Campus Review Volume 28 - Issue 5 | May 2018 | Seite 19

industry & research
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The lines between high and low culture
seem to be more blurred now than they
were previously. Do you agree with
that supposition?
Because someone might be a fan of
particular forms of high culture, say, a
very literary form of reading or classical
music, doesn’t mean to say that in
other areas of their cultural activities
they won’t binge out, [for example,
by] watching sport on a Saturday
afternoon.
In the literature that this project draws
upon, such people are referred to as
cultural omnivores.
People who haven’t had the
advantage of higher levels of
education, their tastes might be more
restricted. They tend less frequently
to be involved in activities that
have higher culture association. There’s
a bit of an imbalance there.
But they don’t do away with the
fact that there are these discernible
differences that show up statistically
in terms of the correlations
between class, education, occupation
and so on.
Do you find any of the conclusions
surprising?
Broadly, they conform to international
studies of the same kind. But we also
explore some uniquely Australian
questions that we want to explore
in more detail. We had an Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander sample, we
had a Lebanese and Italian, a Chinese,
and an Indian sample. There’s a lot
of interesting detail coming out of
those. For example, the Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander sample
shows an exceptionally strong level of
interest in questions of heritage, not
just the Aboriginal kind. But some had
relatively little interest in Australian
heritage, while others were strongly
interested in it, so it was quite a
variable picture. We’ve yet to make full
sense of that.
How will this research be applied?
We won’t be making a report to any
department, but we’ll be doing what
we can to see that the information
circulates widely within the cultural
sector.
The last I heard from the ABC is
that something like 650,000 people
had done the quiz. It’s got people
thinking and talking about culture,
class, education and so on, and that’s
what we wanted – that’s a good
outcome. And many of these had the
same experience as you – which is
not surprising. A statistical study like
ours can only deal in general trends
and probabilities. But individuals
have unique patterns of taste, as
we know from our follow-up in-
depth interview with volunteers from
our survey samples. ■
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