Helping creative businesses and industry organisations navigate government, funding and strategy.
Practical advice for screen, games, arts and other creative industries.
The landscape for screen producers, game developers, creatives and arts organisations in Australia is complex.
Successfully navigating government agencies and programs requires an understanding of their terminology, motivations and mindset, which are all too often misunderstood, by both sides.
Athrotaxis Strategy is Alex Sangston.
Alex works with creative businesses, industry organisations and public agencies to solve the problems that arise when creative ambition meets government, financing, policy and process. Alex will help your business understand and navigate what government and its agencies are telling you.
Get in touch to see how Alex and Athrotaxis Strategy can help you realise your creative ambitions.
What Athrotaxis does
Athrotaxis helps creative businesses and industry organisations understand and work effectively with government, providing practical strategic advice across:
government funding, incentives and applications
government engagement and stakeholder strategy
industry policy and advocacy
navigating public sector processes and decision-making
About Alex
Alex Sangston has spent more than 25 years working across government in programs and policy for screen production, video games and the arts. His senior roles have included managing the Producer Offset at Screen Australia and leading Screen Tasmania.
Athrotaxis brings that experience to organisations trying to understand how government thinks, how decisions are made, and how to position themselves more effectively for success.
What is Athrotaxis?
Athrotaxis is a genus of ancient conifers found only in Tasmania. Its two species, the pencil pine and King Billy pine, can live for over a millennium.
The trees have stood here in the clear air of lutriwita/Tasmania through the sweep of human history: through the long presence of the palawa people, through colonisation, changing industries and technologies, and generations of Tasmanian stories.
They endure while the world around them changes.
Athrotaxis Strategy takes its name from them: Tasmanian, deeply rooted and enduring, but never untouched by change. The business is about enabling the connections between people, institutions, technology, creativity and place, and using those connections to help people tell stories.
The name Athrotaxis comes from the ancient Greek for a crowded arrangement, referring to the configuration of the trees’ leaves.
You can’t tell good stories if you can’t breathe; Athrotaxis Strategy is comfortable in crowded spaces and can help you find the clear air you need.
Same Game, Different Mechanics: Positioning Your Studio for Government Support
Alex will be speaking at GCAP 2026 about how government funding agencies think, why strong applications fail, and how studios can give decision-makers more reasons to say yes and fewer reasons to say no.