Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art [1 ed.] 9781003284765, 9781032257372, 9781032257389

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Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art

This edited collection examines art resulting from cross-cultural interactions between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous people, from the British invasion to today. Focusing on themes of collaboration and dialogue, the book includes two conversations between First Nations and non-Indigenous authors and an historian’s self-reflexive account of mediating between Traditional Owners and an international art auction house to repatriate art. There are studies of ‘reverse appropriation’ by early nineteenth-century Aboriginal carvers of tourist artefacts and the production of enigmatic toa. Cross-cultural dialogue is traced from the post-war period to ‘Aboriginalism’ in design and the First Nations fashion industry of today. Transculturation, conceptualism, and collaboration are contextualised in the 1980s, a pivotal decade for the growth of collaborative First Nations exhibitions. Within the current circumstances of political protest in photographic portraiture and against the mining of sacred Aboriginal land, Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art testifies to the need for Australian institutions to collaborate with First Nations people more often and better. This book will appeal to students and scholars of art history, Indigenous anthropology, and museum and heritage studies. Sarah Scott is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, School of Art and Design, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She writes on non-Indigenous engagement with First Nations art and culture, art patronage, and the representation of Australian art overseas. Helen McDonald is an art historian and an associate of the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art (2001) and Patricia Piccinini: Nearly Beloved (2012). Her recent research focuses on Australian rock art and art about climate change. Caroline Jordan is an art historian and adjunct honorary research officer at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (2005) and recent articles in Australian Historical Studies and Gender and History.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Where is Art? Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art Edited by Simone Douglas, Adam Geczy, and Sean Lowry Counterfactualism in the Fine Arts Elke Reinhuber Art-Based Research in the Context of a Global Pandemic Edited by Usva Seregina and Astrid Van den Bossche Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral Edited by Max Ryynänen, Heidi S. Kosonen and Susanne C. Ylönen Art Agency and the Continued Assault on Authorship Simon Blond Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse Edited by Satu Miettinen, Enni Mikkonen, Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, and Melanie Sarantou Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art Edited by Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art Edited by Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, and Caroline Jordan

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Artand-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art Edited by Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald and Caroline Jordan

Designed cover image: Mrs N. Lewis from Pukatja (Ernabella), S.A., Australian Coat of Arms: We Were There and We Are Here (2018). Spinifex grasses, raffia and wool. Copyright Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Photograph by Emma Poletti. Australian Parliament House collection. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald and Caroline Jordan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald and Caroline Jordan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Scott, Sarah, 1972– editor. | McDonald, Helen, 1949– editor. | Jordan, Caroline, 1962– editor. Title: Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and non–indigenous art / edited by Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald and Caroline Jordan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator of the Berndt Museum / Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ—The Toa of the Dieri / Martin Edmond—Wrecking Culture: Australian Iconoclash 2020 / Helen McDonald. Identifiers: LCCN 2023009523 (print) | LCCN 2023009524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032257372 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032257389 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003284765 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art and society—Australia. | Intercultural communication—Australia. | Australia—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC N72.S6 C755 2023 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC 704.03/9915—dc23/eng/20230522 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009523 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009524 ISBN: 978-1-032-25737-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-25738-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28476-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVanatage, LLC

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction

vii 1

SARAH SCOTT, HELEN McDONALD, AND CAROLINE JORDAN

1 The Weight of Grief – Maree Clarke and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll on Artist-centricity

10

KHADIJA VON ZINNENBURG CARROLL IN CONVERSATION WITH MAREE CLARKE

2 On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator of the Berndt Museum

27

CATHERINE SPECK IN CONVERSATION WITH VANESSA RUSS

3 Price and Provenance: William Barak as an Artist in the Market

45

NIKITA VANDERBYL

4 The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos: Coats of Arms from the Australian Frontier

61

DARREN JORGENSEN

5 The Toa of the Dieri

77

MARTIN EDMOND

6 ‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Aboriginal Art in Fashion and Textile Design FABRI BLACKLOCK

92

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7 Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart: The Art and Designs of Bill Onus and Byram Mansell during the Assimilationist Era

109

SARAH SCOTT

8 Shared Motives: New Art and Curatorial Collaborations in the 1980s

129

CATHERINE DE LORENZO

9 Decolonisation and Conceptual Art: Collaboration, Appropriation, Transculturation in Australian Contemporary Art

151

IAN MCLEAN

10 Widening the Aperture: Cross-cultural Collaboration – A Perspective from Borroloola

175

WENDY GARDEN

11 Wrecking Culture: Australian Iconoclash 2020

196

HELEN MCDONALD

Index

215

Contributors

Fabri Blacklock is a Nucoorilma/Ngarabal/Biripi woman. She is a Scientia Research Fellow and Associate Dean Indigenous at UNSW Art, Design and Architecture, Australia. She is passionate about improving equity in education for Aboriginal people and is committed to embedding Aboriginal research methodologies, pedagogies, and perspectives into education and research. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is Professor of History, Central European University Vienna, Austria, and Honorary Chair of Global Art, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is the author of Art in the Time of Colony (2014), The Importance of Being Anachronistic (2016), Botanical Drift (2017), Bordered Lives (2020), and The Contested Crown (2022). Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman and an independent multi-disciplinary artist and curator. She is a leading possum-skin artist and experimental photographer. Her passion is to research and recreate material cultural objects held in museum collections globally and pass that knowledge onto the next generation. Catherine De Lorenzo’s cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary perspectives inform her research on Australian art, photography and exhibitions, including Australian exhibitions and collections in Europe. She co-authored Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening our Eyes (2018), is an associate editor on several international journals, and an adjunct associate professor at MADA, Monash University, Australia. Martin Edmond is from New Zealand and lives in Australia. He holds a Doctorate of Creative Arts and authored The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (1999), The Supply Party: Ludwig Becker on the Burke and Wills Expedition (2009), Dark Night: Walking with McCahon (2011), Battarbee & Namatjira (2014), and Isinglass (2019). Wendy Garden is a curator and writer based in Darwin, Australia. Curatorial projects include the retrospective exhibition Therese Ritchie: Burning Hearts (Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory) and the touring exhibition Some Like It Hot (Artback NT). She is president of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.

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Caroline Jordan is an art historian and adjunct honorary research officer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (2005) and recent articles in Australian Historical Studies and Gender and History. Helen McDonald is an art historian and an associate of the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art (2001) and Patricia Piccinini: Nearly Beloved (2012). Her recent research focuses on Australian rock art and art about climate change. Ian McLean is the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has written extensively on cross-cultural relations in Australian art, including in the books Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art and Double Nation: A History of Australian Art. Vanessa Russ is a Ngarinyin-Gija woman from the Kimberley Region, Western Australia, and a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previous positions include Associate Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology (UWA). She is the author of A History of Aboriginal Art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021). Sarah Scott is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, School of Art and Design, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She writes on non-Indigenous engagement with First Nations art and culture, art patronage, and the representation of Australian art overseas. Catherine Speck is Professor Emerita of Art History and Curatorship at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities of Australia. Key publications include the co-authored Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes (2018) and Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars (2014). Nikita Vanderbyl is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and History at La Trobe University, Mildura, Australia. She writes on William Barak and on nineteenth-century Aboriginal art and cultural objects. Her work has appeared in Aboriginal History, The La Trobe Journal, History Workshop Journal, Agora magazine, and the Conversation.

Introduction Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, and Caroline Jordan

This book of original, previously unpublished essays is about visual art that is a tangible effect of collaboration and dialogue between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous people. The themes are currently at the forefront of public debate in Australia, as they coincide with the newly elected Labor government’s pledge in 2022 to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The First Nations-authored document calls for a First Nations Voice to Parliament in the Australian Constitution and a Makarrata Commission for truth-telling and treaty-making.1 The government has promised a referendum on the Voice in 2023, which will call on all enrolled 17 million Australians to vote to support the changes recommended in the Uluru Statement. Visual art is playing a substantial role in Australia’s processes of truth-telling and reconciliation. The Uluru Statement itself is a visual artefact, on which the written text is surrounded by collaborative artwork led by Maruku artist, Rene Kulitja, and painted by Mutitjulu artists. It is not surprising that, for today’s First Nations people in Australia, visual art is an important means of expression and communication. Ancient Aboriginal art is everywhere, inscribed into the continent’s vast rocky surface and bearing witness to deep human history. As Yamatji academic Stephen Gilchrist, the curator of the exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia (Harvard Art Museums, USA, 2016), explained, The past is not inaccessible to Indigenous people. It is instead part of a cyclical and circular order. Indigenous conceptions of time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds, and these dynamic relationships find expression in artistic production.2 Despite the violent disruption caused by the British invasion and its ongoing aftermath, First Nations people have continued to make art, often referencing the traditional techniques and motifs of the past within new cosmopolitan circumstances. The political push for the Voice recognises that societies built on colonialism, such as Australia’s, have a responsibility to acknowledge historical wrongs and failures and to make a space for listening to their First Peoples. When dealing with the creation of Australian visual art that is entangled with the legacies of colonialism, as this book does, an historical perspective is not arbitrary but necessary. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-1

2 Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, and Caroline Jordan While the book does not claim to provide comprehensive coverage, it traverses the period from the British invasion that began in 1788 through nineteenth-century settler colonialism and twentieth-century modernity and modernism to now. In several chapters, words with the prefix ‘re’ activate the past in the present: revision, re-evaluate, reclassify, reinterpret, recontextualise, reclaim, reinvent, restore, repatriate, and, in a curatorial context, rehang. The sometimes fretful, sometimes liberating, back-and-forth movement between the past and the present, which these words infer, conveys the urgency and perhaps the inevitability of having to undo the poisonous legacies of racism and colonialism. The idea of cross-cultural exchange can imply hierarchical binaries – black/ white, Aboriginal/settler-colonial, First Nations/non-Indigenous – empowering the settler-migrant Australian over the native Australian. The term crosscurrents in the title of the book avoids such fixed oppositional binaries. A metaphor belonging to water seems more appropriate to describe the fluid coming together of cultures in visual art: the confluence or mixing, turbulence or effervescence, contamination or purification of ideas, beliefs, and affects between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous artists and art forms. Similarly, there are pitfalls in the subject-object hierarchy of the one-who-sees and the one-who-is-seen, an imbalanced power dynamic familiar to feminist art historians in relation to images of women. The European visions of the non-European other, explored by Bernard Smith in his classic European Vision and the South Pacific (1960 and in print ever since), were not always grounded in actual real-life encounters. Crosscurrents avoids the genre of ‘representations of’ in favour of exploring ‘artworks by’ that are the product of in-person cross-cultural exchange. The further back in time an art-making encounter occurred, the harder it can be to find the direct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice within it. Yet precious visual objects and images exist that have their own stories to tell. The chapters explore how these encounters implicitly and explicitly affected the processes and production of art. They uncover patterns of influence, new aesthetic formations, hybrid artforms, and productive artist-centric relationships. Some chapters chart modes of collaboration, including the diachronic passing down of customs, rituals, and influences in visual art from one culture or generation to the next, while others offer a syncretic analysis of dialogue, including the distortions, destructions, and reversals that occur when visual cultures clash or collide. Although Crosscurrents falls short on 50/50 First Nations/non-Indigenous representation in authorship, it plays a part in documenting a broader imperative in the Australian artworld to engage more Indigenous curators and academics and to increase the number of Indigenous-led exhibitions and gallery spaces. On her dramatic resignation from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2011, Arrernte/ Kalkadoon curator Hetti Perkins called for this need to be addressed as a collaborative process: ‘It’s not about politics. It’s about how we can work together to make the art gallery the institution it should be and could be’.3 In 2014, Stephen Gilchrist argued for a more radical and separatist Indigenous-led approach to curation: tactics of separatism, fractioning and de-centring are surely more radical options than attempts at integration, where involvement is invariably

Introduction 3 concessional and ultimately marginalised . . . an assimilationist strategy within the museum can dilute the politics of colonization and mitigate the register of dispossession that is thematically present in much Aboriginal artwork.4 Building has since begun on First Nations-centred cultural institutions: Tarrkarri: the Centre for First Nations Cultures in Adelaide, the National Aboriginal Art Gallery in Alice Springs and Ngurra, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Precinct in Canberra. First Nations curators have gained prominence with the success of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art triennials at the National Gallery of Australia, initially conceived and led by Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra curator, artist, and academic, Brenda L. Croft. Croft’s Culture Warriors, 2007, was followed by Kalkadoon curator Carly Lane’s Undisclosed 2012, followed by Gulumirrgin (Larrakia)/Wardaman/Karajarri Tina Baum’s and Hetti Perkins’ Ceremony 2022. In 2021, Wiradjuri/Celtic artist Brook Andrew became the first Australian First Nations artist/curator of a Sydney Biennale, with his show Nirin. In addition, there has been a series of collaborative curatorial exhibitions over the past decade on the theme of cross-cultural exchange. Sovereignty (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2016) focused on the art of First Nations peoples in south-eastern Australia ‘alongside culturally and linguistically diverse narratives of self-determination, identity, sovereignty and resistance’.5 Colony: Frontier Wars (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018) put a spotlight on the Australian frontier wars, exhibiting Indigenous and colonial art together. Belonging: Stories of Australian Art (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2020) featured a rehang of their colonial art collection alongside the gallery’s Indigenous art. Many state galleries have adopted similarly radical curatorial strategies in rethinking their permanent Australian art collections, breaking up chronology and mixing categories, such as art and craft. In 2022, collectivism, collaboration, and dialogue in mostly non-Euro-based art were the themes of Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany. Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Gurang Gurang artist Richard Bell’s Embassy installation established a central presence in what Terry Smith has described as ‘the most significant of the contemporary mega-exhibitions’.6 Crosscurrents has taken shape amidst this vibrant cross-cultural industry of Australian First Nations art. The chapters are organised around the themes of collaboration and dialogue. Chapter 1 by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Maree Clarke and Chapter 2 by Catherine Speck and Vanessa Russ are collaborations in themselves, structured as conversations between a First Nations person and a nonIndigenous person. Carroll and Clarke speak as both artists and historians about their shared art-making experiences. Hence their art history is, in Carroll’s words, artist-centric. The chapter explores the ways political struggles for cultural recognition have absorbed the historical knowledge about art practices in south-eastern Australia, thus allowing new Aboriginal possum skin cloaks, eel traps, and kopis, or skull caps made for mourning, to be made by Clarke and others. Themes of death and cultural revival are drawn out through examples from the exhibition Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories (Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 2021). Clarke used a nineteenth-century possum skin cloak held in the collection at Museum Victoria

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to spark the cultural revival of the making of the cloaks through workshops held across Australia. Carroll asked, ‘Is there healing in conversation and collaboration?’ leading Clarke to talk about the kopi-making workshops in which both First Nations and non-Indigenous people feel the weight of grief on their heads through wearing the kopi they have created. Clarke states that collaboration is ‘an amazing thing to do, just to hear different people’s stories and perspectives. Things are things, but it’s about those conversations that take place’. In a conversation with art historian Speck, Russ, a Ngarinyin/Gija curator and academic from the Kimberley in Western Australia, talks about her experience as associate director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. The museum was founded by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 1976 and has an outstanding collection of cultural material that the Berndts assembled during their careers. When Russ was appointed in 2016, she was the first Aboriginal person to become head of the collection. She speaks of her commitment to audience engagement and access by Aboriginal communities, as well as the problems she faced. These include storage and display difficulties, which limited access to the collection by communities and impeded the proper museological management of the collection, and a university culture that is resistant to the protocols relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Russ and Speck discuss how Indigenous curatorship differs from Euro-American models, the cultural responsibility of such positions, the importance of working with the relevant elders of the community, and how best to navigate the art/anthropology divide. Russ bravely and passionately explores all these issues, despite her position having been terminated in 2019 in a climate of budgetary and organisational change at UWA. In Chapter 3, Nikita Vanderbyl reflects on her personal role as collaborator, liaising between principal parties in the buying and selling and repatriation of artworks by nineteenth-century Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung leader, William Barak. Vanderbyl worked as both a catalogue writer for the auction house Sotheby’s and an advisor and fundraiser for descendants of Barak’s community, who feared the prospect of their heritage being sold at an international auction for prices beyond their reach. Further exploring the idea of collaboration from an historian’s point of view, Vanderbyl argues that Barak gifted his art to members of the white settlercolonial elite (such as the de Pury family, who originally acquired the artworks put up at auction) as a form of cross-cultural diplomacy. Vanderbyl contrasts the value systems underpinning the prestige art market for Aboriginal art with the value attributed to Barak’s cultural objects by the community, and their arguments for the importance of bringing them home. Chapter 4 by Darren Jorgensen and Chapter 5 by Martin Edmond examine the way Aboriginal artists in South Australia in the early twentieth century deployed imagery, symbols, styles, and genres in artefacts that were made for the white tourist trade and mission context, respectively. Jorgensen identifies the practice of ‘reverse appropriation’ in the production of coats of arms by carvers of artefacts for tourists. He explains how Aboriginal artists reproduced Australian animals, especially the kangaroo and emu on the Australian coat of arms that was reproduced

Introduction 5 and disseminated on Australian coins. These are familiar symbols of a shared Australia, standing for the country’s distinct natural environment. Jorgensen demonstrates how this symbolism was revived in a recent curatorial display of carved animals at the Art Gallery of South Australia and in a woven Tjanpi sculpture by Pitantjatjara artist Niningka Lewis. Edmond studies the production of toa, which are small, painted sculptures of disputed meaning made by Dieri in collaboration with the Europeans who ran the Lutheran mission at Lake Killalpaninna. Several hundred toa were purchased by the South Australian Museum as part of the Reuther Collection in 1907. While possibly based upon traditional models, toa were cross-cultural collaborations made over a period of just a few months. Looking at their genesis from a biographical point of view, Edmond focuses on the roles of Pastor Johann Reuther, superintendent of the Bethesda Mission, and artist and teacher Harry Hillier, as well as on their Indigenous facilitators. Edmond draws analogies between this sudden efflorescence of art making and other Aboriginal and European artistic collaborations that took place at Oenpelli/Gunbalanya in the 1910s, Ntaria/Hermannsburg in the 1930s (including famously between Albert Namatjira and Rex Battarbee), and Papunya in the early 1970s between Geoffrey Bardon and the Papunya Tula artists. Chapter 6 by Nucoorilma/Biripi woman Fabri Blacklock and Chapter 7 by Sarah Scott analyse cross-cultural encounters that occurred in the applied arts of fashion and design in the early post-war period in Australia. Blacklock outlines the history of the production of Aboriginal textiles and examines how modes of collaboration have developed from arts and crafts taught and sold on missions and early remote art centres to today’s prestigious commercial collaborations in fashion and design. Blacklock’s overview of Indigenous fashion starts in 1948 at Ernabella and continues through the Tiwi Islands and the batik movement generated at Utopia. Recent problems of cultural appropriation are touched on as well as a discussion of successful Aboriginal artists in the fashion and textile industries, including Balarinji and Desert designs, Australian fashion designers collaborating with Aboriginal artists such as Roopa Pemmaraju, Aje, Camilla and Gorman, and international collaborations. Blacklock concludes that ‘Aboriginal people who have embarked on coalescing art, culture and connection in Country in unison with introduced western methods and materials are creating innovative acclaimed cross-cultural art practices in the process’. Scott’s chapter presents a comparison between the life and designs of Yorta Yorta designer, activist, and entrepreneur Bill Onus with those of his direct contemporary, settler modernist designer Byram Mansell. Onus set up his shop, Aboriginal Enterprises, in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne in the 1950s to produce Aboriginal tourist artefacts or ‘Aboriginalia’. In the context of previous chapters, Onus was part of a tradition in which Indigenous art and design that was adapted for non-Indigenous patrons could simultaneously stand for cultural revival and survival, just as William Barak, the anonymous nineteenth-century carver of the emu in the Art Gallery of South Australia coat of arms, and the creators of the toas had done. The contemporary making of traditional objects, such as possum skin cloaks by Maree Clarke, includes the aim of generating dialogue, collaboration,

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and greater understanding through workshops. Scott demonstrates that Onus, by contrast, was operating when the assimilation policy was at its height. Mansell was freely able to appropriate aspects of Aboriginal art in order to secure prestigious design commissions, which Scott argues supported assimilationist policies and were closed to the Aboriginal designer Onus. While these two designers created ‘Aboriginalia’, which may superficially look similar, the motivations behind their productions came from politically divergent and deeply unequal economic positions. Chapter 8 by Catherine De Lorenzo and Chapter 9 by Ian McLean focus on the pivotal 1980s. The decade was remarkable for the establishment of Indigenous art as a major part of Australia’s art scene and the 1988 celebration of the Bicentennial of British settlement, a lightning rod for dialogue and protest about national identity. De Lorenzo examines a range of hitherto overlooked small and innovative exhibitions focused in and around the working-class suburb of Redfern in Sydney, which was a hub for Aboriginal arts as well as Indigenous activism. She argues that the cumulative impact of these little exhibitions exerted a significant influence on the broader art and social worlds, due largely to input from non-Indigenous and ‘blak’ artists working together.7 She also charts the rising authority with which emerging Indigenous artists and curators, such as Djon Mundine and Brenda L. Croft, helped reshape the contemporary art scene and ultimately transformed perceptions of Aboriginal art and culture both within Australia and abroad. McLean evokes a global context for the 1980s and the work of two prominent Australian settler-migrant artists, Ian Burn and Imants Tillers. By the late 1980s to early 1990s, the illegitimacy of assuming Aboriginal design was available for anyone to exploit for commercial purposes, as evidenced by Blacklock and Scott, was finally acknowledged and legally enforced.8 At the same time, postmodernist and postcolonialist ideas, combined with the rise of the Western Desert painting movement that began at Papunya in the 1970s, produced conditions for a new genre of appropriation by Australian artists whose outlook was intellectual, avant-garde, collaborative, and international. McLean outlines an historiography of the idea of transculturation, leading to an analysis of the way Tillers’ practice of appropriation grew from his engagement with conceptualism and his teasing collaboration with Gordon Bennett, a painter and contemporary who grappled with what it meant to be of Aboriginal heritage in Australia. McLean shows how Tillers’ association with non-Indigenous artist Tim Johnson introduced him to Papunya artists, particularly Michael Nelson Jagamara. Tillers appropriated Jagamara’s work and then collaborated with him in the multi-panelled Book of Power. McLean notes that while Tillers’ appropriations of Jagamara’s works were only a small part of Tillers’ total body of works, they remain controversial. The final two chapters return to studies of art and events of the past five years. Wendy Garden, in Chapter 10, and Helen McDonald, in Chapter 11, consider the politics of collaborative image making that engages with environmental and land rights protest. Garden explores how cross-cultural collaborations between nonIndigenous artist Therese Ritchie and Garrwa elder Jack Green brought attention to the damage inflicted by the expansion of the McArthur River mine, southwest

Introduction 7 of Borroloola in the Northern Territory. Collaborating on two exhibition projects in 2017 and 2020, Ritchie and Green, together with anthropologist Seán Kerins, tracked the history of colonial expansion and the effects of the mine on local residents. Ritchie’s compelling portrait photographs were subsequently shown in a separate exhibition that elicited various degrees of unease, largely focused on her outsider status. Issues of privilege, agency, and ethics and who can and cannot speak about ongoing injustice were fuelled by a deep mistrust of the camera. Countering the fears and criticisms prompted by Ritchie’s cross-cultural collaborations, Garden draws upon Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the civil contract – the active exchange between the photographer, persons photographed, and viewers of photographs – to argue for an expanded understanding of authorship in which portraits are understood as ‘colabouring’. Garden claims this provides an important means of rethinking the photographic moment, which restores agency to people depicted in images and creates a space for the cross-cultural collaborations of artists such as Ritchie. McDonald demonstrates how three iconoclastic attacks on visual culture in Australia during 2020 were effects of settler colonialism’s ongoing structural violence. The destructive attacks include Tony Albert’s decolonising videoclip, You Wreck Me; the mining company Rio Tinto’s blasting of a sacred Aboriginal site in Juukan Gorge; and the graffitiing of colonial statues during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. McDonald uses Bruno Latour’s essay ‘What is iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars?’ as a lens through which to examine the hesitation of the iconoclasts and the uncertainty of the image defenders. According to Latour’s typology, all contemporary art, such as You Wreck Me, is the ultimate iconoclash, Rio Tinto is a (not-so-innocent) ‘innocent vandal’, and the BLM graffitists are ‘only against images that their opponents cling to most forcefully’. Rather than dwell on Latour’s speculation that iconoclastic destruction is nihilistic and that critique in contemporary art has become cheap, McDonald takes her cue from the many First Nations artists, curators, and reformers who, since the iconoclastic events of 2020, have seized the opportunity to challenge institutions to do better in acknowledging the rights and cultural integrity of Australian First Nations people. The editors note that the generic terms ‘white’, ‘European’, and ‘settler’ may be historically accurate in specific contexts but are unreflective of the diversity of the contemporary Australian population. ‘Settler’ is hardly applicable to a recently arrived migrant who is likely to be not British, European, or white. In preference, we use the admittedly imperfect terms ‘non-Indigenous’ and ‘settler-migrant Australians’. Similarly, there is no consensus regarding terms signifying First Nations people, particularly as there are over 250 different First Nations language groups within Australia.9 As Marcia Langton pointed out, a collective pan-Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity was only deemed necessary following the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.10 The Australia Council for the Arts adopts the term ‘First Nations’; however, it also uses the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ interchangeably.11 Others consider that ‘First Nations’ is originally Canadian and that the term obliterates the difference between Indigenous nations globally. Some express a preference for ‘Aboriginal’, always as an

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Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, and Caroline Jordan

adjective rather than a noun, as in the widely accepted term ‘Aboriginal art’, although when referring to the whole of Australia, it is correct to broaden the term to ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’.12 There is a recent trend, prevalent on the national broadcaster and in public cultural institutions and popularised by the ritual ‘Welcome to Country’ and the ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ that precede formal events in Australia, to use specific language group names, such as Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Wiradjuri, Yolngu, and alternate placenames, such as Naarm/Melbourne. Where possible, Crosscurrents has opted for this approach, but otherwise, First Nations, Indigenous, and Aboriginal have been used interchangeably, according to each author’s preference. It is also important to state to First Nations readers, a warning that this book incorporates the stories and images of some people who have died. Finally, we, the editors, each of whom is a non-Indigenous supporter of Australian First Nations rights, express our gratitude to the following people, all of whom have enhanced our own experiences of cross-cultural collaboration and dialogue. For initial help and support, we are grateful to Terry Smith, Nicholas Thomas, Fiona Nicoll, Anne Dunlop, Alison Inglis, Chris Williams-Wynn, Ian McLean, Diane Kirkby, and Kat Ellinghaus. We thank Brenda L. Croft, Carly Lane, and Vanessa Russ for their interest and advice in the process of shaping the book. Katie Lawry and Patty Brown gave advice about indexing, and we thank them and our indexer, Gary Presland, for his patience and professionalism. The index was paid for with a grant from the University of Melbourne to Helen McDonald, for which we are grateful. Special thanks go to Mrs. N. Lewis and the Tjanpi Desert Weavers for the cover image and to the Department of Archaeology and History and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University for providing the artist fees. We extend our sincere appreciation to our anonymous readers and to the Routledge editors, Lucy McClune, Lucy Batrouney, and Georgia Oman, who made the book possible. Last, but not least, we thank the artists, whose wonderful work is represented in the book, and our authors, for their brilliant scholarship and enduring cooperation. Notes 1 https://ulurustatement.org/, accessed 11 January 2023. 2 Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, ed. Stephen Gilchrist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2016), 19. 3 Joyce Morgan, ‘Letter Reveals Frustration that Forced Perkins to Quit Gallery’, The Age, 26 September 2011. www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/letter-reveals-frustration-that-forced-perkins-to-quit-gallery-20110925-1krtp.html, accessed 11 January 2023. 4 Stephen Gilchrist, ‘Indigenising Curatorial Practice’, in The World Is Not a Foreign Land (Melbourne: Ian Potter Museum of Art, 2014), 57. 5 Paola Balla and Max Delany, Sovereignty (Melbourne: Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, 2017), 6. 6 Terry Smith, ‘Documenta 15, 2022: Collectivism and Controversy’, Artlink, 11 July 2022, www.artlink.com.au/articles/4983/documenta-15-2022-collectivism-and-controversy/#:~: text=‘%20This%20is%20third%20current%20practice,Jogjakarta%2Dbased%20

Introduction 9

7

8 9 10 11

12

group%20Taring%20Padi, accessed 11 January 2023. Since 1972, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy has continuously occupied a site outside the original Australian Parliament House, calling for Aboriginal land rights. A replica of it is the centrepiece of Bell’s installation. See Jack Latimore, ‘Blak, Black, Blackfulla: Language is Important but it can be Tricky’, The Age, 30 August 2021. www.theage.com.au/national/blak-black-blackfullalanguage-is-important-but-it-can-be-tricky-20210826-p58lzg.html, accessed 11 January 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpurrurru_v_Indofurn_Pty_Ltd, accessed 10 January 2023. ‘Living Languages’, AIATSIS. https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/living-languages, accessed 10 January 2023. Marcia Langton, ‘Well I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993), 32. Australia Council for the Arts, ‘Language’, in Protocols for Using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts, 2019, ii. https://australiacouncil.gov.au/ investment-and-development/protocols-and-resources/protocols-for-using-first-nationscultural-and-intellectual-property-in-the-arts/, accessed 10 January 2023. Latimore, ‘Blak, Black, Blackfulla’; Preference in Terminology When Referring to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples’, ACT Council of Social Services, updated December 2016. www.actcoss.org.au/sites/default/files/public/publications/ gulanga-good-practice-guide-preferences-terminology-referring-to-aboriginal-torresstrait-islander-peoples.pdf, accessed 10 January 2023.

1

The Weight of Grief – Maree Clarke and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll on Artist-centricity Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke Kopi is to Ree what copy is to me we mirror these ‘ere and what you might see Lingering round an eel trap or scull cap by Ree are looping reeds and yarns when time was a daughter to the now now and again moving around eely textwater

Introduction to the Artist-centric Method Khadija:

For this book about assembling a historiography of non-Eurocentric Australian art history, the following is a fragment of the conversations I have had over several years in the studio of contemporary Australian artist Maree (Ree) Clarke. Both Maree and I are artists as well as historians. We tell and share memories and their histories through humble listening and through learning methods of making.1 Artist-centric history writing often avoids assumptions about historical distance (including that distance which is assumed to enable objectivity and access to the truth) that are embedded in various rhetorics of historical representation.2 An artist-centric approach allows moments of intimacy and the study of affect.3 As an experiment in such history writing, this essay focuses on Maree Clarke’s work through the context of her recent National Gallery of Victoria Australia solo exhibition Ancestral Memories (2021–2022) and the Koori Possum Skins Cloak project, an ongoing exploration since 1999 that revives a practise in crafting workshops, which we reflect upon in more detail below. From an artist-centric perspective, it redresses gaps and omissions in conventional art history. An example of such an omission can be found, in a currently active register online, where the British Museum’s catalogue has not integrated the research Ree has done around mourning. Describing Wilhelm von Blandowski’s 1862 photograph of a drawing of an Aboriginal burial site along the Murray River,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-2

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 11

Figure 1.1 Maree Clarke, Possum Skin Cloak, 2021, in Installation View of Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories open from 25 June to 3 February 2022 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Tom Ross.

Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

the catalogue’s unnamed author falsely identifies four kopi (clay skull caps made in mourning rituals) as ‘two halved coconuts’.4 In the first room of Ree’s NGV show, there was an historical kopi skull cap borrowed from the Melbourne Museum collection. There are 85 kopi mourning caps in the Melbourne Museum, plus there are skeletal remains that George Murray Black collected at the same time, along with the one he gave to the British Museum. They would have taken the skeletal remains from the graves at the same time. Those that couldn’t be sent back to their Country are buried in the Domain Gardens in Melbourne because they were not identified. The South Australian Museum holds more than I can count, but I’ve photographed every one of them. I have this whole other archive of photos I’ve not done anything with yet. You are remaking objects to weigh grief and cloaks to accompany people from the cradle to the grave. Why do you think you are keeping these images of death? I think everyone is fascinated by death. I guess because in my family we don’t have any uncles, my parents died in their early sixties. My brothers died young, between 30 and 45. It’s a way of dealing with my grief, putting that into making work, on a really personal level.

12

K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

Khadija:

Maree:

Khadija:

I think about what it took for my mother, Alice Ruth Clarke, to raise eleven of us, after leaving school young. My grandfather taught her to read and write. They lived on the fringes as they worked as drovers, and we lived on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River in the 1960s. My bed was a suitcase when I was two years old. Here I am now travelling around the world, making all this work. I used to love daydreaming, lying on my back looking at the clouds. Until mum screamed, ‘Ree – come here and do what you’re supposed to’. Yours was one of the first solo exhibitions of an Aboriginal woman at the National Gallery of Victoria [one of a series curated by Myles Russell-Cook, closely following one of Destiny Deacon’s works in 2020–2021, and including a concurrent show with Clarke’s of Lorraine Connelly-Northey, contrasted with Rosalie Gascoigne in 2021–2022]. The NGV is one of a handful of Australia’s major national museums and that the exhibition did not take place until 2021 shows both how far and how long it took for this discourse about Indigenous art to move from where it was in the nineteenth century, when those graves were robbed of skeletal remains and ceremonial goods like kopi caps. When you spoke at the NGV (3 February 2022), it was like a weight was lifted for all of us (thinking about the weight of various emotions along with grief). I was surprised it was so packed, that blew me away when I arrived. I wanted to introduce my whole family to the masses that would be carrying on this legacy that we are creating here. I just got really emotional about the memories of making and creating, the memories of collecting and sharing and research and travelling over 30 years. All these things are involved in the process of making these objects. The photographs of the people coming into the Koorie Heritage Trust and some of the men I painted up on their bodies of whom I had taken photos and put ochre in their hair. Some of the people went away with the ochre in their hair, left the paint on their chests – they just loved the experience. So the NGV show was sadly closing, but I was so happy we were all together for that celebration. Every one of my family was emotional moving into that space – because they were all babies in those images [the exhibition began with Ree’s early photography, black and white documentary portraits at protests]. Indie, my nephew who is now CEO of the Indigenous Youth Council, just turned 30 a few weeks ago. He was four months old at his first NAIDOC march.5 We’ve talked about cross-cultural collaborations in Canada and around the world, the kopi workshops you did when we were both in Geneva together in 2018, and ones we hope to do in Vienna this year. We circle back to your future exhibitions, and I learn from listening to you about how ancestral memory is embodied, mourned, and brought back to life in contemporary art. Is there healing in conversation and collaboration?

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 13 Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

My workshops are about opportunity for people to mourn. I find that people don’t have the opportunity to talk about passing. Feeling the weight of your grief is necessary because you can’t see a broken heart. By wearing it on your head, feeling how thick and heavy it is – that’s the weight of your grief. People call me after the workshops and say, ‘this is just life changing’. Day 1 is about people making and creating and sharing their stories. Day 2 is about sharing the stories – though there’s no pressure to do so. The emotions in the room are quite incredible. When we did one in Hackney for the Rising Festival, there were all these First Nation artists from around the world, and the energy in that room, people were just sobbing. It brings up stuff for people – a whole range of things. One woman there was, just one day before, saying all these inappropriate things. When she told her story – you got it. She’d say things, and people were just looking at each other as if to say, ‘really!?’ When she shared her story of abandonment, everyone understood. Do you see it as a form of therapy, then? Yes, I see it being like that for different people. When I was doing research, I made one that was three kilos, and just sat out here (in her studio/backyard) for hours feeling it. So I could talk about what happens. One day I got up and for a few days in a row just made a kopi on my head. Because you know I’d had two brothers pass. I’ve had four brothers pass away, a sister, a cousin, a niece who committed suicide, a nephew who committed suicide – there is just a lot of stuff. Recently my oldest brother passed away when I was in London. I have not made one for him yet. I need to be in the right space and place to do that. I’d like to make one and wear it for 24 hours and see how that feels. Because you would wear it until it either fell off your head or you felt free to move on, and then you would take it off and put it on the grave. Some people who I’ve done workshops with have just sat there with it on their heads and just gotten into another zone. What do people do with the kopi after the workshop? In London, a few people put them in the Thames River. That fastflowing river just took it out of their hands and went. Nicholas’ dad had passed away, and he was going to put his father’s kopi in the canal where his grandfather was from in Islington. But then we told Gaye Sculthorpe [then curator and head of the Oceania section at the British Museum], and she said, ‘We’ll have it for the British Museum’ so it’s in that collection now. It’s photographed and described in a book in a section about kopi. I’m imagining all the places these urn-like objects end up, being a part of the maker’s body. People put them at the bottom of a planter pot and grow something from it. [Artist] Megan Evans (see Figure 1.5) brought some kangaroo grass around, made a kopi, and put her mother’s ashes in there. She

14

K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija:

Maree:

then put it under a beautiful tree, so it would just break down over time and fall back into the earth. That’s a beautiful thing to do, too. The older ones of the mob wearing them are on the cover of my book. Do you feel you capture something of the process when you photograph them? I also photographed people (a bunch of art therapists from all around Australia) after a workshop. I got everyone to put them back on their heads. You can see this thing in their eyes, and it’s really, really deep. It’s hard to describe, but that’s how I see it when I photograph people. It’s incredible preparation for a portrait. Usually, photographers just take a picture. You are taking people through a deep process and then taking their portrait. So you are taking a picture of that deep place they get to – it’s not the surface. The relationship between the surface and the portrait in a photograph is often what makes it moving (or not). When you talk about different amounts of time, I think about performance practices like those of Tehching Hsieh where people do everyday things for a long time and you learn something from that duration. I wonder if one could see these kopi workshops as a kind of durational performance as well? Imagine that kopi took months to break down, and this process was documented on Momba Station in about 1870 by Frederic Bonney in a photograph that shows Mary Momba and Wonko Mary wearing kopi skull caps.6 There was a Mummies exhibition here, and, when [Aboriginal artist and cultural leader] Len Tregonning passed, and after a presentation and healing workshop with a group of women I photographed them wearing a kopi too.

8 March 2021 – Zoom between Maree’s Studio in Footscray and Mine in Vienna

It is International Women’s Day, and Maree Clarke and I are discussing the gender of eels, something Sigmund Freud researched before he started on the human mind, but he stopped far short of finding the ancestral memory of either eels or humans. In her solo exhibition at the NGV, Maree suspended two eel traps together (Figure 1.2). One is a three-metre trap ‘I find one to be very feminine in its movement’, she says. The second is lighter, thicker, and ‘more masculine’. Fifteen years ago, we first started this conversation together around the Possum Skin Cloaks project. Maree’s practice and career have blossomed; she has just been announced as a jury member for the new NGV Contemporary building. Now it is 2021, and we are reflecting on the collaborations that carry cultural memories once they are alive again. Maree uses the way the eels know where to travel as an example of ancestral memory that is passed down, like the flight paths of mutton birds, I say, thinking of them swirling around my backyard in Cape Woolamai, Millowl.

