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Drawing upon customised Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this Cultural Commons article argues cultural studies researchers need to remain attentive to the absences and erasures within craft, and cultural and creative practice more generally. It offers a numbers-driven insight into the exclusions of craft work, critically exploring the limits of the quantitative capturing of craft making practices and of the biases of statistical data. But it further contends that to effect change requires not just that we identify the problem - it is important, too, to be on the look-out for the presence of possibility. It thus demonstrates how statistics also have the potential to make visible activity not immediately evident, especially to researchers working empirically from within their own often mostly white middle-class networks. In the Australian context, what the census data do reveal is the ongoing strength of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander visual arts, but not so much craft practice. With Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Australians representing 3.3% of the total Australian population, that 9.17% of all Australians employed as Visual Artists identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is indeed significant – and worth looking to as a source of insights into how crafts practice can become more diverse and inclusive. This short article forms part of the special issue ‘Craft Economies and Inequalities’.

This chapter uses empirical findings to oppose the resonant discourses of liberation presented in postoperaist accounts of ‘immaterial labour’ and their modern proponents, which envision a world of work in which a creative multitude self-actualises unencumbered by the capitalistic demands of industrial factory labour. The ascription of these powers to work in the creative industries misunderstands their continuing status with frameworks of capitalist valorisation, domination and exploitation and the battle waged by workers to escape it. This chapter suggests that whatever potential for creativity creative labour possesses exists only in denial, and that capitalist development will not deliver fulfilled work alone. Struggle must ensue to recapture creative activity from its imbrication in capitalist social relations. Focusing on the movement of creatives from formal employment to freelancing, the case study presented in the chapter explores the possibilities of, and barriers to, this struggle. It looks at the wider economic and employment context behind the movement of creatives from formal employment to freelancing, and then examines the struggle they wage thereafter to secure conditions within the commercial contractual relationship of freelance work to be creative in the way they initially desired upon taking it up. It closes by exploring the nascent forms of coalition-building in evidence among freelancers in the case study of creative labour in the UK and the Netherlands.

At a time when the success of the Etsy website and the Cath Kidston label (among others) marks out a space where women's home-based crafts practice is elevated from the local market to the high street, this article examines the renewed popularity of the handmade and of craft production and its relation to economies of amateur labour. The article situates the popularity of the handmade original as a desirable aesthetic object and part of a broader return of credibility to previously disparaged women's craft practices. This credibility has occurred via younger consumers as well as through the increased potential the internet has created for small-scale business models, where amateur producers with no formal training can set up a creative business. The focus here is on the Etsy.com online marketplace and its spin-off physical markets, and on those practices employing yarn (for example knitting, crochet, needlepoint and weaving) and fabric (sewing, felting). The article then critically examines the economic, political, technological, social and cultural affordances that have enabled this re-articulation of (largely) women's domestic work. I locate current debates around home-based craft production and creative work historically by turning attention to the nineteenth-century British Arts and Crafts movement, and its longstanding association with progressive labour practices and small-scale production. Finally, the article considers the claims to radicalism made on behalf of design-craft or indie craft scenes after Etsy about the desirability of the homemade and small-scale production models.

"This book is a reproduction of Australian Geographic, vol. 41, iss. 1. The publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based." - TP verso. This article examines remoteness and proxim ity as geographical conditions and metaphors. It stems from a large government-funded research project which sought to examine the extent and uniqueness of the creative industries in Darwin - a small but important city in Australia's tropical Top End region, and government and administration capital of the sparsely populated Northern Territory. In talking to creative artists from diverse fields aboul their work and inspiration, it became clear that geographical positionality was a key framing device through which people understood themselves and their relationships with ochers. Remoteness and proximity were tangible in the sense of physical distances (Darwin is remote from southern States, and yet proximate to Asia and Aboriginal country) . But Darwin 's location was also perceived and imagined, in cultural texts, in creative workers' discussions of Darwin in relation to the outside world, and in their sense of the aesthetic qualities of the city 's creative output (pa rticularly shaped by multicultural and Aboriginal infl uences). we develop our analysis from 98 interviews with creative workers and postal surveys returned by 13 festival organisers in Darwin. Qualities of distance, proximity, isolation and connection materially shape a political economy of creative industry production, and infuse how creative workers view their activities within networks of trade, exchange and mobility.

Drawing upon field work and interviews with cultural workers in the UK and Australia, this book examines the cultural work experiences of rural, regional and remotely located creative practitioners, and how this sits within local economies and communities.