I
sent the following letter to Claudia Karvan 2 weeks ago. I have received no
reply.
Claudia
Karvan
Screen
Australia Board
Screen
Australia
Level
7, 45 Jones St
Ultimo 2007
24th
March 2015
Dear
Claudia
I have received no response from
you or any other member of the board to my letter of 10th March.
This is par for the course!
I wonder if you can imagine what
it would be like to be in the position I am in!? To be banned from making any
applications at all to Screen Australia? To be banned from even speaking on the
telephone with a member of Screen Australia’s staff on the basis of allegations
you know to be false? To be in the position where no member of the board (many
fellow filmmakers) is prepared to communicate with you in any way at all or to
provide you with evidence of your crimes?
Recently a longtime friend and
film colleague wrote to me in relation to a screenplay of mine I had sent him
to read.
“James,
I can’t read ‘Honey’. I might like it. What then? I hope you understand.
Nothing personal.”
This is but one of many similar
responses I have received from potential collaborators within the film industry
this past 3 years.
Why on earth would this friend or
any other filmmaker wish to enter into a professional relationship with a
colleague who has been banned by Screen Australia and whose Australian projects
are, by definition, all dead in the water? Why would anyone want to work with a
filmmaker who has ‘intimidated’, ‘placed
at risk’, members of Screen Australia’s staff?
The
board of which you are a member has never articulated what ‘risk’ I posed to
Screen Australia staff and, presumably, what risk I still pose today! Neither
yourself nor any other member of the board has articulated in what way I ‘intimidated’
members of SA staff with my correspondence - leaving potential film collaborators to use
their imaginations to guess.
For
three years I have asked for evidence of
both these allegations. I have been given none. And I have been given
none, as you know, because I have neither intimidated nor placed at risk anyone
at Screen Australia. It suited the purposes of both Ruth Harley and the board
to have a critic silenced in 2012 – not merely
as punishment for asking difficult
questions and insisting on accountability but to let the film and TV community
know, in no uncertain terms, just what happens to anyone who questions the
integrity of senior members of Screen Australia’s staff and of its board.
On
14th Jan 2013, I wrote the following to yourself, Rachel Perkins and
Richard Keddie – all three of you deeply implicated in the continued banning of
me:
My
letter of 21st December, as with my earlier letters, has yielded no
response.
As the
three of you know, as the Screen Australia Board knows, as the Minister for the
Arts Simon Crean knows, Ruth Harley’s assertion that I have, with my
correspondence, intimidated and placed at risk members of SA staff, is a lie.
For
reasons best known to yourselves you are prepared to go along with this lie and
the ban on me that it has led to, regardless of its consequences for myself
both personally and professionally. All three of you, along with the Board,
have ignored my many requests to be provided with evidence of the crimes that
have led to my being banned. That I have been arrested twice for doing nothing
other than sitting quietly in the Screen Australia foyer, waiting only to be
provided with such evidence, seems not to bother you at all.
You
did not have the professional courtesy, Claudia, to respond in any way to this
or any other letter I have sent to you – of which there have been several this
past two years. To do so would necessitate evidence and, given that there is
none, the only option left to you is silence – a silence that enables you to
neither confirm nor deny that I intimidated or placed anyone as SA at risk. The
alternative would be an honest statement along the lines of:
We have
no evidence. We blindly followed Ruth Harley’s lead. We made a mistake. A bad
mistake. It is a mistake that has caused you enormous professional and personal
damage and we, the board, offer our
heartfelt apologies.
You
are not going to do this. The board is not going to do this. To do so would not
only necessitate some humility on your part and on the part of your fellow
board members’ parts, but would open up a Pandora’s Box of questions about the
integrity of the Screen Australia board.
Whilst
you, a serving board member, have been
the beneficiary of more than $11 million of Screen Australia’s production
budget this past year to pursue your film and TV career, I am not able to have even
a telephone conversation with a member of Screen Australia’s staff! Such a conversation
would, you and your fellow board members seem to believe, place the person on
the other end of the phone at risk!
That
members of the SA board regularly vote large sums of development and production
money to fellow board members is an elephant in the room that members of the
film and TV community dare speak of only in hushed tones. To articulate their
concerns in public would be to invite the kind of bureaucratic retribution that
I am the unfortunate beneficiary of – to be officially (or unofficially) banned
by a board that will brook no criticism and will not tolerate anyone who has
the temerity to ask questions that the board does not wish to answer.
Choosing
his words carefully, journalist Michael West has, in his 6th March
Sydney Morning Herald article, asked questions of the kind I have been asking
for years in a fairly pubic manner. That the film and TV community has, for the
most part, remained silent in response to Michael West’s article, speaks
volumes about the fear many filmmakers have of Screen Australia retribution if
they articulate their concerns.
Whilst
you refuse, whilst the Screen Australia board refuses to provide me with
evidence of my crimes, I trust that new board members such as Al Clark do ask,
in board meetings, precisely what this evidence comprises of. As a matter of
both professional courtesy and natural justice you should provide me with this
same evidence.
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
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