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 15

Hands and Feathers and Reeds and Teeth, and Fur So Much Possum Fur for the Cold Winter Figure 1.2 Eel Trap in Installation view of Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories open from 25 June to 3 October 2021 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Tom Ross

On Collaboration Maree:

Khadija:

The Possum Skin Cloaks was a pretty incredible project. To be able to split the state of Victoria in four and have us all go out to the community and give them back a practice that they haven’t practiced for hundreds of years and also designs from their own traditional areas. Right, because the practice of possum skin-making had long ended by the late nineteenth century, and today another practice has begun to paint an altogether different image – for instance, that of mourning the dead, as represented by the kopi skull caps that you make, and of gender in your eel traps, and of power in your kangaroo tooth necklaces. In these cases, cross-cultural issues become part of your objects and the subjects formed in the process of collectively crafting them. My text experiments with open-endedness to sing in polyphony the different stories I learnt in the process of making a film about possumskin cloaks with your relatives, Ree. The medium of film was a way to detail a range of perspectives on the possum-skin cloak’s history and significance (Figure 1.3).

16 K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

Figure 1.3 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Skins Cloak, video still, 2012.

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 17

Figure 1.4 Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wamba Wamba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung born 1961), Maree Clarke 2012; printed 2018. Inkjet print (58.0 × 58.0 cm) (image) (70.0 × 70.0 cm) (sheet) Ed 1/10. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2018 © Maree Clarke.

Possum-skin cloaks appear as cross-cultural art in the earliest settler Australian art history. Wilhelm von Blandowski’s Encyclopaedia Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen was one production of cross-cultural vagabondary in the early colony of Victoria that I have explored through contemporary art projects with your family and friends, which use his images as sources. In Blandowski’s drawings, the old people are wearing these cloaks.7 As a bit of context for readers who are unfamiliar with cloaks: stretched between the crossed legs of seated observers, the south-eastern Australian possumskin cloaks made a drum designed to accompany corroborees. They could also be worn during long walks, slung over the shoulder, with the smoothness of the fur allowing the cloak to slide about the wearer. The fur side worn on the skin gives

18

K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

greater warmth, and the sensation of an animal’s skin weighs on every step. Southeastern Australia was the most heavily colonised region, and thus the old songs and dances were performed in secret or waited for reinterpretation from the archive for over a hundred years.8 The Koorie community has stories passed down through its families about the missionaries forbidding their ancestors to wear animal skins. Presumably this was because a cloak of animal fur was a signifier of primitivity in the colonial Pacific region. As a result, pneumonia broke out in their community when missionary blankets, unlike possum-skin cloaks, proved not to be waterproof. By some strange irony, the skill of making cloaks out of possum skins was viewed as primitive while simultaneously being viewed by the colonial bureaucrats as encouraging the ‘habits of industry’.9 The Board for the Protection of Aborigines records topping up its coffers through sales of Aboriginal crafts. There is evidence from the 1850s and 1860s that many missions, including Lake Tyers and Lake Condah, encouraged the making of possum-skin cloaks for trade, as shown in the painting Aborigines met on the road to the diggings (1854, Geelong Gallery, previously known as The Barter) by Eugene von Guérard, in which possum-skin cloaks are proffered by an Aboriginal family group to two travelling gold-seekers.10 Cloaks are remade a lot now, though it involves importing possum skins from New Zealand because possums are now a protected native species in Australia, and curing the skins properly still hasn’t been achieved, as you tell me after testing some from Tasmania. Their remaking in your workshops originally involved the copying and comparison of those few historic nineteenth-century cloaks that remain in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and Museum Victoria in Melbourne. In the NGV exhibition in 2021, the cloak from Museum Victoria is laid out as the ground before which Ree hangs her newest cloak – a blackened map of country (see Figure 1.1). Visual analysis of the iconography was used to locate the origin of the ‘original’ cloaks. The women both copy directly those designs that belong to their people and freely interpret with new incisions. Political struggles enable new cloaks to be made even as the practice of making the cloaks in the old ways has ended. Cross-cultural issues become the subject of the new cloaks and part of the objects themselves, both in the material and with your settler ancestors in the 2021 cloak (see Figure 1.1). Which communities are in that green-black cloak on the wall? Maree:

I used a green ochre that is from communities I’m connected to in Dunstable (United Kingdom) and Tipperary (Ireland), where great grandmother was from. My grandfather George Briggs, five times back, was from Tipperary, he was a seaman settler. I wanted all the countries I’m connected to, which would have been 60 pelts. That’s a square, and I don’t work well with squares, so I added a few to make a rectangle. The scale was epic, we had to go make it in Vivien Anderson’s gallery. Then I had milk crates in my backyard, with the little trestle tables to bring it all up to the height of my worktable. Lights were

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 19

Khadija:

Maree:

Khadija:

hanging off the Hills Hoist clothes lines. My friend from Montreal is making a documentary film about it. She has hundreds of hours of film of the different components of that cloak. Cloaks are one of many examples of how material culture from the early nineteenth century and prior to colonisation has been received and refashioned. In thinking about how an artist-centric art history can expand a vocabulary for a practice such as this, we pick up on the longer art history of understanding the process of picturing Country. This helps us to articulate the power of repeating forms like possumskin cloak designs, kopis, and eel traps, over many decades. We also seek to find resonances with other artistic practises to strengthen our sense of what cultural revival means to Indigenous people collectively around the world and through time. Because years ago, in the 1990s, when they first started digitising the collection, when the museum was based at the State Library of Victoria. That’s how long ago I’d been in there, with the Koorie Heritage Trust downstairs. In this other section, Melanie set me up on this little computer where I was able to look at like 10,000 objects in a day just by clicking through and looking at specific areas. I printed out all of the different artifacts from the different areas, so by the time 2006 came along, we were able to give people back designs from their own areas. People said things like, ‘oh my God my artwork makes sense to me now because we’re already doing those designs in my work’, and that to me is some type of ancestral memory, you know, like the eels who travel up the river to spawn, and then when the young eels mature, they make the whole journey back alone. And all those little birds that come from Siberia even do that exchange. They are finding the journey a bit hard because, all along the China coast, these major buildings have taken away their rest spots. They have to rethink how they do things and try and include the animals too. The problem of landing places being dispossessed by making ancestral flight paths could be a metaphor for the postcolonial condition. Your house, backyard, and studio, is also a landing spot for many.11 It strikes me that often the grand claims to decolonise the museum might look to spaces like your backyard, Maree, where community gathers and lives culture together – this seems a simple but true turning from a white master narrative to a space of support for Indigenous knowledge. I always felt you were particularly skilled at cross-cultural collaboration and mediating between different people and communities. I am thinking of what happens in your backyard studio where so many people come together. What the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa calls their Ruru Haus at Documenta for example, to emphasise the necessity of a space to be in together collectively.12 Your work feeds and accompanies so many different people and places. I was sitting in the Frankston hospital last year, waiting to give birth to my son Piju, and

20

K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

Maree:

what do I find around me on the walls? – Maree’s possum-skin cloaks – from the cradle to the grave, those soft, fluffy skins accompany us! Collaboration is just an amazing thing to do, just to hear different people’s stories and perspectives. Things are things, but it’s about the conversations that take place. So in each of the different areas that we worked in during our Possum Skin Cloak project, because, you know, there are 38 language groups in Victoria, I think we ended up working with 35. We selected a lead artist from each of those communities. They then pulled together other people in that community to make them create their own possumskin cloak, telling their story. That was totally up to that community to do that pretty incredible thing. Over three and a half, four months, we worked with the Aboriginal community and the wider community to make possum-skin cloaks for reconciliation, and it was about people coming together to tell this story and having other mobs come in, meeting Aboriginal people, and just seeing where these conversations went. It was just such a fantastic project, and we created this really beautiful space to work in. And then we had this artist Rosalie Favell came over from Canada, and she loved the look and feel of the energy that I created in this space. She wanted us to go to Canada and do the same thing over there, but work with them, with our possum skin and their buffalo skin robes. We exchanged, and they marked their buffalo skins for the first time in a long time.13 So we ended up doing that, and then unfortunately Len Tregonning passed away.

Mourning Weight Shared and Weight Hardened in Clay Head Heavy and Held

Khadija:

Maree:

When we were in Geneva together in 2017, you did workshops with the community along with what we all did at the Museum of Ethnography (MEG).14 You haven’t shied away from the difficult conversations with those who are struggling or grieving. How do cultural protocols work in these cross-cultural encounters and in the kopi healing workshops you give? After we finished the project in Canada, my family flew home, and I flew to Geneva, where I thought I’d be working with recovering drug addicts in a health system, and it turned out that I was working with the health professionals who work with recovering drug addicts, and we did a kopi healing workshop. Yeah well, I only got halfway through my presentation before my translator broke down sobbing, and I just stopped and gave her a hug, and she felt like it was so unprofessional, and I said it’s okay like you know, you’re allowed to show emotions and whatever, and so we continued on sort of through the thing, and a

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 21 lot of people get quite emotional after working with these kopies and feeling the weight of the grief. People get to understand actually sitting there with seven kilos on your head, you feel the weight of your grief, and then, what it’s like to take that off and move on. That was probably one of the most powerful ones that I have done. Shedding Light, Wearing Weight, Shedding Tears, Wearing Light, Shedding Weight, Wearing Tears

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

I felt your process was meditative in the way it used repetition. Well, everybody who’s had a go has really enjoyed just zoning in on this one little thing that they’ve got to do, and you just focus. You have no choice, because if you don’t focus, you’re not going to get it. At the end, you can see it and it is really, really satisfying. It’s an amazing thing. I finally got 10 more little ones to go, which I’m working on. What did the performance with Megan Evans become (Figure 1.5)? That’s been really interesting because for that particular piece we ended up going up to Ballarat where they’ve got an area with all of that old Victorian furniture that Megan buys from antique stores and then she’ll bead it with red beads to look like blood. So when she had her exhibition at the Ballarat Art Gallery, she exchanged some of the Victorian furniture for her furniture. There were bleeding chairs and bleeding chandeliers. Then we walked from the hotel she was booked into, which was just up the road from the gallery. I got painted up in my mourning gear wearing a kopi skull cap, and Megan with her Victorian stuff sort of walked along with me carrying one of her beaded bones, and so we came out of the hotel, walked across the road, and straight up into the space, and she had that filmed and photographed along the way, which was really amazing, and then she photographed me in the space sitting on one of the couches while she’s sitting up the other end beading – doing that beadwork that Victorian women used to do. Imagine the people – they didn’t know what was going on! This is a place where 20 years ago they had petitions in their cafés not to change the names of towns back to Aboriginal names. Len Tregonning and I had gone into one of these cafes back then, and we had to get up and leave when we saw that petition there! Weird.

Red Beads Bleeding, Hands Covered in Ochre, in Clay, in Pin Pricks, in Blood

Maree:

People don’t see what goes on behind the scenes to get that made. I live in a tiny house. I’ve overflowed the pot boiling river reeds on the stove. There is always something when you’re multi-tasking all the time in this tiny space where this major work gets made or thought about. It’s not a pristine studio space

22 K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

Figure 1.5 Megan Evans, Parlour, Intervention in the Lindsay Family Parlour, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, featuring the artist and artist Maree Clarke, 2018. Digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 23

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija:

Maree:

like how it looks in the museum. There are three dogs, they have to do their business out here in my space, and I have to clean up every day after them. It’s life stuff. Do you feel the museum can change in order to include life stuff better and more honestly? Bunjilaka (in the Melbourne Museum) has done it well. More of that consultation needs to happen. To me, when you see a diorama in a museum, say of a blackfella standing on a rock (as in the Saffron Waldon Museum in the United Kingdom) it looks like time has stood still – you don’t get a sense of movement in time and space. What do museums need to do when they are lost? Contact groups, the local Aboriginal mobs where those collections are from. Everybody recognises objects from around Australia, yet the southeast in 2022 still barely get a look in, although there is a big scene here with lots of communities and amazing projects happening. I’ve been thinking about how the copies of historical artefacts and ancestors that are made by artists often function in place of the original. I remember we were joking about how the possum-skin cloaks we were making back in 2010 could be swapped for one of the original old cloaks in the museum. Like all jokes, there is a truth to the proposition that museums can open up and become spaces where communities encounter each other rather than just holding very precious objects. The powerful thing about your pieces is that they show exactly that the new glass eel trap can direct attention – becoming an intersubjective device as the artist Dan Graham called it – for the old eel traps to be brought into relationship with the present (see Figure 1.2).15 The Australian Government, through the Australian AIATSIS Renew programme, is proactively researching collections of Aboriginal material overseas with a view to getting them repatriated. This process has huge potential for contemporary artists making new works to take those places – that’s what I’m working on at present. There are art works that catalyse a shift in perception, the way that when a powerful thing returns it brings memories to light. That’s what the potential of repatriation has in my mind. Yeah, that’s really, really good because all those other bits and pieces – first and foremost these ancestral remains and then secret sacred objects – should all come back. But I can’t see in our lifetime all of those other bits and pieces – that just won’t happen. Only secret sacred and human remains, and that’s taking

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K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija: Maree:

Khadija:

donkey’s years. Considering how long that is taking, I can’t see in my lifetime any objects coming back to the community. You know I’ve been trying for years, and [non-Indigenous Melbourne-based academic] Fran Edmonds and I have been working on projects where we can get funding to take elders from particular communities over to give those objects a community and a story. And tell that bigger story, because in a lot of those museum collections and those little ones, like Saffron Walden, that it’s still got a black fella standing on the rock, and everything’s just in there, like the ethnology museum in Florence, where ‘Australia’ is right next door to Captain Cook’s cabinet, and all the boomerangs together just as ‘boomerangs’. There’s a bigger story that could be told around all of those objects that talks about being a living culture, and those objects are connected to, you know, the oldest continuous living culture in the world, so how do we tell that through these little museums? Your work is doing the same in a different way. One visitor from Shepparton [a country town in Victoria] thought it [Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories] was a group show, and when he realized it was a single artist, he was amazed one person could do all these different things. Your continued experimentation with materials is a sign that it’s alive. Yes, telling the same stories in a different, creative way. I’m now using new mediums and new technologies, now working in glass and 3D-printed, 18-karat, gold-plated kangaroo teeth. The glass teeth are different things, but I think it’s just sort of bringing it into the twenty-first century, but still connected to, you know, that first necklace that Len Tregonning and I made, which was based on the first necklace that I saw in at the Melbourne Museum. Just keeping culture alive and strong and relevant. It’s always relevant, but by turning a woven eel trap into a three-meter glass eel trap made in 20 sections – they’re both really beautiful sculptural forms – you can just sit there and look at it all day, it’s just really beautiful to look at this one up here in glass. To look through and just see what it does to that environment. I can’t wait to get the lighting on that one! It is like you are looking through it back through time. You are literally shedding light on and enlarging all processes that allow us to look through that eel trap in glass to the old ones, and vice versa, looking at the new contemporary one from the old one. I’ve been stuck in Europe during COVID-19, but my mother sent me a photo of you in Vogue and I thought Maree has

Khadija Carroll in conversation with Maree Clarke 25

Maree:

disguised ritual as high fashion. So brilliant to make these copies of your necklaces that change people when they wear them. Even a 75-tooth necklace feels powerful on, it just feels amazing. I remember when we finished that first 75-tooth one and [participant] Robert Bundle turned up here and Len said, ‘try this on brother’ and put it on and Robo just burst into tears. It was just like the emotions just took over.

Maree Has Us All in Tears, of Crystalline Clarity, in the Kopies and the Copies

Khadija:

In lieu of a conclusion, I can say that this conversation continues, just as ever more sensitized cross-cultural practices in Australia develop. We plan to put on a future kopi workshop in Vienna in which the processes we articulated here over hours of reflection will be experimented with anew. The ways in which we can collaboratively write (and right) artist-centric art-history are also just unfolding, in publications through Third Text journal focused on polyphony and the artistic research platform Repatriates.16 There is so much yet to share, and the intimacy and affect you can sense from the lines above take time to gestate into language or material form of the kind we explored here through the recent NGV exhibition Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories.

Notes 1 See also: Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. 2 Ian Burn, ‘Is Art History Any Use to Artists?’, in Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) (first published in Art Network, No. 15, Autumn 1985). Thanks to Rex Butler for sharing this piece on artist-centricity with me. 3 Susan Broomhall, Jane W. Davidson, and Andrew Lynch (eds.), A Cultural History of the Emotions, 6 vols (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007). 4 Wilhelm von Blandowski, Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen (1862), Plate 192, catalogue entry is available at www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/ EA_Oc-B68-3, accessed 15 January 2022. This was published since I wrote entries for the Cambridge Encyclopedia at: www.haddon.lib.cam.ac.uk/collection/specialcollections/blandowski, accessed 15 January 2022. 5 NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islander Day Observance Committee) is a national celebration of Indigenous achievements held in the first week of July. 6 Jeannette Hope and Robert Lindsay, The People of the Paroo River: Frederic Bonney’s Photographs (Sydney: Dept. of Environment, Climate Change and Water NSW, 2010): 25. 7 Plate 64 is online at: www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/EA_Oc-B68-1, accessed 15 January 2022. 8 This background section draws on Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Art in the Time of Colony (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014): 35–37. In the film Skins Cloak that the authors made together from 2007–2013 (with different iterations shown in Australia and Germany) these various things that the cloaks do made up many simultaneously playing scenes.

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10 11 12 13 14

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K. von Zinnenburg Carroll in conversation with M. Clarke Maree made a kopi in live long durée, showing and discussing the whole process. See: www.kdja.org/?page_id=315, accessed 15 January 2022. Fran Edmonds with Maree Clarke, Sort of Like Reading a Map: A Community Report on the Survival of South-east Australian Aboriginal Art since 1834 (Co-operative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009). www.lowitja.org.au/sites/default/files/docs/Sortof-like-reading-a-map-amended.pdf, accessed 15 January 2022. www.geelonggallery.org.au/learn/keys-to-the-collection/aborigines-met-on-the-roadto-the-diggings https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/livingarchivenaidoc/ For more on this subject see Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, ‘Painting the Political in Oceanian Textile Cultures: Collectivity, Syncretism and Globalization’, in J. Harris (ed.), A Companion to Textile Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 459–474. https://wrappedinculture.ca/process/ Contemporary Artists, Source Communities, Museums: What is at Stake? Maree Clarke, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Arnd Schneider, Roberta Colombo Dougoud, Carine Durand, Julien Fronsacq (Geneva: Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, conference. December 2, 2017). Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (MoMA, 1975), for example, made the recognition of the other viewer(s) to the central point of the sculpture. Charlotte Klonk has discussed this in her introduction to Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2009). www.repatriates.org and www.thirdtext.org (forthcoming 2023).

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On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator of the Berndt Museum Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ

This conversation with Vanessa Russ centres on her time as the first Aboriginal Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia (UWA). It springboards from that experience to wider and more challenging contemporary issues around Indigenous curatorship, which is currently being driven by a host of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators around the nation.1 The Berndt Museum of Anthropology is frequently credited with holding one of the most important collections of Australian Aboriginal Art and material culture objects, along with a significant Asian art collection.2 This is a collection that was carefully built up by its founders, social anthropologists Ronald M. Berndt (1916–1990) and his spouse Catherine H. Berndt (1918–1994), over a period of five decades as an adjunct to their research.3 They successfully lobbied for a museum to house it, and the collection has been very ably managed by three directors: John Stanton for 37 years until 2013, Sandy Toussaint to 2015, and Vanessa Russ from 2016 to 2019. At times, the Berndt Museum has been in the news with researchers and First Nations people bemoaning a lack of access to the Berndts’ field-note books, which are impounded by Catherine Berndt’s will (1994) for 30 years following the time of her death until 2024.4 The art world and those in anthropological circles were deeply troubled when, in late 2019, the UWA announced that the Berndt Museum and its collection would move into the School of Indigenous Studies, a teaching department, along with abruptly terminating the employment of Director Vanessa Russ. The protest was immediate.5 By November 2020, Victoria Laurie described the move as contravening Catherine’s will in The Australian newspaper: ‘Uni goes against Will to Address Deficit’. John Stanton, an executor of the will, was shocked that a decision about a $63 million gift from the Berndts was taken without consultation and that it contravened the will, which stated that ‘all items must be housed and exhibited from time to time in the museum’. Moreover, Catherine’s will, which enabled the additional gift of significant artwork from eight Asian nations, stated that ‘each collection be kept together, retained and not disturbed’. Over and above these concerns, Stanton’s principal objection was that ‘a $63m collection is going to a department that has no experience in collections management. It cannot be wrought asunder by people who don’t understand that it’s there for the purpose of research and teaching’. Stanton too expressed concern about the long-term care of items in the collection such as the Yirrkala drawings DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-3

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Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ

now listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.6 UWA has, to date, not reversed the decision. Against this background, this chapter explores contemporary issues of curatorship and display of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collections with Vanessa Russ. But first, we explore the history of the Berndt Museum. Historical Background When Ronald and Catherine Berndt moved to Mooro, Beeloo, and Beeliar (Perth) in 1956, it was because Ronald had been appointed to a senior lectureship at UWA to establish the discipline of anthropology there. Catherine was unable to take up a formal position because of a university policy that spouses were not permitted to teach in the same department, a condition she and Ronald were not aware of at the time of the move. By 1958, she was a visiting tutor teaching an honours course in anthropology, and from 1963, she was a visiting or part-time lecturer. The Berndts arrived with a small collection of objects for their initial teaching and research collection.7 The objects were displayed in a small glass cabinet in Ronald’s office and the nearby hallway. Absent were many of the objects they had collected on three social anthropological field trips in North-East Arnhem Land (September 1946– July 1947), to Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) and the Goulburn Islands in Western Arnhem Land, and again in Gunbalanya (1949–1950). Funding for these trips came from grants awarded by the Australian National Research Council when the Berndts were based in the anthropology department at the University of Sydney, and hence the objects collected were stored there.8 With the arrival of a new professor, John Barnes, at the University of Sydney, and a dispersal of objects collected under the previous professor, AP Elkin, Ronald arranged in 1957 for those he and Catherine felt some sense of ‘ownership’ over to be moved to Perth on permanent loan. UWA agreed to cover the costs of the transfer of the 244 objects they selected, with conditions attached such as the documentation and care of the objects for the long-term loan. Ronald and Catherine then staged their first exhibition in Perth, Art of Arnhem Land, around these artworks in December 1957 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). When it was duly opened by the university’s vice chancellor, Stanley Prescott, he said the display would ‘contribute to a better understanding of and appreciation of Aboriginal people’.9 Initially, the Berndts’ collection was stored in the Psychology Department, where anthropology was located in its early days at UWA. By 1961, anthropology moved to temporary quarters where some objects from the collection were placed on display, with much of it in storage. Two years later, anthropology was a department in its own right, and by 1976 it had its own Anthropology Research Museum on the ground floor of the newly-built Social Sciences Building. The collection had grown to include Aboriginal objects collected in 1939–1941, objects from field research in Papua New Guinea in 1951–1953, earlier items collected by Ronald’s father, new Aboriginal work collected from the Northern Territory and Central and Western Australia, and gifts.10 The Anthropology Research Museum was established and funded by the University Senate; it had its own constitution and, from June, 1976 was overseen by

On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator

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a Board of Management with Ronald, the Vice Chancellor’s nominee, as Chair. Its founding vision was to effect and encourage ‘the preservation, expansion and development within the University of ethnological collections . . . for the benefit of both the University and the wider community, displaying the Museum’s collections, and facilitating and fostering research and other activities related to them’.11 It opened with a memorable ceremony at which senior Aboriginal men such as Wandjuk Marika, David Mowaljarlai, and Ken Colbung attended. A curatorial position was created in 1978; it became a permanent position in January 1980, and John Stanton was appointed. A select number of objects were on display in the new museum, but the majority of the collection was still in storage. The museum also housed a small library, a photographic collection, and audiotaped material. The Berndts saw the museum as a resource centre, especially for Aboriginal people whose ephemeral material culture objects produced for ceremony or ritual were in the collection.12 Ronald expanded on this founding vision, pointing out in 1977 that the museum’s function, first and foremost, is to conserve and display the collections it houses, in perpetuity . . . it should be viewed as a facility for all of us – as a tangible expression . . . and a reminder to us of the complexity of cultures both within and outside Australia.13 From the 1980s, there was dramatic growth in the holdings of the Australian and Melanesian collections, which put pressure on the existing exhibition and storage spaces. With 95% of the collection in storage by 1981, it was clear the museum needed new and larger premises. When Ronald died in 1990 and Catherine in 1994, the museum was in safe hands. It had been renamed the Berndt Museum of Anthropology in 1992 in recognition of the enormous contribution both Ronald and Catherine Berndt made to the university, to the field of anthropology and to the museum itself. A host of public programmes and collaborative community-based projects were undertaken, premised on the museum being a meeting place for cultural interchange. One of the most impressive exhibitions staged by Stanton in 1992 was Nyungar Landscapes: Aboriginal Artists of the South-West: The Heritage of Carrolup, Western Australia showing the remarkable drawings and watercolours produced by children living in shocking conditions at the Carrolup Native Settlement, 40 kilometres southwest of Katanning, under the regime of the 1905 Aborigines Act of Western Australia.14 The drawings came about due to the appointment in 1946 of a teacher, Noel White, and his wife, Lily, who introduced art materials, story-telling, singing, and dancing as a way to communicate with the traumatised children.15 Stanton worked closely with a number of Elders in later years to re-establish the Carrolup site and to include a working museum; however, it struggled to gain ongoing financial support. The Berndt Museum itself moved in 2011 from its site in the Social Sciences Building to a larger temporary space tucked away at the end of a car park underneath the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.16 This is essentially a storage area along with office space, while exhibitions are held in the Janet Holmes à Court Gallery

30 Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ within the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. The collection of 12,000 objects along with 35,000 photographs and archival material was now in boxes. The change in location involved a change in governance for the Anthropology Museum from the Anthropology Discipline in the Faculty of Social Sciences to UWA’s unit, Community Engagement. The Berndt Museum became a member of the Cultural Precinct, established in 2009, which oversaw the operations of all university collections, exhibitions, arts events, and publishing. Ted Snell was the director.17 The museum’s founding curator, then director, Dr John Stanton, retired in 2013, and the anthropologist Professor Sandy Toussaint, who had served on the board of the RM and CH Berndt Research Foundation, stepped in as interim director for two years. Then, in 2016, Dr Vanessa Russ, a Ngarinyin-Gija woman, was appointed Associate Director of the Berndt Museum. Much was made of an Aboriginal person finally heading up the Berndt Museum, but in fact UWA was slow in making such an appointment given Indigenous curators had been working at major museums and galleries around the nation since the mid-1980s.18 Djon Mundine, appointed in 1984 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), was in the first wave, and Brenda L. Croft, appointed to the AGWA in 1999, are just two curators appointed over what Fred Myers has called ‘a three decade struggle’ to shape ‘a new discursive space’ in an Indigenous art field.19 He defines the players in this field as ‘institutions and practices that structure the conditions of production, exhibition, recognition, collection and critical reception of Indigenous art’.20 The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA)’s 2001 report, Valuing Art, Respecting Culture pointed to the importance of employing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in institutions holding collections of Indigenous art, while the Australia Council’s Protocols for Using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts, stated that ‘Indigenous people have the right to be recognised and represented as the primary guardians and interpreters of their cultural heritage’.21 Against this background, and in relation to a museum and much of its collection established before critics began thinking through the deep and lasting implications of colonialism, Vanessa Russ and I explore in conversation contemporary issues of Aboriginal curatorship and relevant players in the field within and beyond the Berndt Museum.22 In Conversation CS: VR:

Vanessa Russ, tell us about yourself, your Country, and your art historical and curatorial background prior to joining the Berndt Museum. I’m from the Kimberley region of the northwest of Western Australia and grew up on Ngarinyin Country on the Gibb River Station. My dad was very close to that Country. I was exposed to rock art as a child; you could say it was my first art gallery experience. My interest in galleries began when I lived in London from 2002–2004, and on returning to Australia and completing an Honours Fine Arts degree at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, in 2009, I spent time in small galleries in Sydney. I also worked at the AGNSW, which came

On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator

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about through Joanna Mendelssohn, with whom I was studying Australian art. She did the best thing possible, she walked us through each Australian art gallery at AGNSW, and Jonathan Jones, of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi people, gave us an amazing talk on their Aboriginal art collection. Joanna introduced me to Jonathan, then working in public programmes, and he arranged for me to do the Gallery Guides course. I ended up working closely with him and Amanda Peacock on Public Programs, and occasionally with Hetti Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon curator, on her projects. It was an amazing experience. I moved back to Perth in 2010 for my PhD, which I completed in 2014, researching how Aboriginal art and non-Aboriginal art existed together at the AGNSW, and I was interested to see how that also might operate in a private collection. That took me to the Holmes à Court collection, where I worked with their collections manager, Sharon Tassicker, and acquired important skills such as how you handle materials, and how you register collections. My research for my PhD took me to almost every state institution. and during that period I kept on hearing about the Berndt Museum, but strangely enough, for the entire time I was a student at UWA completing my dissertation, I had no idea it existed at that very campus. In 2014, I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship, which enabled travel through America and then Hong Kong and Singapore, visiting numerous institutions where I was looking at the curation and display of Indigenous art, and engagement. I found it to be very limited at that time. I’m also an artist and member of Art Collective WA, an artist-run initiative.23 When you were appointed Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology in 2016 – what were your dreams, goals, and aims in coming into this position as the first Aboriginal Director? I rapidly found that I was all of director, curator, doing all that a curator does including writing press releases; and community engagement person attending to visits from Aboriginal people arriving to see objects in the collection, which they did. As director, I was also on the Senior Management Group of UWA. I came to the Berndt Museum knowing that it wasn’t necessarily a museum or an art gallery, but that it had a significant art and cultural collection, and I thought each side of the collection must have talked to the other. My interest in the position was from a curatorial and exhibitions perspective, centred around audience engagement with the collection. I set about raising the profile of the museum so it would be better known among the University community. I came in with a fresh vision and a sense of optimism, thinking that we could use the collection to reimagine how we do things. For instance, I knew we needed labels on objects, but my question was ‘what should those labels tell the audience’? I also knew we needed to engage with the community, but my query was how I could do that without additional funding and staff.

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CS:

Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ I also arrived at the Berndt when a really interesting team of people were working there. My collections manager, Natalie Hewitt, had significant experience working in major national and state institutions, and we could see possible new directions all over the place. It became really easy for us to say, ‘we should be doing this with the collection’ but, ‘we need to make sure it is housed properly’. As a curator, I was saying, ‘the data base isn’t sufficient for me to curate exhibitions from’, but with the collection stored away in boxes, I was saying, ‘how do I do see the objects so that I know they are going to talk to each other’? With access to the collection a difficulty, this curatorial and collection management problem affected every aspect of our daily operations. It became clear very quickly that we needed support to restructure how everything was stored. This led us to push for funding to rehouse the entire collection, which, on one hand, would facilitate the job of curating, but importantly, it would also make access to objects in the collection easier for Aboriginal people. We were still engaging with Aboriginal people and communities turning up at the door from places such as Laverton, with family members invited to see objects in the collection, and with curators in training in the Revealed Program run by Fremantle Arts Centre.24 Issues with storage impacted, though, on these activities. I was fresh out of research, and I had spent two years working for an artists-run foundation talking to non-Indigenous artists, so I had a broad approach to seeing the art world. I had experience from the Holmes à Court collection store, and I had worked on the West Australian State Government ‘Strategy for Storage Issues and Needs’ for all of the State Records Office, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the West Australian Museum, and the State Library of Western Australia. I came into the Berndt Museum with an open mind about the institution, but thinking, ‘who is the audience’. It is all too easy to walk in and say, ‘well they didn’t do this’, but when you unpack it, they did engage strongly with the community for a long time on very little resources, so that was not the right judgement to make. Instead, I thought, why not add new people to the narrative. So if we talk about the Carrolup drawings, for example, when we held the Carrolup Revisited exhibition in 2019, I was keen to engage families who had not previously been highlighted as contributors to this story in earlier exhibitions, families whose fathers had produced really strong work as well, when others like Revel Cooper are more famous.25 I was very keen to think through the problems facing museums and galleries, and especially how we bring cultural knowledge back to the museum in new ways that assist Aboriginal people. I was very forward-looking, thinking about a collection of international significance in terms of preservation for future generations and keeping it safe. You might say I was ‘planting trees’ that might not be seen immediately. Where did the Berndt Museum sit in the organisational structure of UWA? Had the University agreed decades ago to fund it?

On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator VR:

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I think there is a very grey area around university museums and significant collections; the Berndt Museum is just one of these collections.26 The original gift to UWA was in 1976, followed by additional gifts in 1979 and 1980, with more items donated in 1994 along with numerous private donations and acquisitions since then. I think the Berndts established the museum in the hope that the University would keep it going, but this needs money. They also established the Professor Ronald M. and Catherine H. Berndt Research Foundation which has done significant work in terms of Aboriginal art and cultural knowledge. The Berndt Museum was originally part of the anthropology department, and its organisational structure was shaped around John Stanton as curator. He also had an academic position in anthropology; he held that dual position for 38 years. Catherine Berndt’s will from 1994 is written around that position always being there. John Stanton represented the interests of Ronald and Catherine really well. A curator then was more a keeper of the collection and less a curator of exhibitions as occurs today. As time moved on, the direction of the museum inevitably changed. John took his role as curator very seriously. I take my hat off to John for his tenacity, effort, and courage because I don’t think this is the only time people of different persuasions across the University wanted to see the Berndt Museum shut down or materials repatriated. He is an important player in keeping that collection together. The site of the museum and the housing of its collection are not ideal – what practicalities confronted you when you took over as Director? There were two years between John Stanton as Director and myself. In the interim, Professor Sandy Toussaint stepped in, but in caretaker mode. When I took over the current site beneath the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, it had its problems. The collection itself was not visible. The Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, came to see the Aboriginal paintings, and I was only able to show him boxes in which the paintings were all rolled up. That was a very awkward moment for the University. On another occasion, I was able to show the damage being caused to the collection in its current situation by exhibiting a painting by Jarinyanu David Downs that had been adversely affected. Our Collections Manager, who had a conservation of paintings background, had to spend a number of hours making sure the painting was stable enough to be shown. That finally won over the University. Our supportive Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the time, Kent Anderson, directed me to apply for infrastructure funding, and we were granted $720,000. My team at the time, five people who had previously been working on individual projects, came together to work on the project I called ‘Saving Culture for Future Generations’. They were passionate, caring, and enthusiastic, and with that funding, we re-housed the entire collection, making it functional and culturally sound. We reconfigured the use of the carpark space that was not a purpose-built facility, and physically replaced everything.

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CS: VR:

Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ We bought tables to work on, made space so you could turn around, and had all the paintings stretched so that you could pull out a painting from the painting rack, which was really quite extraordinary. We didn’t have much room, but we kept on acquiring paintings and ensured there was capacity for acquisitions. I wanted the collection to be front and centre of the Berndt Museum. My intention was to restore those collections, make them accessible to Aboriginal people, and students and staff of the university, and honour a cultural requirement by reconnecting the objects back to family members. This includes having family members’ contact details entered on the database. We did a preservation and conservation check list on every item in the collection and revalued the collection, including creating hardcopy folders for images and documentation. We had to do all this before I could curate exhibitions from the collection. Sadly, this very necessary behind-the-scenes, but hidden work, didn’t win the approval of the Director of the Cultural Precinct, because it didn’t look like he was overseeing an outward-facing museum busy with public programmes. I also got the sense that having an Aboriginal voice to manage the museum did not suit the feel of the place either. Apart from resolving as best as we could the storage issues, the site itself is not ideal. There have been numerous, but failed attempts, to find a purpose-built facility or an appropriate site for the Berndt Museum and its collection. I even involved the students from the School of Design at UWA in a design project for a new Berndt Museum as a culturally appropriate structure and keeping space. It was highly effective, although the building itself was never realised. We engaged the wider architectural community, and we had Aboriginal representatives. We came up with some amazing ideas; it was an exciting project, and it got people talking about the collection and how to seek funding to rehouse a collection in which viewers, at that stage, could not see the paintings. Would you care to expand on the most important factors in your curatorial methodology as an Aboriginal curator working with an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection. A key issue that concerns me is what younger Aboriginal people learn today about their culture. I decided one way to approach this, as a curator, was to bring cultural stories from the Elders back into what we do. For instance, in Boomerang: A National Symbol (2019), which was a hard exhibition to work on as I was finishing up at UWA, I wanted to bring out all the boomerangs and show what they mean, and how they were made.27 We have a big collection from which I selected 90 boomerangs from desert country, to talk about how they were tied up with trade, and the varieties of wood used in making boomerangs. I really wanted an Aboriginal person who had lost knowledge or was still gaining knowledge to come away from the Boomerang exhibition knowing something about culture. I wanted the same outcome for our non-Aboriginal visitors as well.

