidise the shortfall from chronically underfunded domestic teaching. When the federal government moved to slash international student numbers - cutting new arrivals by roughly 30% in a single year, with deeper reductions planned through 2026 and 2027 - the sector’s structural fragility became impossible to ignore.

Twenty-six of Australia’s thirty-nine public universities are now operating in deficit. Sector debt has risen 44% since 2019, cash reserves have dropped by more than 40%, and weekly announcements of course cuts and redundancies have become the grim background noise of Australian academic life. Underneath all of this sits a decade of real-terms funding erosion: Universities Australia estimates that funding has fallen by $2 billion in real terms since 2020, while the previous government’s “Job-Ready Graduates” scheme simultaneously hiked the cost of humanities degrees for students while cutting what universities actually received for delivering them.

Into this financial crisis comes a reform agenda that is, in principle, long overdue, but is producing consequences nobody wanted. Trade unions and labour advocates had spent years pushing for the casual academic workforce to be formalised, and in 2024 the Albanese government’s “Closing the Loopholes” legislation changed the legal definition of casual employment and tightened the conditions under which universities could keep people in perpetual casual arrangements. The idea was to force conversion to permanent positions. What’s actually happening, at institution after institution, is something more brutal: rather than convert their casual staff to ongoing roles, universities are simply cutting those roles entirely.

The University of Technology Sydney, for instance, has eliminated around 10% of its entire academic workforce - 121 positions - on top of hundreds of professional staff cuts. The Universities Accord, the major 2024 review of the sector’s future, identified casualisation as a key crisis point and secured commitments from 27 universities to convert at least 2,554 casual positions to permanent ones. But analysts estimate that this would reach only about one in five of the casual staff who might be eligible.

What makes this particularly stark is just how entrenched casual academic labour had become before any of this happened - and how little choice most casual academics had about it. In 1996, casual staff made up around 16% of the university workforce. By 2019, that figure had climbed to 24%, and some estimates put the total proportion of precariously employed university workers - casual and fixed-term combined - at around 60%. The NTEU estimates that between 50 and 80% of undergraduate teaching in Australia is delivered by casual or sessional staff.

A 2019 survey of more than 6,000 casual teaching academics found that only 18% were happy with casual arrangements - the overwhelming majority preferred ongoing employment but had no pathway to it. More than $100 million in unpaid wages is estimated to be owed to casual staff across the sector. This is not a workforce that chose precarity. It is a workforce that was built on it - by institutions that needed flexible, cheap teaching labour and faced few legal or political consequences for keeping people in that position for years, sometimes decades. The current wave of cuts is not a correction to that system. It is the same system, doing what it has always done, now under financial pressure severe enough that it can no longer hide.

All the staff are miserable

It’s no surprise then that universities - once a bastion for political ferment, intellectual adventure and a crucible for creating innovation and talent - are now pretty unhappy places to work. A large-scale survey of staff welbeing at Aussie universities is disastrous.

The highest score for one university was 34.9 - well below the national benchmark of 41 - which would determine a workplace is, at mimum, psychologically safe.

Trying to catch up to an ever-growing workload, a third of staff are now working more than 48 hours a week. 85% are suffering from emotional exhaustion. Many are reporting unsafe workplaces where they feel unable to tell their manager about the true extent of their stress.

Below is a ranked list, published just a month ago:

The end result? Australian universities are cutting costs across the board, putting more pressure on already exhausted staff. It comes at a time of key vulnerability for the future of education, as AI changes how we learn, research and write. This isn’t an issue exclusive to the Arts, but its toxicity is unique.

What it means for the arts

I’ve been part of the casual workforce at universities for decades. So has almost every artist I know - splitting time between teaching and art-making, and earning income from both.

To speak very selfishly for a moment, the teaching and writing work from universities has been invaluable to me as a mid-career artist. Viewed most cynically, the universities can act as alternative theatre companies - tripling the pool of possible clients for freelance playwriting in Australia. More broadly, the constant teaching keeps me sharp, in a constant state of professional development, and allows me to write works in conditions that professional theatre companies could barely dream about.

