The Fashioning of a Melbourne Event: The Melbourne International Arts Festival 2002-2009 William Peterson W hen seasoned festival director Brett Sheehy took the helm of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) in 2009, he faced an open-minded public and a sympathetic press but a local arts community that a stand-up comic might regard as a 'tough room'. After seven years of festivals led by his predecessors Kristy Edmunds (2005-08) and Robyn Archer (2002-04) that had come to increasingly reflect the aesthetics and practices of Melbourne's independent artists and smaller companies, Sheehy's decisions would be carefully scrutinised by the city's vibrant community of theatre makers. Unlike Sheehy, who built a career as an arts administrator and festival director at Adelaide (2005-08) and Sydney {2002- 05), Edmunds and Archer both moved into festival management after careers as artists. Archer had been a professional singer before taking the reins in 2002,' while Edmunds moved from a visual and inter-arts background into curating one of the most artist-centred festivals in the USA, the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland. Oregon. As MIAF's longest serving director and only the second non-Australian to run the event,"^ Edmunds quickly became respected and even adored by some segments of Melbourne's arts community. On the final night of the 2008 festival, revellers at the Artist Lounge celebrated her contributions and lauded her for having successfully curated a series of increasingly intimate, artist-centred festivals. Even before the 2009 festival opened, there were already some in the creative arts community who were making noise about the relative paucity of local offerings, prompting Sheehy to remark, 'I know artists want their work seen, I also know that in this city there are multiple forums in which their work can be seen ... If their work is great, the odds are it's going to happen anyway'.^ At the outset of the festival, Sheehy made it clear that under his watch the festival was not for '"us" or "them"; it is for each and every citizen of this eity',"^ a statement the editors at the Melbourne Age heralded as 'a triumph of plain language over artspeak' which, they noted 'sadly', was 'an affliction of at least one of his predeeessors', a clear referenee to Edmunds who at times had a less than happy relationship with the mainstream daily press. When the 2009 festival ended with the highest box-office take on record, it was clear that the first Sheehy festival may well mark the end of Australasian Drama Studies 56 (Aprit 2010)