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In curating from an Indigenous perspective, it is important to consult with Elders or the community representatives from the beginning, to bring Aboriginal people along with you in the curatorial process, and to remain fully engaged all the way through. In this way, you avoid misunderstandings about how the exhibition is developed and presented. Another factor in my curatorial approach is what I call rematuration or remarrying cultural knowledge with objects in the collection (rather than repatriation, which is about repatriating ancestral remains, which is unfinished business). Rematuration is of real benefit to Aboriginal people whose community could not possibly fund the cost of caring for a collection, but they can have access to the objects, relearn, and ‘remake’ them and be comforted knowing the museum is ensuring those objects live on for eternity. We get a little lost too with repatriation and people wanting to have western ownership of cultural material, whereas cultural objects have what I call a ‘make’ and ‘remake’ value. This concept of ‘remaking’ was one unexpected outcome of the Makarata: Bringing the Past into the Future held at Milingimbi in 2016, in which representatives from cultural institutions across the globe who hold cultural materials from Milingimbi assembled.28 I attended because the Berndt Museum is the custodian of Milingimbi objects, and Ronald and Catherine had a long and good relationship with the community who in turn was always welcome at the Berndt Museum. The Makarata resulted in Milingimbi residents asserting ‘their right to access and advise on what is culturally appropriate in relation to the collections’ of their objects held elsewhere.29 This led to my curating the exhibition Milingimbi: A Living Culture of Milingimbi objects kept in boxes and not shown for decades. This included a bark painting by a family member of one of the senior women in the community involved in the Makarata.30 I sent her a high-resolution image of that bark, and she literally ‘remade’ the story of bark in her own bark painting, which now sits in their archive. That is what I mean by ‘make’ and ‘remake’. That is how we change things, and it shows Aboriginal ownership of narratives, rather than objects. We need to change our way of thinking about ownership and control, because cultural knowledge and the oral history of the narratives are owned by the community. I like to bring Country back into the stories presented in museological displays. People make broad-brush assumptions about what Country means, whereas it is important to present Aboriginal culture as an active practice in which cultural materials are made and remade again and again as part of this practice. Museums present cultural objects as examples of cultural practice. The Berndts were trying to do something different: they were trying to keep knowledge together with the idea that the museum would be a reflection of that knowledge. Aboriginal culture is very conservative and ruled by strict protocols, it doesn’t change and fluctuate in the way that western culture does. This is something young Aboriginal people in urban spaces may not learn from their Elders, and they might find the idea unappealing. The curatorial issue

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Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ is how do we, as a museum, operate when we have differing perspectives of what being an Aboriginal is; and at the same time work with Elders to ensure those conservative Aboriginal practices of Country and culture are evident. This includes restricted knowledge, and material. How do we continue to ensure Aboriginal world views without losing knowledge, particularly when the knowledge bearers are passing away. During the next decade, we might see the last memory of pre-contact times fade away. How do we keep that alive for the next generation? Thinking about the Australia Council’s raft of protocols for managing a collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Art – what protocols did you manage to establish? I was not in a position at UWA to establish an Aboriginal-led Advisory Group, I was not allowed to have that conversation with anyone. I was told that the University’s Cultural Collections Board could attend to this, as I represented Indigenous people on that Board. Not having an Advisory Board was really concerning. The School of Indigenous Studies, who should have understood the issue, failed to respond to my requests to attempt to solve the problem, and the University as whole seemed disconnected from best practice when it came to caring for Indigenous cultural material. Given that it is a basic requirement when working with Aboriginal objects and artists to have an advisory group, I sought out Elders across Noongar Country and people I know from back home to ensure that I asked the right questions. If I couldn’t form a reference group at the University, at least I could ring them and ask, am I doing it correctly? In terms of the protocols, we were doing much more at the Berndt Museum than those protocols required. We were also very sensible if it meant benefitting Aboriginal people. Sometimes, in regard to access and ethics, the protocols can actually stop Aboriginal people from accessing material we’ve spent 40 years fighting to access. Those Australia Council Protocols are really for non-Indigenous people, that should be stated, but there are Aboriginal people who don’t know the protocols either. The AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) Code of Ethics is a good framework, but it too will end up stopping people from accessing their own material.31 I always say to people who visit, who is the community and who is the Elder? We operated from an access position, and being Aboriginal allowed me to do a number of things. I knew when someone wasn’t being truthful about accessing the collection. I’d get a call from someone else telling me that. In an Aboriginal way, I was ahead of people as to whether I should let them in or not, and quite quickly we navigated that difficult path. You don’t want to be told you are not providing access, but at the same time, you want to ensure that the right people see the right things. This is a huge challenge for museums. We did talk, when we were rehousing the collection, about doing so in accordance with the regions. So when people are looking at objects in a box, they will only see items from their Country; and when Elders

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come, they won’t get shocked at seeing other people’s material. That is a long-term project that the museum should do when it gets its own facility because it is really significant for Aboriginal people, and it will transform the way non-Aboriginal people see Country, culture, and community. Margo Neale talks about how from the 1980s there was a ‘dramatic shift in in the discourse of Aboriginal art from conventional anthropological concerns that once had a home in ethnographic museums . . . to those of fine art subject to formalist modes of display and reception applied to western art’. But she says this shift has become ‘a double-edged sword’. She values museum practices in relation to ‘their anthropological focus on elements inherent in Indigenous culture such as connection to land and environment, spirituality, ritual and ceremony’. For her the challenge is ‘how to bring very different paradigms of the art gallery and the museum into creative dialogue’.32 Would you care to comment on her observation? I’d like to talk about this issue from my time at AGNSW when, in 2010, Hetti Perkins put on Art and Soul. I was asked to take care of 16 Warmun artists who had come down to perform the Gurirr-Gurirr (Krill Krill) ceremony. I remember walking around the exhibition space – there was a Rusty Peters painting up, and one of the Elders, Mabel Juli, walked up and patted it and started talking about the story in the painting of the old man, and where he had come from. It was a very moving experience because it was a way of paying respect to someone from Country. I now support Margo’s approach of bringing two differing paradigms together. Prior to going into the Berndt Museum, I would have said, ‘art is art’, and ‘cultural material is cultural material’, and they belong in separate cultural institutions. The Berndt Museum, though, is unique in holding both kinds of objects. When I was there, and before we rehoused the collection, we had a massive donation of material from the David Mowaljarlai estate. What was really fascinating was that an old man from the Pilbara came in to look at something else, and we had a Mowaljarlai painting out, we had cleaned it and it was sitting in the store. He went up to it; it was as if the painting were alive; he sang a song; he was talking about where it came from; he was touching it; he was singing it alive. Everyone in the room was panicking, and I said, ‘no, this is okay, he’s singing the work back to life’. This is oldschool culture. This man was bringing the artist to life though song, through storytelling, and through memory. We had that happen multiple times with senior men. They would turn a corner, see something, and start singing out loud – it was awesome, they were my favourite moments when the community would come in and you never knew what you were going to learn and what conversations you were going to have. And it never got repeated; if you didn’t have a camera to capture it as it occurred, it finished without a record. So what Margo Neale said about creative dialogue is true – art galleries have done a lot – and they are much more ethnographic in their approach

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Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ than they once were. I think it is great to be able to appreciate a work of art as art, but it doesn’t come from western training, it’s not about composition or materiality. It is about lived experience, story, Country, family and song. It has these deeper layers. Howard Morphy has done much to engage people in those conversations about how we talk about cultural material, along with other anthropologists such as Fred Myers.33 I think it suits Aboriginal cultural knowledge to sit in a more anthropological approach than a purely art critical approach, but it shouldn’t limit how Aboriginal people see themselves. If you want to be known as just an artist, as with Tracey Moffatt, then that should be your choice. But it should not limit Aboriginal artists from remote and regional communities from talking about their culture either. This might be how we get to the new inclusive museum. Too often curators are trained in the European style of museology, which devalues the ethnography of the object (its place, purpose, and meaning); and focuses instead on its display in the clean, spare space of the white cube supported by a short 150-word text panel. We can’t decolonise the museums, but we can transform the museum and the way we do things, such as display Aboriginal objects, in a more flexible, dynamic, and culturally appropriate way. There has been much public discussion about the 30-year embargo Catherine Berndt placed on the field-note books including from Sandy Toussaint who said that had she known, she would never have assisted Catherine Berndt with her will, and Brenda Croft, who is angry that access is being denied to Aboriginal people whose ancestors are the subjects of some of the fieldnotes. How did you manage this situation, and what is your position on the field-note books? One of the best conversations I’ve had about this issue was with Katie Glaskin, an anthropologist, who uses field-note books in her work. She reminded me that field-note books are there because you are sitting in the field and you need to write down your observations on the spot. They are notes, not necessarily made for perpetuity, some even burn them when they are no longer useful. Also, it is important to remember that the Berndts published pretty much everything they felt was publishable in their notes. I just don’t think we have had a chance to see their work in its entirety. Some of their work is no longer in print. The notes are good but they are not necessarily what an old Aboriginal person wants to see. It is as if critics are suggesting that the old people don’t know their own culture. My concern is that people might think there is something magical in the notebooks, whereas if Aboriginal people were to read them, they would say, I knew that already. There is nothing special or unknown. I worry about the politics of the critics dramatising it. The problem with the way this is being approached is that they are treating it as if Aboriginal people are dumb, and that an old man wouldn’t know his story. It is frustrating to watch. It is possible some of the material in the notebooks will have an impact on current Native Title, but it is dependent

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on understanding the content of what you are reading, along with the added problem that the Berndts’ handwriting is not very legible. You spoke passionately to me, ahead of this interview, about how curatorship, as widely practised in this nation and elsewhere, is based on a western notion of curatorship, whereas you are arguing for an Aboriginal notion of curatorship. Stephen Gilchrist too points to the need for First Nations curators to be independent from the Euro-American models of curatorship. He talks about the ‘process of Indigenisation which is grounded in the intellectual and political genealogies of Indigenous people to signal and produce different exhibitionary and political effects’, in short of Indigenising curatorship?34 Can you expand on this? If I learnt anything from researching the development of the Aboriginal art collection and its place within AGNSW, including the gradual appointment of Aboriginal curators for my doctoral thesis, it is that the gallery is a western structure invented to benefit concepts of western ideology. Within that dominant structure, I think we need to reposition the role of curator, and tease out western curatorship from Aboriginal curatorship. You have to remember that the audience is not necessarily Aboriginal. And being Aboriginal is not enough: the crucial factor is knowing your culture and having cultural knowledge. You have to do the work to know who the community is, what is different and important in their culture, and consult with the Elders. We have to stop homogenising Aboriginal Australia into one group of people, given that there are 260-plus language groups. It’s far more nuanced, and that is why understanding Country matters. Curating for Aboriginal audiences is demanding. For instance, when our western desert paintings in the Berndt collection are hung on a wall, how can you transform the story in the painting so that the Aboriginal person who comes to view them can feel confident that it reflects their family, their opinions, and their views. And how can you ensure that other Aboriginal people who see that same work can trust the information, that it is correct, and that it advances their knowledge. These are challenges for Aboriginal curators working in institutions. Would you like to talk about two exhibitions from your time at the Berndt Museum in terms of Aboriginal curation? One of the most interesting exhibitions I did, Stockyards and Saddles: The Story of Gibb River Station (2018), was centred around my Uncle Colin’s (Colin Russ) and Aunty Sylvia’s photographs. It was staged when we were restructuring the collection store, the collection itself was inaccessible, and we had a gap in the exhibition schedule, so I borrowed my uncle Colin’s photographs to fill the programme. They tell this beautiful story of the Gibb River cattle station, which my family owned and ran. The images showed not just my family but a lot of other community members who mustered cattle, helped with branding, not just men, women as well. A really amazing independent society had grown up – we had our own language, our own

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Catherine Speck in conversation with Vanessa Russ way of communicating – and the photographs were beautifully taken. It was quite challenging for me because of the personal context. But given that the store had no works in it, we made the most of the opportunity. To my knowledge, it is the first exhibition of actual photographs of Aboriginal stockmen on Country riding horses. That was really exciting, and it is something people still respond to today. I created a smaller travelling exhibition from this material to show at the Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre in Derby a few months later, and I think that was one of the first institutional shows to be shown at Mowanjum. The second exhibition I would like to talk about is Out of the Boxes and into the Desert (2019), which was a major show that came out of our rehousing the collection. For me, 2–3 years in at the Berndt Museum, we still didn’t know what desert paintings we had in the collection until we stretched them and hung them in our newly acquired racks. We had small thumbnail images, but I could not see what they really looked like. We found paintings by many of the senior artists at Papunya produced from c. 1970 to 1980, some donated by the Aboriginal Arts Board or acquired at the time, that had been rolled up and stored for three plus decades. The exhibition’s title ‘Out of the boxes’, captures that moment when we hung paintings by artists including Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and Yala Yala Gibbs along with more recent work by women artists. Just being able to see those paintings in the flesh hanging on a wall in an exhibition was great, and for the public to see them was quite extraordinary. You were the first Aboriginal curator to head up the Berndt Museum, which you did from 2016 to 2019. During that period, you and your staff were employed on rolling six-month contracts, at a time when UWA was in trouble financially, and the changes in senior management meant you lost your ally there. To make matters worse, the Head of Indigenous Studies, a nonmuseum professional, was vying for the relocation of the Berndt Museum. In that environment of multiple vulnerabilities, you lost your position as Director. Would you care to comment on that scenario? And on the ramifications for the Berndt’s collection and the Berndt Museum? The Berndt Museum was in the Cultural Precinct, along with the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA Publishing, and the Perth Festival. It should have stayed in that partnership; it could have worked really well. Kent Anderson, who has since departed, was developing a clear strategy for the arts and culture portfolio, which I supported. But the leadership of the Cultural Precinct struggled to find its way, politics got involved, making it almost impossible to collaborate, and the decision was taken to pull it apart. In addition, the University’s finances worsened, and they decided they couldn’t fund the Berndt Museum at its capacity. We had a complete lack of certainty about our or the museum’s future. In this environment of political lobbying, a newly appointed Vice Chancellor arrived. He did not have a background in the issues and moved the Berndt Museum across to

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the School of Indigenous Studies, and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery into Education. The transfer of the Berndt Museum to the School of Indigenous Studies hasn’t worked out and it won’t work out in the future. This is a teaching department that has no background in managing or caring for cultural materials. Its focus is health research. There is the potential for risk to the collection, which is in limbo. Being Aboriginal is not enough. It needs to be managed by someone with cultural knowledge and museum knowledge, which is no longer occurring. New graduates without museum training have replaced the highly experienced team I led. The real test will be in 2024, when the embargo is lifted on the field-note books. The Berndts left an amazing collection, but it is a very contested collection and I don’t know why. It is contested mostly by non-Aboriginal people who should know better, but gain from a paternalistic position or exerting power. Aboriginal people generally don’t get a lot of access to the collection. It seems hard for people to accept that the museum and its collection is of benefit to all Australians. I reset the tone of the Berndt Museum and its research focus. This led to my instigating an investigation into items in the collection including the Birrundudu drawings, that has now been funded by the Australian Research Council.35 Academics at UWA were shocked at the decision to relocate the museum and to terminate my position, especially when the museum was being managed for the first time by an Aboriginal person who was bringing the collection alive. In speaking with Indigenous curators a topic that often surfaces is the cultural responsibility such curatorial positions embody – at other times called ‘cultural labour’ – would you like to expand on this hidden side of the role? If you are an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curator working in an institution, you represent every single Indigenous person living across the country. You represent their cultural knowledge, while also negotiating your own place in the institution’s culture. And you are expected to look after Aboriginal visitors who come too. The expectation is very different for nonAboriginal curators working, for example, in European art or Australian Contemporary Art. They might let their artists know what they are doing in their exhibitions as a courtesy, but they are not expected to consult to ensure that the cultural knowledge is accurate, or that what is being said meets the artist’s expectations. There is a lot more freedom for these curators. Aboriginal curators working on major exhibitions need funding so they can spend time with the relevant community. They might travel to a community to find the person they want to talk to is not there, or people don’t want to talk about that knowledge, or people are debating whether that idea is culturally accurate. This high-level research requires much consultation, and it has major ramifications if it goes wrong. There are multiple pressures on being the Aboriginal curator in an institution including knowing the people related to your collection, along with pressure from those in the outside world asking, why did

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you do it that way? The main issue for the curator is to engage with the community to know what is happening, and where the stories come from. It takes a lot of work. Stephen Gilchrist has plotted a path forward, suggesting that Indigenous curators should redeploy their energy, and rather than reacting to colonisation, be proactive, and reimagine the world otherwise.36 Would you like to respond? To reimagine the world otherwise, you have to step away from the contemporary trend for sovereignty and unceded nations discourse – ‘us’ versus ‘them’. You have to accept that you can’t decolonise a colony – it’s impossible to send people back. And you have to accept that the world is crossdisciplinary and cross-cultural. And we have to live with the consequences, since colonisation, of a forced diaspora due to moving Aboriginal people onto other people’s Country. The gradual passing of a generation of Elders is leading to a loss of old Aboriginal culture. We are close to reaching a point where, as an Aboriginal friend of mine once said, we will be producing ‘performance’ culture by which I mean there will be a manifestation of Aboriginal culture, but without its deep spiritual underpinnings and the old ways of doing things. This will no longer be true culture, but a hybrid form. The alternative, in terms of reimagining the world, is to remake institutions to allow for the full spectrum of cultural knowledge to work across exhibitions without diminishing the conservative and highly contested continuation of what I call old Aboriginal culture led by Elders who practise it, not by opinion pieces in the news media.

Notes 1 See Stephen Gilchrist, ‘Indigenous Curation: Now and into the Future’, in Rebecca Conway (ed.), Djalkiri: Yolngu Art, Collaborations and Collections (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2021), 22–29; Australian curators’ entries in Julie Nagam, Carly Lane and Megan Tamati-Quennell (eds.), Becoming our Future: Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (Manitoba, Canada: ARP Books, 2020). 2 John Stanton, ‘The Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia’, Pacific Arts, 11/12 (July 1995): 56. 3 John Stanton, ‘“I Did Not Set Out to Make a Collection”: The Ronald and Catherine Berndt Collection at the Berndt Museum of Anthropology’, in Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby (eds.), The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australasian Museum Collections (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 511–536. 4 Claire Smith, Gary Jackson, Geoffrey Gray, and Vincent Copley, ‘Friday Essay: Who Owns a Family’s Story: Why it’s Time to Lift the Berndt Field Notes Embargo’, The Conversation, 14 September 2018 Friday essay: who owns a family’s story? Why it’s time to lift the Berndt field notes embargo (theconversation.com); Sandy Toussaint, ‘A Letter to Catherine Berndt: Aboriginal Cultural Life and the Preciousness of Time’, Griffith Review, 79 (February 2023) Sandy Toussaint – Griffith Review; Victoria Laurie, ‘Access Denied: A Vault Full of Precious Indigenous Cultural Knowledge Has been Kept Under Lock and Key in a Perth Museum for Decades. Why?’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 5–6 March 2022, 21–25; ‘I want to tell my children’: The history hidden in Berndt’s notebooks (smh.com.au).

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5 It was raised as an issue from the floor at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Academy of Humanities in November 2019. 6 Victoria Laurie, ‘Uni Goes Against Will to Address Deficit’, The Weekend Australian, 7–8 November 2020, 9. The Collection had been incorrectly valued in earlier years and was revalued under Vanessa Russ at $45 million. 7 The position was funded by a Carnegie Corporation Grant for three years: Ronald Berndt, ‘General Report on the Establishment and Development of Social Anthropology in the University of Western Australia, January 1957–March 1958’, June 1958, Anthropology Department Archive, University of Western Australia Archives, 1.; Robert Tonkinson and Michael Howard, ‘The Berndts: A Biographical Sketch’, in Tonkinson and Howard (eds.), Going it Alone: Prospects for Aboriginal Autonomy (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990), 33. 8 For the details of these negotiation, see Geoffrey Gray, ‘Cluttering Up the Department: Ronald Berndt and the Distribution of the University of Sydney Ethnographic Collection 1956–57’, reCollections, 2, no. 2 (2006): 1–46. 9 Draft of a talk for the Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia on the occasion of his opening the Exhibition of Australian Aboriginal Bark Paintings at the Perth Museum, 23 December at 8 pm, Anthropology Department Archive, University of Western Australia (UWA) Archives, 6. 10 R.M. Berndt and J.E. Stanton, Australian Aboriginal Art in the Anthropology Museum of the University of Western Australia (Nedlands, WA: UWA Press, 1980), 1. 11 Senate Minutes, 18 June 1976 cited in John Stanton, Relocate and Rediscover: Treasures of the Berndt Museum, Berndt Museum Occasion Paper, no 9, UWA, 2012, 8. 12 Berndt and Stanton, Australian Aboriginal Art in the Anthropology Museum of the UWA, 6. 13 Ronald Berndt, University News, 8 October 1977, cited in John Stanton, Relocate and Rediscover: Treasures of the Berndt Museum, Berndt Museum Occasion Paper, no 9, UWA, 2012, 7. 14 Search – Aboriginal Child Artists of Carrolup: Healing Trauma. 15 Connection – Aboriginal Child Artists of Carrolup: Healing Trauma. 16 Perth’s Berndt Museum seeks proper home for collection stashed away in cardboard boxes – ABC News. 17 See About the Cultural Precinct: Cultural Precinct: The University of Western Australia (uwa.edu.au). 18 MediaRelease_NewBerndtMuseumAssociateDirector.pdf (uwa.edu.au); Dr Vanessa Russ appointed first Indigenous head of Berndt Museum | NITV (sbs.com.au). 19 Fred Myers, ‘Recalibrating the Visual Field’, in Lawrence Bamblett, Fred Myers and Tim Rowse (eds.), The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019), 63. 20 Myers, ‘Recalibrating the Visual Field’, 63. Myers is working in Bourdieusian framework, see ‘Introduction’, in Bamblett, Myers and Rowse (eds.), The Difference Identity Makes, 3. 21 Doreen Mellor and Terri Janke, Valuing Art, Respecting Culture: Protocols for Working with the Australian Visual Arts Sector (Sydney: National Association for the Visual Arts, 2001), 17.2; Australia Council for the Arts, Protocols for Using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts (Sydney: Australia Council, 2019), 26. 22 The conversations between Vanessa Russ and Catherine Speck took place on 1 April, 29 April, 6 May, and 23 May 2022. 23 Artists | Art Collective WA. 24 On the Revealed program see: Revealed – Fremantle Arts Centre (fac.org.au). 25 Berndt Museum Exhibition ‘Carrolup Revisited’ Opens – Aboriginal Child Artists of Carrolup: Healing Trauma. 26 There are more than 250 museums and collections in Australian universities: see Cinderella Collections: University Museums and Collections in Australia: The Report of the University Museums Review Committee (Canberra: Australian Vice Chancellors Committee, 1996).

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27 Boomerangs – from an effective tool to a national symbol: Archive Page: The University of Western Australia (uwa.edu.au). 28 Traditionally, a Makarata is a Yolngu peacemaking ceremony. This one was a part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, The Legacy of 50 Years of Collecting at Milingimbi by Lindy Allan (Museum Victoria) and Louise Hamby (ANU), and included the late Dr Joseph Neparrnga Gumbula (1954–2015) (Milingimbi). Milingimbi Makarrata (kluge-ruhe.org) 29 Makarrata Ceremony – Milingimbi art and culture 30 The exhibition Milingimbi: A Living Culture was held at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, UWA, from 29 July to 16 December 2017: Milingimbi_Gatefold_Pages.pdf (uwa.edu.au) 31 AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research 32 Margo Neale, ‘Whose Identity Crisis? Between the Ethnographic and the Art Museum’, in Ian McLean (ed.), Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 309. 33 See Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 141–167; Howard Morphy, ‘Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research Journal, 7, no 1 (2001): 41, 43; Fred Myers, ‘Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings’, Cultural Anthropology, 6 (1991): 26–62. 34 Stephen Gilchrist, ‘Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations: Insistence and Refusal’, in Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers and Tamara Winikoff (eds.), The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), 252. 35 This research project Collecting at the Cross Roads: Anthropology, Art and Cultural Change has ARC Linkage Funding. Vanessa Russ should have been on the research team, but she is not because she lost her position at UWA. Collecting at the Crossroads: Anthropology, Art and Cultural Change (1939–85) (deakin.edu.au). 36 Gilchrist, ‘Indigenous Curatorial Interpellations’, 254.

3

Price and Provenance William Barak as an Artist in the Market Nikita Vanderbyl

William Barak (c. 1824–1903) was an elder of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people and was well-known as a leader (Ngurungaeta) of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve near Healesville, a rural town an hour and a half’s drive today from central Melbourne. Recognition of Barak as an artist has been slow in coming, but, in recent decades, auction prices for his art have escalated. For Barak’s descendants, his paintings, drawings, and carved weapons and tools have a different value, as windows onto the past and embodiments of priceless cultural knowledge.1 In the chapter that follows, I analyse the events leading to a record auction price at Sotheby’s, in New York in May 2022, for two artworks by Barak – a painting called Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) and a parrying shield incised with geometric designs (Figures 3.1 and 3.2) – and the rare event of the artworks coming home to Traditional Owners through the crowd-funding efforts of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community and their supporters. The chapter seeks to illustrate the importance of Barak’s artworks to the community by exploring the often-emotive links between people and objects raised by the 2022 auction. It asks, where do the community’s ties to the objects fit in the art market? Drawing inspiration from Indigenous Studies scholar Martin Nakata’s essay ‘Decolonial Goals and Pedagogies for Indigenous Studies’, I acknowledge the multiple epistemologies that are at play in any non-Indigenous author’s discussion of First Nations art and culture and the challenge of identifying what knowledge becomes legitimised by the academy.2 By reflecting on my own role as an art intermediary during the events leading up to the auction, I interrogate not only the webs of value creation but also the threads of the legacies that bind the unequal power relations between Indigenous and nonIndigenous knowledges tightly in place. There is no detached and neutral point from which to know the world, and, acknowledging this, I situate myself at the outset. I write from the standpoint of a nonIndigenous researcher who completed a PhD thesis on Barak in 2019.3 Since 2016, I have been consulting, and now collaborating, with the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community through their peak body, the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation. I support the community’s desire for increased access

Note to reader: this chapter contains language quoted from period sources that may be considered offensive. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-4

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Figure 3.1 William Barak, Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks), 1897, Earth pigments and charcoal on paper, 50.5 by 68 cm. Collection of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation.

to Barak’s legacy through research and outreach. During the months leading up to the Sotheby’s auction in 2022, I was involved in both of these activities. On hearing in late 2021 that ‘rare and important artefacts and drawings from the nineteenth century’ were to be auctioned at Sotheby’s, I began emailing them seeking further details, knowing that one of the as-yet-to-be named artists could be William Barak.4 As a result of this exchange, in February 2022, Sotheby’s asked if I would write the catalogue note of just under 3,000 words describing the significance of the painting and shield to be published on the Sotheby’s website. I thereby became more than a scholarly historical researcher on Barak; I was potentially complicit in value generation as the paid writer of the catalogue note, describing the significance and provenance of the artworks coming to auction. I also acted as an intermediary and spoke to journalists to raise awareness of the event.5 Taking on the catalogue note allowed me access information valuable to the community and facilitated knowledge sharing between the Corporation and the auction house. I sought and received permission from representatives of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people to write the essay and negotiated with Sotheby’s art dealers to pass on the provenance information and ‘hi-res’ images as they became available. A crowd-funding campaign was organised by the Corporation, and wealthy individuals and organisations in Victoria were approached for donations in February and April 2022. Many

Price and Provenance 47

Figure 3.2 William Barak, Parrying Shield, 1897 (detail), Earth pigments on carved and engraved hardwood, 95 cm by 15.5 cm. Collection of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation.

possibilities were discussed regarding how the artwork might be purchased. I was conscious that my influence as an art intermediary could contribute to an escalation of the artworks’ price at auction. This was ultimately outweighed by my desire to communicate the significance of the artworks to as wide an audience as possible, in the hope of supporting the Wurundjeri people’s claim to own the artworks outright. The painting Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) and the parrying shield, here described as ‘artworks’, had been in Switzerland for over 120 years when they resurfaced at auction at Sotheby’s in late 2021 (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). The Sotheby’s artworks belonged to the de Pury family, Swiss settlers and friends of Barak’s, who were winegrowers on land near Coranderrk, Victoria, Australia. From this connection, the artworks came by family descent and migration back to Switzerland. Such relationships are key to research examining the provenance of Barak’s artworks. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Barak was known

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by the hereditary title of Ngurungaeta, or leader, of the people living at Coranderrk who were from the Kulin Nation, an alliance of five Aboriginal language groups in south central Victoria.6 As Ngurungaeta Barak had been thrust into the spotlight of colonial politics on several occasions. For example, Barak made a painting of a corroboree as a gift for Victorian Governor Loch in 1887. The newly arrived and politically naïve Loch had expressed a wish to see a corroboree in person but was prevented by public outcry (corroborees being characterised by some vocal critics as barbaric relics of the past). Barak’s gift of the painting was a face-saving compromise.7 Here, Barak was engaging in an act of cultural diplomacy that was understood to be an equal exchange between leaders. His diplomatic ability and willingness to forge relationships and communicate with all classes of settlers, including anthropologists, scientists, artists, and politicians in the Victorian colony, are in large part responsible for the creation of his artworks and their survival in museums and private collections. Barak’s skills in artmaking and diplomacy combined with his advocacy for his people and the preservation of Kulin cultural knowledge in his artworks contribute to making him one of the most significant Indigenous figures of the nineteenth century in Australia. Barak’s artworks and, particularly his paintings, recognised in the late nineteenth century and then neglected, received documented attention from the artworld in the mid-twentieth century. A 1943 exhibition titled ‘Primitive Art’, presented by the National Gallery and National Museum of Victoria, showcased two and threedimensional objects from across Oceania and Africa and located Aboriginal, cultural objects within this burgeoning modernist discourse.8 Greater attention came in the 1980s with ground-breaking group exhibitions exploring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural objects in Australia’s art history. ‘Aboriginal Australia’, curated by Carol Cooper, was presented at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1981 and showcased this increasing scholarly interest.9 At the same time as this artistic re-evaluation was occurring, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people were seeking the preservation and restitution of their cultural heritage and belongings. Aunty Winnie Quagliotti (née Terrick) was responsible for the first painting by Barak to be officially collected/returned by the peak Wurundjeri body, now known as the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation.10 Quagliotti was instrumental in forming the organisation in 1985, though details are limited about how the painting, which is a rare example of conflict depicted in Barak’s oeuvre, was returned to the community.11 The question of community ties to Barak and access to his cultural heritage for Wurundjeri people is therefore far from new. Ngurungaeta A community of self-sufficient Kulin Nation families farmed at Coranderrk from the 1860s until 1927.12 During his life Barak saw the arrival of John Batman and the establishment of the Port Phillip Association, the formation of Victoria into a colony distinct from New South Wales and the federation of Australia in 1901. His artworks were made during the 1880s and 1890s at Coranderrk and their survival is intimately tied up with the practices of tourism and sightseeing, which were the

Price and Provenance 49 primary way the Coranderrk community became visible to the settler public. In his chronology of tourist visitation to Coranderrk, historian Ian D. Clark characterises William Barak as ‘something of an attraction to visitors to the settlement, whether they be children, dignitaries, or researchers’.13 The art historian Andrew Sayers, in his study of Aboriginal artists of the nineteenth century, describes Barak as the most famous Aboriginal man in Victoria.14 When Barak was in his fifties, he took on the role of Ngurungaeta or leader of the assembled Kulin people at Coranderrk.15 His profile grew, and he was frequently described in terms that are now seen as offensive because they promulgated the belief that Aboriginal people were being superseded by a superior race. These ideas have since been discredited, but they were often inscribed onto Barak’s paintings as part of the select information that tourists thought relevant to preserve. I discuss this below. As a farming community, the Kulin people grew vegetables and hops, and also manufactured cultural objects, including shields and baskets. As the closest mission or reserve to Melbourne, Coranderrk’s relative proximity ensured a steady flow of curious tourists. These activities brought in enough income to make the station almost self-supporting. However, their hard-won prosperity was not to last, and local settlers, in collaboration with the Aboriginal Protection Board, undermined their successes and attempted to have the reserve closed and the residents moved.16 In his role as Ngurungaeta, Barak commenced a persuasive and peaceful campaign of letters and deputations, making use of the settler press and drawing upon connections formed with colonial elites. Known as the ‘Coranderrk Rebellion’, this period has been detailed in a book of the same name by historian and anthropologist Diane Barwick.17 Anne Fraser Bon (1838–1936), a Scottish widow and long-time friend of Barak, supported him and became an early collector of his paintings and drawings. Before her death Bon donated one painting to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria and one to the Ballarat Art Gallery in regional Victoria, the first Aboriginal artwork donated to a major public art gallery.18 Governors of Victoria, including Brougham Loch and Thomas Brassey, politicians including Alfred Deakin and Graham Berry, and anthropologists, including Alfred Howitt, were among Barak’s network of contacts. But it was Bon who consistently supported the community, providing a place for the men to stay when they walked the 67 kilometres to Melbourne to present petitions to the Aboriginal Protection Board. The ‘Coranderrk Rebellion’ resulted in a parliamentary inquiry in 1881, the first of its kind to hear Aboriginal testimony. In the 2010s, the script of the inquiry was adapted into the acclaimed verbatim theatre production Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country.19 In 1884, Chief Secretary Graham Berry declared Coranderrk ‘a site for use of the Aborigines’.20 It was in the years following this decision that Barak began painting. Against the backdrop of the loss of his wife and son to consumption (tuberculosis) and the removal of Coranderrk residents of mixed heritage under new and extremely damaging legislation, this marked the beginning of an important phase in Barak’s life as the leader of his people.21 The relationships Barak formed with a range of settlers who were also neighbours, artists, or colonial administrators show that Aboriginal art, in this case at least, was appreciated in

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slightly different ways from the more frequently cited narrative of salvage anthropology. Barak’s painting and carving, arising in the highly politicised space of Coranderrk, affirmed the opposite. His artworks were informed by Kulin movements for survival and sovereignty and appreciated by certain members of the colonial elite as important cultural expressions. The de Pury Family A family of Swiss wine growers, headed by Baron Guillaume de Pury and assisted for a time by his brother and nephew, had taken up Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung land near Coranderrk in the 1850s. The de Pury men transformed the hills into a fashionable winegrowing estate, known as Yeringberg, founded in 1863 concurrently with Coranderrk, and they too hosted visitors throughout the latter nineteenth century. Barak became good friends with a group of these Swiss settlers, and, as wine expert Max Allen has argued, he used this relationship to maintain access to his hereditary lands.22 Barak took Guillaume’s sons Victor and George hunting on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung lands, and Coranderrk residents were employed by the family during the grape harvest.23 Jules de Pury, the Baron’s nephew, was one of those on friendly terms with Barak, and family letters document their sharing tobacco on visits Barak made to the estate. Their friendship ultimately led to an exchange of artworks. Jules returned permanently to Neuchâtel in the late 1890s, and he took with him the parrying shield and the painting of women and men in possum skin cloaks. He may have taken other items too, but the former two remained in his family and were passed down through his sons. Other items created by Barak or members of the Coranderrk community reside in the Musée d’ethnographie Neuchâtel (MEN). The building was donated by a de Pury ancestor, James-Ferdinand, to form an ethnographic museum after his death.24 A few years after Jules returned to Switzerland, his cousin and the Baron’s son, Victor de Pury, painted a portrait of Barak. Victor’s tutor, Portuguese-born and Melbourne-based (from 1884 to 1901) artist Arthur Loureiro, also painted the Ngurungaeta. This was an important moment, and one of only a few that exposed the Elder to the colonial art world. While Barak does not appear to have been concerned with exhibiting his artworks, he made himself intelligible to audiences by comporting himself like a Western artist, painting en plein air at the same time as the Heidelberg School, and using materials and techniques recognisable to settlers. I have argued elsewhere that these were deliberate tactics of imperial literacy designed to ensure the survival of Wurundjeri cultural knowledge.25 The painting that Jules acquired is titled Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) (Figure 3.1) and it depicts a group of women clad in possum skin cloaks, carrying their babies, digging sticks and woven baskets on their backs. In three rows across the whole page, the cloaked women appear, walking purposefully. Barak has individuated each woman’s cloak, a technique he frequently used in other paintings, using curved sections to represent the possum pelts making up each garment. An individual’s possum cloak grew incrementally with new pelts

Price and Provenance 51 being added as needed, the garment becoming as unique as its wearer. Thick charcoal lines demarcate these cloaks, which have been in-filled with light red or dark red ochre. An inscription added in French to the top reads: Corroboree peint par Berak, roi et Dernier survivant de la t ribu des Yarras Yarras (nee in 1825, mort en 1903) 1897 Corroboree painted by Barak, King and Last survivor of the Yarra Yarra tribe (Born in 1825, death in 1903) 1897 Such descriptions often feature on the front or reverse of Barak’s paintings and drawings. Many visitors to Coranderrk who purchased artworks from Barak sought to commemorate the occasion by inscribing the date of their visit with a note of the subject of the artwork such as ‘Corroboree’. Designating Barak as a ‘King’ and the last survivor of his tribe was common, but misguided. The role of Ngurungaeta was passed on by Barak to his descendants, who continue Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung cultural practices and the strong connection to Coranderrk and their Country established by Barak and ancestors before him. As a crowd scene in reds and black, Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) stands out for its minimal colour scheme and uncommon composition. Though stylistically similar to Barak’s other paintings and drawings from the 1890s, which feature thick outlines and detailed cloak designs, his most frequent compositions feature ceremonies with two fires and male dancers assembled. Compositions with dancers across the top of the page, supported by one or two masters of ceremony, animals, and women drumming across the bottom, have become Barak’s most recognisable style and subject matter. As a different type of gathering, his Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) is similar to Figures in Possum Skin Cloaks and Lyrebird in the South Australian Museum collection (Figure 3.3). Here Barak depicts a similar grouping of red-cloaked individuals, this time a group of men, their beards and hair adornments distinguishing their age or rank. In rows across the page, men are gathered around a central lyrebird whose presence perhaps indicates the purpose of the gathering. The similarities between this painting and Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) indicate important themes within Barak’s oeuvre, which are still being uncovered through research with descendants. The Artworks at Auction The 2022 auction demonstrates acutely the competing notions of value operating for different stakeholders, where an economic model comes up against understandings of value defined along cultural, aesthetic, justice-bound lines. As the writer of the Sotheby’s catalogue note, my first intervention in collaboration with the Sotheby’s art dealers was to amend the name of the painting from ‘Corroboree’ and to add the descriptive detail ‘women in possum skin cloaks’, following the

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Figure 3.3 William Barak, Figures in Possum Skin Cloaks and Lyrebird, 1880–1903, Drawing: pencil, ochre, charcoal, 50.5 × 45.6 cm. Archives Collections: AA795/1, South Australian Museum.

art historical conventions of other similar paintings in Barak’s oeuvre. It was not until I was speaking with Wurundjeri artist and language warrior Mandy Nicholson, however, that I became aware that there were not just women and babies in this painting. The men in headresses walk across the bottom of the page, just as obviously as the women. This ‘discovery’ raises the question of how art historical knowledge is conjured and disseminated and where Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung cultural knowledge fits into an understanding of the artworks. As Mandy Nicholson explained on The Art Show on ABC national radio, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people scrutinise these artworks in a unique way, as referents for cultural revival. I think that the importance of this piece – and all of Barak’s pieces are – there’s no monetary value that could be attached to them because it’s our cultural narrative, and me being a Wurundjeri woman and having three generations of my family not being able to speak language and only limited knowledge in ceremony, limited knowledge into dance and how we painted

Price and Provenance 53 up, and how we did our ceremonies visually before invasion, this is the key to our knowledge; because if this didn’t exist, or Barak never paint anything, we would have no idea about any of this imagery and what people would do in their ceremonies and in dance. This particular piece is really informative because it’s got women, it’s got men, they’re all in cloaks, they’re wearing headbands with the bullen bullen or lyrebird feather, in their head piece, little details like that are priceless knowledge that we need to grab a hold of. (40.04–41.08)26 Since the painting has been in a private collection for over 120 years, the opportunity for the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people to access this knowledge is only now becoming possible. Like Nicholson, Uncle Colin Hunter described the significance of Barak’s artworks as ‘windows into our culture’, and he added an insight into Barak’s motivation for making them: ‘This is Uncle William’s way of preserving our history. He’s seen the impacts of colonisation from day one’.27 The second artwork coming to auction was a long, pointed parrying shield with a front-facing section incised with concentric diamond patterns and a central curved motif. A square grip sits midway along the length of the weapon. Like other parrying shields from Australia’s southeast, Barak has reserved the patterned carving to one section. The geometric designs resemble many shields in Australian gallery collections such as the National Gallery of Victoria and Koorie Heritage Trust collections. Shields with a clear provenance to the artist are rare as the names of the makers were not necessarily recorded at the time of their acquisition, which follows other questionable collecting practices during the colonial era.28 This parrying shield has not seen the wear or gained the patina of heavy use. Despite its age, the carving looks as fresh as the day Barak presented it to Jules de Pury.29 These two artworks received the greatest attention in the online catalogue with the note for Barak’s artworks being significantly longer than that for any other artwork. Looking at the provenance details for other carved weapons and tools, it is disturbing to see the vagaries of colonial-era collecting echo in the present. Lot 7 in the auction was a ‘rare boomerang’ from the Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia. Its provenance was described as ‘reportedly collected in the Great Sandy Desert in the 1920s’ after which time it was at the Aboriginal and Pacific Art Gallery in Melbourne, and then a private collection in the USA. There is no clue here about who did the collecting and whether this was consensual at the time. The auction traversed both cultural objects and documents from the nineteenth century all the way up to contemporary art by practicing artists. In the context of the catalogue, each of these items is an ‘artwork’ rather than an ethnographic artefact, and its provenance is listed. What gets obscured by this flattening classification are the divergent contexts of each object’s origins and the ways in which they are valued. Cultural objects acquired on the Australian ‘frontier’ possess a different type of cachet to large and colourful canvases arising from the dynamic Western Desert painting movements, yet both are brought together as ‘Aboriginal art’ before an avid audience in the auction room.