In the last decade, the majority of Australian playwrights have been trained to dream small. ‘Please produce my show,’ begs the earnest playwright, ‘it’s got a cast of two and can be performed on a haystack and lit by an iPhone.’ The antidote to that may have been youth theatres and university spaces, where playwrights are forced to write large-scale works because of cast size.

Plays that may fit into this category from the last decade include: Spontaneous Human Combustion by Daniel Evans, The Royal Experiment by Melanie Tait, Stupid Fucking Bird by Aaron Posner, Gods Country by Nathan Maynard, Follow Me Home by Lewis Treston, Very Fine People by Grace Wilson and many more.

The benefit is not only for the playwright, but for the students as well. Inevitably, soon-to-be-graduates working closely with professional artists is about as strong a mentorship and career pathway as you could hope for, offering a direct line to employability. Casual academics ensure course content is industry-relevant and of-the-moment - balancing out Shakespeare with Nakkiah Lui, Benjamin Law, Suzie Miller, and countless others.

It’s another example of a volatile pathway for emerging artists, removing opportunities for graduates to find employment and providing further evidence for university management to remove or defund creative arts courses. It also hurts artists who are currently working in the industry, removing a key part of their income, diluting their opportunities, placing more pressure on them at a time when the entire nation is in a cost-of-living crisis.

Now imagine similar conveyor belt of talent problems occuring for animation, design, dance, film, television. The imagine the quality of teaching available to those who are training in ‘essential’ skills: nursing, education, medicine, engineering.

Issues with arts education aren’t exclusive to those who are avid arts lovers. It affects every aspect of our lives.

Some limited spots still available for a special creative writing online class, with me, starting this Wednesday.

Full length play below for paying subscribers.

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Key Works

• Australian Universities Accord Final Report (February 2024) — available via the Department of Education

• 2024 Higher Education Staff Statistics — Department of Education data portal

• “Decasualisation and the Universities Accord” — Smithers, Harris, Heffernan & Gurr (2025), Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management

• “The Rise of a Casualised Workforce” — Woelert, Croucher & Hoang (2026), Higher Education journal (Springer)

• “Regulating for Job Security in Australian Universities” — Griffith Law Review, Vol 34, No 4 (2025)

• NTEU’s “Ending Bad Governance for Good” report (2024)

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I have a slightly different newsletter this week, as there’s some housekeeping to attend to.

Firstly, thank you for all the support for last week’s letter. It struck a nerve - it’s now been seen by a few thousand people. I am yet to have a response from the Minister or anyone else.

The problem that I raised in that letter - namely, the incredibly unfair and inappropriate scale of Drama and the arts in ATAR in Queensland - is part of a larger national dysfunction. Arts education across the country is in a well-documented, dire crisis. If you haven’t already, please sign the petition to take to Federal Parliament.

If you haven’t been following my other blog about homeschooling, it is now a month old and beginning to grow its archive. This includes a suite of lesson plans, research on how homeschooling affects socialisation, and the academic differences between home-schooled and traditionally schooled kids. Plus, of course, more personal details of how we came to the decision and now design our lives.

Thirdly, there are a few spots remaining in my new online creative writing course. You can find details here. It will be an exciting eight weeks together. You’ll leave with an individualised plan with practical steps on how to get the exact future you want for your creative writing. E-mail me to secure your spot (or drop a comment below).

Chin up and power on,

Dave

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Just last month, QPAC opened a new theatre, The Glasshouse Theatre, to much excitement and ceremony. As things stand, within ten years, we will be unable to staff that theatre, both on stage and off, with Queensland talent.

