Wesley Enoch’s lecture framed cultural leadership as relational, embodied, and enacted through practice rather than authority. His concept of a currency of favour and the rotation of leadership within an unelected cultural parliament disrupts dominant Western hero narratives, aligning instead with First Nations knowledge systems where authority is distributed, contextual, and relational, which resonates with Yunkaporta’s pattern-thinking, where knowledge moves across systems rather than sitting in fixed hierarchies (Yunkaporta 2019).

The tension Enoch raised between transactional systems and cultural obligation directly reflects my own career across the arts, education, high-performance sport, and Defence. My pathway is often read as fragmented, but in practice it is adaptive, relational and a carrier bag of embodied knowledge built through return and endurance (Le Guin 1989). In institutional contexts that prioritise output and visibility, I have experienced how easily creative labour becomes extractive. Enoch’s challenge around dirty money reframes it as accountability in how resources are mobilised (Enoch 2026).

His call for hyper-engagement positions artists as active participants in public discourse. This aligns with Smith’s (2012) emphasis on decolonising practice through relational accountability, and with Meadows’ (1999) identification of paradigm and narrative as the highest leverage points for systemic change. 

For my practice, this translates into designing for creative wellbeing as cultural infrastructure, not individual responsibility. As my manifesto states, the sector often demands endurance without supporting survival, producing structural abandonment rather than sustainability. Drawing on Wolflink (2022), this is a value claim, prioritising relational wellbeing over transactional productivity.

This has direct implications for my practice. As a performer and cultural leader, I am also less interested in “art for art’s sake” and more in how work engages audiences as participants rather than observers. My interest in embodied practice and Taekwondo as aesthetic language reflects this, demonstrating ideas through doing, rather than explaining them. This aligns with Indigenous knowledge systems that privilege practice-based transmission and multiplicity of ways of knowing (Yunkaporta 2019).

Ultimately, Enoch’s framework strengthens my leadership approach as container-building, creating conditions where artists can endure, engage, and contribute meaningfully and whether my presence actively reshapes ideas and systems.

One thing I loved that he said he does, that I often do too, is sign off ‘love’, because why not? We need more of it don’t we?

Love Nat 

Enoch, W. 2026. ‘The Art of Cultural Leadership and Public Engagement.’ Lecture. Cultural Leadership (MFA): NIDA, Kensington NSW.

Le Guin, U.K. 1989. The carrier bag theory of fiction. In Dancing at the edge of the world: thoughts on words, women, places. New York: Grove Press.

Meadows, D. 1999. Leverage points: places to intervene in a system. Sustainability Institute.

Smith, L.T. 2012. Decolonizing methodologies: research and Indigenous peoples. 2nd edn. London: Zed Books.

Wolflink, A. 2022. Claiming value: the politics of priority from Aristotle to Black Lives Matter. New York: Routledge.

Yunkaporta, T. 2019. Sand talk: how Indigenous thinking can save the world. Melbourne: Text Publishing.