The University of Melbourne has announced a new Indigenous Arts Residency that will allow Indigenous arts practitioners from Victoria to undertake significant projects. Recipients will receive a cash grant of $40,000 and up to $5,000 for materials as part of the Hutchinson Indigenous Residency and will be based at the University’s Southbank campus, home to the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (VCA & MCM). The Residency was established in perpetuity last year from a $1,000,000 grant from the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and named in honour of Darvell M Hutchinson, who steered the Trust for 50 years.

Associate Dean of the VCA & MCM and Chair of the selection panel, Ms Deborah Cheetham AO, said the Residency aimed to build an alumni of Victorian Indigenous artists, enabling them to share their ideas, enhance their skills and to strengthen and develop Indigenous cultural practice.

“For the Indigenous people of this land, the arts have never been a luxury – rather a necessity. For more than one thousand generations the Indigenous people of this land have passed on all knowledge of geography, the sciences, medicine and humanity through the visual and performing arts. As a Yorta Yorta artist, I know that the visual and performing arts are the most powerful way by which we may know the world and give meaning to everything in it.”

You can read more about the residency here and applications for the first round are now open, closing Friday 18th September 2015.

The Residency will offer each artist appropriate support from a range of specialist resources at the University of Melbourne, including the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, the Faculty of VCA & MCM, and the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation (CCMC).

Applications are open to Indigenous arts practitioners who identify with at least one of the 11 language families of Victoria.  They must also have had at least three years experience as an Indigenous arts practitioner and at least three years relevant experience in a related industry. A degree in a relevant discipline is desirable but not mandatory.