In 2017, 10,274 Queensland students were enrolled in Drama in Years 11 and 12. By 2021 - just four years later - that figure had collapsed to 6,431. More than 3,500 students had disappeared from Drama classrooms across this state, not because they lost interest in storytelling, performance, or the arts, but because a formula in the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC) inter-subject scaling process had made it financially irrational for them to pursue the subjects they loved.

Desperate to score as high on their final results as possible, students across the state are now being warned as early as year nine to not pursue the arts or drama. The effect is being felt at high schools, at universities, and in the industry.

Since 2021, the decline has continued without interruption. The number of Queensland schools offering Drama fell from 303 to 279 between 2021 and 2024. Year 12 Drama completions fell from 3,131 in 2021 to 2,439 in 2023, recovering only marginally to 2,470 in 2024. That’s a net loss of 661 students, or 21%, in three years. QCAA's own 2024 subject report describes this as a 1.27% increase on the prior year, a framing that obscures the structural reality: Drama enrolments have not recovered, the subject is being cut from school timetables across Queensland, and the trend that prompted Drama Queensland's formal complaint in 2022 has not reversed. It has continued.

This letter is addressed to you because the crisis is now well-documented, peer-reviewed, and accelerating. This is having a massive impact on all of Queensland Arts, and sabotaging your own policy for Queensland Arts in the future.

ATAR scaling acts as a penalty for creativity

The Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank was designed to create a common measure for students from diverse educational backgrounds. Its inter-subject scaling process was meant to ensure fairness. In Queensland, it does the opposite.

Under QTAC’s current methodology, a student who achieves a perfect result in Drama in Practice receives a scaled score of just 47 at the 99th percentile. A student with an equivalent perfect result in Mathematical Methods receives 97. This is not a marginal gap. It is a chasm. And it is produced not by any difference in the effort, rigour, or achievement of the student, but by the subject they chose.

The problem is structural. QTAC’s scaling formula assumes that if many students perform well in a subject, the subject must be easier. This assumption is discriminatory when applied to the Arts. Drama, Dance, and Music are subjects where high performance is the product of years of dedicated practice, not the absence of difficulty. To penalise students for collective excellence is to fundamentally misunderstand what arts achievement looks like.

Drama Queensland, the peak body for drama educators in this state, identified this problem in precise terms when it called for an urgent review in February 2022: “Queensland operates in a deficit model, where even if a student receives a 99, this mark is scaled down.” The organisation also noted that Queensland’s drama scaling is significantly worse than New South Wales and Victoria, meaning it is objectively better for a student’s future to study Drama across the border than in their home state. That is a damning indictment of Queensland’s education system.

You’ve ignored this before

This crisis did not arrive without warning. In February 2022, Drama Queensland made a formal public call for an immediate review of the QTAC scaling formula and requested an urgent meeting with QTAC leadership. The statement was detailed, evidence-based, and named specific consequences already playing out in classrooms across Queensland.

What followed was silence. QTAC’s public response was to reiterate that students should choose subjects they enjoy and which meet prerequisites, the same platitude that Drama Queensland had already identified as “directly contradicted” by the published scaling data. No review was announced. No methodology changes were made. The scaling formula remained intact.

In the years that followed, nothing improved. The enrolment numbers continued to fall. Schools began collapsing Drama classes into composite groups, meaning students in a Year 11/12 Drama class might now be sharing a room and a teacher with Year 9/10 students, receiving a truncated curriculum that fails to meet the full scope of the syllabus. Teachers began being directed to teach outside their specialist area. Some Drama programs were discontinued entirely at the school level.

The complaint was lodged in good faith by professionals who could see the damage being done. The appropriate response, a serious, transparent review of the methodology, did not come. This letter exists because the institutional process failed.

The cascade: big impacts on the industry

It would be a mistake to view this as a problem confined to Year 11 and 12 classrooms. The consequences of depressed Drama enrolments ripple outward in ways that are now well documented.

