The word ‘community’ has long been used in everyday language in two distinct but related senses. On the one hand, it can refer to a group of people who interact, who occupy the same space or are a part of a collective entity: the community of people who live in a particular suburb or who belong to the same school. On the other hand, it refers to a sense of shared identity that people have—for example, by having certain interests in common or sharing a similar sense of being in the world: the artistic community, the Catholic community or more abstractly the community of like-minded individuals. In this second sense, the community can comprise a set of people who never or rarely meet together and can be applied so broadly that in most respects the people included by the term have little at all in common—the ethnic community, for example. Just because a term defies simple definition or seems to break down under close inspection, this does not, however, mean that there is not a valid idea behind it. A term that is used as often as community and that indeed is thought by its users to have a degree of moral force that implies commitment is likely to signify something important in human society.^[1]

There will be cases where a broad commonality of interests is reflected in real groups of people who live together as neighbours in the same place, but, more commonly in complex societies, communities cut across residential patterns. The idea of community becomes less problematic as soon as it is realised that individuals can be members of many different types of community and that membership of any one community does not prescribe its identity. This brings out the ambiguity of the two senses of community: it is possible for people who occupy the same residential space—people who belong to a community in the first sense—to belong to many different communities in the second sense. Nonetheless, in the case of both senses of the term, there is likely to be a moral dimension.

In the case of residential communities, even if they are not historically constituted, there is a pragmatic requirement to act as a moral community at least with respect to those interests that enable members to live together—common interests arise out of living together. On the other hand, the dispersed communities that are created through sharing interests in common or having a shared sense of identity or history are often motivated to act together. Members are likely to congregate together on an occasional basis through meetings, fellowships or conferences or, if possible, meet on a daily basis. While dispersed, they act together at a distance through newsletters and magazines and, today, by forming groups on the Internet. It is important to recognise that the residential communities in the first sense can differ nearly as much from each other in their constitution as the communities of interest in the second sense that crosscut them. And, almost by definition, the residential community is going to reflect diverse communities of interest in the second sense—interests that might even be conflicting. Social cohesion clearly requires a complex balancing act between moral forces that encourage people to act together and interests that separate people from one another.

Social cohesion at a national level means something very different from social cohesion at a local level. At the local level, social cohesion refers to the capacity of people to work together on the ground and to have a sense of obligation to the community as a whole. At the national level, it is a much more abstract concept since it must link groups and individuals with vastly different and often opposed interests; a cohesive society needs to include people who believe that the arts are an essential component of a society requiring government funding and those who believe that art is a luxury or a commodity that should simply be left to market forces. Hence, social cohesion at a national level requires compromise and a balance of interests, and must allow for diversity. In the arts, social cohesion will be achieved largely by artists acting in and on behalf of the community. Nationally, a number of different factors will be involved.

Different communities and interest groups need to feel that they have access to resources on an equitable basis and are included in the decision-making processes. Factors of identity politics, however, are also likely to be crucial: there are sub-communities. For these, it matters how inclusively Australian art is represented in local and international contexts. And for these sub-communities, the extent to which the artistic community itself embraces cultural diversity, gives space to different practices and recognises value in different histories also matters. Feelings of social inclusion in the case of Indigenous Australians are influenced by the extent to which their rights are recognised and by the success or failure of government policies in alleviating social disadvantage. Equally important has been reversing the history of exclusion that for many years removed Aboriginal Australians from the public face of the nation. The absence of Aboriginal art in the museums and galleries and the failure to resource Aboriginal art practice were signs of this exclusion.^[2] A sense of shared identity or commonality of interest can be influenced by the ways in which institutions that operate at a national level articulate and contribute to the success of organisations at a regional or local level. If those links work well then, even if local communities still feel disconnected from the national identity, they will at least be able to take advantage of mechanisms for inclusion.