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My catalogue note traced the relationship between William Barak and the de Pury family and included a description of a painting by Barak depicting Samuel de Pury’s vineyard. This painting was presented to a de Pury who then returned permanently to Switzerland. The Yarra Ranges Regional Museum’s collections of cultural objects from Coranderrk are further evidence of the strong relationship between the two neighbours and were used to illustrate this point in the 2013 exhibition Oil Paint and Ochre.30 Knowledge of this history supported an interpretation that the items to be auctioned were a ‘gift’. For Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elders, it suggested the argument that if the seller no longer wanted to be custodian of this gift it should be returned to the artist’s descendants.31 This argument was also made on the ABC discussion programme The Drum by Palyku legal scholar Aurora Milroy and represents a new approach to claiming rights over the artworks of William Barak.32 In the same programme, airing two days before the auction, Uncle Ron Jones said he felt sure Barak would be unhappy that a branch of the de Pury family were profiting from the gifts that were given. These discussions contrast with the last time a painting by Barak was auctioned. In 2016, Barak’s painting Ceremony sold for AU$512,400, shocking the community and its supporters who sought to crowdfund its purchase. Ceremony became the possession of an unknown individual or institution compounding the anguish of community members, who attribute national treasure status to these artworks. In 2016, many avenues were also explored to prevent the painting from leaving Australia. However, it became clear that no Victorian legislation could prevent this and the artwork was sold through Bonhams.33 The disappointment felt after 2016 persisted, in part due to the unknown location of Ceremony. The aim, in 2022, was to get the two priceless artworks returned to Country, and this meant explicating a claim for their significance. The crowd-funding campaign became the focus. The GoFundMe website organised by the community used the word ‘invaluable’ to describe Barak’s artworks, noting that they rarely appear at auction and the rarity of the artworks themselves made for a pressing situation. There are only an estimated 39 paintings and drawings by Barak in public and private collections in Australia, and an additional 13 in European public ethnographic collections.34 The purchase estimate was put at $1 million. Crowdfunding was one avenue the Wurundjeri Corporation utilised, while concurrently speaking to as many potential donors as possible. The final amount raised by crowdfunding was AU $122,000 but without the last-minute donation from the Victorian Labor Government of $500,000 the attempt to buy back this heritage would not have succeeded.35 Through crowdfunding, Barak’s descendants and wider community and supporters sought to deal with the art market on its monetary terms. It was also the only option left to them during a period of federal government transition. The timing meant that any financial support was unlikely because the outgoing government led by Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison was not sitting and the incoming government of Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had not yet been assigned all its portfolios. In the absence of the federal government, it was up to the state government to step in. The donation

Price and Provenance 55 by the Victorian Labor government led by Premier Dan Andrews is consistent with its public support for the Yoorook Justice Commission and Treaty processes, and sits within the larger picture of its support for the arts which includes $32 million in the 2022/23 Budget for the National Gallery of Victoria.36 The combined effort of grassroots fundraising topped up by government intervention speaks to the possibilities of support from the public and the possibilities of non-Indigenous people listening to the needs of First Peoples and acting on their wishes. The auction took place in New York at Sotheby’s major May sale titled ‘Aboriginal Art’. It was afternoon in New York, but 6 am in Eastern Australia. The auction items were ordered chronologically, which meant the community did not have to wait long for Barak’s artworks to come under the hammer. The ABC nightly news programme 7:30 filmed several Elders at the Corporation’s offices in Melbourne as a representative bid in New York on their behalf. Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) had an estimate of US $300,000 to $500,000 and ended up selling for US $378,000. The Parrying Shield had a pre-auction estimate of US $15,000 to $25,000 and ended up selling for $52,920. This was significantly higher than the shields which began the auction, two of which did not meet their reserve price, and was significantly higher than the estimate. In Australian dollars (at the time) this was more than $530,000 for the painting and more than $74,000 for the parrying shield.37 Frantic text messages shortly afterwards confirmed the artworks had been successfully purchased and the community rejoiced. Defining Value Though Barak is not a contemporary artist, his work was sold alongside both contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and artworks from the nineteenth century whose makers were not recorded at the time of acquisition. Within the chronologically ordered Sotheby’s catalogue, Barak’s works were positioned as signature pieces, preceding contemporary works that were predominantly paintings by living artists. This positioning impacts the value attributed to the works and may help to account for the difference between the pre- and postauction price of Parrying Shield. The catalogue note for Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) and Parrying Shield featured research adapted from my PhD thesis to explain the significance of the relationships between Barak and the de Pury family and was longer than any other in the catalogue. Sotheby’s reported in 2022 that the May sale was ‘the highest sale total ever achieved for Aboriginal art outside Australia, and by a huge margin the highest sale total for the field globally this year’.38 This result reflects the evident appeal and all-embracing definition of Aboriginal art internationally, as well as the scale of this valuable market. In marketing, one theory of how value in art emerges is socio-cultural.39 That is, value is created collaboratively with other actors within industry sectors. As recently as 2016, marketing scholars suggested this more distributed notion of value blurs the boundaries between product and service, producer and consumer.40 The value attributed to artists and artworks is not one-directional but contingent upon multiple factors and intermediaries, some of whom have dual goals or competing

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motivations. Tamar Yogev, for example, describes the contradictory logics of the contemporary art market which combines commerce and culture and where the judgements of a select few ‘high-status market actors’ are responsible for defining what is perceived as a high-quality product.41 In this context, it is interesting that the inheritor and seller, Simon de Pury, was an auctioneer and owner of an art business selling art between $100 and $1 million.42 The figure of Simon de Pury crosses the boundaries between owner-collector and dealer-commercial actor. The art market has been described as a machine with cogs creating value at separate stages.43 This cannot completely apply to an artist like Barak who did not fit within, and was not accepted by, the colonial art establishment in the same way as non-Indigenous artists were. It does, however, have relevance to the contemporary sale of his paintings and cultural objects, particularly given the role of the seller as an industry insider. The machine model describes artists first, who attend art school, and then, second, seek endorsement from galleries and art dealers. Critics, curators, and academic researchers, such as myself, thirdly create meaning and value through their writing and critique. Auction houses are the fourth cog that validates art through provenance and authentication. This is continued, fifth, by the collectors who signal the value of art through what and who they buy and when. Art fairs and international events complete the machine, which is premised on artworks leaving the market when they are acquired by museums. A version of this model, in its infancy, could be said to have operated in the colony of Victoria at the time Barak was painting and carving. One of the many avenues arising from the discovery of gold in the Victorian colony was the establishment of the Free Public Library of Melbourne which grew quickly and received significant public patronage.44 The Library building eventually also housed the National Gallery of Victoria alongside the National Museum. Both developed at a time when museums and galleries were conceptually and practically coalescing into places for the benefit of society at large. This benefit was consciously expanded to include the working class and women, but it was not so clear if the definition of the ‘public’ was prepared to extend to Chinese recently arrived on the goldfields, or, still less, Aboriginal people. As an indication of the scientific priorities of the time and the place of living Aboriginal people Ann Galbally has noted that among the objects on view at the 1854 meeting of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria was ‘the skull of an Australian half-caste’.45 The types of artworks intended to improve the populace leant heavily on the Western canon and were developed by a class of ex-Britons. Exhibiting artists were also heavily influenced by European trends and taste and, until the development of the first Australian art school, the National Gallery school in Melbourne, Great Britain, and Europe was and remained an important training ground for any serious artist in the Australian colonies able to afford the trip. The cultural productions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were regarded as ethnographic research materials, souvenirs to be purchased, or as curiosities by a people thought to be disappearing. It was not until the twentieth century was well underway that Indigenous cultural objects were discussed as artworks and even longer before they became part of Australian art histories.46 Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Gurang

Price and Provenance 57 Gurang artist Richard Bell’s demonstration in art and writing that ‘Aboriginal Art – It’s a White Thing’, highlights how, in spite of nineteenth-century cultural expressions being known and collected, Aboriginal art as a category and its appreciation as contemporary art did not take place until the 1970s and 1980s.47 More recently, marketing scholars have sought to apply a decolonial lens to the construction of value in the Aboriginal art market in Australia. Chow, Carrigan, and Ozanne have looked at art intermediaries, including dealers and galleries, and where it is possible to break free from colonial ways of thinking or colonial power structures.48 In their analysis, it is the Indigenous intermediaries who show the greatest potential. This is echoed by Bandjalung curator and writer Djon Mundine who came to prominence in the 1980s and who for several decades has pointed to the colonial ways of thinking that underpin the artworld’s power structures in Australia. In 2005, he proposed five phases for the ‘discovery’ of Aboriginal art by non-Aboriginal Australia with the final phase being the present one in which ‘Aboriginal artists, art curators and art writers more centrally steer the discussion, definition, and interpretation of our own culture’.49 Yet, in 2022, when Chow, Carrigan and Ozanne published their writing, non-Indigenous collectors and dealers continue to solidify the legitimacy of settler-colonial structures, despite efforts to promote specific Indigenous artists and recognise ongoing power imbalances.50 We can observe the legacies of colonisation in the circumstances of the Sotheby’s auction as well as the under-representation of Indigenous people in influential positions within auction houses. The sale and repatriation of Barak’s painting and shield in 2022 highlights that valuing Indigenous art and heritage, and the cultural knowledge contained within, is now more than ever the subject of ongoing debates. As Wuthathi/Meriam legal scholar Terri Janke has identified, there is as yet no comprehensive framework for the protection of traditional knowledge in place. Cultural objects that come to auction, framed as artworks, have already traversed contradictory discourses that previously defined them along ethnographic and preservationist lines. A decolonial approach situates at its centre the fact that these objects are now understood as treasures connected to living people.51 I have highlighted some of those connections to people, albeit in a colonised context, that were crucial to the creation of each of Barak’s artworks. Their survival is due in part to the strong relationships he formed with those like the de Pury family, who acquired paintings, drawings, weapons, and tools from him at Coranderrk. The key to understanding Barak’s artmaking is to see that it was inseparable from his diplomacy, his advocacy for his people, and his preservation of Kulin cultural knowledge, the implications of which continue to play out today. Barak’s artworks were always double-coded envoys, intended to bridge different audiences and different knowledges. Their value was and is multiple: political, cultural, and artistic. They were made in fraught political circumstances, gifted, bought, sold, lost, cherished, and passed down for generations by families like the de Pury’s, absorbed into obscure ethnographic collections in Australia and overseas, and undergone a dramatic re-evaluation from the museum to the art gallery that is now reflected in the keen interest of international auction houses like Sotheby’s. There can

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be no ambiguity, however, about where they belong today, and in the future. Carol Cooper, currently senior curator at the National Museum of Australia, describes Barak as a monumental figure, ‘a diplomat and communicator who tried to adjust to the world of the Europeans but was also a spokesperson for the rights of his own people’.52 For Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, a senior Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder, her great-great-uncle Barak’s paintings represent something even more profound to her people. They are ’our ancient treasures’ which should be revered because they are ‘embedded with respect and integrity and represent the stories of the oldest living culture in the world’.53 As these treasures make their exceptional journey back to Country, the community and their supporters are rejoicing at the achievement. Notes 1 Barak’s descendants trace their lineage via his sister Annie a.k.a Borate (c. 1838–1871). 2 Martin N. Nakata, Victoria Nakata, Sarah Keech, and Reuben Bolt, ‘Decolonial Goals and Pedagogies for Indigenous Studies’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1, no. 1 (2002): 120–140; 124, 29. 3 Nikita Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman: William Barak and the Trans-Imperial Circulation of Aboriginal Cultural Objects’ (PhD Doctoral Thesis, La Trobe University, 2019). 4 Tim Klingender, ‘Sotheby’s Aboriginal Art New York May 2022’, News Release, 9 November 2021. https://artmail.artcollection.net.au/t/ViewEmail/d/0F004503E639AC68 2540EF23F30FEDED/C6136AFE5E293FD0A0F01D70678E0DEE?alternativeLink= False. 5 Nikita Vanderbyl, ‘William Barak and the de Pury Family’, in Aboriginal Art New York 25 May 2022 Lot Listing (New York: Sotheby’s, 2022). www.sothebys.com/en/buy/ auction/2022/aboriginal-art/corroboree-women-in-possum-skin-cloaks-1897 6 The language groups making up the Kulin Nation are the Dja Wurrung, Wathaurong, Boon Wurrung, Taungurung, and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung. 7 Anon, ‘The Governor and the Gippsland Corroboree’, Mount Alexander Mail, 3 February 1887, 2. 8 Leonhard Adam, Primitive Art Exhibition [Catalogue] (Melbourne: National Gallery & National Museum of Victoria, 1943). 9 Carol Cooper, Aboriginal Australia (Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981). 10 Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman’, 279. 11 ‘Quagliotti, Winnifred Evelyn (Narrandjeri) (1931–1988)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne University Press, 2012, 18. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ quagliotti-winnifred-evelyn-narrandjeri-15578/text26792 12 Coranderrk was handed back in 1999 and is once again being cared for by its Traditional Owners. 13 Ian Clark, A Peep at the Blacks’: A History of Tourism at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 1863–1924 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 162. 14 Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, paperback ed. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in Association with National Gallery of Australia, 1996). 15 Giordano Nanni and Andrea James, Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2013), 86. 16 Nanni and James, Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country, 19. 17 Diane Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, eds. Laura E. Barwick and Richard E. Barwick (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 1998). 18 Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reakton, 2016), 56.

Price and Provenance 59 19 Nanni and James, Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country. 20 Nanni and James, Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country, 204. 21 The Aborigines Protection Act 1886 (Vic) No. 912, 1886. http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/ legis/vic/hist_act/tapa1886265/ 22 Max Allen, ‘Not Forgetting Yous at All’, in Karlie Hawking and Yarra Ranges Regional Museum (eds.), Oil Paint and Ochre: The Incredible Story of William Barak and the de Purys (Lilydale, Vic: Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, 2015). 23 Hawking and Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, Oil Paint and Ochre, 28. 24 “The Collections of the M.E.N.,” Ethnographic Museum of Neuchâtel, 2019, accessed 2/09/2022, www.men.ch/fr/collections/. The Museum website notes that JamesFerdinand de Pury (1823–1902) is said to be from a different branch of the family to the controversial David de Pury whose wealth derived from slavery in Brazil. 25 Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman’. 26 Mandy Nicholson and Nikita Vanderbyl, The Art Show, podcast audio, Abdullah brothers, Leeroy New and the return of a William Barak painting 2022, www.abc. net.au/radionational/programs/the-art-show/abdullah-brothers-leeroy-new-williambarak/13908352. 40.04–41.08 quoted with permission. 27 Jack Latimore, ‘Descendants Seek Support to Buy Barak’s Art from New York Auction’, The Age, 25 May 2022. www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/descendants-seeksupport-to-buy-barak-s-art-from-new-york-auction-20220524-p5ao1g.html 28 Carol Cooper, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections in Overseas Museums (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989); Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (University of Cambridge Press: Cambridge, 1996); Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen, and Louise Hamby (eds.), The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 29 The ongoing significance of carving from the south-east of the continent has been presented in the exhibition Murruwaygu, curated by Jonathan Jones, ‘Murruwaygu: Following in the Footsteps of Our Ancestors’, Art Gallery NSW, 2015. www.artgallery. nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/murruwaygu/, accessed 11 July 2017 (Exhibition 28 November 2015–21 February 16). 30 Hawking and Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, Oil Paint and Ochre. 31 Tim Stone, ‘Sale of William Barak Works Breaches “Aboriginal Cultural Lore”, Says Australian Wurundjeri Elder’, The Art Newspaper, 25 May 2022. www.theartnewspaper. com/2022/05/25/sale-of-william-barak-works-breaches-aboriginal-cultural-lore-saysaustralian-wurundjeri-elder 32 ‘Video: The Drum Monday 23 May’, 2022. www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-23/the-drummonday-23-may/13895110. 53:04 to 54:35 33 ‘Art Sale Devastates Wurundjeri Community’, Sydney Morning Herald, updated 19/06/2016, 2016. www.smh.com.au/comment/art-sale-devastates-wurundjeri-community20160617-gplaai.html (na), accessed 25 June 2016. 34 Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century; Judith Ryan, Carol Cooper, and Joy Murphy-Wandin, Remembering Barak (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003); Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman: William Barak and the Trans-Imperial Circulation of Aboriginal Cultural Objects’. 35 Gabriella Coslovich, ‘Indigenous Art Coming Home after Setting Auction Records’, Australian Financial Review, 26 May 2022. www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/ indigenous-art-coming-home-after-setting-auction-records-20220526-p5aopr 36 ‘Supporting Arts and Tourism to Recover’, updated 29 April 2022, 2022. www.budget. vic.gov.au/supporting-arts-and-tourism-recover, accessed 12 September 2022. 37 Margaret Paul, ‘Descendants of William Barak Buy Two of His Works at New York Auction’, ABC News, 26 May 2022. www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-26/william-barakart-auction-new-york/101100606

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38 Tim Klingender, ‘Sale Announcement and Call for Entries’, News Release, 14 November 2022, https://mailchi.mp/7e7cc1653b3c/sale-announcement-call-for-entries?e=6a80fbc71d 39 Chloe Preece, Finola Kerrigan, and Daragh O’Reilly, ‘Framing the Work: The Composition of Value in the Visual Arts’, European Journal of Marketing, 50, no. 7/8 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-12-2014-0756 40 Preece, Kerrigan, and O’Reilly, ‘Framing the Work’, 1377. 41 Tamar Yogev, ‘The Social Construction of Quality: Status Dynamics in the Market for Contemporary Art’, Socio-Economic Review, 8, no. 3 (2009): 512. https://doi. org/10.1093/ser/mwp030 42 Stone, ‘Sale of William Barak Works Breaches “Aboriginal Cultural Lore”’; ‘About’, www.de-pury.com/about, accessed 1 August 2022. 43 Victoria L. Rodner and Elaine Thomson, ‘The Art Machine: Dynamics of a Value Generating Mechanism for Contemporary Art’, Arts Marketing (Bingley, England), 3, no. 1 (2013): 58–72. https://doi.org/10.1108/20442081311327165 44 Ann Galbally, The First Collections: The Public Library and the National Gallery of Victoria in the 1850s and the 1860s: University Gallery, the University of Melbourne Museum of Art 14 May – 15 July 1992 (Parkville: The Museum, 1992), 21. 45 Galbally, The First Collections, 22. 46 Susan Lowish, Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art (New York and Abingdon, Oxen: Routledge, 2018). 47 Djon Mundine, ‘White Face Blak Mask [Apologies to Franz Fanon]’, Artlink, 25, no. 3 (2005): 19. 48 Ai Ming Chow, Michal Carrington, and Julie L. Ozanne, ‘Reimagining the Indigenous Art Market: Site of Decolonisation and Assertion of Indigenous Cultures’, Journal of Marketing Management, 38, no. 17–18 (2022): 1983–2010. https://doi.org/10.1080/026 7257X.2022.2082513 49 Mundine, ‘White Face Blak Mask’, 22n1; Fiona Foley (ed.), The Art of Politics, The Politics of Art: The Place of Indigenous Contemporary Art (Southport, Qld: Keeaira Press, 2006), 58. 50 Chow, Carrington, and Ozanne, ‘Reimagining the Indigenous Art Market’. 51 Terri Janke, True Tracks: Respecting Indigenous Knowledge and Culture (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2021), 23. 52 Carol Cooper, cited in Kelly Gellatly, ‘When the Wattles Bloom Again: The Barak Project’, Art Journal, 51 (2013). www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/when-the-wattles-bloomagain-the-barak-project/ 53 Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin cited in Judith Ryan, Carol Cooper, and Joy MurphyWandin, Remembering Barak (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003), 6.

4

The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos Coats of Arms from the Australian Frontier Darren Jorgensen

In December 2018, the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) rehung its collection to include an Australian faux coat of arms, assembled from three different historic carvings (Figure 4.1). An emu and kangaroo sit on either side of a spectacular Adnyamathanha shield from the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, in a combination of settler Australian and Aboriginal Australian art styles. The carved emu is dated to c. 1930, and probably comes from Port Augusta, Ooldea, or another stop along the same transcontinental railway line, where Indigenous artists had begun making animals for its passengers during the 1920s. The carved kangaroo is attributed to an unnamed settler artist from South Australia and is dated to c. 1845 (Figure 4.2), predating the rise of an animal carving movement among people of the Western Desert, a vast area covering most of the interior of Western Australia and extending into South Australia and the Northern Territory. From the late 1800s, carvings of emus, kangaroos, lizards, and snakes were bought by travellers on the transcontinental trains and roads that were built to stretch across the continent. Animals and plants were also carved into classically carved forms, such as coolamons, shields, and spearthrowers, to be collected as examples of Indigenous Australiana. The shield is a strikingly brilliant example of Adnyamathanha pyrography, or wood burning, and is dated to about 1930, when the Western Desert carving movement was at its most prolific, at the tiny settlement of Ooldea on the railway line between Adelaide and Kalgoorlie, a major mining town in Western Australia. The shield features emus, kangaroos, swans, and horses walking or swimming as though from one side to the other in banded rows, above an emu sitting atop a nest of eggs. It is easy to accuse the AGSA of neo-colonialism here, as the shield is incorporated into a symbol of nationhood that was conceived by excluding Aboriginal people.1 This concept of recolonising, however, overlooks the way in which Aboriginal artists have themselves appropriated the coat of arms to decorate clubs, shields, walking sticks, and more recently to make tjanpi, soft sculpture that is partly made from native grasses. It also overlooks a long history of animal carving by artists living on the contact frontiers of pastoral and missionary Australia, in which, this chapter argues, emus and kangaroos play a duplicitous role. These antipodean animals symbolise nationhood when included in the Australian coat of arms, but within the carving and tjanpi movements, they represent a politics of Aboriginality amidst cultural and material exchange. The installation creates a continuity between carvings made by DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-5

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Figure 4.1 Installation view: Elder Wing of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2018. Photo: Saul Steed.

Adnyamathanha, Western Desert, and settler artists, bridging carving histories not only between settler and Aboriginal artists but also across Aboriginal communities. The AGSA installation of animal carvings prompts us to rethink the way these artists, working on the frontiers of Australian society and using skills inherited from families and traditional life, repurposed symbols of nationhood. The Elder Wing The historical experience of Aboriginal Australians in the early twentieth century was substantially different from that of Europeans and the settler population of the country. Exhibitions that suggest there are motifs shared by Aboriginal and nonAboriginal artists risk the censure of an audience educated in the inequality between the two peoples. When the AGSA combined Aboriginal Australian art with European, Oceanic, and settler Australian art in its new hang, it attracted criticism from Ali Hayat, who accused the AGSA of recolonising its collection.2 The faux coat of arms is not the only curatorial conceit in the rehang and not the only recombination of Aboriginal, settler, Oceanic, and European arts on the wall. These recombinations are part of an approach that was fostered at AGSA by then Director Nick Mitzevich and by curator and then Assistant Director Lisa Slade. Mitzevich was Director of AGSA from 2010 to 2018 before he became Director of the National Gallery of Australia, overseeing a similar rehang of its Australian art collection. Mitzevich and Slade sought to improve attendances with provocative purchases and displays.3 Take, for example, the 2018 installation of Auguste Rodin’s

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Figure 4.2 Kangaroo, c. 1845, South-East Adelaide Hills, South Australia. Casuarina, iron, glass eyes, plaster. Gift of Dr Robert Lyons to the Art Gallery of South Australia, 2014.

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sculpture, Flying Figure (1891–1892), alongside Tom Roberts’s painting of a drover on horseback rounding up sheep, A Break Away (1891). The poses of the figures in both are near identical. In reaching across the wall, Rodin’s sculpted torso appears to mimic Roberts’s shepherd, who leans out of the saddle. AGSA curator Tracey Lock argues that Roberts and Rodin, like other artists of the period, were fascinated by the new technology of photography and its effects of movement, bringing about this new, dynamic pose in art of the 1890s.4 Such insights are typical of good curating, in which artworks reflect not only the historical experience of artists but also new ways of seeing the world. The gambit becomes risky, however, when curating work from Aboriginal Australia in which history has been fraught by colonisation. The Australian provocations have taken place in the Elder Wing, which once welcomed visitors at its entrance with the busts of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal dignitaries; on one side, the Tasmanians, Trucaninny, and her husband Woureddy, and on the other, those of explorers Charles Sturt and George McLeay. The pairing sums up something of the ambition of the AGSA’s new curatorial gambits to trouble Australian art history. The beginnings of these gambits may lie in the 2012 show by Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist, Jonathan Jones for the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art. Jones arranged the colonial paintings of the Murray-Darling River system by their Indigenous names. This show also featured a wall display by contemporary non-Indigenous Australian artist Tom Nicholson of 38 painted copies of H.J. Johnstone’s Evening Shadows (1880), one of the most reproduced paintings in Australian art history. Together, these exhibitions created a troubled relationship between colonial representations and the Indigenous history of the country, as well as between high Australian art and kitsch.5 In 2018, the Elder Wing featured kaolin smoking pipes made by the Arrernte artist, Erlikilyika (1865–1930), also known as Jim Kite, amidst Indian colonnades and wallpaper inspired by William Morris (Figure 4.3). This partition of the Elder Wing suggests that this Arrernte man was influenced by the styles of Persia and India, in objects brought to Australia by so-called ‘Afghan’ cameleers from present day India, Pakistan, and Iran.6 Erlikilyika shaped hands, faces and more abstract designs to hold the tobacco bowls of his pipes. There is no direct evidence that the styles of Persia or India influenced Erlikilyika, since clay figurative pipes are part of European and, particularly, English culture. In the AGSA display, however, there is a suggestion that he may have been inspired by the Afghan cameleers who once travelled the deserts carrying goods for early miners, pastoralists and telegraph-station operators. Erlikilyika may also have been inspired by Chinese miners, gardeners, and cooks who populated the desert at this time. The effect of the rehang is to open these pipes to visual interpretation, to de-Aboriginalise the pipes, and make them a part of a cross-cultural history of the continent. As Lock makes clear, the new Elder Wing hang features ‘artists working in an international experience but in human contexts’.7 Another installation in the AGSA gallery is modelled on the famous 1920s salon display of European, African, and Oceanic art on the walls of the Parisian apartment of the French surrealist theorist, writer, and poet, Andre Breton (1896–1966). The new AGSA hang puts mid-century settler Australian paintings and Oceanic shields alongside Arnhem Land and Kimberley bark paintings in an eclectic display of

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Figure 4.3 Erlikilyika (Jim Kite), Untitled (clay pipe), c. 1913 on display in the South Australian Museum. On loan from the South Australian Museum. Gift of A.V. Heidenreich to the South Australian Museum, 1974.

surrealist ethnography. Celebrated settler Australian painters Ian Fairweather and Albert Tucker sit alongside an anonymous Asmat bark shield from West Papua and a 1970 Wandjina Spirit by Ngarinyin artist Charlie Numbulmoore from north-west Australia. The wall is a clutter of different types of art, suggesting the global universality of art practice rather than the particulars of any one art history. This part of the Elder Wing lends itself more than any other to postcolonial critique, since it gambles on an unreconstructed display of what has long been critiqued as a kind of primitivism. Suzanne Close writes that the ‘sensibilities of individual works are lost in the aesthetically jarring display, dominated by the curatorial agenda’.8 Close is particularly critical of an installation of Kunwinjku paintings from Arnhem Land that sit on either side of an animated film from 1929 by New Zealand experimental filmmaker, Len Lye. The film, called Tusalava, was inspired by the story of the Udnirringita, the totemic witchety grub group of Central Australian Arrernte people.9 The story is documented in Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) by eminent Melbourne-based anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer and his fieldwork collaborator, Alice Springs postmaster Frank Gillen. Tusalava, however, takes its name from a Samoan word and shows the influence of Pacific carving in its animated faces that resemble carved masks as they morph into animated abstraction.10 Lye took his inspiration from what he thought of as an ‘old brain’

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that could be seen in Aboriginal and Pacific material culture.11 Some of Lye’s other works were inspired by Indigenous materials. He scratched his film Free Radicals (1958), for instance, with American Indian arrowheads. The Peanut Vendor (1936) is more ethically problematic, as Lye animates the image of a monkey dancing the Rumba. The AGSA curators are true to Lye’s roaming primitivism in juxtaposing Tusalava with two paintings of the rainbow serpent, one by Billy Yirawala and the other by Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek. Nadjamerrek’s painting is called Rainbow Serpent (1972), and the Yirawala painting is Katjailen (The Serpent) (c. 1969). Arguably, however, these paintings are of very different Dreamings, and on different country, to the Udnirringita. They are aesthetically striking, but with very different Indigenous subjects. Slade defends this reinvention of surrealism, by arguing that that placing such a wunderkammer in the southern hemisphere displaces the Eurocentrism of European and settler Australian art. Rather than the surrealist works, it is the bark paintings that are the focus for an antipodean viewer. This reorientation of place displaces the centrality of European art movements such as surrealism to art’s history, in a decolonising perversion of surrealist ethnography.12 The Coat of Arms These debates over the new Elder Wing hang are pertinent to the faux coat of arms, which sits on a wall that has been especially erected to partition it from the international part of the gallery. The faux coat of arms introduces the Australian section of the gallery as the pairings of Trucaninny and Woureddy, Sturt and McLeay once did. Given its age and origins, the carved kangaroo is the most unique carving in the three-part installation of the kangaroo, shield, and emu. The kangaroo is dated to c. 1845 and was donated by Robert Lyons, who is from a Germanic South Australian family and has amassed a collection of folk art from the state. This provenance suggests it was made by one of the many Germanic migrants who fled Prussia to SA during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, bringing their skills in felling, turning, and carving wood to new settlements in the hills just north of Adelaide.13 While the emu and the shield are made of mulga, a wood commonly used for carving in the dry regions where Aboriginal settlements were situated, the kangaroo is casuarina, and incorporates iron, plaster, and glass eyes. Casuarina’s distribution in the nineteenth century was mainly in coastal regions, where the new settler populations were based. The incorporation of glass, iron, and plaster materials in this early year of colonisation also suggests its settler origins. While the shield and kangaroo are part of a largely twentieth century art history of figurative carving and pyrography, the kangaroo troubles this history with an earlier example of animal carving by European rather than Aboriginal hands. It has, however, an uncertain and probably unknowable provenance, as the AGSA came to acknowledge. In 2019, the curators changed the didactic panel that accompanied the kangaroo. The first panel attributed it to the Adelaide Hills, while a second, later panel was more general, saying simply ‘South Australia’. The change is symptomatic of the uncertainty surrounding historic carvings, which often arrive in collections accompanied by minimal information about their makers.

The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos 67 Uncertainty about provenance particularly applies to Aboriginal carvings, which were collected anonymously along railway and telegraph lines, as well as on missions and pastoral stations. The animal carvings, as well as walking sticks, coolamons (shallow vessels), spearthrowers, and other classical wares, were sold to passengers at the train stops of Port Augusta, Ooldea, and Yalata. The train did not stay at the sidings long, and a photograph from 1940 suggests that passengers did not even leave the train to make such trades, as they leaned through the window to negotiate with Aboriginal men and women who peered up at them from below.14 Further north, carvers sold their wares to bus tourists of the Central Desert during the 1950s and 1960s, on their way from Alice Springs to Uluru. Missions such as Nepabunna that was home to Adnyamathanha people in the Flinders Ranges also facilitated the production and sale of classical Aboriginal artefacts, as well as European styles of plaques, bowls, and spoons. The sales of carvings served to finance this and other missions. During the 1960s and 1970s, boxes of carvings were sent from the Ngaanyatjarra settlement of Warburton in Western Australia to Perth, while boomerangs and wall plaques were the specialty of Hermannsburg, north of the South Australian border during the 1930s and 1940s. Some types of carved objects proliferated and were presumably more in demand than others. Boomerangs, as symbols of Aboriginality, if not of Australia itself, were popular as were the tools of hunting, including spears and spearthrowers. The style of decoration on these objects owed much to classical Western Desert designs, but other styles and types of objects were owed to European influence, including mulga plaques and walking sticks. The continuity of these styles across settlements testifies to the extensive traffic of carvers around the region, and the opportunities they found in selling their work to settlers travelling through regional and remote Australia by train, truck, and car. It may be that the AGSA’s emu was carved by Moonee David, who is named in a newspaper article that pictures him with a kangaroo carving.15 In the absence of solid provenance, such attributions are often speculative, as buyers of these animals and other carvings spent little time with artists who today remain sadly anonymous. It is, however, possible to make a more certain attribution to the shield in the middle of this faux coat of arms. The AGSA’s didactic panel attributes it to ‘Adnyamathanha people’, but it is likely the artist was Davy Ryan or Henry Wilton, two of the more prolific carvers of the Adnyamathanha School. Ryan and Wilton are known for the quality of their work and for their interest in animals. The intricate figures of kangaroos, fish, horses, and a seated camel on this shield indicate a skilled and experienced artist. The fauna represents a bounty of meat, from mobile cattle and swans to two emus standing above a nest of eggs. The shield pictures a lively state of nature from an earlier era of Australian history when animals crowded the landscape. Camels were once extensively used for transport through Adnyamathanha country and extending into the dry north, while the fish may have been from the Murray River system that was once a part of an old trading network to the east. The estimated date of 1930 suggests that it was made at Nepabunna, where in the early 1930s the missionaries encouraged a culture of carving to support the mission’s endeavours, but paid its artists little.16 The silhouette style, in

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which pyrographed animals are burned to stand out from the wood, makes the Adnyamathanha School distinct amidst a carving movement that extended across South Australia and into Western Australia, as well as north into the Central Desert.17 The appeal of such carvings to a newly federated settler population may well have been that they provided relational authenticity as the souvenir of an encounter with an authentic Aboriginal person. The hand of the artist assured the buyer of the traditional quality of the item and its connection to a distinctly different culture and people. In a series of publications, Ian McLean has described Aboriginal art as a modern art movement because its work is syncretic, combining both Indigenous and non-Indigenous influences to create something new.18 McLean’s argument extends not only to new genres such as emu and kangaroo carvings but also to more traditional forms of carving made for sale and trade across remote Australia. This is because they were not made for ceremonial or functional use but were made to be a part of the modern economy. Coolamons and shields, and boomerangs and spearthrowers, were made to simulate their classical contexts without being classical. There are other animal carvings installed on this AGSA wall below the coat of arms. Two wooden kangaroos that face each other in a pose that mirrors the emu and kangaroo above. One of these kangaroos is also from the Robert Lyons collection and is dated to c. 1900. There are two wooden decoy ducks here too, swimming below the left of the coat of arms. The ducks are dated at c. 1910, are from the settlement of Blanche Town on the Murray River, and were likely to have been used by hunters. While the practice of making and deploying decoy ducks is European in its origins, the carving of decoy ducks was also practiced by Aboriginal craftsmen.19 These carvings invite a cross-cultural interpretation, since animals are carved by both settlers and Indigenous people who are invested in their symbolism. The multiplication of wooden animals here suggests the reproduced quality not only of the animal carving and pyrography but of the coat of arms itself. Outlined on the back of pound, shilling, threepence and florin coins, the coat of arms was a highly visible part of the currency of early Australia. Introduced in 1910, the early currency was significant for defining the identity of the fledgling country and more simply as a means to buy food and other essentials. Carvers nicknamed the tourists, who bought artefacts from remote Aboriginal craftsmen in Central Australia, ‘two bob’ after the price that they shouted in an attempt to secure a bargain boomerang.20 ‘Two bob’ or two shillings was little money in those days, as in the expression ‘carrying on like a two-bob watch’, a cheap watch that went too fast. Today’s Aboriginal artists are celebrated in a way that was unthinkable during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aboriginal artists are increasingly visible amidst an appetite for exhibitions and conversations around the place of Aboriginal people in the nation. In the early twentieth century, following the federation of the colonies in 1901, Aboriginal people were rendered almost invisible by the rise of Australia as a new nation, institutionalised into missions, reserves, schools and pastoral stations.21 Aboriginal families were decimated by disease and regarded as late as the 1930s and 1940s to be a dying race, or at least one that would be assimilated into the greater Australian population. The making and trade of artefacts offered a rare opportunity for Aboriginal people to create economic opportunities

The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos 69 for themselves and to represent a nascent, pan-continental Aboriginal identity to white Australians, amidst poverty, disempowerment, and the horrific practice of taking children away from their parents. In their turn, white Australians were enthusiastic about collecting Aboriginalia that represented both a dying race and expressed an authentic Australian iconography. Boomerangs, coolamons, kangaroos, snakes, spears, and spearthrowers were traded across the deserts of Australia and on missions and government settlements. Institutions including Bungarun in the Kimberley, Cherbourg in Queensland, La Perouse in Sydney and Nepabunna in the Flinders Ranges became factories for the manufacture of inscribed artefacts. At Cherbourg, thousands of blank boomerangs were carved from imported wood before being inscribed with designs of animals, hunting and station work scenes. At La Perouse, a stand welcomed visitors who were able to take away their boomerangs inscribed with pictures of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, souvenirs of the part of the country that had been subject to the longest colonial occupation. It is with this widespread manufacture of souvenir art in mind that it is interesting to find, amidst the many subjects of carving, that the Australian coat of arms was reproduced on both shields and clubs and influenced their designs. Gallipoli veteran Douglas Scott collected a rudely etched copy of the symbol on a toy spearthrower when he went to Central Australia to work after returning from the First World War.22 An earlier version of the coat of arms was also collected from an inscribed lil lil, a type of club made in south-eastern Australia, at the beginning of the twentieth century23 (Figure 4.4). This is no toy, measuring half a meter and being made of hardwood. The ‘Advance Australia’ coat of arms, in use from 1908 to 1912, bore the emu and kangaroo motifs, but used a differently designed shield in between them. A commonwealth-style star was placed above this shield with ‘Advance Australia’ written onto a scroll beneath. The appearance of coats of arms on Indigenous carved objects at this time suggests the symbiosis of Aboriginal and Australian symbolism. Through these carved works, the artists suggest to a newly nationalistic settler population the presence of Indigenous people as a part of Australia. Since the 1980s, the appropriation of Aboriginal motifs has been of ethical and intellectual interest to Australian art historians and critics.24 The debate over

Figure 4.4 Lil Lil club, year unknown. Private collection.