In Schools

Researchers Professor Sandra Gattenhof (Queensland University of Technology) and Dr John Nicholas Saunders (Australian Catholic University), writing in the Australian Journal of Education in February 2026, described a cascading effect that begins the moment senior enrolments drop: “When a school sees a drop in enrolments in Year 12 Drama, and there’s only a handful of students, a school might decide they don’t have capacity to deliver that subject and so it will be cut. And once it’s removed from Year 11 and 12, then often it’s removed from Year 9 and 10, then often the elective in Year 7 and 8 then gets reduced — that all goes.”

This is not a theoretical model. It describes what is already happening in Queensland schools. Drama is disappearing from the bottom of the curriculum ladder because it has been made unattractive at the top.

The same researchers note that students in combined composite classes “are not getting the full range or scope of what the syllabus should be offering. They’re getting kind of a half-half version” - and that this further deters prospective students. The scaling problem thus creates its own feedback loop: fewer students select Drama, which reduces funding and class viability, which reduces the quality of what is offered, which further reduces student numbers.

In Universities

In November 2024, the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE) alerted the sector that Queensland University of Technology - this state’s flagship creative arts institution - had announced a pause on enrolments in its Bachelor of Creative Arts: Dance program, pending a review. That review subsequently expanded to include Acting, Drama, and Music. By 2025, QUT’s dance major had been recommended for closure. The acting program was restructured away from stage performance toward screen and digital formats.

This is a direct and traceable line: ATAR scaling discourages students from studying Drama. Fewer students with Drama experience graduate from high school. Fewer of those students enter tertiary performing arts programs. Tertiary programs cite declining enrolments to justify cuts and restructures. The degree infrastructure of performing arts in Queensland contracts.

QUT’s student guild described the result plainly: students who want to study dance or drama are being pushed toward the private sector, with expensive studio classes becoming the only viable alternative - placing performing arts training out of reach for students from lower-income backgrounds.

In the Industry

Your own government’s Queensland’s Time to Shine: Creative State Strategy 2025–2035 acknowledges that Queensland’s creative sector is experiencing critical skills shortages — specifically in technical production, business administration, and arts administration roles. It describes the creative workforce as essential to the state’s ambition to build an experience economy and deliver vibrant cultural programming in the lead-up to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Queensland Government cannot invest hundreds of millions of dollars in cultural institutions and Brisbane 2032 legacy programming while simultaneously operating an education system that empties the pipeline feeding those institutions. The ATAR scaling formula is doing exactly that: systematically, and at scale.

The solution

This is not a call to abolish ATAR, to dilute academic standards, or to pretend that all subjects are identical in character. It is a call for a methodology that is honest about what it is measuring, and one that does not punish students for choosing subjects that require creativity, discipline, and years of dedicated practice.

Specifically, we call on you all to take the following actions:

• Immediate commission of an independent review of QTAC’s inter-subject scaling methodology, with specific attention to the treatment of Drama, Dance, Music, and other Arts subjects. This review should include representation from arts educators, performing arts peak bodies, and equity advocates - not only mathematicians and statisticians.

• Transparent publication of the full methodology used to calculate scaled ATAR scores, including the specific variables, exclusions, and assumptions applied to each subject. The current level of opacity is incompatible with QTAC’s stated commitment to accountability.

• Alignment with interstate practice, ensuring that Queensland students studying Drama are not systematically disadvantaged relative to students in NSW and Victoria in a shared national tertiary admissions landscape.

• A moratorium on further cuts to performing arts programs in Queensland state schools and universities while the review is conducted, to prevent further irreversible damage to the sector.

• Direct ministerial engagement with Drama Queensland, the Queensland Teachers’ Union, and the National Advocates for Arts Education, who have been raising these concerns through appropriate channels since 2022 without receiving a substantive response.

Drama is not a soft subject. It is where students learn to inhabit other perspectives, to communicate under pressure, to collaborate, to fail and revise and try again. These are not peripheral skills. Arts education nurtures innovation, creativity and leadership. They are the skills of every industry — and they are the skills this state will need in abundance to deliver on its promise of a culturally vibrant, creatively led Queensland by 2032 and beyond.

