Walking through the gates of Fremantle Arts Centre I was filled with a nervous excitement. The gothic building and beautiful courtyard was all to familiar to me from my previous trips to the arts centre for relaxed concerts or contemporary art exhibitions. This trip however had a different air to it, I was filled with that feeling reserved for first days of school and job interviews.
I had loved the Arts Centre ever since I first walked through the gates at 8 years old and watched a medieval fayre complete with princesses and a ‘rock opera,’ so when it came to choosing a place to take my PR Internship it was easily my first choice. The process of applying for the internship was surprisingly simple. After emailing the Communications Coordinator, Kathryn Doust and expressing my interest in an internship with Fremantle Arts Centre she offered me the position instantly and I was given my start date of 16 February 2012, the nerves didn’t kick in until 8:50 the morning of my first day.
Once I navigated my way around the familiar public grounds and into the cavernous admin offices upstairs and finally found Kathryn’s office my nerves instantly vanished. Kathryn shares an office on the top floor of the arts centre with Stephanie, the new communications assistant and Isabel, the graphic designer who’s desk I’ll be using as she only works part time. The view is amazing and the atmosphere is relaxed and creative, a perfect environment for unique and effective ideas.
My first task was media monitoring, an easy one to introduce me to the world of ‘actual PR’ compared to the University PR that I’m used to. This entailed me going through the week’s newspapers and cutting out all the articles that mentioned Fremantle Arts Centre. I enjoyed this but found myself getting sidetracked by upcoming gigs and exhibitions happening around Perth. These media clippings are used as a reference for future media releases and are sent out to the artists and performers once their exhibition has ended. They also act as a simple and effective way to summarise the print media coverage of an event from an array of community, state wide and national magazines and newspapers.
After that Stephanie took me on a tour of the grounds. I saw the exhibitions that were currently on display as well as the supposedly ‘haunted’ back rooms that managed to freak me out even at 11 o’clock in the morning. I was taken through the different area’s and told what sort of exhibitions and performances they are used for from the courtyard gigs to the clay moulding classes. Then it was lunch and I found myself sitting in the picturesque courtyard enjoying the world’s largest cappuccino. A lady was sitting in the courtyard writing poems and asked me to choose some words out of a hat and she’d write a poem about me. Everyone in the arts centre is passionate and creative, finding ways to incorporate art into their everyday lives making it a very inspiring and interesting place to work and spend time.
After lunch I helped Stephanie prepare an acquittal for Shaun Tan. This basically entailed my googling Tan and preparing a list of media appearances, articles, events, reviews and other significant media on him from the past 12 months to then be sent of to his nation wide PR person so that the same angle isn’t pitched twice.
My first day of this internship left me excited for the next 19 days and already I am beginning to see the field of PR I am passionate about and want to pursue in the future.
