What does your typical day entail?

Yesterday I did boring management stuff in the morning. Organising meetings to present the CuriousWorks approach and pitch for funding, doing the tax and super, making sure all the company's projects and partnerships are going steady from a bird's eye point of view.

Then I did a workshop at Roebourne High School teaching some local boys how to build their own simple speaker system - out of cardboard and a speaker driver. Also helped them shoot a short film about a basketball game. That afternoon we went to the youth centre and I helped one of the boys edit the film and upload it to All Around You. He also showed it to the other dozens of kids in the youth centre.

In the late afternoon we went to the Ngarluma Aboriginal Corporation and joined Peter, my fellow full-time worker and CuriousWorks Online Director. Our work at NAC is developing simple workflows for using digital media to preserve language and culture. They are using free tools from Flickr, You Tube and Google to build photographic, audiovisual and wiki databases about and for the Ngarluma people. Early evening I finished off by uploading the days photos and videos to Flickr and All Around You and went home to a nice cold beer.

Did you go to art school/study arts? Where at?

Nah. In my family and in Tamil culture that's not considered a real job (in terms of earning a good salary). I did a media degree and my mum was no doubt hoping I'd become a journalist with a stable job. But that's not what happened.

What difficulties did you face upon graduation?

The period from leaving the expensive, debt-developing holiday that is University to being paid steadily for doing what you love is totally difficult. I'm almost there, touch wood.

The biggest difficulties in the last few years have been:
- not taking up all the great job offers that would have meant ending CuriousWorks
- ignoring everybody telling me how fraught with danger my life was in terms of economic stability
- dealing with the quite intense difficulties one faces with starting an arts company like paying everyone else but not yourself, everyone else not being paid enough and sometimes working overtime and you feeling responsible
- believing in where this is supposed to all end up in five years and getting through that hard start-up period

Did you ever consider dropping out?

Of Uni? Yep. Most days. Was never sure what I was doing there. At least I met some great people.

Do you recommend the experience?

Looking back I would've liked to go to a creative-based university course where I learnt more technical skills and was immersed in theory that teachers could actively direct back to the real world. It's makes the learning curve out of uni easier to handle. I think that would be awesome.