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appropriation and the representation of Aboriginality has a long history to draw upon, but there has been relatively little discourse around reverse appropriation, that is, the way in which Aboriginal artists used the motifs of the invaders in strategies of creativity and survival.25 It is possible to interpret the use of the coat of arms on carved artefacts as one such reverse appropriation, as a motif consciously lifted from settler culture to be traded back with this culture in an exchange. There is some evidence for the intentions of carvers in the interpretations and memories of their descendants. Artist Joseph ‘Yugi’ Williams is able to interpret the way kangaroos and emus are painted onto his grandfather Tracker Nat’s coolamons, shields and spearthrowers from a Warumungu perspective. Nat was working between the 1930s and 1950s, and rather than painting his animals running, bounding or feeding, he placed his emu and kangaroo to face each other as they do in Australian coats of arms. Nat sold his artefacts to settlers making their way through Phillip Creek Mission, Tennant Creek, and the government settlement of Warrabri in northern Central Australia. He not only made artefacts for commercial reasons but also gifted artefacts to politicians, teachers and other important figures who were in some way serving the Warumungu community. Williams describes Nat’s generosity with these artefacts in terms of ngijinkirri, a Warumungu mutual gifting that implicates the giver and receiver into a relationship of obligation.26 Nat’s art created relationships with those outside the small society of Aboriginal people living in this region to further the political interests of the Warumungu people. The use of the emu and kangaroo on his artefacts can be interpreted as a way of reaching common symbolic ground with the settlers he aimed to impress. Through his carvings, Nat was a visual and material diplomat. The motif of emu and kangaroo facing each other is also found on walking sticks made by Ted Coulthard and Winne Ryan and their five daughters on the Nepabunna settlement in Andymathanha country, South Australia, during and after the 1930s. The kangaroo and emu are shaking a paw and claw, the figures resembling the ‘Advance Australia’ coat of arms. Contemporary Andymathanha carver and Ted’s great grandson Kristian Coulthard explains that this emu and kangaroo symbolise agreements between people, particularly gentlemen’s agreements and friendships.27 Such agreements have been a part of doing business for the Coulthard family for generations. When Ted and his brothers started a carting business, Kristian and his father Vincent Coulthard struck up an agreement with Balcanoona Station.28 They asked the bosses at Balcanoona that if they carted wool and stores from the station to the railhead and back with their donkey teams, if the bosses could give the Adnyamathanha place to live. This kind of handshake agreement is represented by the kangaroo and emu on these old walking sticks. They symbolise mateship and friendship and agreements, and that even different animals can coexist, and we can get along even when opposite, udnyu and yura. Usually, Kristian says, the pyrographs of this symbol are the first carvings to sell, in a testament to the way in which carving itself stands for an agreement between the artist and his customer, in a kind of bridge between people. It is instructive to return to the lil lil from c. 1910, and to the carved and pyrographed animals from the transcontinental railway line, with this visual diplomacy

The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos 71 in mind. Could these animal carvings represent an attempt to broach the cultural and racial divide with figures commonly recognised by both Aboriginal and settler Australian viewers? Could the appropriation of the coat of arms on the lil lil be part of a diplomatic strategy on the part of an unknown artist at the dawn of the twentieth century? These questions are for a large part unanswerable but only in the sense that so much art from the past remains enigmatic, marooned in the historical multiplicities that produced it. It is, however, surely too simple to dismiss the carving movement as commercial opportunism – the way the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt did in their later years – and as not truly representative of Aboriginal art.29 Nor would it be accurate to romanticise the diplomatic function it was performing, or to dismiss it as a symptom of the assimilationist and protectionist policies of Australian governments, at the hands of which these artists were then suffering. In his 2006 book Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art, Ian McLean argues for transcultural thinking around the history of Aboriginal art. Extending his argument for Aboriginal art being a modern, syncretic movement, he turns to the concept of the transcultural to describe that which appropriates the cultural forms of Indigenous and Western for to create art that exceeds both.30 The term supplements the anthropological emphasis on the cross-cultural, in which Aboriginal and Western societies come to art from distinct ontological and historical experiences of colonisation.31 To a degree the transcultural and crosscultural are interchangeable terms, since both describe difference and collusion in the collision of societies, Indigenous, and non-Indigenous. The transcultural emphasises the performative dimension of the encounter, in which difference is part of a deliberate play with identities and their politics. The cross-cultural is instead interested in the continuity of the cultures that it describes. The transcultural is defined by reinvention rather than the recurrence. It lends itself to the appropriation of the emu and kangaroo from the coat of arms, an appropriation of animals that have themselves been appropriated from their Indigenous contexts. Tracker Nat’s painted shields can be interpreted as transcultural as they simulate classical designs while also adapting Western styles of figurative representation. Classical Warumungu shields were certainly not painted with hunters, plants and animals as they are in Nat’s hand. And yet these shields also play a part in conflict with people outside the Warumungu community. Given to outsiders, they are part of a diplomatic strategy Nat used throughout his leadership of this community. He may not have painted the shield in the centre of his version of the coat of arms because a Warumungu shield was already there, as the surface of the painting. Nat employed these shields as means to further his negotiations with white authorities around the movement of the Warumungu people from township to mission to reserve to government settlement, amidst the arrival of cattle and gold prospectors on their country.32 Similarly, the painting of the Australian coat of arms on a hardwood lil lil club, one of the most formidable and rarest of artefacts from southeastern Australia, signifies an ongoing incommensurability between Australia and its original occupants. The two central motifs of the Australian coat of arms, the native animal and the shield, lent themselves to the reverse appropriation of Aboriginal artists. In the hands of carvers on the frontiers of settler society, animals

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and shields become duplicitous signs of an ongoing cultural and political collision, in the aftermath of an invasion that had left Aboriginal people impoverished and disempowered. Tjanpi A more recent example of a remote Australian artist remaking the national coat of arms carries on this politicisation of its symbolism. Ninginka Lewis’s We Were There and We Are Here (2018) is a version of the coat of arms made from spinifex grasses, raffia, and wool (Figure 4.5). The striking difference of Lewis’s coat of arms to the carvings discussed previously lies in the unity of its parts. While the kangaroo, emu, and shield appear as distinct entities on the lil lil, and as part of the AGSA’s carved coat of arms, here the woven form necessitates the joining of the parts into a whole, as the weave ties all of its parts together. Also striking and in contrast to these earlier versions is an emphasis on vegetation. The official, national coat of arms features branches, leaves and flowers of the golden wattle that are not featured on either the lil lil or the AGSA assemblage. Here Lewis has placed leaves and colourful fruit to approximate the wreathing of the coat of arms, their bright colours and friendly shapes lending this coat of arms something of its loose, tactile character. It is, in Pitjantjatjara, tjula which ‘means it is pliable and flexible’.33 There

Figure 4.5 Mrs N. Lewis from Pukatja (Ernabella), S.A., Australian Coat of Arms: We Were There and We Are Here (2018). Spinifex grasses, raffia, and wool. Copyright Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Photograph by Emma Poletti. Australian Parliament House collection.

The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos 73 is friendliness to this coat of arms, a warmth of colour and design. Fibre artist Nalda Searles describes the way works like this are made as ‘cobbling’, in which different materials are tied and stitched to make all kinds of sculptural forms.34 There is a material continuity between this kind of ‘cobbled’ work and carving. Before working with grass, Lewis was part of the revival of carving practices that took place across the southern desert region of Australia during the 1980s, as Maruku Arts began its operations from Yulara, the township next to Uluru. Although carving has long been practiced and sold by Pitjantjatjara artists in this part of the desert, Maruku mobilised it as part of a commercial operation. Carving was of particular interest to Pitjantjatjara artists, who had chosen not to make paintings like the Papunya artists to the north. The move has been interpreted as a conservativism on the part of Pitjantjatjara elders, who were among those who protested when paintings from Papunya were first exhibited with restricted ceremonial scenes.35 The arrival of the punu man in communities across the desert, ready to pay artists for carvings that would then be ‘onsold’, was a precedent for the tjanpi coiling and weaving that began during the 1990s. A series of workshops run by the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council introduced carvers to this new practice that combined native grasses with imported materials such as wool and raffia, to make baskets and animals. Many of the women had already been carving coolamons, lizards, and sometimes snakes as a part of their carving practice, as well as classically designed clubs and hunting sticks, when these women’s workshops diversified their art practice.36 Maruku Arts became the biggest buyer and seller of tjanpi as they used their existing network of galleries and shops.37 From her earliest work, Lewis used raffia as well as desert grasses, string and wool.38 Wool, Lewis says, ‘is good for the colour on top’, and in this coat of arms the wool certainly brightens the sculpture.39 The continuity between carving and tjanpi lies not only in the transcultural combination of tools and materials from local and settler material cultures. It also lies in an emphasis on making animals. Kanytjupayi Benson was the first to turn to animals as a subject, making an emu and then a dog. Taking up animal sculpture was not, however, a merely secular or commercial choice. When Benson began weaving dogs, Elaine Wanatjura Lane was not sure that it was the right thing to do, because dogs are ‘our sacred animal’.40 The significance of the emu and kangaroo, too, holds meaning on the Pitjantjatjara Lands, where the kalaya (emu) and malu (kangaroo) Dreamings cross the country. This significance, in which animals symbolise longstanding connections between Aboriginal people and the land, is one that Lewis wants to emphasise in speaking about her coat of arms sculpture: This work represents Tjukurpa (the foundation of Anangu life and society) and Nguraritja (sovereignty and traditional ownership), strength of culture, and the abundance of landscape which has nurtured and sustained us since ancient times. It also reflects on Anangu youth experiencing jail brutality, and demands that we, the original people of this land, be treated with respect.41

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The tjanpi sculpture combines this sense of continuity with the classical past, with the tjukurrpa (Dreaming) and country. This is placed within a contemporary context, in which Aboriginal people continue to face the consequences of invasion and colonisation. The coat of arms is an act of diplomacy, a means to marking the difference of Aboriginal points of view through a national iconography. The significance of the emu and kangaroo in Aboriginal versions of the coat of arms, and of animal carving and weaving more generally, can be interpreted after both Nat and Lewis in political terms. The making of carvings of native animals for sale to settlers was a reverse appropriation of the significance they had been ascribed within a newly founded nation. The faux coat of arms assembled by the AGSA curators suggests this reverse appropriation, as well as a continuity of art practice between settler and Indigenous animal carvers. The c. 1845 kangaroo carving, presumably by a recently arrived Prussian colonist of South Australia, is an early carved response to an encounter with not only a new kind of animal but also an early attempt to symbolise the experience of colonisation and settlement itself. The kangaroo image becomes a means by which to carve out a relationship with a strange country, an icon lending itself to appropriation. The upright stances of the kangaroo and emu, the power contained within these fast and powerful local fauna, lent themselves not only to animal sculptors and designers of the national coat of arms but also to the Dreamings through which the ranges and rock holes of the desert itself are carved. Although it was designed without consulting Indigenous people, the Australian coat of arms carries within it the ancient significance of these animals to the people who first symbolised them in ceremonies. Inscribed onto shields and spearthrowers, made into tjanpi and punu, the coat of arms animates the symbolic power of kangaroos and emus for both settler and Indigenous cultures. Acknowledgements With thanks to Clifford Coulthard, Cynthia Webster, Denise Champion, Kristian Coulthard, Lily Neville, Luke Scholes, and Michelle Young from Tjanpi Desert Weavers. Research for this essay was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 180103308. Notes 1 For critiques of the AGSA rehang, although not of the faux coat of arms in particular, see Yusuf Ali Hayat, ‘Domesticating Settler Colonization at the Art Gallery of South Australia’, Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 4, no. 2 (2019): 233–244; and Yusaf Hayat, ‘Na(rra)tion’, Fine Print, 23 (June 2019). www.fineprintmagazine.com/previous#/narration. See also Suzanne Close, ‘The Elephant in the Room at the Elder Wing’, Unpublished Essay, 28 September 2021. 2 See Ali Hayat, ‘Domesticating Settler Colonization’, 233–244; and Hayat, ‘Na(rra) tion’, and Close, ‘The Elephant in the Room’. 3 Caitlin Eyre, ‘“It’s Not Art, it’s a Monstrosity”: Reflections on Public Outrage at the Art Gallery of South Australia’, Fine Print Magazine, 10 (March 2017). www.fineprintmagazine.com/its-not-art

The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos 75 4 Suzie Keen, ‘Elder Wing’s New Hang Takes a Fresh Look at Australian Art’, InDaily: Adelaide Independent News, Wednesday 5 December 2018. https://indaily.com.au/ inreview/2018/12/05/elder-wings-new-hang-takes-a-fresh-look-at-australian-art/ 5 Another curatorial innovation within the field of Aboriginal art has been on display since 2017, in a juxtaposition of watercolour landscape paintings by Albert Namatjira with the dot and circle paintings of the early Papunya school, suggesting a continuity between the two. This rehang of the collection builds on recent rewritings of Western Desert art history by Vivien Johnson and John Kean, which revisit the significance of Namatjira to the emergence of the Papunya art movement. See Vivien Johnson, Streets of Papunya: The Re-invention of Papunya Painting (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015); and John Kean, ‘Dot, Circle and Frame: How Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura, Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangula created Papunya Tula Art’ (PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2020). 6 Anna Kenny and Philip Jones, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland, 1860s–1930s (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2007). 7 Tracey Lock, ‘Tuesday Talk: Tracey Lock Takes a Closer Look at the Elder Wing of Australian Art’, Filmed, 7 May 2019 at the Art Gallery of South Australia, video, www. agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/elder-wing-australian-art/ 8 Close, ‘The Elephant in the Room’. 9 Max Bannah, ‘Crossing the Dotted Line: Animation and Aboriginal Representation’, in Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara (eds.), Modern Times: The Untold Story of Australian Modernism in Australia (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2008), 64–65. 10 Baldwin Spencer and Frances Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (originally 1899) (New York: Dover Publications, 1968). 11 Len Lye, ‘Art of the Old Brain’, uploaded 2020. www.lenlyefoundation.com/page/ art-of-the-old-brain/4/93/ 12 Lisa Slade, ‘Breton’s Compass and Marek’s Map: Seeing Surrealism from the South’, Historie de L’Art, 84–85 (2019): 49. 13 Norris Ioannou, The Barossa Folk: Germanic Furniture and Craft Traditions in Australia (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995), 12–20. 14 Frank Leyden, Passengers on the Trans-Australia Train Leaning Out of the Train Windows at a Stop Between South Australia and Western Australia, ca. 1940. National Library of Australia Object Number 147017150. See also Tony Thomas, ‘How the Truth Went Begging’, Quadrant online, 10 January 2014. https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/ bennelong-papers/2014/01/truth-went-begging/ 15 ‘Moonee David’, Adelaide Advertiser, 8 July 1938, 32. 16 Kristian Coulthard and Clifford Coulthard, private conversation with the author at the Wadna Shop in Blinman, South Australia, 13 June 2021. 17 This concept of the silhouette style was used by Anyamathanha woman Lily Neville, private conversation with the author and Denise Champion and Cynthia Webster in Port Augusta, 26 May 2021. 18 See, for example, Ian McLean, ‘Crossing Country: Tribal Modernism and Kuninjku Bark Painting’, Third Text, 20, no. 5 (2006): 599–616; and Ian McLean, ‘Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira’, in Ruth B. Phillips and Elizabeth Harney (eds.), Mapping Modernisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 187–208. 19 Jared Thomas, personal communication, 28 January 2021. 20 W.E. Harney, To Ayers Rock and Beyond (Adelaide: Rigby, 1969), 100–101. 21 See Tim Rowse, Indigenous and Other Australians Since 1901 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2017). 22 Pelargonium2, ‘Aboriginal WOOMERA, Small, Hand-carved with Coat of Arms, Resin Work, 1920s’. www.ebay.com.au/itm/Aboriginal-WOOMERA-small-handcarved-with-coat-of-arms-resin-work-1920s/233566382697?hash=item3661a42a69:g: lHkAAOSwOmtentjz, accessed 2 June 2021.

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23 Davidson Auctions Sale 143, ‘Lot 40, Willem Kow Collection Tribal, Asian Arts’, Weapons/Estate and Collector, 17 October 2020, Sydney. https://auctions.davidsonauctions.com.au/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=143+++++++40+&refno=10012724&salet ype=. 24 Rex Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Rex Butler (ed.), What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the ’80s and ’90s (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art and Power Publications, 1996), 13–46. 25 On reverse appropriation, see Olu Oguibe, ‘Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art’, Third Text, 16, no. 3 (2002): 243–259. An exception to the lacuna of such studies in Australia lies in the scholarship around Tommy McRae, including Carol Cooper and James Urry, ‘Art, Aborigines and Chinese: A Nineteenth Century Drawing by the Kwatkwat Artist Tommy McRae’, Aboriginal History, 5, no. 1 (1981): 80–88; Ian McLean, ‘Mysterious Correspondences between Charles Baudelaire and Tommy McRae: Reimagining Modernism in Australia as a Contact Zone’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, 13 (2013): 70–89; and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Art in the Time of Colony (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 209–257. 26 Joseph Williams and Darren Jorgensen, ‘Rediscovering the Art of Tracker Nat: “The Namatjira of Carving”’, The Conversation, 4 July 2022. https://theconversation.com/ rediscovering-the-art-of-tracker-nat-the-namatjira-of-carving-184749 27 Coulthard and Coulthard. 28 Coulthard and Coulthard. 29 Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt with John Stanton, Aboriginal Australian Art (Sydney: New Holland, 1998), 136–141. 30 Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 10. 31 Anthropologists Howard Morphy and Fred Myers have advocated cross-cultural readings of Aboriginal art. See, for example, Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Howard Morphy, ‘Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research, 8, no. 1 (2001): 37–50; and Fred Myers, ‘Unsettled Business: Acrylic Painting, Tradition, and Indigenous Being’, Visual Anthropology, 17 (2004): 247–271. 32 See David Nash, ‘The Warumungu’s Reserves 1892–1962’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1 (1984): 2–16. 33 Ninginka Lewis, ‘This is What We Say When We Make Baskets’, in Penny Watson (ed.), Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2012), 324. 34 Christiane Keller, ‘From Baskets to Bodies: Innovation within Aboriginal Fibre Practice’, Craft + Design Enquiry, 2 (2010): 27. 35 Judith Ryan, ‘Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra Art of a New Millennium’, in Tjukurpa Pulkatjara: The Power of the Law (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2010), 4. 36 Kanytjupayu Benson, ‘Beginnings and History of the Tjanpi Weaving Movement’, in Penny Watson (ed.), Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Melbourne: MacMillan Art Publishing, 2012), 17. 37 Penny Watson, ‘Timeline’, in Penny Watson (ed.), Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Melbourne: MacMillan Art Publishing, 2012), 337. 38 Niningka Lewis, ‘I Thought I’d Get Some to Experiment With’, in Penny Watson (ed.), Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Melbourne: MacMillan Art Publishing, 2012), 70. 39 Niningka Lewis, ‘String, Wool and Raffia’, in Penny Watson (ed.), Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Melbourne: MacMillan Art Publishing, 2012), 319. 40 Cited in John Carty, ‘Purnu, tjanpi, canvas’, in Tim Acker and John Carty (eds.), Ngaanyatjarra: Art of the Lands (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012), 29. 41 Rhett Hammerton, ‘Ninginka Lewis’ Coat of Arms Acquired by Australian Parliament House’, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council News, 5 February 2019. www.npywc.org.au/news/ninginka-lewis-coat-of-arms-acquiredby-australian-parliament-house/

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The Toa of the Dieri Martin Edmond

I have drawn inspiration from my ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Central Australia, focusing not on art as an expression of individual genius or as an aesthetic, but rather on the work of art, where work is to be read as a verb rather than a noun and understood as a technê for making one’s life more individually and socially viable. Art opens up an artificial – one might say a ritual or utopian – space for getting around or beyond the mundane difficulties that beset us and the misfortunes that befall us. . . . Crucial to this point of view is the pragmatist assumption that art (ars) and technê are intimately linked, and that the work of art is a matter of making, acting, and doing before it is a form of knowledge, an object of contemplation, or a thing of beauty. Michael Jackson1

I In the first 70 years of the twentieth century four significant cross-cultural exchanges took place between Indigenous people and their colonisers in central and northern Australia: at the Bethesda Lutheran Mission at Killalpaninna in the eastern Lake Eyre region in 1903–1904, when the objects called toa were made; on a cattle station at Oenpelli in the Northern Territory in 1912, when local bark painters were persuaded to start inscribing their works on portable supports; at Hermannsburg Lutheran mission at Ntaria, west of Alice Springs, when the Hermannsburg school of watercolour painting was invented in the 1930s; and at Papunya, north and west of Ntaria, in 1970–1971, when the desert painting movement began to flower. You could say the gestation of that flowering did not just go back to the birth of the toa of the Dieri at Killalpaninna but to the many generations before the most recent interruption (or eruption) in time which caused these things to be made. Toa are sculpted wooden objects capped by a membrane coated with white gypsum, which, after it hardened, was painted in yellows, blacks, and reds. The wooden support is pointed at the other end as if made to be thrust, like a peg, into the ground, while the gypsum was shaped into various forms, including bird heads and human hands, or inlaid with material things like feathers, leaves, or sticks (Figure 5.1). About four hundred of these complex objects were made at Killalpannina over an indeterminate period between August 1903 and March 1904. They are associated with seven realistic figures of dogs shaped out of spinifex resin. DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-6

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Figure 5.1 AA298/42/15/70 Lake Gregory Toa. Artist Jennifer Thurmer, South Australian Museum.

No account survives of how these artefacts were made, or indeed of who, exactly, made them. They seem to have been the product of a shared enterprise between the old people of the Dieri and perhaps other tribes then resident at Killalpannina and the Lutheran missionaries and staff, notably the superintendent, Johann Reuther, and his schoolteacher and artist colleague, Harry Hillier.

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Reuther sold these objects, along with the rest of his collection, to the South Australian Museum in 1907. Toa, at that point, were described as directional markers, like signposts, left behind by individuals or family groups to tell those coming after them where they had gone. This explanation, although it continues to figure in some accounts, is almost certainly wrong. Rather, toa encode information about places which were already known; every toa has a relationship to a particular location in the eastern Lake Eyre region. Reuther described the story of this relationship and the place referred to in captions appended to each object in his collection. Toa may also have a connection to a map of the Lake Eyre region, which Hillier drew up around the same time under Reuther’s instructions, and, surely, that of the old people too. Of all the 2,700 place names on Hillier’s map, however, fewer than one hundred are represented by toa. It seems likely then that toa, rather than signposts, are sculptural representations of Country made for a purpose which remains enigmatic but not entirely inscrutable. It may be that their primary function is, or was, as a medium of exchange between Dieri people and the mission folk. If so, what was being exchanged? Perhaps the makers of the toa were paid at the time they made them, probably with tobacco, a common currency then. For Reuther, toa represented a substantial ethnographic and intellectual investment, and he benefited financially when he sold them as part of his collection and used the money to buy property. Their value to Dieri, and indeed to the South Australian Museum, which acquired them, cannot be expressed in monetary terms. Rather, they encode traditional knowledge of the Dieri in complex ways for purposes that European thought has not yet fully comprehended. The exchanges at Oenpelli, east of Darwin on the fringes of Kakadu, began nearly a decade later, in 1912. The freshwater country had been opened up around the turn of the century by buffalo hunters from Queensland. They traded sugar, alcohol, and tobacco for access and hides. One of them, Irishman Paddy Cahill, began farming at Oenpelli on the present site of the town of Gunbalanya, raising cattle and growing fruit, vegetables, and cotton. Cahill developed an interest in the local Indigenous peoples’ traditions, knowledge, and language. In order to keep their culture ‘intact’, he attempted to restrict contact with other Europeans, especially missionaries. In 1912, he was appointed protector and manager of the reserve at Oenpelli, the same year scientist Walter Baldwin Spencer was made Special Commissioner and Protector of Aborigines in Darwin. Together, the two men started commissioning bark paintings from Indigenous artists. In the next few years, around 200 such paintings were made and donated, along with a collection of ceremonial objects and personal ornaments, to the National Museum of Victoria, where Spencer was Director.2 When Oenpelli flooded during the Wet the local people, who divide into a number of clans, each with its own language and Kunwinjku as a lingua franca, would go up to live on the Arnhem Land escarpment. There, using ochre, ashes, and clay, they painted animals, hunting scenes, ancestor spirits, and Dreaming stories onto the rocks, often in the X-ray style. In the Dry, they painted on the more ephemeral support of bark, for ceremonial use. Spencer said he first saw the paintings in ‘bark shelters’ at Oenpelli, which he collected by cutting down the shelters and extracting the paintings. Later, he asked three local artists to produce works of this kind

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on prepared, portable pieces of bark, for which he paid first in tobacco and later in cash. The paintings were made using white pipe clay and two shades of ochre applied with a small stick that had been deliberately frayed at one end, ‘like a minute, old-fashioned, chimney-sweep’s brush’.3 These brushes, and this palette, with the addition of black, are still what bark painters use today. The innovation was simple but profound; a portable support for something hitherto made in situ, of ephemeral materials, for ceremonial use and discarded once that function had been fulfilled. Or else they were in fact decorations in houses (‘bark shelters’) used in ceremonies, perhaps initiations, which were alienated from their original environments and sent forth into the world as discrete artefacts of a kind familiar in the European world, whether considered as art objects or exhibits in a museum collection. Like toa, they came with explanatory texts attached. One of the earliest collected was described by Spencer as: ‘Warraguk, a spirit who walks around during the day searching for “sugarbag” (honey) and rests at night, hanging like a bat from trees’.4 As well as commissioning works, Spencer attended ceremonies and purchased carved wooden sculptures and other artefacts. He was told and recorded the ancestral precedents for these ceremonies, their creation stories, and associated creation journeys, while at the same time consciously excerpting material things from the flow of time and immuring them in the eternal past of the museum. His rationale was that these archaic and primitive societies would inevitably die out and therefore knowledge of them should be preserved for posterity, a conviction shared by the missionaries who, rather than anticipating ultimate extinction, foresaw a new, Christian future for these doomed pagans whose culture they too were, in their own way, memorialising. The exchanges at Ntaria/Hermannsburg Mission are better documented, if not necessarily better understood, than those at Killalpannina/Bethesda Mission and Oenpelli. At Ntaria and Papunya, the names of Indigenous practitioners and the works they made are known, which is not the case at the other two places. Ntaria’s most famous artist is Albert Namatjira, a Lutheran Christian and an (incompletely) initiated Arrernte man. He had journeyed into the west as a ‘native evangelist’ and shown interest and skill in making objects for the souvenir trade: wooden plaques with homilies burnt into them using a technique called pokerwork, boomerangs and womeras with animals, flowers, insects, birds, and other more abstract or traditional motifs inscribed upon them. These were made at the initiative of the then superintendent of the mission at Ntaria, Pastor Friedrich Albrecht, and always intended for sale. Albrecht wanted not only money to flow into the community but also ‘his’ people gainfully employed. Making souvenirs was one of the many strategies he tried to achieve this end. In the latter part of the 1920s, white Australian artists, mainly Melbourne-based, began to travel outback to paint. The earliest to reach Ntaria was probably painter and etcher Jessie Traill, who came in 1928. Traill employed the young Namatjira as a camel man when she went sketching and painting in nearby Palm Valley. Her work was exhibited pinned to blankets at the Alice Springs police station. Rex Battarbee and his painting companion John Gardner, driving a converted ambulance,

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came to Ntaria in 1932 and again in 1934, both times holding impromptu exhibitions at the mission. Gardner was an oil painter but Battarbee, because of his war injuries, used only watercolours. After seeing the 1934 show, Namatjira told Albrecht: ‘I can do the same’, whereupon Albrecht furnished him with materials, and Namatjira began teaching himself how to paint in the realistic style favoured by Battarbee. When he returned in 1936, alone, he and Namatjira travelled into the landscape together on the first of several painting trips during which Namatjira learned as much about the art of painting with watercolours as Battarbee was able to teach him. What Namatjira offered Battarbee in return is less certain: knowledge of Country, knowledge of Law, access to collectible artefacts, and other intangibles. The Hermannsburg school of watercolour painting continues to this day. Generations of Arrernte people, following Namatjira, have taken up brushes, made work, and sold it. Albrecht’s hope for the development of a sustainable craft skill has thus been realised. Whether traditional knowledge of Law and understanding of Country are encoded within the largely unpopulated landscapes of the Hermannsburg school is another question, one without a satisfactory answer. A nephew of Namatjira’s, Wenten Rubuntja, as a child in the 1950s used to watch his uncle paint, souveniring his used brushes and empty tubes of paint. Rubuntja grew up to practice both figurative and abstract (‘dot’) painting as pioneered at Papunya. He said the first is about Country and the second about Law.5 Papunya was also where Namatjira served out his custodial sentence for alcoholrelated offences in 1959. A number of painters who later became prominent in the Papunya Tula movement, such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, saw him painting there. They were aware of his example as a man who had made a good living for himself and his family by painting and selling art works. The exchanges at Papunya, which culminated in the fluorescence of artmaking in the early 1970s, had been building throughout the 1960s in the complex, mixed community which gathered at the government settlement around the bore at Papunya. People from country to the north, west, and south had ended up there. Relations between the different groupings were not always harmonious, and one of the factors behind the rise of the Papunya Tula painting school was a search for common ground among people with varying or antagonistic affiliations. The arrival of Geoffrey Bardon, a Christian and an art teacher, at Papunya in 1970 was the catalyst. A group of men decided to make a collaborative painting on the walls of the schoolhouse. This was done, and in the aftermath, a number of individuals, some working collaboratively, some working alone, began to transfer their traditional knowledge onto canvas or board, generally using water-based acrylic paints. These works were almost always painted lying flat on the ground and may be understood as a view of Country, seen from above, depicted not as landscape but as a theatre for the actions of ancestor figures as well as for mortal men and women. The use of dots in these works – ‘dot paintings’ – may sometimes act as a kind of camouflage, obscuring secret-sacred knowledge, encoded in the painting, from the eyes of those not entitled to see it.6 That there was an economic motive behind this movement cannot be doubted. The works were made to be sold, and there was keen interest among the artists in

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securing the proceeds from the sales of the things they had made. This does not mean the subject matter was secularised. Traditional knowledge was being repurposed for a commercial end, but it was meant to perpetuate, not desacralise, the Dreamings. This intent was expressed by one of the painters, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri: ‘The money belongs to the ancestors’.7 Like toa, like bark paintings, but unlike Hermannsburg watercolours, most works from Papunya come with explanatory captions of some kind. The methodology so pioneered ― the visualisation of Dreaming stories in works of art and their elucidation in written captions ― has proved remarkably resilient, has been adapted by remote communities all over Australia, and stands behind the extraordinary success of the Desert Art movement, both in terms of what it contributes to communities and as the engine for the making of works in a respected, collectible international style. II The toa and the early bark paintings from Oenpelli are effectively anonymous works, even though, in both cases, there are lists of names gleaned from the records of those who most likely made them or contributed to their making, as well as corroborating testimony by their descendants. On the European side, there is more information, and that is the line of inquiry followed here. Biography is an uncertain guide to history, especially art history, because it is always imprecise and, to some degree speculative, but sometimes it is all we have. The discussion will focus upon two figures active at Killalpannina when the toa were made, the missionary Johann Reuther and the teacher and painter Harry Hillier, with some remarks about Baldwin Spencer and retired policeman and storekeeper George Aiston. Reuther, Bavarian-born, in 1861, the son of weaver, came late to his calling. He was in his mid-20s when, on a snow-bound platform in Germany one Christmas Eve, waiting for the arrival of a mail train, hearing bells ring out across the town, he had an epiphany and decided to enrol at the Lutheran Seminary of Neuendettelsau at Hermannsburg in Lower Saxony.8 At this point he had finished his schooling, completed his compulsory military training and had been employed as a postman and then as a railway worker. Students at the seminary were given a solid grounding in classics and theology and were sent out into the world with a clear view of what their role was and how to accomplish it. One of the requirements was to learn the language of those people you were trying to convert. This had deep historical roots; Martin Luther translated the Bible into the vernacular precisely so that every literate German could read it. He believed it was a divine book that could be made over into any language on earth and still be comprehended in its entirety. The German anthropological tradition also favoured language learning alongside rational and impartial accounts of material culture, religious beliefs and practices, and folklore. One of Luther’s intellectual heirs, the philosopher Johann Herder, taught that any culture was as good as any other and that each culture expresses itself through a language which is, in turn, as sophisticated as any other. Herder collected folk tales as examples of peasant culture, as did his nineteenth-century successors, the Brothers Grimm. The primary anthropological task in this tradition

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was a description of the world and its cultures, without preconceptions and without judgement. Only then could right action follow. It is unclear how directly Reuther engaged with this school of thought but it seems likely that he absorbed its main tenets at Neuendettelsau, along with his younger fellow seminarian, Carl Strehlow. Both men’s activities once they emigrated to Australia bear this out. Reuther arrived in October 1888. While living in the Lutheran community in the Barossa Valley, he became engaged to the widowed daughter of his superior, and they married the following year. By Easter 1889, Reuther, his wife Pauline, and the three children from her previous marriage were installed in the mission house at Killalpaninna, where they would live for the next 18 years, during which time Pauline gave birth to eight more children, seven sons and a daughter. Reuther started on his language studies and made such progress that, by the early 1890s, with Strehlow, he was translating the New Testament into Dieri, the first translation of any biblical text into any Aboriginal language. There is debate about the relative contributions the two men made to this translation, with most scholars subscribing to the belief that Strehlow, the better linguist, must have made the greater contribution. Be that as it may, it was a remarkable achievement, and Reuther was instrumental in its commission, execution, and completion. Strehlow stayed three years at Killalpannina until, in 1895, he was sent north to revive the then moribund Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission at Ntaria. He remained there, with one break, for the rest of his life. Reuther continued his language studies, adding words to what would become a four-volume dictionary of the Dieri language. Not long before Strehlow left, a third seminarian from Germany, Otto Siebert, arrived at the Bethesda Mission at Killalpannina to take up the post of ‘bush missionary’. That is, he was to proselytise among those still living on country. Siebert was another brilliant linguist, able to preach a sermon in Dieri only three months after arriving at the mission. Until his departure due to illness in 1902 and his return to Germany, Siebert worked with Dieri, Wangkangurru, and other peoples, making detailed records of their languages, beliefs, and family histories. He photographed ceremonies, drew up a map of tribal boundaries and collected artefacts. He and Reuther worked amicably together for a time but ultimately fell out with each other over access to informants, the respective contributions each had made to Dieri ethnology, and even the ownership of items in the collections of artefacts they had assembled. Siebert went on to become Alfred Howitt’s principal informant for his 1904 book Native Tribes of South East Australia. Meanwhile, at Ntaria, Carl Strehlow was becoming as notable an anthropologist as he was a missionary, gathering a large collection of artefacts and writing an ethnography, in seven volumes, of the Western Arrernte, among whom he lived, and of the Loritja, their neighbours to the west. This work was written in German and published between 1907 and 1920. It has not yet been satisfactorily made available in English. Although Reuther’s ethnography was more or less complete before Strehlow began to publish his, he was still important to Reuther as an example, a provocation, a rival, and a friend. Reuther’s vast ethnography of the Dieri people – 13 volumes, 5000 hand-written pages – has never been published either and probably won’t be now. Though full

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of arcane and fascinating information – you can learn from it, for instance, how to cast a spell on 15 different types of objects, including waterholes, yellow ochre, brown ochre, the sun, and the rain – it is also repetitive, chaotic and idiosyncratic.9 When revising, rather than updating what he had written before, Reuther simply added the new material on to that which was already there. Like Strehlow, he also collected examples of the Dieri material culture for sale to museums. Toa formed a part of this collection and Reuther was, it seems, instrumental in their manufacture. In the period just before they were made, in the winter of 1903, Carl and Frieda Strehlow spent six weeks at Killalpannina. Possibly by pre-arrangement, while the Strehlows were there, Alexander Yashchenko, a Russian ornithologist and ethnologist travelling in Australia, spent ten days at Killalpannina. Reuther showed the Russian his voluminous documentation of Aboriginal material ‘in several ledgers’.10 Yashchenko was enthusiastic, urging Reuther to publish and offering to buy his collection for £10. The sale was agreed upon but for some reason did not go through. It is likely that these visits and the discussions they entailed had an influence upon the manufacture of toa, which seems to have begun soon after the Strehlows left in early August. When their existence was announced to the world by Reuther in March 1904 they had never been heard of before. One of their functions may have been to add saleable objects to his collection. This is not to accuse Reuther of cynicism or fraud. It is more likely he was in the grip of an enthusiasm bordering upon mania. Even so, the actual role he played in the making of toa is unclear. He might have acted as a patron, commissioning the items, extracting from their makers the information used in the captions, which he then wrote down, and purchasing them (using whatever currency) once they were complete. His long-term colleague at Killalpannina, Harry Hillier, was probably more directly involved in their making. He documented every toa, producing two sets of exquisite miniature watercolour images. One set is now in Germany, the other is in Adelaide (Figure 5.2). Hillier had by then been living at the mission for more than a decade. An Englishman, the son of a surgeon, he had come out to Australia aged 18 in 1893 for his health. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was given just six months to live. He was a devout Christian who soon after he arrived became affiliated with the Lutheran community in South Australia. He was directed by them to Killalpannina where he became ‘almost like a son’ to Johann and Pauline Reuther. His health improved in the dry desert air and he turned into an enthusiastic member of the mission staff, learning to speak both German and Dieri and teaching the missionary children and also those Dieri, of all ages, who wanted to attend his classes. There are figurative drawings of Killalpannina Mission from the early in the century which were most likely done by children under Hillier’s tuition.11 As well as teaching and documenting toa, Hillier made many fine drawings of Dieri shields, boomerangs and other artefacts. He donated to the British Museum more than two thousand illustrations of insects and other creatures which, unfortunately, have since been lost. Other artefacts he collected he sold, via his mother, at cost price, to English and Scottish museums. Some of this material he took back himself on visits ‘home’ and some was gathered after he left Killalpannina in 1905

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Figure 5.2 AA266/10/4 Toas 90–119. Artist Harry Hillier, South Australian Museum.