Arts education is also the birthplace of massive cultural exports such as Bluey, and stars like Margot Robbie, the Hemsworths, and more.

The students who should be filling the stages and studios and screen productions of that future are, right now, being quietly counselled away from Drama by a formula that tells them their passion is not worth as much as someone else’s. Some of them are listening. And they are choosing different subjects. Not because they want to, but because the system has made it financially punishing not to.

This has been allowed to happen for too long. A formal complaint was made in 2022. It was not answered. The enrolments fell further. The university programs contracted. The industry pipeline narrowed. There is no more time for silence.

Sincerely,

Dr. David Burton

Playwright, director and arts educator

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KEY SOURCES

Drama Queensland, ‘Drama Queensland calls for a formal review into the process of ATAR inter-subject scaling results by QTAC’, 1 February 2022. dramaqueensland.org.au/dq-statement/

Drama Queensland, ‘Review of Arts Courses at QUT’, November 2024. dramaqueensland.org.au/news/

Gattenhof, S. & Saunders, J.N., ‘Polycrisis: Arts and Creative Education in Australia’, Australian Journal of Education, Sage Publications, February 2026. doi.org/10.1177/00049441261421275

QTAC, ATAR Report 2021 / ATAR Report 2024. qtac.edu.au

Arts Queensland, Queensland’s Time to Shine: Creative State Strategy 2025–2035. arts.qld.gov.au

National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE), Response to QUT Creative Arts Review, November 2024.

EducationHQ, ‘’Polycrisis’ threatens future of arts education in Aussie schools: researchers’, 10 February 2026. educationhq.com

2016 was a tumultuous year. A hard year. We moved to Sydney because common wisdom told us that’s what working artists had to do at some point. And we were trying to get pregnant.

My wife worked at Uniqlo. We spent weekends travelling to Parramatta to teach youth drama classes.

In January, hiding in the bedroom of our Lane Cove flat from our newly acquired roommate, I read Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It remains one of my favourite books on writing, if for no other reason than it renders Steinbeck wonderfully human. He is insecure about his book, annoyed by interruptions, and fears it will never be finished. The idea that he was making a masterpiece was entirely invisible to him.

Writing was precious and important to me. Late in 2015, my first book had been published, and my ego was awaiting fame. I was hurriedly trying to write a second book, sure my publisher would rush to print it.

In February, my reading was dotted with other Australian authors with whom I was touring at the time. My calendar was punctuated with speaking panels, talks and trips to writers’ festivals. Among the books were The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland, who was absolutely the coolest writer at the time.

Also, thrillingly, I was frequently in contact with Magda Szubanski for her memoir Reckoning - a stunning piece of work. She was and is, reassuringly, kind and wonderful.

I read and adored The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood - a fantastic piece of Aussie dystopian fiction - a natural reply to The Handmaid’s Tale.

My publisher rejected my plans for my second book.

In a revelation of my mental state, my reading in March became centred on comics. Comics are high art, but they require less cognitive load to read. They bring a reassuring pang of nostalgia.

My log is also punctuated with middle-grade reads. I’d been assured that ‘middle-grade’ was where the tide was turning. But the middle-grade authors I read weaved a magic I instantly respected. I struggled to imagine my voice in their world: Jack Heath, Andy Griffiths, Felice Arena…

Mid-year rolled through, and I no longer remember the list of books. Was I ardently making my way through some awards shortlist? None of these books have stuck around in cultural member, but they all have the whiff of being ‘significant’ and ‘important’ books of the time.

I remember picking up books from the library at Chatsworth. We moved again, to a place with a dodgy landlord in Sydney’s wealthy suburbs. I remember friends visiting, and we played Pokémon Go for an entire weekend - but everyone did. It was a phenomenon for three days. The streets of Sydney were stacked with people catching Pokemon

There is a few hi-lights here: some collections from Mary Oliver, Murakami’s 1Q84, Jay Kristoff’s first Nevernight book.

