About CAMRA

CAMRA (Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia) is a major Australian Research Council and industry funded project running from 2008 to 2013 as a partnership between seventeen organisations, including four universities.

CAMRA aims to provide planners, policy-makers and communities with the knowledge they need to make better-informed planning decisions for more effective development of their local arts and cultural industries. It will do this through:

  1. building a GIS and relational database to store this information and allow it to be interrogated, analysed and used at local, regional and peak levels by a variety of users;
  2. enabling systemised interactions between national and international experts in cultural development through this culturemap.org.au online (and offline) community as a key site for knowledge exchange and storage;
  3. developing models of data collection and documentation using a range of methods specifically appropriate to regional, rural and remote settings in Australia.

Concentrating on a carefully selected set of communities that cover many different types of regions - so the information can be usefully transposed to a national scale - CAMRA will provide an understanding of how a region's capacity for creativity and innovation can ensure its quality of life and its economic viability. Moreover, it will show researchers and policy-makers how to recognise and valorise regional specificities and local knowledge when piecing together an integrated approach to development.

The CAMRA project focuses on four regions of Australia and is very "site-specific"; closely examining the cultural characteristics and potentials of each particular region. Even so, there is also a general, nationwide relevance to the research and regions were selected so that the knowledge gained from studying them can be easily transposed to similar types of regions around Australia.

The project regions are:

  • Albury-Wodonga: a major inland regional centre and transport corridor, with state-to-state border issues, and concerns around attracting and retaining skilled workers.
  • Central Darling Shire: a remote area, sparsely populated, with increasing Indigenous population and fragile communities.
  • Uralla and Armidale: enabling examination of the relationship of smaller towns to regional centres; a multicultural community and a major education and agriculture centre.
  • Wollongong: a major commercial and education centre in a high-growth coastal area, with increasing population, bordering a capital city, with a changing economic and employment base, and issues concerning retaining young people and a North-South economic "divide".

Our hope is that regional arts advisors, councillors and policy-setters in every state will be able to use CAMRA data and patterns of knowledge to stimulate their own site-specific inquiries and policies and activities.