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welcome we're joined by norik de lancian who has been a business lawyer and consultant since 1983. uh his focus is on contract drafting and review intellectual property and information technology uh norik thank you very much for your time thank you so to start can you tell us a bit about your background where you live where you're from and about your armenian background in general in terms of where i live nowadays it's very philosophical in terms of where i live but in terms of where it came from i guess there's some physical realities that are easily explained i was born in iran in tehran my parents are therefore iranian armenian from back to 400 years my father sent his two eldest sons to the school in calcutta in india where they received an education in english after graduating they found their way to australia like a lot of indian armenians did and that resulted in chain migration to australia so in terms of just that aspect that's me now in arriving in australia australia was a very unwelcoming country to people from abroad in the 60s still changed dramatically from the 1970s um for various reasons i was not connected with the armenian community from about the age of nine to 24. in fact i rejected armenians because i could see nothing of value it seemed to be terribly ethnic very insular boring but after i finished university where i did humanities and law i actually through the mechanism of being keen about what was happening to the palestinians in lebanon in 1982 uh one day i arrived home and my father said where were you today and i said i was at a uh palestinian demonstration and he said oh our story's the same and i said what do you mean and then it began where i kind of got involved in understanding my own heritage and i was kind of fortunate because uh in my travels you can travel when you're young in my travels i uh ended up living in the homes of a lot of scholars in america or in france and now i'm sort of like friends of their sons so that's what i mean by living in a mental space it's philosophical meaning that nowadays with the internet with social media you can basically live anywhere as we have seen people doing um nowadays in that social media creates all these echo chambers and these separate identities of people and in terms of education as applied to your work your career began as a book book publishing a lawyer you've since been in business uh ip an it lawyer and a lecturer and you have a passion for history and culture so how did these activities shape your thinking exactly it's often said that your first job shapes you certainly did for me so arriving after law school in a book publishing company and being an in-house lawyer for a book publisher meant i was surrounded by the most common job description was editor and then you had uh graphic designer uh so being in that creative environment meant that i could understand uh what had occurred over the last 300 years in industrialization because a book begins with a manuscript goes through editing and ends up in a product that has to be sold so that was kind of useful for me so i was shaped by that first job it also shaped me because rather than having a secretary in 1983 i was given an ibm display writer which was pretty rare for a lawyer to have a computer in 1983 in australia so that got me involved in drafting contracts uh i do like writing and for me writing contracts is the same as writing because you're gathering um your views so really uh the rest of my career has always remained shaped by that first job in that uh i draft contracts i'm an intellectual property lawyer which means i'm involved with trademarks and copyright and patents and the really big challenge and the most interesting one is the business models like how do you create new businesses from that which a client has um and at the same time going back to what i was saying earlier about philosophy um you know dialogue with clients is really important uh and for me law can get dreadfully boring unless you have that dialogue and i find the history studies it's like my hobby in a way but it actually helps me also to explain where the world's come from what ills it what creates society what destroys society and while i had your normal historical education that you have in an anglophone world uh australia being a colony of england it was a very english kind of education um what and so things like greece rome um and egypt before it were drilled into one but after university i got involved in um something closer to armenia which is the history of mesopotamia and i've learned a lot about how civilization works from that study of history right and in australia you and a group of sydney armenian lawyers recently collaborated on a project to support arts currently you have a working draft 40 pager titled entitled arts culture property law and related resources uh can you tell us a bit about this and uh the importance of cultural property but before i talk about the importance of cultural property and and the work we were doing just a little overview because the armenian australian um community is not well known um so the generic numbers are that there's 50 000 uh australian armenians um we do know for sure that there's six thousand people on the armenians of australia facebook group uh so that gives us a stat that we can work with um it's a community that has its origins uh in terms of having having a community like character from the late 50s but accelerating because of all the um uh diasporan remigrations that have occurred from mostly the middle east uh that occurred in the 70s and the 80s just as it did elsewhere um currently much to my amazement i i discovered uh late last year that there are now 100 lawyers in uh in australia that are of armenian origin uh and there's probably about 15 people studying law i was i believe the second or the third lawyer who was within the i mean in background in australia so you can see the shifts occurred you can see that that the migration of armenians australia has had the same pattern as elsewhere meaning these people are very devoted towards education and um prosperity and betterment so when the group of my friends established lawyer friends got together late last year because of what was happening in ottawa uh we basically were doing things that were in a sense adjunct to what the armenian national committee locally was doing and more specifically i took it upon myself to rewrite some of the stuff about the legal status of art stuff to make it more presentable and more more of a narrative rather than bullet points so that was our initial task and of course like many people november 10 arrived with a great surprise and so there had to be a shift in terms of focus areas um now being involved in culture myself and the history of old jewel for new jewel for the hutch cars of jewel for um you know i've been collecting this stuff and studying this stuff for decades uh being involved in all that made me uh immediately