This article is a revised version of a public talk I gave at Griffith University's Creative Arts Research Institute (CARI) in May 2023. It follows on from the Michael Volkering Lecture I delivered at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Australian cultural policy in 2022, and an interview-based research project I led on the impact of COVID-19 on the arts in 2021. The last began by employing the tropes of resilience and recovery that frame a large number of studies on the consequences of the pandemic for the cultural sector. However, as a team, we soon decided they were inappropriate for the responses we were getting from our South East Queensland organisations. It was not that the practitioners we interviewed did not possess these qualities. It was rather that, as explanatory metaphors, they fudged the line between empirical observation (what our organisations were doing) and normative reasoning (what they should be doing). The problem compounds when policymakers use natural language terms as operators of capture - Revive, Australia's latest national cultural policy, being a case point.4 Words lose analytical purchase the more they circulate as an idiom of official control. They empty out (what do 'resilience' and 'recovery' actually mean?), flatten out (are there different kinds?) and reify (should cultural organisations be pursuing goals other than these?). Put this way, the terms invite strong challenge. But this is to make terminology, rather than lived experience, the focus of research. I want to find a way to go beyond governmental master metaphors, not by rejecting them but by shifting the critical gaze to systemic issues - that is, to the big-picture narratives in which Australian arts and culture are mired like a sucking bog.