Published by The Conversation under Creative Commons licence on May 5, 2026 9.18pm BST. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of professional artists, writers, musicians and performers living in Greater Sydney shrank by 17% – even as overall employment increased by 20%. This didn’t happen anywhere else in Australia. On the contrary, most of the other capital cities had growth of artists above the rate of employment. Among Sydney’s policy makers and art sector, there’s an entrench

In 1999, a song played in cinemas across India to considerable acclaim. Nimbuda Nimbuda, from Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, became one of the most recognised film songs of its decade — Aishwarya Rai dancing in a red lehenga, the melody infectious and immediate, the choreography celebrated in film schools and on wedding floors for years afterward. What most audiences did not know, and what the film's credits did not especially emphasise, was that the song had