realize that the whole issue of cultural property in arizona is going to be a major issue so for me it was a question of gathering something again to tell a story to tell a narrative to put it in context the challenging bit for me and for many is actually the cultural law aspect cultural law is a very new field for me but it obviously has a legal existence so over the course of the next few weeks or months the aim is to bring together that document which is on cultural property you know why is it at risk what laws might apply who should do what who is doing what in doing all that what i found to be the most useful thing is just creating a resource database you know like who are the players in this area because there's lots of people from denver colorado through to yerevan who are doing things and then there's lots of video resources i mean youtube for me is just a gold mine so in that document i've listed uh all of the youtube videos and the metadata related to them that is relevant so essentially i wanted to create a resource that could be a tool for other people to work with and your work involves business and a form that business modeling and economics in your opinion what conditions does armenia need in order to create prosperity obviously that's a very complex question and it's a one that involves cross-disciplinary thinking in fact multi-disciplinary thinking but i think there's some things that people have to let go of and some things they have to rush very quickly to adopt my personal view is speaking as a diaspora that i mean is a way to stuck in nostalgia and into what i call symbolic ethnicity it's been observed in other diasporas jewish and otherwise that essentially those who become diaspora tend to have this fixed view of what the homeland was when they left and that doesn't change for them which is the reason why you get this symbolic ethnicity you know people i am not religious but people you know saying lovely things about jesus will save you and uh people being nostalgic about uh i don't know a whole bunch of things from food to clothing to cymbals um i don't think that's going to get you very far um so i think they're things that need to be lost um i think we're in a period of history globally and i'm not just talking about armenians but we're in what uh historians might refer to as an interregarum it's a period where there is no dominant power there is a shift towards what i believe is eurasia and around eurasia we've got your china russia iran i mean is in their nations as well as india and we know that the [Music] pivot point of a lot of history is actually eurasia so it's not going to be too much of a surprise if over the next three decades things shift in that direction so one's got to when one's thinking about the prosperity of armenia think about the realignment and i know others in um in interviews in civilian referred to this but this realignment is really important i mean being somebody from iran in his origins and i've discovered before the interview you are also from iran um means that we have an affinity with this civilization that is older than armenian civilization i mean it's 5 000 years of history and so the opportunities from an economic moral support perspective are very real so i think the thing is that for the prosperity of armenians and armenia education has to come to the center obviously good governance is really important good policy is really important and one cannot just import and this is the main point one cannot just import models from abroad and work with labels like oh democracy all of these labels are now really up for redefinition just as the label western values we saw during the asap war was completely up for values even the word human rights and human rights organization became up for value i mean sorry for up for re-evaluation um i think a shroud or a veil has been removed and i think it's a a moment to race towards the clarity that i think armenians have because they have this 2500 years of clarity about how you create a civilization grow a civilization and how a civilization erodes and so i think we are dealing with a period in history where the very notion of what a human being is in this century will be redefined um but also so too will what is the civilization and why is it important and at the end of the day um as the famous saying says culture eats strategy for breakfast so it's up to us to improve the culture and finally i want to ah oh sorry that would lead to prosperity is is the perspective that i come from obviously inclusive of the concept of culture is is business and governance and many other branches and finally i want to ask about your work as a collector you have a photo collection which includes about 6 000 images and maps associated with armenia uh can you tell us why you decided to do this work as a collector and the end goals for the resources that you have in mind the the why answer begins with just plain interest um i like images you know you've heard from me that i've been involved with books and uh you know from books i've been involved in assisting filmmakers and other people so the thing is that the photo collection is really about um trying to visualize information specifically historical information um when i have sought to understand uh i mean in history i've obviously had to read text um i've tried to engage in having videos made like the you know genocide survivors in australia series in the 1980s but the thing is that um photos and images of objects in museums are an amazing wealth because when you see them they are able to tell you so much more than the text will uh in an instant sort of way so my ambition is that with these sort of 6 000 images that are categorized and metadata and put into chronological order and interconnected with keywords my ambition is that um that like that uh cultural property work that i'm doing that it becomes a resource you know you you also told me before we met that you have an italian background um that you know if you have these resources be it italian iranian if you're an iranian armenian or australian or whatever access to resources is the way creativity kind of can flower when when a filmmaker book writer journalist videographer doesn't have the images doesn't have the ability to visualize things um then the whole approach towards getting people more involved in something of importance isn't there we we saw that hollywood made the 20th century for a lot of cultures and hollywood flowed into american television as an export industry and all along there you had the african-american music tradition so the thing is that if the 20th century was about american culture the question arises what is the 21st century and really um you either as they say in um in academia yeah you either publish or you perish well norik uh that was very enlightening and thank you very much for your time it was a pleasure emilio thank you very much for the conversation all right cheers for now and thank you for joining us on civilnet [Music] you