Film has been around for a long time and has given us a wealth of useful memories, insights and entertainments with its ability to collect and represent sounds and images as a rich experience to an eager audience. Another reason for film's continuing popularity has been the benefits given it by new technologies, each new development better able to present information and entertainment to many more people and in many new ways.

Each time a suitable new technology arrives, the industry is able to adopt a new face and reinvent itself. And we viewers gleefully oblige this old "actor", forgetting the lined face underneath the new makeup, and remain entranced before the screen. From silent to sound films, black and white to colour, television to videos, and so on up to video games, virtual reality arcades, the computer-based internet and future interactive television services, the makeup and costume changes keep on coming.

For Australia's film makers, it's a difficult routine and requires practitioners who are quick on their feet, flexible enough to play many parts and able to project themselves well from a stage with a increasingly international audience. Australia's position as a world leader during the infancy of the film industry, producing some of the earliest features and sound films, provides a valuable role model to base the next few years on. Then we led the world because talented storytellers, actors and crew were committed to creating a unique Australian character and voice working with what was, in those days, a new technology. For them - as much for the audiences that flocked to our cinemas - what was on the screen was more important than how it got there.

So today, what direction will the Australian new media industries take to ensure their future in an uncertain and rapidly changing global media marketplace? The yearly get-together of the Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association (AIMIA) held last month in Adelaide was an attempt by the preeminent industry body and the four hundred participants to answer this most pressing of questions.

One thing was clear: this is a complex and dynamic industry, the likes of which can only be compared to models such as Hollywood, where "hit titles" are few and far between and production budgets climb to heights only an Arnold Schwartzenegger could hope to scale. One government response is to allocate over $80 million to the industry over three years, via August 1994's Creative Nation cultural package, to give this new industry life.

Our industry stands in danger of becoming a bit-part player in the larger world industry if we don't take a lead in this uncertain and speculative new media. Whether our view of the world makes it at the box office, into well-paid prime-time television timeslots and onto the interactive new media services, or merely remains a convenient back drop to an international plot, like the shots of the Sydney monorail in the latest Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie, is up to us.