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and went to work, for five years, with Carl Strehlow at Ntaria. Hillier taught the young Namatjira in the mission school at Ntaria, and his classes may have included lessons in drawing and painting. Hillier also taught Carl Strehlow’s youngest son, Ted Strehlow, and became a life-long friend and a mentor to him. Despite what we know of his relationships and his work at the missions, Hillier himself remains inscrutable. One of his traits seems to have been abnegation, a refusal to embrace opportunities or undertake roles to which he felt he was not entitled or not qualified to perform. He declined an offer, for instance, to contribute ethnographic writing to the prestigious magazine Man, the official journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He also refused, when Strehlow was going away on leave in 1910, to accept a formal appointment at Ntaria because, he said, he did not wish to become a de facto missionary. He left the mission soon after. Did Hillier make the toas or teach others to make them at Killalpannina, as well as document them? Some toa show signs of having been worked with metal tools, some are carved out of soft wood, probably from packing cases, and some have webbing woven from parcel string. The gypsum that was applied over this netting and then sculpted came from traditional sources to the east. At Killalpannina, it was stock-piled and used to make plaster for the walls of houses. Dieri made skull caps out of gypsum for mourning ceremonies and it had other ceremonial uses, but it was not part of the day-to-day toolkit and its employment as a sculptural medium in toa was unprecedented. There was a workshop at Killalpannina and that is where toa were probably made by Dieri under the supervision of Reuther and Hillier. Two long-term lay workers at the mission, Herman Vogelsang and Ernst Jakob, may have helped. Toa encode traditional knowledge of places in the eastern Lake Eyre region in such a way as to be understood as a claim to title. For his captions, Reuther interviewed each individual about the toa they had made or which they had rights to or knowledge of, noted the exact place it referred to, and transcribed the information. Those few that lack captions, Reuther explained, did so because the owner was absent from the mission while he was making his notes or else deceased.12 In this way, toa became an active component in and a distinguishing feature of both his ethnography and his collection. If, as seems likely, they are at least in part Reuther’s own invention, they must have come out of his yearning for a scholarly reputation, his ambition to gather a collection of artefacts he could sell, and a genuine desire to preserve aspects of the culture of the people he lived among for so long. You can imagine the circumstances of their making as a period of high excitement and intense creativity, sustained over weeks, perhaps months. Historian and museum curator Philip Jones, the authority on toa, has demonstrated that the first ones made, which are larger than the rest, follow the pattern of imagery on headdresses worn in Dieri ceremonies. As such, they have a relationship with the tjurunga of the Arrernte to the north and west. Tjurunga too are complex works, made of wood or stone and inscribed with motifs, which function as a marker of title as well as a form of personal identity and a testament to a particular relationship with ancestor figures. Reuther may have had these functions of tjurunga in mind

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when he claimed that toa constituted a pictorial script, a language of signs in which each object represented a unique signifier. Jones writes: ‘Reuther’s fantasy of a picture-script with its unique signifiers had fused both with the flexible Aboriginal motif-set of the Dreaming and the nondescript wooden stakes or pegs used to mark resources or activities’.13 One of the mysterious things about toa is their name. The word does not exist in Dieri anymore and is not included in Reuther’s dictionary, though he used it elsewhere in his writing. He recorded it, for instance, as a component of two place names from Bilatapa country, to the south, defining one usage as a ‘sign, way-marker, indicator, sign-post, sign-language’ and the other, more directly, as ‘to bury’. Both entries have stories attached. Linguist Luise Hercus, in her study of Dieri and associated languages, suggests ‘toa’ is cognate with the word ‘thuwa’, which means to bury, or perhaps to poke into the ground, in Bilatapa, Yarluyandi, and Wangkangurra languages. It may once have existed in Dieri too but, if so, it went unrecorded and is now unremembered, except in Reuther’s re-purposing of it to name the objects made at Killalpannina.14 Jones goes further, suggesting that the re-purposing of the verb as a noun opened up the space for their manufacture: ‘An object might not only provide access to unencountered words, but words themselves might lead to undiscovered objects’.15 It is unknown if the use of the word pre-dated the objects, was applied to them while they were being made, or given afterwards, but it is clear that Reuther was inventing, naming and describing a class of artefacts which he claimed to be, on the one hand, a hitherto-unknown part of traditional Dieri material culture and, on the other, a unique discovery of his own. His assertion that they constituted a language of signs was accepted by Edward Stirling of the South Australian Museum when he bought Reuther’s collection in 1907 and was repeated for a long time afterwards. Others were not so sure. German scholar Baron Moritz von Leonhardi, who became Carl Strehlow’s editor and publisher, advised the Museum für Volkerkunde in Berlin not to buy Reuther’s collection, perhaps because of the extravagant and uncorroborated claims he had made on behalf of toa, though the Baron seems to have been just as concerned about the provenance of the seven spinifex resin dogs. He had never heard that Aboriginal people in Central Australia made realistic sculptures. Alfred Howitt, who noted the use of sign language among Dieri as early as 1861–1862, when he was searching for traces of the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, was sceptical of Reuther’s discovery of a ‘picture-script’ too. It wasn’t something he had observed in more than 40 years outback. George ‘Poddy’Aiston, a former soldier who fought in the Boer War, policeman and amateur ethnographer, was stationed at Mungeranie on the Birdsville Track from 1912–1923 and after his retirement built and ran the store at Mulka, also on the Track. Aiston thought toa were fakes. Among his informants were men who had been with Reuther at Killalpannina and they told him they had never heard of such a thing until the missionaries started making them. ‘The great Toa hoax was got up by one of the teachers who is now at Hermannsburg – he suggested the designs and supervised the making of those toas – a thing totally unknown to the tribesmen of this country’.16 He can only have meant Harry Hillier.

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Aiston, like Paddy Cahill and Baldwin Spencer, was a social Darwinist who believed in a pristine Aboriginal culture that was of great antiquity, unchanged and unchanging until the advent of Europeans, and now dying out. The anthropologist’s task was to record this culture for posterity. A consequence of this belief was the classification of any hybrid artefact, like toa, which used non-traditional materials or forms, as corrupt, degenerate, and without significance. Such artefacts were impure and therefore should not be in a museum, nor, perhaps, in the Dreaming either. Another of the arguments between ‘scientific’ anthropologists and missionary ethnographers is implicated here. Reuther, Strehlow, and others said the people they worked among already had a concept of a Supreme Being. The anthropologists disagreed, saying this was simply a convenient fiction meant to make the missionary’s job easier, but also because proof of such a belief would upset their evolutionary hierarchy, with the Christian God as the culmination of history. Such arguments seem academic now. Then, like the debate over the existence of a pictographic script, they were impassioned and sometimes followed up by threats of action. When Baldwin Spencer visited Ntaria in 1912 in his capacity as Protector of Aborigines, he recommended the Mission be closed down. Strehlow, who survived this attempt to undermine his enterprise, several times rebuked him and his collaborator, the Alice Springs postmaster Frank Gillen, co-author of The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899; 1927), for having no understanding of the language of the people they were writing about. Their informants spoke to them in English or in pidgin and they made elementary errors as a result. Reuther, who was himself never fluent in English, said the same. How could those who did not speak the language understand the complexities of Dieri society? They were bound to get things wrong. The ways in which Reuther might have got things wrong remained uninterrogated. There were reasons for this. By the time he had completed his dictionary, in 1904, he was showing signs of instability and fatigue. According to historian Regina Ganter: ‘He increasingly suffered from insomnia, trembling and epileptic fits, to which he referred as his “nervous condition”. In the end he believed that he would either have to leave it alone or face the lunatic asylum’.17 Sometimes after one of these fits he would fall into unconsciousness and sleep for hours. If it was Grand Mal epilepsy, as seems likely, you wonder how long it had afflicted him? Remember his vision on Christmas Eve on the snow-bound train platform in Germany that led him to the antipodes? Was that the aura before an attack? Reuther was a melancholic who sometimes prayed to God to end his earthly travails. He seems to have suffered the same fate that befell other nineteenth-century missionaries, a form of Stockholm Syndrome perhaps. Like Thomas Kendall in New Zealand, and David Cargill in Fiji, he was seduced then overcome by the strange world he was trying to understand. Ganter writes: ‘When he left the mission in a great hurry in 1906, it seems that it was his ethnographic work that he was running away from, rather than the suspicions of his Brethren’. (He had been falsely accused of impregnating a young Dieri girl.) ‘Perhaps he realised that his Dieri informants had turned the tables on him: he had become the student and they the teachers. They were colonising his mind and he was losing his’.18

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Baldwin Spencer was hospitalised in 1921 after an alcoholic breakdown, but recovered. Geoffrey Bardon also suffered a nervous breakdown, from which he never recovered, in the aftermath of the events at Papunya in the early 1970s, as if the outbreak of jouissance that led to the making those works had to be paid for in some way. The consequence of seeing too far into other worlds might be the loss of your own sanity, a vastation leading to madness. Reuther retired from the mission in 1906, sold his collection and with the proceeds bought a farm for himself and his family to settle upon. He died in 1914, in his mid-fifties, drowned with another man while trying to cross a flooding river. He never saw the toa exhibited. Their first public showing did not take place until after the Great War was over. They have remained of consuming interest, both to Indigenous people and to scholars, ever since. III Anna Kenny writes that for the Aranda (Arrernte) people on the mission at Ntaria, magical powers were invested in the Bible and in other kinds of documents. Christian law was immanent in the good book, which therefore became an object to be handled with care and respect. Senior lawmen were interested in this new technology of power. ‘Pepa’ was what Arrernte called Carl Strehlow; but ‘pepa’ also meant paper, in particular the Bible, which embodied the law. Kenny suggests that Arrernte lawmen told Strehlow everything that was necessary for him to produce their own book, the book of Arrernte law, on paper. Dieri, with the making of the toa, and their larger co-operation with Reuther’s ethnological project, may have been offering something similar.19 Reuther may or may not have known what he was being offered. His obsessive recording of data suggests, however obscurely, that he did. Toa were different from everything that had come before. Hybrid forms, invented at the time of their making, they encode traditional knowledge, while leaving their true function occluded. Reuther decided they were items of a picture script but it is more likely that they operated like tjurunga: as claims of identity and title, as propositions to do with Country and Law, as the double of a living person and the embodiment of the spirit of his or her totemic ancestor. Thus the making and the giving of toa, from a Dieri point of view, might have been a reciprocal act in return for the gift of the Bible. They might be a sculptural version of the Dieri’s Pepa. For the purposes of study by Western scholars their classification remains equivocal, suspended in a notional space between ethnological objects and works of art. They cannot really be classified as ethnological objects because they are unique, unprecedented, and the occasion of their manufacture did not recur. As works of art they are equally problematic. If a work of art is an expression, what are they expressing? A way out of this conundrum is to adopt Michael Jackson’s formulation that ‘the work of art is making, acting and doing’ before it is anything else. Only afterwards can the verb take on noun form and become, as toa have become, ‘a form of knowledge, an object of contemplation, or a thing of beauty’.20 Toa in this sense are a rich gift, a field in which further discoveries continue to be made.

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Toa are prophetic in other ways. In the Indigenous Australian context they initiate the tradition of pairing a mute, portable object, whether sculptural or painted, with a text that gives its story – its ‘pepa’. This tradition has continued with respect to works like the bark paintings, the canvasses and boards inscribed at Papunya, and the many other subsequent permutations of that model which followed. Toa are also inadvertently prophetic of the same development in the European fine art tradition; now every image in an art gallery must have its explanatory text and, for some viewers, an image cannot be satisfactorily understood without it. In terms of toa, the explanations so lovingly gathered by Reuther speak past each object to the landscape it represents and also through that object to the occasion of its manufacture. Baldwin Spencer recorded that the people he engaged with at Oenpelli and elsewhere were always keen to assist his research in order, he thought, to promote the importance and value of their own culture and their own beliefs. Mid-century anthropologist Ronald Berndt testified to the desire of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory to share knowledge about ceremonial matters as a means of transforming, for the better, their relationship with white administrators. Anthropologist Luke Taylor writes of the early bark paintings Cahill and Spencer commissioned: ‘rather than a baseline of traditional Aboriginal practice before contact, it is more appropriate to interpret these works as revealing excitement at the prospect of intercultural communication in a new mode of interaction’.21 The making of toa at Killalpannina over the summer of 1903–1904 can be seen as an example of Taylor’s ‘new mode of interaction’, one that, almost certainly, was undertaken during a prolonged, celebratory period of ‘making, acting and doing’ which, through the medium of the things so constructed, continues to resonate. Toa were made the way objects were made for ceremonies, and they commemorate, as ceremonial objects do, the occasion of their making. In addition, they are an idiosyncratic account of traditional knowledge of Dieri in the early twentieth century; a repository of mournful yearning of, and for, a kind of scholarship; and a novel art form, invented collaboratively by Indigenous and European practitioners, at a particular time and place which now seems, from this vantage, and increasingly, to be the site of a Toa Dreaming. Notes 1 Michael Jackson, The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), xiv. 2 M.A. Clinch, ‘Cahill, Patrick (Paddy) (1863–1923)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. https://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/cahill-patrick-paddy-5461; D.J. Mulvaney, ‘Spencer, Sir Walter Baldwin (1860–1929)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spencer-sir-walter-baldwin-8606 3 Spencer quoted in Luke Taylor, ‘Categories of “Old” and “New” in Western Arnhem Land Bark Painting’, in Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb (eds.), Long History, Deep Time; Deepening Histories of Place (Canberra: Australian National University Press and Aboriginal History Inc., 2015), 104–105. 4 Spencer quoted in https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/175325

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5 Wenten Rubuntja with Jenny Green, The Town Grew Up Dancing: The Life and Art of Wenten Rubuntja (Alice Springs, NT: Jukurrpa Books, 2002), 159 and following. 6 Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya: A Place Made after the Story (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004/2018). 7 Martin Edmond, Battarbee and Namatjira (Sydney: Giramondo, 2014), 8; also quoted in Stephanie Radok, ‘The Ethnographic Present: Aboriginal Art Today-the Gift that Keeps on Giving’, Artlink, March 2009. www.artlink.com.au/articles/3220/the-ethnographicpresent-aboriginal-art-today-th/ 8 Christine Stevens, White Man’s Dreaming: Killalpannina Mission 1866–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 119. 9 Regina Ganter, ‘Reuther, Johann Georg, Rev. (1861–1914)’ http://missionaries.griffith. edu.au/biography/reuther-johann-georg-rev-1861-1914. See also companion book to website: Regina Ganter, The Contest for Aboriginal Souls: European Missionary Agendas in Australia (Canberra: ANU Press and Aboriginal History, Inc., 2018). 10 Stevens, White Man’s Dreaming, 222. 11 John Strehlow, ‘Hillier, Henry James (1875–1958)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://adb.anu.edu. au/biography/hillier-henry-james-12982 12 Philip Jones and Peter Sutton, Art and Land: Aboriginal Sculptures of the Lake Eyre Region (Adelaide: South Australian Museum/Wakefield Press, 1986), 59–60. 13 Philip Jones, ‘Unearthing the Toa’, in Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2008), 280–281. 14 Jones, Ochre and Rust, 257. 15 Jones, Ochre and Rust, 277. 16 Aiston quoted in Jones, Ochre and Rust, 271. See also Philip Jones, ‘Aiston, George (Poddy) (1879–1943)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/aiston-george-poddy9320/text16359 17 Ganter, ‘Reuther’. 18 Ganter, ‘Reuther’. 19 Ganter, ‘Reuther’. See Anna Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa: An introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907–1920) (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2013). 20 Jackson, The Work of Art, xiv. 21 Berndt quoted in Taylor, ‘Categories of “Old” and “New”’, 106; Taylor quote 108.

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‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ A Cross-cultural Analysis of Aboriginal Art in Fashion and Textile Design Fabri Blacklock

Cross-cultural collaboration between Aboriginal artists and non-Aboriginal people has taken many forms, with traditional art practices combining introduced western mediums and materials and establishing Aboriginal art as a modern art movement. This chapter charts the history of the production of Aboriginal textiles in Australia and, more recently, internationally, and examines how modes of collaboration have changed from ‘arts and crafts’ taught and sold on missions and early remote art centres to today’s prestigious commercial collaborations in fashion and design. Aboriginal textile production began with a cross-cultural collaboration between Aboriginal artists and missionaries at Ernabella Mission in South Australia. Ernabella, established in 1937, has the oldest continuously-running Aboriginal Arts Centre in Australia, from 1948. Deaconess Winifred Hilliard, who was handcraft supervisor at Ernabella from 1954, noted that Ernabella textiles were ‘the first Aboriginal art form to develop . . . into . . . beautiful and creative fabrics’.1 Hilliard recognised the wider importance of the collaborative work she helped to pioneer with the women artists of Ernabella when she said, ‘the arts are where cultures meet’.2 Non-Aboriginal missionaries, anthropologists, and artists like Hilliard were instrumental in establishing art centres in remote Aboriginal communities where they introduced and nurtured the technical development of western mediums and materials, mainly with the aim of providing the artists with a sustainable income pathway. The textile practices of hand looming, knotted rugs, and batik introduced in Ernabella (in 1948), batik in Utopia (1971), and screen printing and woodblock printing in the Tiwi Islands (1968), emphasise the success of early textile and fashion cross-cultural collaborations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, which laid the foundations for today’s designers. It was not just non-Aboriginal people who innovated and led these developments. Aboriginal people have always been responsible for coalescing art, culture, and connection to country in unison with introduced western methods and materials, creating innovative and acclaimed cross-cultural art practices in the process. Hilliard recognised this when she accredited Hermannsburg artist Albert Namatjira’s success to his embracing of the introduced western medium of watercolour in his paintings. Hilliard stated, ‘Significantly it was the Aboriginal who stepped over the cultural boundaries when Albert Namatjira portrayed his lovely homeland in European style art. It was then that the white population looked beyond its own DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-7

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 93 boundaries and began to see’.3 Namatjira’s watercolours reflected his knowledge of and connection to his country and invited Australians to appreciate Aboriginal art beyond the Eurocentric ethnographic and anthropological primitive conceptions of ‘Aboriginal art’. Unfortunately, these lessons were not always learned, and cultural appropriation or the reuse of Aboriginal designs without permission has been an ongoing problem in the fashion and design industries. This chapter dwells not so much on the decades where rip-offs were allowed to occur unpunished and uncriticised but on instances in the late twentieth century when the practice began to be challenged and new modes of collaboration developed. Balarinji Design Studios and Desert Designs, both founded in the 1980s, developed designs by working fairly with Aboriginal artists and translating them into lucrative commercial commissions for the likes of Qantas, the Australian national airline. On the more artistic end of the fashion spectrum, Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson are a notable example of once-appropriators who developed creative and meaningful artistic collaborations with Aboriginal women artists later in their careers. These predecessors set bestpractice examples for mindful twenty-first-century collaborations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and Indian designer Roopa Pemmaraju, Australian labels Aje, Camilla, and Gorman, and French luxury brand Hermes. Gorman, in particular, is notable as a collaboration that was initiated and led, not by the designer, but by the artists at the Mangkaja Art Centre in Western Australia, who chose Gorman as a good fit for their work. Today, a new wave of individual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fashion designers are being more actively mentored and supported than ever before through a range of partnerships including Indigenous Fashion Projects, Australian Fashion Week, the National Indigenous Fashion Awards, and the department store David Jones, signifying growing autonomy and a bright future. Ernabella In 1936, the Presbyterian Church purchased a sheep station in South Australia on Pitjantjatjara country and in 1937 established the Ernabella Aboriginal Mission where they set up a church and school for the local Pitjantjatjara people and introduced Christianity. In an example of cross-cultural collaboration in the arts between colonisers and Aboriginal people, the missionaries introduced western art materials, firstly pastels and paper, and in the early 1940s, a nurse and schoolteacher taught women to knit jumpers with wool produced on the mission – while they attended bible classes. Then, in 1948, Mrs M Bennett established a craft room and weaving was introduced to provide employment opportunities for the women. In 4–6 weeks she taught four older women to adapt their spinning technique which was to roll the fibre against the leg, used for the spinning of human hair, to the spinning of wool on the property. Four younger women were taught weaving. The older women collected wool and took it away to their more familiar camp, and the others made floor-rugs in a craft room. Rug

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The rugs were hand-loomed, hand-pulled and knotted rugs, and featured the women’s unique distinct pattern that is known as the ‘Ernabella Walka’.5 In 1954, Winifred Hilliard moved to Ernabella to work as a handcraft supervisor with Pitjantjatjara women at the mission. Hilliard was a trailblazer in establishing Aboriginal textile design as a significant Australian art movement. Inspired by the beautiful design motifs, she wanted to create employment and economic opportunities for the Pitjantjatjara artists by marketing and selling their art. However, as Diana Young has noted, the fact that this was art made and brokered by women has diminished Ernabella art’s recognition compared to male-dominated Aboriginal art movements such as those begun at Hermannsburg and Papunya Tula. Compared to them, ‘the influence of Ernabella art made by women remains obscure, a mere footnote to this art history. The role of its long-serving female art-broker and the influential intercultural brokerage role carried out by Hilliard is surely germane to this’.6 Hilliard was proactive in organising cultural exchanges and workshops. In 1971, American teacher Leo Brereton taught the women batik, a Javanese method of wax resist dyeing on cloth using a tool called a tjanting. The introduction of batik at Ernabella further developed international cross-cultural collaborations in 1975, when artists Jillian Rupert, Yipati Kuyata, and Nyukana Baker travelled to a batik research institute in Yogyakarta, studied under leading Indonesian batik masters, and returned to pass on their new knowledge to other artists. There were further trips to Africa and Japan. Hilliard struggled to raise public appreciation and steady income for the Ernabella artists because their labour-intensive textile works were recognised as craft rather than as art, and accordingly undervalued. While she was instrumental in efforts to market Aboriginal art to the wider Australian community, Hilliard said in The Canberra Times in 1972 that the reluctance of Australians to pay good prices for Aboriginal art was exploitative when ‘the Tribe depend on the sale of their art for a living’.7 Frustrated by the Eurocentric perception of Aboriginal art, Hilliard noted ‘There was an erroneous impression that Aboriginal people could not be innovative and Aboriginal works were expected to be cheap – but if from a mission, even cheaper’.8 Furthermore, she stated: ‘The art from Ernabella’, . . . did not conform to the public’s perception of “Aboriginal art” or “Aboriginal colours”. Aboriginal art should accordingly consist of bark paintings and have a story’.9 Hilliard’s championing of Ernabella women artists is an exemplary case of cross-cultural collaboration in Aboriginal art history. As Young observed, ‘Hilliard never attempted to suppress “difference” in the enactment of her brokerage. Nor did she peddle primitivism. Later with batik she moved towards a modernist claim to universality through “art”’.10 The ability of Ernabella artists to embrace a diverse variety of mediums has ensured their continued success today. In 2003, artists collaborated with the ceramic studio, The Jam Factory, in Adelaide, innovating their signature designs through transferring batik techniques onto ceramics. Both their

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 95 textile and ceramic works are represented in major Australian collections, reflecting the ongoing significance of the movement. Utopia Utopia is located 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory and is the country of the Alyawarr and Anmatyerre people. Unlike Ernabella, Utopia was not a mission but a place of continuous Aboriginal occupation. The vast majority of the land was leased by German settlers in 1927, who set up a station and homestead, calling it Utopia. In the late 1970s, the pastoral lease and adjacent lands were acquired and passed back into traditional Aboriginal ownership. In early 1977, Jenny Green, who was living at Utopia at the time, began working as an adult educator teaching women basic skills in western ways of living, art administration (documentation, commercial sales) and social matters (pensions, childcare support, dealing with governmental agencies). Green also taught craft classes that included sewing, tie-dying and woodblock printing on fabric. In late 1977, batik was introduced to the women artists at Utopia by Suzie Bryce and Pitjantjatjara woman Yipati Williams, who facilitated a workshop, and it became the preferred medium for the women artists. As Anne Marie Brody has observed: ‘Batiking and other art practices fit in well with the highly sociable, domestic and informal character of camp life. Batik is done outdoors. . . . People usually work in the vicinity of their houses, often in groups with other women and children’.11 The women’s knowledge of and connection to country translated beautifully onto the batik silk artworks in a natural flow of cross-cultural collaboration that infused Aboriginal and Javanese art. Their absorption of the batik method allowed them to develop their own techniques which moved away from the strict, technical, traditional Javanese discipline of utilising the tjanting to create fine lines and geometric patterns. The Utopia women developed their distinctive style creating ‘stray blobs of colour’, which are considered ‘hallmarks of the local style’ of the movement.12 In 1978, Julia Murray joined Green in teaching the adult education programme and was enthusiastic about the influence of the batik medium on the artists’ work and their natural ability to master the time-consuming and complicated artistic method. Brody reports: Murray was excited by the women’s batik and the fact that it was free of any preconceptions about ‘art’ and demonstrated impressive expertise in a foreign medium. She saw the potential of the work as more than simply ‘recreational’ and subsequently played a major role in both promoting it commercially and securing funding to keep the batik operation viable13 In 1978, the Utopia Women’s Batik Group was formed, with Murray as the Art Co-ordinator promoting their work over the following five years. In 1979, Murray negotiated for their work to be acquired by Museum Victoria, the first Australian cultural institution to do so. The significance of the women’s art and the power of Aboriginal art as a durable connection to country and culture was further

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demonstrated in 1979 when the Utopia women presented their evidence at a Land Claim Tribunal through a performance of an Awelye women’s ceremony at the bush hearing. The successful claim enabled the community to gain permanent legal title to the Utopia Pastoral Leasehold. An exhibition of Utopia batiks held in Alice Springs in 1980 was the first of many. The next transformative phase of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group came in 1987, when Rodney Gooch, then manager of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) shop, was approached by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to take over management of the group. Gooch: proposed the idea of a thematic project and they were enthusiastic, keen for a new start as their work had been languishing for a while from a lack of direction and structure. A Picture Story was conceived as a collection that would be a major cultural document as well as an outstanding group of individual works of art. A crucial consideration was the fact that A Picture Story would never be split up and sold individually.14 In 1988, Utopia – A Picture Story comprising 88 batiks was exhibited at Tandanya in Adelaide and subsequently toured internationally, accompanied by many of the artists. The collection was acquired by The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, one of the most significant Aboriginal art acquisitions ever made by a private collector. In 1988–1989, the CAAMA shop initiated another project introducing the Batik Group to acrylic painting. It is important to note that previously Aboriginal women artists in the central desert had assisted the men in making their art and rarely produced their own artworks. Some of the original Batik Group members included Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Audrey Kngwarreye, Lena Pwerle, Rosie Kunoth Kngwarreye and the Petyarre sisters Kathleen, Violet, Gloria, Nancy, Myrtle, and Ada. These women went on to become enormously significant and highly collectable artists of international renown, for which Murray’s early leadership was crucial. Whereas Hilliard had not long before in the early 1970s protested the devaluation of Ernabella textiles as inauthentic Aboriginal art and women’s craft, unworthy of high prices, by the late 1980s, members of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group were internationally recognised as an avant-garde of contemporary art. Tiwi Islands The Tiwi Islands are located 80 kilometres north of Darwin in the Northern Territory and comprise eleven islands, with Melville and Bathurst islands as the two main islands. As Natasha Bullock and Keith Munro explain, ‘The language and traditions of the Tiwi are distinct, setting them apart from Aboriginal cultures on mainland Australia. Within this context, Tiwi art has developed over time, across various genres, incorporating motifs drawn from Tiwi people’s understanding of cultural cosmologies’.15 Silkscreen printing was introduced in the late 1960s by Catholic Church Bishop John O’Loughlin, who was inspired by Canadian Inuit woodblock prints he had

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 97 seen. The Inuit, traditionally known as stone carvers, had adapted their practice to printmaking. O’Loughlin identified the potential of developing the traditional Tiwi wood carving practice in a similar way to produce woodcuts as a western economic art enterprise. In 1968 he advertised for an art teacher to teach western mediums to Tiwi artists. Responding to this advertisement, Madeleine Clear began teaching three Tiwi men, Giovanni Tipungwuti, Bede Tungutalum, and Eddie Puruntatameri, screen-printing and woodblock printing.16 This initiative led to Bathurst Island’s Tiwi Design being founded in 1970 by Giovanni and Bede, now one of the longest established Aboriginal art centres in Australia. Tiwi Design grew rapidly, and Tiwi women were taught to sew the printed fabrics produced into garments as well as tablecloths and napkins. Clear left Bathurst Island in 1973 and 1974 and Diana Wood Conroy arrived to further assist the artists in the direction of their artworks. Conroy was instrumental in guiding Tiwi artists to transition from printing individual motifs to the method of repeating fabric lengths, developing prints of animals and birds into continuous pattern designs that are symbolic of Tiwi designs. In 1974, Conroy discussed her role in developing Bede and Giovanni’s unique and individual design style. I have tried to encourage Bede and Giovanni to think in terms of all-over geometric motifs from traditional Tiwi art, and not just isolated animal and bird figures. . . . Up until now they have made simple square or rectangular repeat patterns, in one colour only – we combine the screens to give a variety of colour and pattern, one for each colour. Giovanni’s sense of design is more asymmetrical (wiggly) than Bede’s strong patterns, I hope to develop it. Bede’s sense of design has improved enormously; he now makes excellent designs with very little direction from me.17 Her sense of direction in guiding the artists to naturally develop beyond the influence of Inuit woodblock printing style and utilise their geometric patterns transformed Tiwi art making and attained national acclaim for the artists. As Conroy recalled in 2015: When I began as coordinator of Tiwi Designs, my great desire was to encourage all over patterns, printed on cloth through the transparent mesh of the silkscreen. Tiwi art was abstract, with many vivid permutations of spots, circle, crosshatching and diagonals in the four main colours, red, yellow, white and black. Single animal figures in one colour had been then mainstay of the design repertoire at Tiwi designs, not unlike Eskimo woodcuts that had caused a stir in the 1960s. Although these were charming. I longed to see the force and sweep of geometric and brushy motifs of Tiwi bark paintings and carved poles translated on to cloth in dense webs of all-over pattern.18 This intercultural art exchange between Tiwi artists and O’Loughlin, Clear and Conroy not only enabled the transformation of their traditional artistic practice of wood carving and bark painting via modern western materials, but it also provided

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economic and entrepreneurial opportunities. In 1983 an exhibition of Tiwi Design printed fabric and traditional Tiwi artefacts was held at Hogarth Galleries in Sydney. This exhibition was hugely successful and drew the attention of major Australian designers, including Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson and Robert Burton who wanted to collaborate with them. Gallery Director Adrian Newstead said: ‘The result was a sensation. Huge spreads in Vogue magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald and other publications. . . . Within just a year . . . the turnover at Tiwi Design art centre had increased from $30,000 per annum to $300,000’.19 Tiwi Design influenced the establishment of other remote art centres on Bathurst and Melville Islands with Bima Wear established in 1978, Jilamara Arts and Crafts in 1988 and more recently Munupi Arts and Crafts. Adding to this long history of intercultural art exchange between Tiwi artists and non-Aboriginal artists, missionaries and academics, is this twenty-first-century exchange described by Amy Jackett: In 2012, the late Tiwi artist Jean Baptiste Apuatimi travelled to Darwin to make work with master printmakers Jacqueline Gribbin, Karlissa Kennedy and Glynis Lee at the printmaking studio, Northern Editions. Together they printed several designs to create paper tungas (bark bags). Taking the same shape as the traditional folded bark tungas, they stand alone as unique and colourful sculptures. Collaborative projects such as this reveal the dynamic and vibrant nature of Tiwi art.20 Tiwi Design has recently entered into licensing agreements with designers and has been commissioned to create textile prints. A diverse range of western art-making mediums were further introduced to Tiwi people, and today Tiwi Design artists work in a variety of mediums, from paintings to carvings, ceramics, bronze, and glass sculptures. Cultural Appropriation There is a long history of cultural appropriation of Aboriginal art in the fashion and textile industries, and while there have been numerous initiatives to address it, sadly it continues to be a major problem. Cultural appropriation disempowers Aboriginal people through cultural disrespect and lost economic opportunities. This causes emotional distress to Aboriginal artists whose designs have been copied and sold for profit by non-Aboriginal people. The late Wandjuk Marika became a trailblazer in raising awareness around copyright and unauthorised reproduction of Aboriginal art onto commercial products when in 1959 he discovered his painting titled Djang’Kawu Creation Story had been reproduced onto tea towels without his permission. He became so distressed he stopped painting for several years. However, he went on to be an outspoken advocate for Aboriginal artists and he states, ‘It is not that we object to people reproducing our work, but it’s essential that we be consulted first, for only we know . . . and only we can give permission’.21

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 99 Many non-Aboriginal artists and designers have been inspired to utilise Aboriginal art and culture as a way of creating a uniquely Australian identity in their fashion collections. Aboriginal art was (and to some extent continues to be) perceived as ancient art with no meaning, whether motifs, patterns or designs, and works have been blatantly copied and reproduced onto everything from Australian decimal currency, tea towels, jewellery, fashion and textiles. There have been numerous fashion and textile designers and manufacturers that requested a so-called ‘Aboriginal look’ for their collections, and without consultation with Aboriginal artists, employed a team of designers to create it. Litigation being very expensive and time consuming for Aboriginal artists enables this practice to continue both nationally and internationally. One of the first copyright litigation cases in the fashion industry was brought by Bundjulung artist Bronwyn Bancroft in 1991 against clothing manufacturer Dolina Fashion Group, two designers from Japanese fabric manufacturer Sasatani, and Myers department store (then known as Grace Bros.). As told by Vivien Johnson in her 1996 book Copyrites, Bancroft alleged that Dolina had, without her permission, taken a fabric design from an original artwork, Eternal Eclipse, she had painted in 1988, which was in breach of her copyright. Due to the expense and complexity of multiple companies being accused, the case was settled out of court, with Bancroft receiving an $8,000 settlement payment and all remaining stock being destroyed. While ‘Bancroft was denied the satisfaction of any admission of liability’, the spiritual distress had a greater impact. She stated, ‘The Dolina suit makes my work look cheap and nasty and undermines my reputation, which I have spent years building up. . . . This painting (Eternal Eclipse) includes my spirit figures. The copy has abused these figures. They are central to my work’.22 Unfortunately, international fashion labels have continued to appropriate Aboriginal art in their collections with many looking to the Australian outback as inspiration without consultation or permission. In 2017, streetwear brand Les Benjamins launched their 2018 Spring/Summer collection during Paris Fashion Week. The collection was inspired by Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Māori culture. Designer Bunyamin Aydin described the influence as ‘minimal details in my collection that are inspired by traditional clothing, face paint, and art from the region fused with British colonial details like royal and floral embroideries’.23 The collection drew criticism for the insensitive and inappropriate use of Aboriginal symbols and motifs. Regarding the use of face paint on models during the launch, Vogue Runway fashion blogger Nick Remsen made the following comment, ‘He wanted to combine both aboriginal (sic) and British influences. Unfortunately, this area was inevitably going to be dicey, considering the colonialist persecutions by the latter of the former, and the still existent sensitivities toward relations. Tribalinspired face paint, for example, was unnecessary’.24 In the case of other designers, there has been a process of learning and an evolution from inherently disrespectful appropriation to conscious collaboration. Fashion and textile designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson opened their Flamingo Park shop in Sydney in 1973 selling Kee’s signature bright knitted jumpers with Australiana motifs and Jackson’s retro and modern art-inspired designs. Jackson, and

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later Kee, have long been inspired by Aboriginal art and culture and in their early years, both appropriated Aboriginal art onto their garments and textiles. Later, they learnt to work collaboratively with Aboriginal artists and are today supportive advocates for Aboriginal fashion. In the 1980s, Jackson parted ways with Kee and founded the label Bush Couture using her own natural-dyed, hand-painted and screen-printed fabrics. Her travel and research drew her to remote Aboriginal communities, including meeting Jenny Green and Julia Murray in Alice Springs where she was introduced to the Utopia batik women artists. The cross-cultural collaborations established enabled Jackson and Kee to address their past mistakes. As Karen de Perthuis has pointed out: In many ways, Jackson’s (and, later, Kee’s) close association with the artists of Aboriginal communities redressed a blind spot in their earlier work which, under the misguided apprehension of ‘honouring’ First Nations people, often appropriated Indigenous imagery and motifs, using them out of context, without permission and ignorant of the spiritual and cultural significance.25 In 2019, for a retrospective exhibition titled Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson: Step into Paradise held at the Museum of Applied Art & Sciences (MAAS), the designers acknowledged their previous ignorance and practice of appropriating Aboriginal art in their designs, as well as recognising that there is a long way to go in the industry to rectify this practice. While developing our colourful and exuberant picture of Australia, we must acknowledge in our country a period of great cultural naivety, societal ignorance and colonial blindness that only now we – as a society – are starting to address, enabling a pathway to true recognition, respect and reconciliation. To Indigenous Australia, we thank you for your custodianship, your creativity, your ingenuity and your generosity. You have inspired us in our work and in our lives.26 Jackson and Kee are but one example of (ultimately) successful collaborations with Aboriginal artists in the fashion and textile industry. Other names contemporary with them whose work is familiar to Australians through prominent commercial applications of their designs are Balarinji Design Studio and Desert Designs. In 1983, Balarinji Design Studio was established by John Moriarty, a Yanyuwa man from Borroloola, together with his non-Aboriginal wife, Ros Moriarty. The Moriartys established Balarinji after the birth of their first son, when John drew some sketches of a turtle and Ros screen-printed them onto a quilt cover for his cot. This gesture of the Moriartys collaborating to create a hand-printed textile quilt to celebrate their son’s mixed heritage has informed the studio’s identity from its inception. Balarinji is now one of the leading Aboriginal art and design companies in Australia, having collaborated with major Australian and international companies including Qantas, Nespresso, and Microsoft. In 2005, Balarinji collaborated with Qantas and Australian fashion designer Peter Morrissey to design Qantas staff

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 101 uniforms. Balarinji designed a textile print utilising a boomerang motif titled Wirriyarra, which means ‘my spirit home’ in the Yanyuwa language, with Morrissey designing multiple ranges of uniform garments for the varied staff roles at Qantas, including flight attendants and ground staff, that aligned with the Qantas corporate identity as being uniquely Australian. The collaboration offered the Australian design industry a successful example of using Aboriginal art to promote Australia around the world. As MAAS wrote of this design in 2022: The boomerang is a unique motif which is recognized and valued for its quintessential Australian character. Boomerangs feature in stories from all over the country about the Dreaming travels and exploits of spirit ancestors, as they journeyed across Australia, creating the landforms and naming the valleys, mountains and waterways. The boomerangs in the Wirriyarra design follow modern day Australian journeys.27 Desert Designs was established in 1984 by Stephen Culley and David Wroth who were working as art teachers in Fremantle Prison where they met the late Jimmy Pike, a Walmajarri man from The Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia, who was serving a prison sentence. When they introduced Pike to fluoro-coloured texta pens, he utilised the bold bright colours in expressing his motifs of flowers and water holes from his country into hand-drawn artworks on paper. Inspired by Pike’s designs, Culley and Wroth nurtured his natural artistic talents in this introduced western medium, working closely with the artist in translating his unique motifs and patterns into fabric designs to ‘preserve the creative and cultural integrity of Pike’s interpretations of ancient iconography’.28 They entered into a licencing agreement and Pike’s designs were reproduced onto prints, textiles, clothing, rugs, and homewares. Culley and Wroth were leaders in the field of commercialising Aboriginal art that respected Aboriginal cultural protocols and guaranteed Pike’s intellectual property through copyright licensing agreements which ensured he retained full ownership of the original artworks, as well as generous remuneration. Their respectful innovation in cross-cultural awareness launched Jimmy Pike as an internationally acclaimed artist brokering multiple collaborations, most notably with the Japanese company Rakarrarla, which reproduced Pike’s designs onto high-end tech ski wear for the exclusive Japanese ski market. Culley and Wroth illustrated that mutually beneficial collaboration between Aboriginal artists and non-Aboriginal companies in the fashion and textile business was attainable and economically viable. Pike’s artwork was also licensed via Desert Designs to fashion designer Roopa Pemmaraju for her 2012 collection. Australian Fashion Designers Collaborating with Aboriginal Artists Since the pioneering Jackson and Kee, Balarinji and Desert Designs first launched in the late twentieth century in the 1970s and 1980s, several other Australian fashion designers in the early twenty-first century went on to forge collaborations with Aboriginal artists, including Roopa Pemmaraju, Aje, Camilla, and Gorman.

