LONG STORY SHORT
HE HAS SPENT DECADES CHAMPIONING BATTLERS, NOW IT’S SCOTT RANKIN’S TURN TO SHINE
Scott Rankin is a big-picture kind of guy. No topic is so small that he can’t immediately envision the broad implications of it and take the conversation on a fascinating philosophical tangent.
The co-founder and creative director of art production organisation Big hART, Rankin, 58, is firmly embedded in Tasmania’s North West community. But his mind is always roaming. As we sit in a pair of old leather armchairs in the cottage office out the back of his Boat Harbour home, it quickly becomes clear that confining the producer and playwright to simple answers is close to impossible. He is always four enthusiastic steps ahead, but self-deprecating when he catches himself on a rant.
“Community and virtuosity are two sides of the same coin,” he concludes at the end of one such tangential exchange, before smiling and adding “or some bullshit like that”.
In November Rankin was named Tasmanian Australian of the Year and is a finalist for 2018 Australian of the Year, which will be announced next week.
The accolade recognises his nearly 30 years of service to the community through Big hART, which he co-founded in 1992 with Burnie producer John Bakes. Big hART’s mission is to give voice to the invisible stories, to allow people living in remote and rural areas to tell their stories through art, film, theatre and other content.
The motto driving Big hART is “it’s harder to hurt someone if you know their story”.
“All nations, all societies are narrating themselves and evolving,” Rankin says. “And as they do, it is easy for some people to be pushed to the outside and lose that ability to be part of that storytelling. A lot of people assume Big hART is focused [only] on young people. We’re not. It’s about all those invisible people.
“Our elders, in their 80s and 90s, are they visible to us? In Aboriginal communities, the elders are revered. There is a deep respect there. But we made our elders into boilermakers and accountants, we gave them RSI, made them work long hours, then spat them out with a gold watch, then lost sight of them. Instead of honouring them, we allow them to lie in a puddle of piss on a plastic mattress in an institution. It’s a slow genocide.”
Young people, he says, are used by governments to appeal to the fears of the middle class. Rankin believes young people are unfairly portrayed as dangerous and criminal. He says it is whitecollar criminals such as the serial tax-avoiders, who so often avoid prosecution, who are doing more damage to society.
Rankin believes helping people to tell their stories is a way to begin addressing injustice, and Big hART excels at facilitating the telling of these stories.
“Australians are generally good people once they see the story,” he says. “‘This person hasn’t been given a fair go? OK, take it easy mate, let’s help’. Our job is to add into that narration with new stories of people who have fallen into invisibility and we want to skill those people up to allow them to bring their story to the rest of the world.”
Big hART formed in 1992 as a response to Burnie’s paper mill downsizing. People were disillusioned and uncertain
about their futures. Big hART’s first project, a theatre show called Girl, was an attempt to address the issues faced by young local people headed towards the juvenile justice system.
“When we started out, we thought, ‘What are the ways to use this whole-of-life experience to make something new? Is there a creative safety net that can pick up a bunch of people and give them something new to respond to, rather than a handout?’, Rankin says.
“Before that project, there was one offence being committed every week from that group of people. But after the project, that dropped to only one offence in 10 months.” After the success of Girl, Big hART developed another play,
Pandora Slams the Lid, looking at HIV and injecting-drug use, the play’s title a reference to the then-standard public attitude of trying to stifle conversation about controversial topics.
Big hART began expanding its work into other forms of performance art, installations and exhibitions, including performances in pubs, and a performance art piece that involved turning wooden rifle butts into pens live on stage, a protest against gun violence in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre.
Multimedia and digital art works followed, and most recently Big hART has been running a project in partnership with Wynyard High School in the North West, helping students create whole-school multi-arts projects, giving opportunities to young people who might otherwise never have entered the arts.
His award-winning documentary Drive, made between 2007 and 2010, told the story of a group of young North West men and their obsessions with their cars. Statistically, the biggest killer of people aged 15-25 is car crashes, and Drive cut to the heart of this car culture, putting faces to the statistics.
Farther afield and more recently, Big hART produced theatre show Namatjira, the story of the late Central Australian Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira. The play was also turned into a feature-length documentary tracing the ultimately successful quest of the Namatjira family to regain the copyright to their grandfather’s artwork.
