How many artists are there in australia

These documents will be presented in a new window. Skip to main content. Archived content. See ABS Website for latest information and statistics. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Note that data will be added and updated when available. The ACT findings are below. The full reports are available on the Australia Council for the Arts website. More Australians now recognise the many positive impacts the arts have on our daily lives and in our communities, including on our wellbeing and happiness, and ability to think creatively and develop new ideas.

The arts give life meaning and Australians are proud of their artists. The high value that Australians place on the arts is reflected in the time and money they give to support artists, arts organisations and arts projects.

More Australians are attending First Nations arts across art forms, reflecting the high quality work of First Nations artists and initiatives to build audiences for First Nations arts. Data available for the first time shows that the community arts and cultural development CACD sector is a leader in the use of the arts to support social cohesion, enabling diverse voices to be heard and connected through creating art.

Attending arts experiences in person enables Australians to come together as audiences and connect with artists in unmediated ways. Listening to music and reading are vital, accessible and popular ways that Australians engage with the arts.

Across Australia, online engagement with the arts is booming. But she says "in Australia it's pretty rare for you to make a complete living out of just the writing". Lanagan began writing in the 80s. In the 90s she became a freelance editor and had a child. That's when she "fell into" technical writing — penning publications such as reports and manuals for organisations.

Even after earning international acclaim for her short story collection Singing My Sister Down, her main income came from technical writing. Still, she says, "there was never a year until this recent contract … where I was able to completely stop doing a day job and just write.

That contract was for the Zeroes series with collaborators Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti and gave Lanagan four years off technical writing. She says Australian writers need to sell beyond Australian shores — and in the millions of copies — to make a living.

Ballarat-based sculptor, painter, aerosol artist and muralist Stuart Walsh comes from many generations of "monumental masons" and gravediggers. You can see that family history in his work, which he says sits at "the intersection between morbidity and politics".

Walsh still sometimes plies the family trade — gilding and restoring servicemen's graves — and also works 10 hours a week as a social worker. But he makes his main income from grants and commissions including designing graphics for local bars and heavy metal bands.

Walsh says living in Ballarat, a town of just over , people an hour outside of Melbourne, is key to making his life as an artist viable: "the cost-of-living is insanely cheaper".

Ballarat is also near several towns that are supportive of the arts including Geelong, Castlemaine and Daylesford.

While Walsh declined to take part in the Biennale of Australian Art that took place in Ballarat last year, he has observed the impact on local artists who say they are yet to receive payment for the event. Walsh says that people don't see the amount of unpaid labour that goes into an artist's life. There's lots of work in making something creative that's not fun work. I would tell my customers to go see the film because it was in the papers After premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Strange Colours played and was well received at film festivals across Australia and including Sydney Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival and had a limited cinema release.

While Lodkina was recently in Paris on a funded residency to work on a new script, she usually lives in a Melbourne sharehouse and works casual jobs at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and in hospitality. Across Australia, there are 50, professional artists and , workers in the creative industry. The overwhelming majority are not employed fulltime. Bookshops, galleries, museums, theatres and cinemas all over Australia have been closed by government order. Festivals, residencies, regional and international tours have been cancelled.

And rightly so: we all need to take very good care right now.