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In 2006, Indian-born Australian based fashion designer Roopa Pemmaraju established her eponymous fashion label ‘with a vision to create ethically produced fashion working with Indian artisans’. For her 2012 collection, she was inspired to collaborate with Aboriginal artists, stating ‘My main interest has always been working with artisans, so when I came to Australia I began researching how I could work closely with Aboriginal artist communities here’. However, after promoting her concept to a range of Aboriginal art gallery directors she was met with reluctance until she contacted the Director of Cooee Art Adrian Newstead who ‘was thrilled with my concept, and said he would come on board and help me because he’d never seen anyone take this onto international runways . . . he helped me pick artists from different art galleries which, me being an outsider, I wouldn’t have understood how to do’.29 Pemmaraju worked with nine Aboriginal artists including Judy Martin, the late Jimmy Pike’s estate, Ben Jangala and Lorna Fencer, consulting with them from concept to finished garment. Stephen Culley from Desert Designs who was already accomplished in brokering licensing agreements for Aboriginal artists in the fashion and textiles industry noted the significance of this collaboration: ‘In our combined 50 years in the industry, we have never seen a more grounded, inspiring project. Roopa has created a wonderful opportunity for cultural and economic collaboration across the Indian Ocean’. With artists receiving 20% of the price of each garment, Newstead praised the cross-cultural venture as ‘ethical, innovative and culturally sensitive. We are confident the range will have global impact on contemporary fashion’.30 Pemmaraju’s foresight and careful, culturally appropriate consideration in working with Aboriginal artists and Indian artisans made her a trailblazer and would inspire future ethical and economically responsible collaborations with Aboriginal artists in the Australian fashion industry. Sydney-based label Aje drew inspiration from three paintings by the late Alyawarre artist Minnie Pwerle, an artist from Utopia, for their 2018 Resort Collection. Aje designers Adrian Norris and Edwina Robinson were approached by Pwerle’s great granddaughter Jade Torres who was interested in fashion and proposed the concept of Aje collaborating with Pwerle’s work. Agreeing to the proposal, Norris and Robinson worked collaboratively with Pwerle’s grandson Fred Torres, a curator, and Jade to select three paintings from Pwerle’s archive to be reproduced onto Aje garments. The collection was aptly titled ‘Awelye’ after the Utopia women’s body paint and ceremonies. Aje were conscious of the rampant practice of cultural appropriation within the fashion industry, with Norris stating, ‘that’s why our whole thing was about working with the family, because we have so much respect for Minnie as an artist’. Further paying homage to Pwerle, Aje shot the collection’s promotional campaign in Utopia where she lived and worked. Noting the significance of the collaborative design process Fred Torres stated, ‘they’ve been very careful to pay respect to the culture, and all the right copyright and intellectual property issues . . . to work in the higher end of the fashion industry is just breakthrough for Aboriginal art and culture’.31 Further enhancing the Aje-Minnie Pwerle collaboration, three generations of Pwerle’s family attended the launch of the collection to celebrate this unique moment in Australian fashion history.

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 103 As part of Camilla Franks’ 15-year anniversary collection for her label Camilla, in 2019 she collaborated with Warlukurlangu artists Julie Nangala Robertson, Murdie Nampijinpa Morris, Lynette Nangala Singleton, Selina Napangnka Fisher, Lawrence Jangala Watson, and Jerusha Nungarrayi Morris on a collection titled Mother. Franks visited the Warlukurlangu Aboriginal Arts Centre in the Northern Territory to meet with the resident artists and centre curators. She stated at the time that: We wanted to work respectfully with Aboriginal artists and understand the importance of song lines, therefore we sought permission from each individual artist for their permission in collaborating in this way. The result is a three print capsule collection that both celebrates and honours this beautiful art form with percentages of sales being invested back into the community.32 The blog post announcing the collaboration acknowledges the importance of reciprocal collaboration and moves beyond promoting Camilla’s own collection by prompting people to support Aboriginal artists. It states: In a world where almost anything can be replicated and craftsmanship abandoned to accommodate commercial gain, we have collaborated with Warlukurlangu Arts Centre to share their colours with our world. Authentic. Indisputable. Unrivalled. You can help save Australia’s colour and Protect Aboriginal Art by welcoming a piece of this magic into your world by purchasing from Aboriginal Art Centres around Australia or directly from independent Aboriginal or Torres Straight (sic) Island artists.33 During the 2010s, Australian fashion label Gorman collaborated with the Mangkaja Arts Centre in Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia to produce a collection titled ‘Mangkaja x Gorman’ which was launched at the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF) Country to Couture 2019 event. The Mangkaja-Gorman collaboration is one of the most exemplary mutually beneficial cross-cultural collaborations in the fashion industry, which extended beyond commercial benefits by foremostly respecting Aboriginal ontologies throughout the design, manufacturing and promotion of the collection. As Lynley Nargoodah, chairwoman of Mangkaja said, quoting elder, artist and Mangkaja director Ngarralja Tommy May, ‘Like Tommy May says ‘same story, different style’. Our stories and connections live on no matter whether on paintings, prints or clothing. Our culture is going to live forever. We are keeping it going for the next generation’.34 The Mangkaja-Gorman collaboration is notable for being initiated by the community rather than the label. The fashion collaboration concept was conceived by Mangkaja artists themselves, who had previously rejected approaches for collaborations that were tokenistic and did not deliver equal partnership. As Belinda Cook, manager of the Mangkaja Arts Centre, reported: This was a shift in how industry approach working with Indigenous artists. In the past Mangkaja had been approached and declined to work with designers

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who wanted art for collections already fully developed with no interest in artist involvement, let alone co-design.35 The Mangkaja artists chose Lisa Gorman, founder and director of the popular Melbourne-based Gorman brand known for its brightly coloured and boldly patterned textiles, and approached her with the concept to partner with her label. Gorman had not collaborated with Indigenous artists previously, put off by not wanting to be seen to be exploiting Aboriginal art as had so often been the case in the past and in the present, as seen in the Les Benjamins collection. Gorman stated, ‘For me to be comfortable to move forward I needed the collaboration to be on the artists’ terms’.36 The significance of the Mangkaja-Gorman collaboration extended beyond a oneoff fashion collection exemplifying equality of the partnership through knowledge exchange and cultural and economic development for both parties. They developed a benchmark agreement together with the assistance of the Copyright Agency which ensured artists were well remunerated as well as Gorman providing ‘significant income for ongoing youth programs’.37 Adam Suckling, CEO of Copyright Agency, has suggested that the licensing agreement developed for the project was: an example of best practice as we worked with both Mangkaja and Gorman to respectfully negotiate fair and reasonable licensing fees. We made sure terms, conditions, attributions and acknowledgment of the artists were negotiated to protect the artist and the reproduction of the artwork. And crucially, we ensured the artists had approval throughout the whole process, from concept to instore delivery, and the approach to promotion via online platforms and social media.38 Another notable collaboration between the late famous artist Gloria Petyarre, one of the founding members of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, and the prestige French fashion house Hermes in 2009 also demonstrated an ethical awareness in the development of mutually beneficial opportunities with Aboriginal artists, who are consulted and remunerated appropriately for the reproduction of their art. Hermes commissioned one of Petyarre’s bush medicine motif designs to be reproduced onto their renowned, collectable, and extremely expensive luxury silk scarves, which are worn by numerous celebrities. This cross-cultural exchange was brokered through Hermes artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Petyarre’s art dealer Lauraine Diggins when they met at a Paris art fair in 2006. Petyarre was paid a standard fee as well as royalties for her design and received four of the silk scarves, which she shared with her family. As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, ‘Hermes’ 170-year heritage did not initially impress the Aboriginal artist, whose own artistic tradition is considerably older. . . . Her work hangs in the National Galleries in Canberra and Melbourne, in the Lodge’s dining room, and in museums and galleries around the world.

‘The Arts Are Where Cultures Meet’ 105 Diggins reported that Petyarre was bemused by the commission. ‘A scarf is a scarf is a scarf’ and so ‘Hermes doesn’t quite figure. I think for Gloria, it was a little mundane. However, when I showed her the packaging and the box, she became quite aware it was quite special’.39 The Way Forward The phrase ‘a fashion statement’ points to the power of fashion and design to communicate messages. Fashion can make social and political statements, be an economic indicator, or simply state ‘I am here’ – a phrase that resonates with Indigenous people’.40 Fashion and textile design is just one of many introduced western mediums, materials and techniques that have allowed Aboriginal people to successfully translate and share visual representations of their cultural knowledge and connection to country, in this case onto cloth and into a wearable form. It creates a unique visual presence of the world’s oldest living culture onto bodies and into homes. However, the translation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art from an ephemeral to a wearable form represents more than a successful adaptation of aesthetic and cultural expression into a western medium and a powerful means of cross-cultural communication. Since Ernabella women artists started producing handmade textiles in the 1940s and the Utopia women batik textiles in the 1970s, Aboriginal participation in the fashion and textile industry has continued to grow and diversify. Engagement with a diversity of textile media include weaving, screen printing, block printing, batik and natural dyeing through to fashion design and fashion modelling, has created opportunities for Aboriginal participation in the industry which carries cultural, social and economic benefits that continue to grow exponentially. As this chapter has outlined, these benefits include innovative creative and business collaborations, national and international recognition, and economic empowerment for its makers. Despite the recent successful collaborations between Australian and overseas fashion designers and Indigenous artists (Roopa Pemmaraju, Camilla, and Gorman), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander textile and fashion production is far from having realised its full potential. It is still to make a mark on the international stage. As Mangkaja Arts Centre manager Belinda Cook, who helped broker the successful Gorman collaboration in 2019, observes, ‘there is an international audience waiting to be enamoured by our fabrics and fashions as they have been by Indigenous Australian contemporary art and we have yet to crack the global market’.41 More could be done in Australia to create the conditions for this to occur. As noted by the Guardian, ‘prior to 2021, Indigenous representation at Australian Fashion week was rare, beyond a handful of models’.42 However, nationally, there is a current growing autonomy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fashion designers making their individual mark in the Australian fashion and textile industry. The establishment of Indigenous Fashion Projects (IFP) supports the development of these enterprises across a range of activities through industry skills development supporting their participation from concept creation to realisation. Their Pathways Program partners with retail store David

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Jones and fashion designers through workshops and mentorships to nurture the growth of Indigenous fashion businesses. This programme has led to Indigenous fashion being featured on the runway at Australian Fashion Week, and most importantly, David Jones stocking the collections of Native Swimwear, Kirrikin, Liandra Swim, and Ngali, to name a few. IFP further supports this growth by promoting the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fashion and textile designers through the National Indigenous Fashion Awards, the Country to Couture runway event, and the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair. The new generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fashion designers are inspired by their connection to culture and country creating unique and distinct collections not seen anywhere else in the world of fashion. They are sustaining and promoting culture through utilising traditional motifs, patterns and designs mixed with modern media and materials. For example, Debra Beale, whose Deboriginal collection has been exhibited at Global Indigenous Runway in 2019 and 2020, states ‘My connection to country, sea and sky is a spiritual connection. It is also a healing journey allowing me to express my lived experience through experimenting with sustainable and natural materials from our “ngayi parri” (mother earth), Wonnarua language’.43 Similarly, Colleen Tighe Johnson, whose Buluuy Mirrii label recently opened the 2022 Melbourne Fashion Week, states ‘I am inspired immensely by storytelling through art of the oldest living culture on earth printing on high textiles and fabric’.44 Designer Grace Lillian Lee’s wearable interpretations of her Torres Strait Islander culture are being recognised through acquisitions by major galleries and museums and Haus of Dizzy designer and self-proclaimed Queen of Bling, Kristy Dickinson, has created a successful collection of ‘bold, playful, statement-making jewellery that celebrates and honours Indigenous culture’45 which is available through multiple online retailers. The inclusion of Indigenous Fashion Projects showcases of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fashion designers at Australian Fashion Week in 2021 and 2022, and in feature stories in Vogue Australia (September 2020, May 2022), signifies the importance of nurturing and empowering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. It prepares the way for future positive cross-cultural collaborations where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists are respected, remunerated, and celebrated for a successful future. Notes 1 Winifred Hilliard, ‘The Story of Ernabella Arts’, in J. Ryan and R. Healy (eds.), Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998), 37. 2 Winifred Hilliard, Ernabella Arts: A Cultural Meeting Point, Paper presented to the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan, 10 September 1983, 13. 3 Hilliard, ‘Ernabella Arts’, 13. 4 ‘Ernabella Arts’, quoting Hilliard, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, n.d. http:// archive.maas.museum/hsc/paperbark/contemporary.html 5 Diana J.B. Young, ‘Deaconess Winifred Hilliard and the Cultural Brokerage of the Ernabella Craft Room’, Aboriginal History, 41 (2017): 71–94, 79.

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Young, ‘Deaconess’, 71. Young, ‘Deaconess’, 84. Young, ‘Deaconess’, 83. Young, ‘Deaconess’, 83. Young, ‘Deaconess’, 87. Anne Marie Brody, Utopia a Picture Story (Perth: Heytesbury Holdings, 1990), 23. Brody, Utopia, 25. Brody, Utopia, 23. Brody, Utopia, 7. Natasha Bullock and Keith Munro, Being Tiwi: The Work of 9 Artists from the Tiwi Islands (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2015), 2. www.mca.com.au/storiesand-ideas/being-tiwi-curatorial-essay/, accessed 24 May 2022. Madeleine Clear, ‘Tiwi Design: The Early Years’, in N. Bullock and K. Munro (eds.), Being Tiwi (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2015), 29–31, 29. Diana Conroy, Report to the Aboriginal Arts Board, July 1974, 2. Diana Wood Conroy, ‘Vernacular Patterns in Flux: Mirroring Changes in an Aboriginal Workshop, Tiwi Designs, Northern Australia’, in S. Stephanides and S. Karayanni (eds.), Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination (Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2015), 49–50. Adrian Newstead, The Dealer is the Devil: An Insider’s History of the Aboriginal Art Trade (Sydney: Brandl and Schlesinger, 2014), 44–45. Amy Jackett, ‘Community and Continuity: The Art of the Tiwi Islands’, The Conversation, 24 September 2014. https://theconversation.com/community-and-continuty-theart-of-the-tiwi-islands-28043, accessed 28 May 2022 on 5 May 2021. Vivien Johnson, Copyrites: Aboriginal Art in the Age of Reproductive Technologies (Sydney: Riverstone Printing, 1996), 4. Johnson, Copyrites, 31. Aydin quoted in Suril, ‘Les Benjamins Interview and Spring/Summer 2018 Collection’, Pause, 23 June 2017. https://pausemag.co.uk/2017/06/les-benjamins-springsummer2018-collection-and-interview/, accessed 5 April 2021. Nick Remsen, ‘Les Benjamins: Spring 2018 Menswear’, Vogue Runway, 23 June 2017. www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2018-menswear/les-benjamins, accessed 5 April 2021. Karen De Perthuis, ‘Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson: Step into Paradise’ (exhibition review), Fashion Theory, 25, no. 2 (2021): 289–299, 294–295. Glynis Jones, Georgina Safe, and Penelope Tree, Step into Paradise: Jenny Kee Linda Jackson (Sydney: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Media; Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2019). Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Wirriyarra’ Womens Qantas Uniform Designed by Peter Morrissey and Balarinji Design Studio. https://collection.maas.museum/object/346864, accessed 5 May 2021. Cooee Art, Jimmy Kurtnu Pike Profile. www.cooeeart.com.au/marketplace/artists/profile/PikeJimmy/, accessed 3 April 2021. Georgina Safe, ‘Aboriginal Artists and Indian Designer Create Latest Ancient Appeal’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 2012. www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/aboriginal-artists-and-indian-designer-create-latest-ancient-appeal-20120427-1xq8l.html, accessed 20 April 2021. All quotes Safe, ‘Aboriginal Artists and Indian Designer’. All quotes G. Traill-Nash, ‘Cultural Co-operation in Heritage Homage’, The Australian, 29 April 2017. Camilla, ‘Camilla x Warlu’, Weblog Post, 23 September 2019. https://au.camilla.com/ blogs/camilla-world/warlu, accessed 30 March 2021. Camilla, ‘Camilla x Warlu’.

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34 Belinda Cook, ‘The Mangkaja x Gorman Collection: A New Wave of Indigenous Art and Fashion Collaboration’, Artlink, 41, no. 1 (April 2021): 40–47, 40. 35 Cook, ‘Mangkaja x Gorman’, 44. 36 Cook, ‘Mangkaja x Gorman’, 44. 37 Cook, ‘Mangkaja x Gorman’, 44. 38 Copyright Agency, ‘Mangkaja and Gorman Create an Indigenous Collection Setting a Benchmark in Collaboration’, 19 July 2019. www.copyright.com.au/2019/07/mangkaja-and-gorman-create-an-indigenous-collection-setting-a-benchmark-in-collaboration/, accessed 31 March 2021. 39 M. Griffin, ‘Aboriginal Artist Gives Fashion House a Good Wrap’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 October 2009. www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/aboriginal-artist-givesfashion-house-a-good-wrap-20091018-h2yf.html, accessed 6 January 2023. 40 S. Miller, J. Wilson-Miller, and F. Blacklock, Bayagul: Contemporary Indigenous Communication (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2002), 21. 41 Belinda Cook, To Research the Growing Global Indigenous Fashion Industry, to Support the Building of an Indigenous Kimberley Textile Industry. Churchill Fellow Report (2018), 4. www.churchilltrust.com.au/project/to-research-the-growing-global-indigenous-fashion-industry-to-support-a-kimberley-textile-industry/, accessed 11 October 2021. 42 Alyx Gorman, ‘A Movement, Not a Moment: Indigenous Design in the Spotlight at Australian Fashion Week’, The Guardian, 4 June 2021, 5. www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/jun/05/a-movement-not-a-moment-indigenous-design-in-the-spotlight-ataustralian-fashion-week, accessed 5 May 2022. 43 Personal Communication, Debra Beale, 2022. 44 Personal Communication, Colleen Tighe Johnson, 2022. 45 https://hausofdizzy.com/pages/about

7

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart The Art and Designs of Bill Onus and Byram Mansell during the Assimilationist Era Sarah Scott

During the 1950s and early 1960s, two Australian artist/designers responded to the demand for Aboriginal-inspired designs from tourists and homemakers. Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta elder Bill Onus (1906–1968) set up a small factory and shop called Aboriginal Enterprises in Belgrave, an outer suburb of Melbourne in the Dandenong Ranges, in 1952. This shop sold items including boomerangs, boomerang-shaped coffee tables painted with Aboriginal designs, and Aboriginal-inspired scarves, pictures, cards, and pottery (Figure 7.1). Onus was well-known for his boomerang-throwing demonstrations, which he performed outside the shop and at public events. Dying at the age of only 61, Onus’ artistic reputation was eventually eclipsed by that of his successful painter son, Lin Onus (1948–1996). Now Bill Onus’s star is belatedly rising, with increasing recognition given to his role in advocating for Aboriginal rights, most recently featured in the film Ablaze released in 2021–2022, co-directed by Alec Morgan and Onus’s grandson, the opera singer and academic Tiriki Onus.1 The reputation of Onus’s comparatively long-lived Anglo-Celtic contemporary, Australian commercial designer and public artist Byram Mansell (1893– 1977), has gone in the opposite direction. Once a minor celebrity and curiosity featured in films, newspaper, and magazine articles, he has now faded into obscurity (Figure 7.2). At the height of his fame in the 1950s and 1960s, Mansell undertook a series of major public and private art commissions, notably panels adorning train carriages for the New South Wales (NSW) railways and murals for the interstate passenger ferry, the Empress of Australia, the Mount Kosciusko ski chalet (both destroyed), and the Commonwealth Bank at various premises including Martin Place in Sydney. Still extant is one of Mansell’s large-scale ceramic murals for the Commonwealth Bank in the regional town of Taree on the mid-north coast of NSW (Figure 7.3). In addition, he produced smaller-scale items such as pottery, silk scarves featuring Aboriginal designs, note paper, fabric designs, and illustrations for publications, including covers for the Melbourne literary journal Meanjin and Dawn (1915–1969), a propaganda magazine for assimilation issued monthly to the Aboriginal people of NSW and produced by the NSW Aboriginal Protection Board.2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-8

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Figure 7.1 Jeff Carter, photographer, ‘The business near Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges out of Melbourne was called “Aboriginal Enterprises”’, 1956. Bill Onus (right) with his employees. National Library of Australia, Canberra http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-13708160. Jeff Carter Archive courtesy of Sandra Byron Gallery.

This chapter explores the political dimensions of the work of Onus and Mansell to shed light on the dynamics of the assimilationist period and the discrimination experienced by Aboriginal people during this time. Mansell was described as a ‘reverse Namatjira’,3 in reference to the famous Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira, whose watercolours of desert landscapes painted ostensibly in a European idiom were held up as an exemplar of assimilationist success in the 1950s. Through his reverse adoption of making art and design in an ‘Aboriginal’ idiom, the chapter argues that Mansell built a career as a visual ambassador for the official government policy of assimilation. Mansell was a recipient of government sponsorship; he published his work in the NSW government-sponsored Dawn and received public art commissions from the Commonwealth government bank and the NSW government railways. By contrast, Onus was never commissioned for the Dawn,

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Figure 7.2 Artist Byram Mansell adopts the conventions of the Aboriginal artists in this picture painted with native pigments. Panel shows hibiscus tree and honey ants’ nest. Reproduced in Pix, 24 (4), 22, 28 January 1950. National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS9197.

and he and other Aboriginal designers were actively excluded from being selected for large-scale commissions. While Mansell made a comfortable living from his commissions, Onus suffered financial hardship. His fight for Aboriginal rights meant he was placed under political surveillance by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). He also had to fight the Victorian government to have his theatrical production, Out of the Dark: An Aboriginal Moomba, shown

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Figure 7.3 Byram Mansell, Mural for Commonwealth Bank of Australia, 1956, photograph supplied by Manning Regional Art Gallery, Taree.

in Melbourne. Onus’ and Mansell’s work may have been aesthetically similar, but politically they were far apart. Bill Onus was born at Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve in NSW. Facing limited employment opportunities because of his race, he worked in many different jobs, including shearing, truck-driving, and as a rigger at Bankstown Aerodrome. In 1939, he joined the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), an all-Aboriginal body, and went back to Cummeragunja to join the walk-off protesting conditions there. Soon after, Onus became the APA secretary and a principal member of the Committee for Aboriginal Citizen Rights. Moving to Sydney, Onus organised weekly Aboriginal dances at Newtown Town Hall to raise money for the legal expenses incurred by local Aboriginal people who fell victim to the law. In 1946, Onus moved to Melbourne and along with Pastor Sir Doug Nicholls, revived the Aboriginal Advancement League. He attempted to lobby against the building of the Woomera rocket-testing range in South Australia, organizing a 20-member deputation from Sydney to visit the Minister for the Interior, H.V. Johnson.4 One of his greatest achievements was Out of the Dark: An Aboriginal Moomba, a theatrical production featuring an all-Aboriginal cast, held at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, for the Centenary of Victoria and the Jubilee of the Commonwealth in 1951.5 In 1952, his focus moved to Aboriginal Enterprises. Workers included Nyungar artists Alma Toomath and Revel Cooper who had both grown up on Carrolup Mission in Western Australia, non-Indigenous chief designer Paula Kerry who was motivated to join because of her support for the Aboriginal cause, and

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 113 others, including newly-arrived postwar European migrants.6 As art historian Sylvia Kleinert has pointed out, Aboriginal Enterprises became a ‘meeting ground’ where both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people were: involved in processes of adaption, incorporation and collaboration [and were] changed in the process. . . . Aboriginal enterprises enabled art, as a form of social action, to mobilise culture in the realisation of a political agenda. . . . [representing] a dynamic, multicultural community where Indigenous and non-Indigenous employees worked co-operatively in a form of cottage industry that involved all aspects of production: manufacturing, demonstrating, designing and sales.7 Onus’s business became ‘a rallying place for all of us Aborigines’, according to the Aboriginal singer Margaret Tucker, who performed weekend concerts there.8 The productive opportunities for cross-cultural exchange enabled by Onus’s business furthered Onus’s political agenda of lobbying for the rights of Aboriginal people nationwide.9 For example, in 1956 he attacked Paul Hasluck, Minister for the Territories, over the wages paid to Aboriginal stockmen in the Northern Territory, pointing out that they were only an eighth of the basic wage.10 Like Namatjira, the character of Onus himself, his tourist art, and his boomerang performances were important symbols of cultural survival. In the film Ablaze, the late Stolen Generations actor Jack Charles recalls seeing Bill Onus’s boomerangthrowing demonstration at Aboriginal Enterprises during a daytrip bus outing from his boys’ home.11 To see another Aboriginal person helped to counter the ‘whitewashing’ environment he experienced in the Box Hill salvation army home where he had been taken as a two year old. This is an example of how the legacy of Onus’s actions continues to have an impact not only on his descendants but on the many people that he encountered through his political and cultural activities. Byram Mansell was also born in NSW but a long way from Cummeragunja. He was born in 1893 in the well-to-do suburb of Double Bay, Sydney, and educated at exclusive Scots College and Sydney Grammar. Unlike Onus, he had the opportunity to train as a professional artist. Following school, he worked with his father as an engineer, but this did not suit him, and he studied art at the Julian Ashton School at night.12 During this period, he produced art nouveau designs.13 In 1921, he left Australia, studied at the Academy of Art in Honolulu and spent a year at the Academie Julien in Paris. He then operated a studio on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles and became known as an interior designer and theatre set designer. In 1930 Mansell returned to Australia and opened a textile studio in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, where he specialised in batik.14 At the end of the 1940s, there was a dramatic change in his practice. Mansell was initially influenced by the book The Native Tribes of Central Australia first published in 1898 by the anthropologist and Melbourne Museum director Baldwin Spencer and his fieldwork collaborator, Frank Gillen. This included plates of rock art engravings found on ‘Ayers Rock’ (Uluru).15 Spencer believed that Aboriginal culture was in stasis in concordance with Darwinian evolutionary theory. This was

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centred upon the belief that Aboriginal people would inevitably ‘die out’.16 Mansell thought the bark paintings and rock art he saw recorded in the photographs to be ‘astonishingly imaginative’ and the ‘softness and peculiar attraction of the earth colours’ intrigued him.17 He began paintings inspired by the ‘patterns’ in this work. The decisive catalyst for Mansell’s ‘Aboriginal turn’ came after he arranged for the Australian Government’s Department of Information to send him photographs from the 1948–1949 expedition into Arnhem land led by amateur anthropologist Charles Mountford.18 The photographs prompted Mansell to destroy hundreds of his previous works.19 In their place, he produced silk scarves featuring Aboriginal motifs utilizing natural dyes. Some very beautiful adaptations of Aboriginal designs as sketches for fabric prints are to be found in the NGA collection. Although Mansell supported the idea of assimilation, he simultaneously held the view that Aboriginal people, particularly within Arnhem land where traditional ways of life were less impacted by colonialism, were part of a static stone-age age culture in binary opposition to the present.20 He stated, I have scrapped all my English and Continental notions for what I consider is purely Australian and have returned to Stone Age man, who takes his line technology from the warp of the iguana, a bird, or a minute mark in the sand.21 In this, he echoed the views of Mountford who in his application to the National Geographic Society, the sponsors of the expedition, described Arnhem land as ‘uninhabited by Europeans’. He believed that he was participating in a type of ‘salvage anthropology’, recording the art of Yolngu artists who he described as ‘stone age’ before they ‘disappeared’.22 The truth was very different. Yolngu had been actively involved with the war effort in northern Australia and this had a profound impact on the Yolngu community. As the historian Martin Thomas has argued, Yolngu cooperated with the expedition because it allowed them to learn about ‘Balanda’.23 The visual records of the expedition, copies of which are now held in the BukuLarrŋgay Mulka Centre, have now become a key record of past people and practices for the Yolngu community.24 Mansell’s new direction was encouraged by the Australian arts publisher Sidney Ure Smith who had promoted Margaret Preston’s Aboriginal-inspired modernist art and design in his magazines since the 1920s and who believed ‘in the establishment of an Australian School of Design’.25 When shown some of Mansell’s Aboriginal work Ure Smith reportedly told the artist/designer that ‘he had something’.26 Subsequently, it was reported in The Australasian Post: ‘Byram Mansell believes that in the primitive art of the aborigine he has discovered an Australian culture probably thousands of years old.’27 Aboriginal art was largely seen at this time as a museum artefact, for the most part not worthy of inclusion in the fine arts space. The art and culture of Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia, including the art of Onus himself, was completely overlooked, acting to reinforce primitivist stereotypes that centred upon so called ‘stone age’ art in Northern Australia. It was not until the abstract painter and assistant director of the AGNSW, Tony Tuckson’s Aboriginal Art

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 115 exhibition in 1960 that this began to change dramatically, and it took even longer for art produced by Aboriginal people of the south-east to be recognised.28 One could argue that Mansell’s zealous pursuit of this Aboriginal style was a canny marketing move aimed primarily at popular and commercial success for himself. Certainly, he progressed because he knew his market and operated across a range of different materials and sizes that could be adapted to both the domestic and public realms. He was also a hard worker with a prodigious output ranging from the covers of music scores to the production of head-dresses for Berenembah, an Aboriginal ballet to be performed Dutch television.29 A 1951 photograph of a glass-case displaying Mansell’s wares at the Bowral Gift Store, a country town in the southern highlands of NSW shows bowls and scarves with Aboriginal designs, decorative panels and paintings featuring Aboriginal legends alongside paintings of the Australian landscape (Figure 7.4). To be fair, however, Mansell’s engagement with Aboriginal art had more integrity than just a cynical commercial copying of Aboriginal motifs onto things like rugs and tea-towels. Mansell stressed that his work was an adaptation of Aboriginal art and culture, although in fact elements of direct appropriation are sometimes evident. The artist in him led him to experiment with Indigenous materials and techniques used by the Yolngu of North-East Arnhem land who painted on bark

Figure 7.4 Photoprint of 1951 display of Aboriginal motif decorative panels by Mansell in window of Bowral Gift Store, from Byram Mansell collection, PXE 777/no. 61, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

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with feathers using ochres and orchid juice as a binder. In his backyard version, Mansell painted with parrot feathers, ground ochres found near his home in Killara, and after much experimentation, grew prickly cactus in his garden which he used as a binding agent rather than orchid juice.30 Mansell repeatedly said that what he took from the Aboriginal art he saw was the simple line technique and the restricted colour palette of black, white, yellow and red earth colours.31 His works on the whole do not reflect a specific region but construct a type of Aboriginalism by sourcing art from different regions and amalgamating this with his own interpretations. This conglomerate of different Aboriginal styles used as a source is reflected in the ‘Aboriginal artefacts’ found in his studio that included rainforest shields from Queensland and boomerangs from the Central Desert. Mansell believed that his approach served a project of ‘educating’ his audience about Aboriginal art. By assimilating rather than copying Aboriginal art into his practice, he believed that he was promoting the significance of Aboriginal culture to the world in a form that would be more palatable for national and international audiences. As Dawn magazine explained, ‘His present work is not a copy of their designs, but is more suited for explaining Aboriginal stories to Europeans’.32 Onus drew upon some of the same sources as Mansell for his Aboriginal designs but for very different reasons. The Australian Home Beautiful article ‘Stone Age Legends in Modern Design’ from 1955 discusses how Onus ‘has spent hours in Sydney’s Mitchell Library studying pictures of Aboriginal Cave Drawings’.33 A boomerang with a Bill Onus stamp on its back held in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney utilises images of figures taken from Mountford’s Art Myth and Symbolism (1956). A cross design featuring cycad nuts is painted on the left and right of the boomerang, and at its centre is a painting of a Royal Spoonbill with a dotted body (Figure 7.5). Other sources included Miller and Rutter’s Child Artists of the Australian Bush (1952) focussing on the art produced by Aboriginal school children in Carrolup, Western Australia. This is reflected in the designs found on the Onus coffee tables. The Aboriginal figures bear a remarkable resemblance to those found in Reynold Hart’s images featured in the book. It

Figure 7.5 Bill Onus, Boomerang, wood, made Aboriginal Enterprises, decorated by Bill Onus, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 1950–1960, object number 95/26/2, Museum of Applied Art and Sciences, Sydney.

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 117 is likely that the table was a collaboration between Bill Onus and Revel Cooper, who was trained at Carrolup Native Settlement and who featured in Child Artists when he was young. Also featured were a Queensland rainforest shield design, birds with footprints, and boomerangs34 (Figure 7.6). While Mansell emphasised interpretation, Onus was more concerned with capturing something of the original images that he and his fellow-workers appropriated. Kleinert describes how he sent the non-Indigenous designer Paula Kerry to Alice Springs and Uluru in order to expand her knowledge of Aboriginal culture. Unlike Melbourne textile designers Frances Burke and Margaret Preston, Kerry emphasised the accurate reproduction of regionally distinctive designs. The wares of Aboriginal Enterprises were not a form of personal artistic expression or part of a manifestation of a particular national identity. Rather, they were utilised to promote Aboriginal culture. Onus stressed the ‘authenticity’ of his designs, with Onus himself pointing out that ‘some goods are being sold bearing figures claimed to be Aboriginal art, but these are simply what the designers consider it should be like’, ...‘We produce the real thing’.35 The text supports the authenticity of Onus’s cultural production by linking it organically to his Aboriginal heritage, reporting that: When Mr Bill Onus of Melbourne decided to enter the modern furnishing fabric field, he didn’t have to stretch his imagination to conjure up designs. He simply turned to the legendary drawings of his ancestors, transferred them from cave to wall to cloth, and produced curtain and furnishing fabrics that are contemporary and original.36

Figure 7.6 Bill Onus, Coffee Table, wood, made by Aboriginal Enterprises, decorated by Bill Onus c. 1960, Private collection.