Aside from heading Big hART for 25 years, Rankin remains a nationally successful producer and playwright in his own right, his earliest plays including Box the Pony and Three Men Walk
Into a Bar in the mid-’90s. His projects have been included in festivals around the world, with his most recent theatre works including O, Ghosts in the Scheme, Blue Angel, Hipbone Sticking
Out and Nyuntu Ngali. In television, he has been the executive producer of Hurt (SBS), Knot @ Home (SBS) and 900 Neigh
bours (ABC1). He has won three Green Room Awards for Best Direction and Most Innovative Production.
Additionally, Big hART has received more than 45 awards, including the 2017 Telstra Business Award of the Year and Charity of the Year in Tasmania, a World Health Organisation award, an AFI, eight Coalition of Australian Heads of Government awards and the Myer Performing Arts Group Award.
Rankin’s empathy for “invisible” members of the community stems from his own early life experiences of being one of them. Growing up in Sydney, his parents never had much money – they ran a small store selling specialist educational toys – but loved the water, so they befriended a local fisherman, who let them live in his boatshed.
“But the council said we couldn’t live in a shed permanently, so they bought an old Chinese junk, because it was cheap, and if the council asked questions, they just said we lived on the boat,” Rankin says. “But we weren’t supposed to do that either, and if the water police came by they told them that we only holidayed on the boat. So by slipping between the cracks, my family lived that idyllic way for years.
“I had that outside, creative, quiet life living on the water, I was living barefoot. I’d slept on a boat since the age of three. In many ways it set me up to be playwright or writer, because I was always on the outside looking in and being quiet about it. I was a very introverted, slow and watchful child. I had every characteristic of becoming a playwright.”
At the age of 21, in the early 1980s, and with an interest in social justice, Rankin moved to Burnie to take up a role establishing a drop-in centre and employment project. Already at that stage the paper mill, which had operated since 1938, had started downsizing and people were finding themselves out of work.
With the Franklin River anti-damming protests putting Tasmania in the national spotlight, Rankin remembers it as an exciting and dramatic time to come to the state.
“I turned up with little more than a pushbike and I had only one friend here,” he laughs. “Burnie was very different then to now. It was like a miniature Port Kembla – a mini city, very busy. And it also had this underbelly of creative life, artists who weren’t embraced by the community so they continued doing their thing underground, quietly.
“It was while I was in Tassie that I wrote my first show, went on tour in 1985, and then moved back down properly in 1992.”
Burnie City Council Alderman Sandra French, who was Burnie mayor when Big hART was founded, is now a board member for the organisation and says Rankin was a grassroots supporter of the community from day one.
“The first company he set up in Burnie was a theatre company called Rip and Tear, and he immediately began working with young people who needed help or guidance,” Ald French says. “They had never had the opportunity to be involved in something like that before and it opened doors to many young people here.
“His contributions to arts and theatre in Tasmania are enormous. There is such value in having such a creative thinker living in this community who is giving people the chance to do things they might never have done otherwise. What he and Big hART have achieved here is huge and ongoing.”
Rankin’s Boat Harbour home is perched high on the rugged coast overlooking the restless waters of Bass Strait and jagged cliffs stretching into the distance. It is an inspiring place, which he shares with his wife, artist Rebecca Lavis, and children Darcy, 24, Locky, 22, and Ginger, 18.
“Burnie listens to the voices of the south and devalues itself a little bit,” he says. “But look at it, on this beautiful coast facing north to the water, with the cleanest air in the world, right next to the finest produce in the country … All it takes is a little cultural shift to say literacy matters, education matters, digital literacy matters, support for local business matters, and realising we don’t live on an island but an archipelago, and you can turn this place into something amazing.”
Rankin is philosophical about his Australian of the Year nomination, saying it was humbling to be named Tasmanian Australian of the Year. He says the award gives that little bit of extra clout to his endeavours and influence.
“This is not about being the best or even better than anyone at anything, to me. Because so much of my life is about failure. The compost of what you didn’t do well, becomes the fertiliser for a better version of you and your own nature,” he says.
“It’s like when people talk about peace. You don't keep the peace, you make the peace. And equality is the same. It’s not something you discover, it is something you have to actively create and maintain every day.” The 2018 Australian of the Year Awards will be presented at Parliament House in Canberra on the evening of January 25 and will be broadcast live from 7.30-9pm on ABC TV