In September my first Queensland Theatre mainstage show premiered. St. Mary’s In Exile’s production week coincided with the week we moved back to Brisbane suburbia. It was an impossibly hectic time, and my reading shows it - I barely read anything in those last months. My cultural memories are of playing Overwatch in what little spare time I had.

My wife and I, out of money and defeated, considered opening a sex toy shop for extra income. It was a fun, distracting thought.

In November, Trump was elected. We found out we were pregnant.

In those closing months, exhausted and relieved, I returned to comics. My wife and I played Super Mario Odyssey on a new Nintendo Switch. And the world kept on.

I don’t have a diary of that time .Only the list of the books I read and the time I spent with them.

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Going off my own career, and thousands of hours of teaching writers of every stripe - it’s not about more inspiration. It’s usually about structure, feedback, momentum - and ultimately a clear path forward.

The Creative Writing Studio is a small, focused 8-week program for emerging writers who are ready to accelerate their work and take themselves seriously.

Who is this for?

This studio is for writers who:

• Have already started writing seriously

• Have drafts sitting half-finished

• Feel stuck between ambition and execution

• Want professional-level craft guidance

• Are ready to produce real work over 8 weeks

You don’t need to be published. But you do need to be committed.

what happens over 8 weeks?

Each week combines:

• Focused craft teaching

• Structured writing exercises

• Workshopping and feedback

• Accountability

• Professional insight

By the end of the 8 weeks, you will:

✔ Produce meaningful new writing
✔ Clarify your voice and direction
✔ Identify strengths and blind spots
✔ Develop an individualised professional writing plan
✔ Leave with clear next steps

You will leave with “good vibes.” But also: you will leave with work.

The structure

8 weekly sessions

• Live, interactive format

• Small cohort (strictly limited places)

• Direct feedback from me

• Clear weekly writing targets

Writers are expected to:

• Attend consistently

• Submit work

• Participate generously

• Take the process seriously

This is a studio environment, not a drop-in workshop.

Why small matters

The cohort will be intentionally capped.

This allows:

• Real feedback

• Real conversation

• Real accountability

• Real community

If you’ve ever been in a large writing course where you barely spoke — this is the opposite of that.

Pricing & Timing

Full Price: $549
Early Bird: $449 (limited time, closing 9th of March)

Payment plans available. Pay in halves or thirds.

Classes begin on the 1st of April and take place for eight weeks, every Wednesday, from 7pm Brisbane time, online.

E-mail me to secure your spot.

Optional Bundles

Writers may also choose:

• Creative Writing Studio + 6 months premium Substack access

• Creative Writing Studio + 30-minute one-on-one consult

About me

I’m a playwright, author, and educator with over three decades of writing experience and more than forty plays professionally produced, and a doctorate.

I work with writers and creatives to move projects from stalled to structured — and from idea to execution.

I believe writing is both craft and discipline.

Is this right for me?

Ask yourself:

• Am I ready to be accountable?

• Am I willing to produce work each week?

• Do I want to move forward professionally, not just creatively?

If yes, this studio is for you.

E-mail me to secure your spot.

Enrolment

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Everyone is horny.

Wuthering Heights, Heated Rivalry, Euphoria, Bridgerton, Normal People, Poor Things.

And that’s just on screen. Never mind the tidal wave of romance fiction where explicit sex scenes punctuate the plot. It is, to borrow the phrase of one critic, a “smut renaissance”.

My argument is that this is explicitly a millennial framing of feminism. Post # MeToo (circa 2016) - a decade on, the millennial screenwriters (predominantly women) have crafted sexual dramas for the female gaze.

Twenty years ago, the era of ‘prestige’ drama had only just begun. Freed from the confines of network television, HBO and cable began running more sophisticated, less serialised dramas. Noticeably, almost all of them were written by men: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Shield, Oz.

Sex was never a centre point for these shows, but sex was certainly a part of them. Sex was most often used as a form of violence - a demonstration of a power struggle between characters, or the hedonism of our broken, tortured male protagonist. This reached its apex in Game of Thrones - where the term “sexposition” was termed to describe the show’s artless way of covering info-dumps by placing them in brothels, usually with naked women in the background.

The most sexually progressive show, written by a gay man, was Sex and the City, an ‘uncensored’ comedy that promised frank discussion of sex and plenty of nudity. The most recent re-launch of the show (And Just Like That…) was famously awful. It became clear: the world has moved on from Sex and the City’s view of performative sexuality (particularly when it focuses on a trio of wealthy white women in New York).

Critically, the show’s relaunch was missing the character of Samantha, the most audacious invention of the original show. An antecedent to Sabrina Carpenter and millennial sexuality, Samantha was the horniest character on Sex and the City and refused to apologise for it. She was the show’s most interesting figure, because she was devoid of shame. Samantha - a caricature of femininity that made her an idol of drag queens and camp culture - helped map the template for the female protagonist that would come to dominate so much of millennial erotic fiction (and gay male sexuality).

Importantly, Samantha could feel pleasure without feeling shame or over-intellectualising her sensual desire.

Thus inspired, I argue, millennial women began crafting their own stories of sexual freedom. The typical female protagonist of contemporary romantic fiction is insecure about countless things, but rarely sex. She is horny, thank you very much. The end.

The shows and films I mentioned above are less easy to metabolise in this framing. Heated Rivalry is the closest example of a kind of ‘corrective narrative’ - where the potential shame of gay love and sex is painted with a profoundly hopeful storyline.

Beyond this, it’s certainly enjoyable to watch critics tie themselves in knots about whether this is good or bad for storytelling. Some critics seem to seperate any explict sex from an ability to take a work seriously or critically - very puritan coded. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the million-and-one think pieces about the latest “Wuthering Heights” adaptation.

Opinion is divided, to say the least. I haven’t seen it. But I love Funnel as a film maker and am looking forward to it. It’s difficult to argue that she’s not an intellectual. Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are explicit, sexual films, but she is fascinated by the line between pleasure and pain, desire and disgust.

“Wuthering Heights” may be a bad film or boring. But it’s interesting to read critics who argue it’s somehow profoundly damaging for “gen Z” - who will watch it, of course, in the same way millenial teenagers watched Sex and The City. The film infantilises its audience, says one. It dangerously re-frames abuse (present and clear in the novel) to the erotic, says another. An apt criticism comes from the white-washing of Heathcliff - a bizarrely tone deaf bit of casting.

All of these critcisms are likely fair and justified. But, as fellow Substacker emmm pointed out in her analysis - many opinions have become purtian-coded and anti-sex. Some crticis, confusingly, would’ve perhaps preferred to see a contemporary Margot Robbie Catherine as abused and passive rather than empowered and desperate for physical pleasure.

It reminds me of bell hooks scathing review of Beyonce: “a terrorist to feminism”. As if a woman owning and celebrating her sexuality, or performing it and framing it as desirous for an audience - is automatically a thudding loss for the sisterhood. It’s very second-wave.

Perhaps what unsettles some critics is not the sex itself, but who is authoring it and to what end. When women – and particularly millennial women – centre female desire without apology, without punishment, and without narrative shame, it disrupts a long tradition in which sex on screen was something done to women, not something claimed by them.

That doesn’t mean every explicit adaptation is good, or thoughtful, or politically watertight. It does mean we should be careful not to slip back into the reflex that seriousness and sensuality are mutually exclusive. If this really is a “smut renaissance,” it may be less about shock value and more about authorship: who gets to frame desire, who gets to aestheticise it, and who gets to feel pleasure on their own terms. History suggests the pendulum will swing again.

For now, the throbbing feels less like cultural decay and more like a recalibration.

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