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From a contemporary perspective, the appropriation of designs from other parts of the continent is suspect, but during the 1950s, it was a way of asserting and reaffirming a collective pan-Aboriginal identity following the dispossession and unrelenting colonisation that were evident in south-eastern Australia.37 This panAboriginalism was also political, with Onus fighting against the treatment of Aboriginal people across the country. For example, Onus had witnessed the chaining up of Aboriginal people first-hand during the filming of The Overlanders (1946), and consequently he supported the 1946 Pilbara walk-off, a strike held on 1 May 1946 involving 800 Aboriginal pastoral workers who walked off the stations in protest against unfair wages and working conditions. In response, Onus filmed and produced a play entitled White Justice at the New Theatre in Melbourne, which highlighted the despicable treatment of Aboriginal people by station owners.38 The ‘Stone-Age Legends in Modern Design’ article acknowledges Onus’s aim to use the marketing of Aboriginal-inspired design and performances of boomerangthrowing to put a spotlight on Aboriginal rights, with the text stating that ‘the authorities know him as a fighter for his own people. . . . Mr Onus is president of the Australian Aborigines League and a justice of the peace’.39 A ‘National Art Form’: Aboriginal-inspired Art While Mansell wished to educate a white population about Aboriginal art, he was not concerned with cultural revival like Onus. The ‘Aboriginalia’ that Mansell produced was seen to be representative of a national Australian art form and of a ‘redemptive’ synthesis between Aboriginal and settler design symbolising assimilation, and his work was therefore popular as souvenir gifts for overseas clients. Hunter attacking Opossums in a Tree for example, was presented to the Queen as part of the Royal Tour in 1954. It depicts two possums in western Arnhem land x-ray style, sitting in a settler-style gum tree painted in the ochre colours common to Aboriginal art of Arnhem land. A hunter, a loose interpretation of an Oenpelli rock art figure, approaches the tree with a spear. The timber frame features Australian mulga wood. It remains in the Royal Collection.40 English comedian Tommy Trinder bought a similar work and explained that the reason he made the purchase was because ‘what he got was Australian earth on Australian material by an Australian artist and framed with Australian wood’.41 Mansell also made an Aboriginal Sari for Mrs Muni Lal, wife of India’s Information officer in Australia, featuring the age-old story created by the Northern Territory aborigines of how the earth became coloured. . . . To make them Byram Mansell worked with mortar and pestle pulverising red earth for the rich browns, crushing native berries and flowers for the bright reds, oranges, reds and yellows. . . . The result is something both Mr. Mansell and the Muni Lals feel is distinctively Australian.42 The Aboriginal-inspired art that Mansell produced was seen to reflect a ‘native born’ ‘national’ art form. It was utilised, not only for the purposes of Australia

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 119 presenting a unique image of itself on the world stage but also as a defence against an imported European culture. Hence, a review of Mansell’s exhibition at David Jones department store art gallery in 1953 in Woman’s Day declares: It is important to the growth of Australian culture that we strive to develop typical Australian arts and crafts. Otherwise in the next century or so we shall find the influx of old European arts and crafts being sponsored here by new Australians who will swamp our national culture.43 To put this extraordinary statement into context, between 1947 and 1971 2.5 million people from all over Europe were persuaded, assisted, and conveyed to Australia.44 The favoured migrants were British as reflected in the assisted passage scheme and the ‘Bring Out a Briton’ campaign of the 1960s. However, during the 1950s, less than a third of the migrant intake was from Britain and by the end of the 1960s 10% of the Australian population had been born in continental Europe.45 This led to fears sparked by the mass migration of non-British ‘New Australians’.46 This attitude starkly contrasted with Onus’s active support for and employment of European migrants at Aboriginal Enterprises. It was not only the ‘aliens’ from without that were seen as countered by Mansell’s Australian, national style work drawing upon Aboriginal subject matter, but also the ‘enemies’ from within. Mansell assumed that his plan for an interdenominational church in Alice Springs to memorialise the achievements of the Reverend Flynn, founder of the Flying Doctor Service, would hamper the spread of communism. At a poorly attended meeting held in Alice Springs, Mansell argued that the church would help Christians to unite because it was ‘riddled with communism down south’.47 Only the previous year, Prime Minister Robert Menzies had made the ‘protection’ of Australia from communism a central platform of his election campaign of 1951. He declared that communism ‘is not only anti-Christian, but is opposed to all those nobler aspirations which spring from the religious faith of decent people’ and he promised: ‘to root out the evil ideas which are quite foreign to our civilisation, our traditions, our faith’.48 Despite Menzies’ protestations, the 1951 referendum held to ban the Communist Party of Australia failed, causing concerns amongst anti-communists like Mansell about the spread of communist influence. It was feared that Aboriginal people would become politically mobilized by the Communist Party who were known to support their rights.49 The plan for the church also responded to an anxiety about the depopulated centre and north of Australia. As the ‘threat’ of communism in China and SouthEast Asia grew, plans to populate the Northern Territory were prevalent because the government hoped that this would help defend Australia against communist attack. Again, the contrast between Onus and Mansell is stark. Although Onus met his wife at a communist rally and she was a member, he himself was never a member of the party. Nevertheless, he was actively involved with the union movement, was known as an orator for his people, and personally suffered from his association with left-wing organisations. In 1952, he was blocked from visiting the United States of America specifically because he had spoken from a communist platform

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to protest the establishment of the Woomera Rocket Range.50 All of this was found in his ASIO files.51 Whereas Onus was fighting for the rights of Aboriginal people, the church proposed by Mansell reflected the official assimilation policy of the time. ‘Revolutionary in design like the Matisse church in the French alps’, the church was to be built from Australian stone. Scenes from the bible painted by Mansell in ‘Aboriginal style’ were to be featured on the church walls.52 This vision for a church acted to suppress the culture and beliefs of Arrernte people, all the more so given that it was planned to place the church on ‘Billy Goat Hill’ or Akeyulerre, an Arrernte sacred site and a ‘gathering and healing place’, now the site of a cultural centre.53 Even though it was never built, the church is a powerful metaphor for the broader damaging suppression of Aboriginal culture during the assimilationist era and experienced by the Stolen Generations.54 From church to transport to banks, Mansell’s work enjoyed wide support, particularly from government agencies such as the NSW railways and the Commonwealth Bank. A typical wall panel for the NSW railways was A Kangaroo Hunt on the Riverina Express. In this mural the points of spears rain down on an X-ray style Kangaroo near a billabong featuring pseudo X-ray style fish and a lizard. The Kangaroos ‘run through a European landscape of three-point perspective . . . they are figures in a white story’55 Carolyn Lovitt puts forward a theory that the murals were part of a broader project of colonisation and modernity represented by the railways themselves. The railway lines allowed Australia to be presented as ‘traversable, accessible and secure (possessed)’ while the railway carriage itself reflected ideas of home and the domestic space during the assimilation era.56 In these public and private spaces, ‘the dream of a united, egalitarian benevolent and morally responsible nation seemed possible’.57 At the same time ‘Mansell’s paintings replaced the story of violent acquisition with a naturalised, mythical sense of belonging, concealing crimes against humanity that threatened to unsettle our sense of being at home’.58 The Reverse Namatjira This easy appropriation of Aboriginal people and culture by European Australians and its characterisation as a friendly exchange of cultures between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is reflected in the references to Mansell as a ‘reverse Namatjira’ found in the French-English language newspaper Le Courrier Australien and other publications. Le Courrier declared that in Mansell’s work: The Namatjira story has now been reversed. We now have artists living in the western tradition who interpret aboriginal legends, life and background using the artistic conventions, the lines and symbols of the aborigines themselves. If this helps us to understand the age-old primitive tribes that came before us to this continent, so much the better; we would do well to understand those who came first to this country.59

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 121 Several of the reviews of Mansell’s 1953 exhibition of artworks at David Jones gallery compared Mansell to Namatjira, although not all were enthusiastic about Mansell’s approach. The critic for the Daily Telegraph felt that ‘Mansell meets difficulties where he uses depth and perspective with stone age terms. The reconciling of totally different styles is indeed a problem’.60 Rex Batterbee, the otherwise minor artist who taught Namatjira at his request how to paint landscape in watercolour, was another of those who was ‘less enthusiastic’ about Aboriginalism more broadly amongst settler artists declaring that ‘we can learn something from our Aboriginal artists. At present there are several white artists trying to show us an Australian aboriginal form of art which is too forced to be of much value’.61 The once-obvious comparison between Mansell and Namatjira overlooks what non-Indigenous audiences have now learned to appreciate, which is that Namatjira used watercolour as a strategy to communicate the significance of Country. For First Nations people, however, Namatjira was always a trailblazer whose existence and experiences allowed the future development of the Aboriginal art movements. Onus paid homage to the artist in his 1951 production Out of the Dark which featured a backdrop reproducing a work by Namatjira, a proscenium arch utilising dendroglyphs from the southeast and an all-Aboriginal cast.62 Namatjira’s work was also remembered as an important reminder of Aboriginal identity for ‘The Stolen Generations’ as so movingly attested by Lola Edwards in the ABC radio broadcast ‘Albert’s Gift’.63 In 1956, Namatjira presented his painting Arreyonga Paddock, James Range, a watercolour of a gum tree in bushland, to the Cootamundra Aboriginal girls training home. It hung in the home’s main dormitory. This painting, like Onus’s boomerang-throwing for Jack Charles, was a significant indicator of a First Nations identity for displaced Aboriginal children.64 The comparison between Mansell and Namatjira also ignores the extent to which Namatjira, ‘while granted first citizenship’ was, as is well-known, victim of the extreme power inequities between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people that existed during the assimilation era. Namatjira’s death in 1959 led the communist artist Noel Counihan to produce an image of Namatjira crucified on a cross. Meanwhile, Mansell went from strength to strength, making a living from producing work inspired by Aboriginal art. The Mural at Taree Mansell’s career highlights included a major commission of the Taree Commonwealth Bank consisting of 1863 oven-fired mosaic ceramic tiles made ‘with some of the coloured clays dug in the hills of Taree’. It was felt that it was ‘fitting’ that ‘one of these stone age stories should be interpreted through pottery’.65 The massive 17-feet-high and 25-feet-long mural tells the story of Bilinga and the Fig Tree, a legend associated with the area about the Brush Turkey and how Magpies gained their appearance and song under the fig tree by the river (Figure 7.3). When the mural was first under threat of demolition in 2007 (it still is), the local Biripi people did not want it to be destroyed. They supported a move to preserve

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it because, as Pamela Paulson, the Aboriginal community officer of greater Taree City Council, wrote: The mural has been part of Taree’s history for the past 50 years and relates particularly to the Aboriginal people of Taree (derived from Tareebit) ‘Home of the Fig’ because of its depiction of the Aboriginal story of Bilinga and the Magpie.66 It does seem that the story was based on a local legend. Biripi woman and Purfleet resident Ella Simon told the story of the ‘brush turkey’ and magpie on a recording.67 Given this, Mansell might possibly have drawn upon the stories of the locals he met as a source for the legend depicted in his mural. Although it may be surprising that the community support the preservation of this mural by an assimilationist artist like Mansell, in an environment where previous generations were given little opportunity to celebrate First Nations art and culture, the mural served as a reminder that First Nations culture was important, even if it was through the distorted lens of the coloniser. Nor are the Biripi community the only First Nations people to do this. The musician Archie Roach and Lin Onus have talked affectionately of William Ricketts Sanctuary, set in native fern forest outside Melbourne and filled by Ricketts with his romantic sculptures of Indigenous figures, and the ProppaNOW artist Tony Albert recalls that as a child his collection of Aboriginalia was ‘seemingly for me like being surrounded by pictures of family’.68 Having realised as an adult the political context surrounding these images, he feels that his current artworks such as Sorry and Ash on Me are ‘rescuing these objects’ and ‘giving them a voice they didn’t have’.69 Aboriginal Tourist Art and the Purfleet Mission In 1954, social attitudes made it impossible for the Biripi people on Purfleet Mission, significantly situated a few kilometres away from the town centre of Taree where the mural was placed, to contribute to the artwork. As the historian Jennifer Jones has documented, in Taree/Purfleet a type of apartheid was operating. In a 1989 interview, Purfleet man Harry Saunders recalled the ostracism he encountered when he moved into central Taree and the segregation enforced at the Taree cinema.70 Saunders had to leave Purfleet because he campaigned against the subpar conditions there. Even as late as 1960, conditions at Purfleet were abysmal leading to an outbreak of gastroenteritis which ‘raged for a month’. Jones points out ‘The cottages at Purfleet had no electricity, no interior lining, no kitchen, no bathroom, no sewerage service and no running hot water’.71 By 1956, things were beginning to change. During this year, Alderman Bill Nelson and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, mooted the idea of a gift shop at Purfleet, and in 1962 the Gillawarra Gift Shop was established there. Nelson was directly inspired by a visit to Aboriginal Enterprises. Onus actively supported the Taree initiative, both by visiting it with Pastor Doug Nicholls and by distributing some of his own work and wares to the organisation. As with Aboriginal Enterprises,

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 123 the Gillawarra Gift Shop was much more than a country craft shop. Both became community centres providing an avenue for interaction, education, and cooperation with non-Indigenous people. Just as Onus utilised boomerang throwing to engender publicity in non-Indigenous society and cultural pride amongst his own, Purfleet resident Ella Simon, who was seminal in setting up the Gillawarra shop, ‘delivered countless lectures on Aboriginal culture to tourists and interested community groups and she would ‘really enthral them with her talks about the old days in the Aboriginal community’ thereby challenging the assumption that people had ‘lost their culture’.72 Both organisations were inherently political, as recognised by the Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins, who visited Gillawarra and signed the visitors book there during the Freedom Ride he led through towns in rural NSW in 1965, campaigning against racism and discrimination.73 Dawn Magazine The same organisation that ran the Purfleet mission, the Aboriginal Protection Board, published the monthly periodical, Dawn magazine (1915–1969). During the 1950s and 1960s, the vice-chair of the magazine was the anthropologist A. P. Elkin, a longstanding advocate of assimilation and the professor of anthropology at Sydney University. Tellingly, Onus was never commissioned to complete the illustrations for Dawn, even though his images would have been suitable. Instead, he is a subject within its pages and, despite his prominence, is mentioned only four times. First, in a small paragraph under the title ‘smoke circle’ from 1953, describing how the ever-enterprising Onus was planning to make 50,000 boomerangs out of felled poplars along St Kilda Road in central Melbourne, and last, his death notice in 1968.74 In contrast, Mansell’s numerous contributions of images and a letter to Dawn implicates him as part of the majority settler support for the assimilation policy which reached its height between 1951 and 1962. It was a policy that was to have an enormously destructive impact on Aboriginal people leading to the Stolen Generations.75 One example of Mansell’s contribution is his picture of a kangaroo hunt featured on the cover of the 1954 edition. It now seems disturbing and inappropriate that a settler artist was employed to reinterpret Aboriginal legends inspired by imagery drawn from Arnhem land specifically for an Aboriginal readership in New South Wales. Typical for the era, the only ‘authentic’ Aboriginal culture acknowledged was ‘non-assimilated’ ‘stone age’ culture in the north while the culture of those Aboriginal people in the south, subjects of the very assimilation and Stolen Generations policies supported by Dawn and the Aboriginal Protection Board, were disavowed. In all this, Mansell’s support for assimilation remained clear. The July 1957 edition featured Mansell’s Yondi lifting the sky on the front cover. Inside, it stated that: Our aboriginal friends everywhere will know that the policy being carried out by the Board on behalf of the New South Wales Government is that of assimilation; that means complete merging with the white community, on equal conditions as one Australian people.

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Yet the board effectively operated a system of apartheid by placing Aboriginal people on reserves ‘out of town’ that were run following the Aboriginal Protection Act. The Dawn article criticized people for ‘not making the effort to provide themselves with normal housing’ effectively denying the terrible conditions many First Nations people endured on government-run missions such as on Purfleet and Onus’s birthplace, Cummeragunja.76 In 1967, Dawn featured a photograph of ‘The Legend of the Boomerang’, a ceramic mural that Mansell completed for Willoughby Council in Sydney. Mansell is the topic of a feature article, which declares: Australian artist Byram Mansell in his paintings and murals has been ‘sowing the seeds’ of the Aborigines culture throughout the world. He has a firm belief that Australia’s tribal Stone Age man is the most noble and interesting in the world. And he has won many converts to his belief.77 Eventually, the settler-designer Aboriginalism expressed in Mansell’s work began to lose its populist base. The April 1967 Dawn featuring Mansell’s work registered the momentous changes that were occurring. Mention is made of the ‘Vote YES for Aborigines’ referendum campaign which a month later allowed Aboriginal people to be recognised as part of the population. Another article celebrates the achievements of the young Mervyn Bishop, then a cadet photographer at the Sydney Morning Herald and a graduate of photography at Sydney Technical College. Only eight years on, in 1975, Bishop was to famously photograph Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring dirt symbolically into the palm of Vincent Lingiari at Wave Hill, a famous locus of Gurindji protests against colonial working conditions. Whitlam’s gesture recognised Lingiari and his people’s land rights. A few pages later, the Arrernte Kalkadoon activist Charlie Perkins is present in a photograph of the exhibition area at the Aboriginal Affairs Centre on George Street near Sydney’s Central station, opened in 1966. This was two years after Perkins led the Freedom Ride through NSW.78 By 1967, Mansell’s work was becoming more and more anachronistic as Aboriginal activism ensured that Aboriginal art began to occupy the place previously reserved for settler interpretations of First Nations art. The continuing strength of Aboriginal self-determination is reflected in the recent creation of six murals totalling 230 metres in length by the Purfleet/Biripi community. These directly counter Mansell’s inconveniently concrete-set murals which have been for many years stranded in a much-modified vacant building in the main street and are under constant threat of demolition. The Biripi murals were produced as part of the work-for the-dole programme in conjunction with the Purfleet Taree/Aboriginal Land Council in 2016 and were designed by Jason Paul Simon. Simon’s mural features the same key subjects as Mansell’s mural incorporating the fig tree, the Manning River, the sun, and Aboriginal people. Some of the murals feature X-ray lizards against an orange background, others underwater scenes, another of Aboriginal people fishing in the river. They are strategically placed between the Taree Service Centre and Purfleet helping to build a bridge between the community at the former Aboriginal reserve settlement and the town.

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 125 The production of Aboriginal-inspired designs by Onus and Mansell was superficially similar but motivated by different concerns. Mansell’s plans for an interdenominational outback church, his murals and tourist art presented a ‘synthesis’ of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art and design. They provided a vivid example of the ‘reinterpretation’ and active suppression of genuine Aboriginal art, people, and culture during the assimilationist period, even if there was a desire to ‘educate’ whites about Aboriginal art. Mansell’s art and design were founded on the belief that the mistakenly interpreted ‘stone-age’ Aboriginal art of northern Australia was the only ‘authentic Aboriginal art’ and that this needed to be interpreted by settler artists in order to provide a platform for an Australian national design. It was an approach that belied the existence of Aboriginal culture in the south-east, of which Onus was a representative. All of this is reflected in Dawn magazine, which gave Mansell a platform for his assimilationist art. As a settler artist working in an ‘Aboriginal’ idiom, Mansell was given many opportunities for large scale public art commissions that were denied to Aboriginal designers such as Onus and others. In contrast with Mansell, Onus’s business aimed to generate income not only for himself but also for his Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal employees, including European migrants. The business and Onus’ famous boomerang demonstrations actively promoted and revived Aboriginal art and culture and were inseparable from Onus’ political leadership in support of Aboriginal rights. Aboriginal Enterprises and the Gillawarra Gift Shop that it inspired were both meeting places for Aboriginal people and political sites. Onus died prematurely aged 61 in 1968, only a few months after the successful ‘yes’ campaign at the referendum. Meanwhile, Mansell continued production of work into the 1970s almost until his death at the age of 84 in 1977. Over time, the positions of Bill Onus and Byram Mansell have reversed. Now Mansell has been all but forgotten while the film Ablaze in 2021 has revealed the previously hidden extent of Onus’s contribution to Australian art, design, film, and theatre all in the context of a fight for Aboriginal rights. The recognition of his contribution will be continued with Bill’s grandson, Tiriki Onus, holding the flame. Notes 1 Tiriki Onus and Alec Morgan, Ablaze 2021. Co-Directed by Tirki Onus and Alec Morgan (Melbourne: Umbrella entertainment, 2021). 2 New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board, Dawn: A Magazine for the Aboriginal People of N.S.W. https://aiatsis.gov.au/collection/featured-collections/dawn, accessed 15 March 2022. 3 See Sydney Morning Herald, ‘By Our Art Critic’, 20 April 1953, 2; Le Courier Australien, ‘At Sydney Galleries’, 1 May 1953, 4; People Magazine, ‘Artist Goes Back to Cactus’, 31 January 1951, 21. 4 Ian Howie-Willis, ‘William Townsend Onus’, Australian Dictionary of Biography online. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/onus-william-townsend-bill-11308, accessed 12 January 2022. 5 Australian Aboriginal Advancement League, An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the Dark, written by Jean Campbell and produced by Irene Mitchell (Melbourne: Princess Theatre, 1951). 6 Sylvia Kleinert, ‘Aboriginal Enterprises: Negotiating an Urban Aboriginality’, Aboriginal History, 34 (2010): 185.

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Kleinert, ‘Aboriginal Enterprises’, 180. Kleinert, ‘Aboriginal Enterprises’, 181. Kleinert, ‘Aboriginal Enterprises’, 176. Howie-Willis, ‘William Townsend Onus’. Onus and Morgan, Ablaze, 2021. Arianne Rourke, ‘Mansell, William Arthur Byram (1893–1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Online. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mansell-william-arthur-byram-11052, accessed 12 January 2022. Andrew Montana, ‘At Home With Silk Batik and Painted Furniture: Byram Mansell’s Decorative Art in 1920s Sydney’, Australiana (February 2007): 3–7. Rourke, ‘Mansell, William Arthur Byram’. Montana, ‘At Home with Silk Batik’. Susan Lowish, Rethinking Australia’s Art History (London: Routledge, 2018). Howard Morphy, ‘Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research, 1, no. 8 (2001): 37–50; Catherine de Lorenzo, ‘The Hang and Art History’, The Journal of Art Historiography, no. 13 (December 2015): 1–17. Sally May, Collecting Cultures: Myth, Politics, and Collaboration in the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2010). People, ‘Artist Goes Back to Cactus’, 31 January 1951, 31. Charles Mountford, ‘Exploring Stone Age Arnhem Land’, National Geographic, 96, no. 6 (1949): 745–782. Brisbane Telegraph, ‘Stone Age Colours for Tour’, 18 February 1953. Charles Mountford, ‘Application to Chairman of the Research Committee, National Geographic Society’, 5 March 1945, Correspondence 1945–49, vol. 1945–47, PRG 1218/17/4, American/Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1948, Records, State Library of South Australia. Martin Thomas, ‘Aboriginal History’, in Martin Thomas and Margot Neale (eds.), Exploring the Legacy of the Arnhem Land expedition 1948–49 (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2011). Martin Thomas, ‘A Short History of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition’, Aboriginal History, 34 (2010). ‘A Short History of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition’. https://pressfiles. anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p170581/html/ch06.xhtml?referer=&page=7#toc-anchor Nancy Underhill, Making Australian Art 1916–1949 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991). People, 31 January 1951, 51. The Australasian Post, 15 Feb 1951. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian Aboriginal Art: An Exhibition Arranged by the State Galleries of Australia, 1960; Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008). Sun, ‘Artist Wants to Put Australian Colours on U.S. Market’, 17 October 1951, 19. We get a boost from feathers and cactus juice in The Daily Telegraph Sydney, 10 September 1950, p.15 See Sydney Morning Herald, “By our art critic”, 20 April 1953, 2; Le Courier Australien, “At Sydney galleries”, 1 May 1953, 4; People Magazine “Artist goes back to cactus”, 31 January 1951, 21. Dawn: A Magazine for the Aboriginal People of N.S.W., April 1963, 4. The Australian Home Beautiful, November 1955, 25. Mary Durack Miller in assoc. with Florence Rutter, Child Artists of the Australian Bush (London: George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd, 1952), plates 11, 14, 33. Herschell Hurst, ‘Stone Age Legends in Modern Design’, The Australian Home Beautiful, November 1955, 26. Hurst ‘Stone Age Legends’, 26. Kleinert, ‘Aboriginal Enterprises’, 185. Onus and Morgan, Ablaze, 2021. Hurst, ‘Stone Age Legends’, 26.

Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart 127 40 See ‘Hunter Attacking Opossums in a Tree’, Royal Collection Trust, 451567. www.rct. uk/collection/search#/1/collection/451567/hunter-attacking-opossums-in-a-tree 41 People, 31 January 1951, 31. 42 ‘Aboriginal Sari’, Woman, 2 November 1953, 3. 43 David Jones Art Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings and Batik: Australian Aboriginal Legends and Monotypes of the Barrier Reef by Byram Mansell, 20 April–2 May 1953. 44 Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration in Australia since 1901 (Sydney: University of New South Wales press, 2008), 204. 45 Richards, Destination Australia, 210–231. 46 Richards, Destination Australia, 231. 47 Centralian Advocate, Alice Springs, 14 August 1952. 48 Robert Menzies, ‘Election Speech’ Delivered at Canterbury Victoria 1951. See https://elec tionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1951-robert-menzies, accessed 19 March 2021. 49 Bob Boughton, ‘The Communist Party of Australia’s Involvement in the Struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Rights 1920–1970’, in Labour and Community: Historical Essays (Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press), 263–294. 50 Tribune, Sydney, 9 April 1952, 11. 51 Onus and Morgan, Ablaze, 2021. 52 Centralian Advocate, Alice Springs, 14 August 1952. 53 Kieren Fenane, ‘Contours of Cultural Recognition in a Desert Town’, in Julian Schultz and Sandra Phillips (eds.), Griffith Review 60: First Things First (Brisbane: Text Publishing, 2018). www.griffithreview.com/articles/centre-of-controversy-cutural-recognitiondesert-town/, accessed 19 March 2021. 54 Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families (Freemantle: Freemantle Press, 2000). 55 Carolyn Lovitt, ‘Aboriginal Art as Décor: The Politics of Assimilation in White Australian Homes 1930–1970’ (Master’s thesis, Department of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne, April 2000), 80–81. 56 Lovitt, ‘Aboriginal Art as Décor’, 96. 57 Lovitt, ‘Aboriginal Art as Décor’, 78. 58 Lovitt, ‘Aboriginal Art as Décor’, 82. 59 Le Courrier Australien, ‘At Sydney Galleries’, 1 May 1953, 4. 60 Daily Telegraph, 21 April 1953. 61 T.G.H. Strehlow, Rex Batterbee Artist and Founder of the Aboriginal Art Movement in Central Australia (Sydney: Legend Press, 1956). 62 The Australian Aboriginal Advancement League, An Aboriginal Moomba. 63 Lola Edwards, ‘Albert’s Gift’, interview first broadcast on ABC Radio National, 19 February 2007. www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/alberts-gift-part-1lolas-story/3669650 64 Sally Pryor, ‘Namatjira’s Gift to Girls Will Now be Shared by All’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 November 2009. www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/namatjirasgift-to-girls-will-now-be-shared-by-all-20091129-gdttgi.html 65 Commonwealth Bank Pamphlet, ‘Bilinga and the Fig Tree: Australian Aboriginal Legend of Taree’, 1956, in Manning Regional Gallery Collection, Taree; See also ‘Bilinga and the Fig Tree’, Dawn, March 1967, 11. 66 Pamela Paulson, Letter to Sue Mitchet, 18 January 2007, courtesy of Manning River Regional Art Gallery. Paulson states: ‘This is a very important part of the local history of the Purfleet/Taree local community’. 67 Jennifer Jones, ‘Assimilation Discourses’, in Country Women and the Colour Band: Grassroots Activism and the Country Women’s Association (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2015), 11. 68 Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), ‘Why Does Tony Albert Collect Aboriginalia?’, 31 May 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPbd808PUiU. 69 QAGOMA, ‘Why Does Tony Albert Collect Aboriginalia?’.

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70 Randall Wiggers, ‘Transcript of Interview with Harry Saunders’, 25 August 1989. https:// uoncc.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/a6971i_saunders.pdf, accessed 12 April 2022. 71 Jones, Country Women, 68. 72 Jones, Country Women. 73 Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002), 207. 74 Bill Onus is Mentioned Four Times. ‘We Don’t Want Sympathy: Chances for Aborigines Sought’, Dawn, September 1953, 9; ‘A Milestone in Progress of Purfleet’, October 1962, 14; ‘50 000 Boomerangs’, Dawn, December 1963, 14; ‘Smoke Signals’, Dawn, March 1968, 14. 75 Mekarle, Ampe Akelyernemane Meke, ‘Little Children Are Sacred’, Report. https:// humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/57.4%20“Little%20Children%20are%20Sacred”%20report.pdf, accessed 14 May 2022; Haebich, Broken Circles. 76 Chairman, Aborigines Welfare Board, ‘Why the Board Expects Rents to be Paid’, Dawn, July 1957, 2. 77 ‘Australian Artist Promotes Aboriginal Art Overseas’, Dawn, April 1967, 3. 78 ‘Mervyn Bishop Graduates from Photographers Course’, Dawn, April 1967, 6; ‘High Hopes Realized. Success of Centre Now Seems Assured’, Dawn, April 1967, 7.

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Shared Motives New Art and Curatorial Collaborations in the 1980s Catherine De Lorenzo

This chapter argues that it was in the 1980s that artists and curators found new modes of cross-cultural practice that had significant implications for Australian art and cultural history. The filter through which these changes are most easily identified is exhibition history, both large-scale and small. A few large-scale exhibitions, such as selected Biennales of Sydney, have received much art-historical analysis for not only reasserting Aboriginal art as contemporary but also actually including it in cutting-edge contemporary art shows. Here the focus is on a less familiar trajectory, one that charts the steady transformation of the Australian art scene through exhibitions across makeshift, artist-run, and museum spaces. Most of the exhibitions discussed have an archival legacy of flyers and small catalogues that provide rudimentary information about the artists but little or no data on the art shown, so accompanying essays and critiques become critical tools for understanding the overall intent and impact. The evidence provided by these archival sources has been enhanced by the author’s discussions with Djon Mundine OAM FAHA, a proud Bandjalung man from northern New South Wales (NSW) and a central figure who rose to national prominence as a curator during this time.1 This particular microhistory makes use of exhibitions that exemplify emerging and morphing models of collaboration. It highlights some passionate and fluid forces at play within the arts sector. By identifying myriad connectivities between artists, exhibitions, and activism for recognition of Indigenous rights, it shows the cumulative impact of these exhibitions in reshaping Australian culture. The focus is on Sydney, where most of these exhibitions were generated, which is not to disavow innovations in other cities and towns. Within Sydney, the locus was the formerly working-class, inner-city suburb of Redfern. Redfern had long been identified as the home of the metropolitan Aboriginal community, and by the 1980s, it had become a national epicentre of Indigenous activism. The Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Medical Service, the Aboriginal Housing Company, Black Theatre, and the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Company were all established in Redfern by the early 1980s, and the Australia Council moved from North Sydney to Redfern in the middle of the decade. The socio-political and artistic ferment of Redfern in the 1980s arguably produced the conditions for new modes of Aboriginal-inspired art and exhibitions to emerge that were grounded in cross-cultural relationships and shared political DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-9

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causes. This shift occurred in the context of a series of significant leaps in government policy between the late 1960s and the early 1990s regarding the recognition of Aboriginal rights, arts, culture, and history, as well as the defining Australian cultural event of the 1980s, the bicentenary of British occupation of Australia (1788–1988). At one end were the 1967 Referendum and the formation of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council in 1973, and at the other the Mabo decision of the High Court and Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech, both in 1992. In the middle and dominating the cultural landscape of the 1980s, was the lead-up to and then the lavish celebration of the bicentennial. For Indigenous Australians, especially, the bicentennial provided an opportunity to acknowledge truths about dispossession recorded through oral histories that were typically overlooked in mainstream accounts. It was not just the whitewashing of history that was questioned. Contemporary injustices had continued unabated. Aboriginal deaths in police custody became the subject of a Royal Commission in October 1987, with an explosive Interim Report being issued in 1988 and the final report three years later.2 The newspapers continually ran stories of these ongoing tragedies, with funerals and sorry business, outrage and demands for reform. In his book on Protest, Land Rights and Riots of the 1980s, Barry Morris presents ‘an account of political agency, and the struggles for visibility and for recognition of post-colonial rights’.3 Many of the activist arts and exhibitions examined here reflect these goals. The wider art world and the Australian public responded enthusiastically to the new visibility of what was popularly known as Aboriginal ‘dot painting’ in the 1980s and at the same time became aware of the socio-political messages coming out of Redfern. Although some of the nation’s state art museums had started to acquire Aboriginal barks and Pukumani poles from the ‘Top End’ in the late 1950s, most Australians showed little interest until the 1980s and 1990s, with the flourishing of the Western Desert ‘dot painting’ movement begun at Papunya in 1971.4 The Whitlam Labor government’s establishment in the early 1970s of the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB), comprised entirely of Aboriginal artists, tracked this evolution and was itself an important force for change.5 To begin with, most of the Board’s early activity was in supporting artists in northern and central Australian communities, acquiring their works and overseeing exhibitions locally and abroad.6 Painted barks, carvings and central desert acrylics on canvas gained greater traction within the embassy circuit overseas than at home. When state and regional art museums showed Indigenous art at all it was typically a handful of works from a limited range of areas.7 The 1980s, however, saw momentous changes in popular perceptions of Aboriginal art and of Aboriginal issues within art, signalling an awareness that not all Aboriginal art and artists necessarily originated in remote desert communities. Artists from southern and eastern cities worked with contemporary media to address individual and collective concerns. Many starting out in this period, like photographer and film-maker Tracey Moffatt, formed a new generation of art stars that defied easy categorisation. Their art practice resisted a formalist analysis prevalent in Western art history and postwar anthropology.8 By the 1980s, popular adjectives used to describe Aboriginal art in Sydney were ‘urban’ and ‘Koori’, and ‘pan-Aboriginal’ when the collaborations, juxtapositions, or common purposes

Shared Motives 131 outweighed an emphasis on places of birth or residence.9 To engage with this urban Koori art meant engaging with historical and ongoing injustices and with a newfound pride in black identity that freely integrated aspects of familial and Western art and cultural traditions.10 In 1990, poet, activist, and artist Kevin Gilbert looked back on the decade as one where Aboriginal artists showed the creative force of a people who are more concerned with delivering the rough edge of justice and truth as a priority. . . . Life for Australian blacks is far too real, too raw, far too close to the knuckle of oppression in the ghettos of the cities, the fringe camps in the rural areas, for abstract interpretation.11 Large Shows, New Beginnings Recent art histories have acknowledged the pioneering roles played by Nicholas Waterlow and Bernice Murphy in including Aboriginal art within surveys of cutting-edge contemporary European and Australian art.12 Waterlow’s European Dialogue for the third Biennale of Sydney in 1979 included three artists from Ramingining: David Malangi, George Milpurrurr, and John Bunguwuy. Murphy’s inaugural Australian Perspecta 1981 at the Art Gallery of NSW showed three major pieces, one each by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Charlie Tjapangati, all from Papunya. Despite efforts by knowledgeable (white) spokespersons to transcribe the artists’ intents, and thus allow for a critical understanding of the works in comparison to others on display, critics basically ignored them.13 Undaunted, the curators continued to stretch the boundaries of engagement and collaboration. 1983 is a year that deserves re-examination for two projects that expanded the model of curatorial collaboration. For her second major survey of contemporary Australian art, Australian Perspecta 1983, Murphy invited Djon Mundine into the curatorial process. As the relatively new art advisor (1980–1994) at Ramingining in Central Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, Mundine was invited to select a suite of works from that community and to write about their significance so that the largely-ignorant art audience in Sydney might better grasp Indigenous epistemologies and spirituality.14 Mundine liaised with Murphy in selecting the art and his contribution to the catalogue marked a new beginning in terms of transferring expertise from settler to Indigenous voices within exhibitions of this type. This curatorial move would have immediate and major consequences. The following year Mundine was invited by Murphy and Leon Paroissien, now joint curators of the Power Collection at the University of Sydney, to fully curate Objects and Representations from Ramingining. While his principal focus would remain that of the art and artists of Ramingining for another decade, Mundine was also able to add value to that experience by inviting the artists to Sydney. Not only did the Northern Territory artists see the southern contemporary exhibition context, but also Mundine was able to introduce them to urban Koori artists. Before long, artists from the south-east visited Ramingining to meet with the artists on their own turf.15 Meanwhile, as different segments of Australian Perspecta 1983 toured regional galleries around Australia throughout the second half of the year, D’un autre

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continent: l’Australie le rêve et le réel (From Another Continent: Australia Dream and Reality) was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in France16 (Figure 8.1). This major survey of 27 Australian experimental artists, including 12 members of the Warlpiri community from the Northern Territory, was complemented by additional exhibitions on Australian photography, Aboriginal art, video

Figure 8.1 D’un autre continent: l’Australie le rêve et le réel (1983) curated by Suzanne Pagé and Leon Paroissien for Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France. Catalogue cover. Collection of the author.

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Figure 8.2 Aboriginal Memorial (1988), conceived by Djon Mundine in 1987–1988 and realised by 43 artists from Ramingining and neighbouring communities of Central Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. Cover of brochure from 1988, showing part of the installation at the Biennale of Sydney. Photo: Jon Lewis.

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and film as well as music performances at numerous sites around Paris.17 With a transnational curatorial team headed by Suzanne Pagé in Paris and Paroissien in Sydney, the central exhibition had a substantial catalogue with contextual essays by a number of writers, including one by Warlpiri artist, Maurice Jupurrula Luther.18 In short, 1983 marked a step-up in terms of Indigenous agency in the presentation of exhibitions of their work, with visual artists amplifying audience engagement through song, dance and text. Within a few years Mundine conceived of, produced and curated the Aboriginal Memorial (1988). This 200-piece installation by 43 Ramingining artists was installed within the Biennale of Sydney, which in that year was named the Australian Biennale 1988, under the curatorial direction of Waterlow19 (Figure 8.2). The Memorial inserted a necessary level of gravitas into the bicentennial art project, with Mundine describing the piece as ‘a War Cemetery, a War Memorial to all those Aboriginals who died defending their country’ over 200 years.20 Here is not the place to reiterate the considerable scholarship on this piece as it settled into its permanent home in the National Gallery of Australia (NGA),21 or to elaborate on the major roles Mundine would later play in championing the art of south-east Australia. My point in mentioning it is to note its resonance with many projects at the time that saw common purpose between very long-standing traditions, as seen at Ramingining, and emerging art in the cities that addressed survivance and cultural integrity despite colonisation.22 Artists did not have to mingle on the streets of Redfern to protest the injustices of colonisation. Solidarity among artists around the country was palpable. One strange feature of the Australian Biennale 1988 was that no other Aboriginal work was included. It was not as if Sydney art spaces had not been alive to new artists and issues throughout the 1980s. The 1980s saw many exhibitions that presented art by emerging Indigenous and sometimes established non-Indigenous artists who found a common purpose in backing calls for selfdetermination. The following account interweaves white and black responses to a changing and exciting moment with the focus now shifting to smaller exhibitions assembled in town halls, community spaces, artist-run galleries, and some art museums, before acknowledging some additional larger shows towards the end of the decade. Little Shows, Big Strides There was a shifting habitus of artists and curators within the increasingly politicised and productive 1980s. A new and distinctive camaraderie between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and curators was centred on opening up opportunities for change within the art world and in society at large. Whether working side-byside or in unison, artists were working together. In retrospect, the process was captured in 1993 by Marcia Langton, then well on her way to a distinguished career as a government adviser and university professor, when she expanded a definition of Aboriginality to embrace ‘a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation’.23 Somehow, there was space for white people to join the struggles for

Shared Motives 135 justice and land rights, to understand the catastrophic aspects of colonialism, and to enable art projects that provoked tough discussions. The easiest way for non-Indigenous artists to get involved in supporting land rights campaigns was through donating works to fundraising exhibitions, and this was quite common in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1980 to 1982, Apmira Artists for Aboriginal Land Rights staged exhibitions to fundraise for land rights activism. Founded and co-ordinated by journalist and writer Guy Morrison, the Apmira Festival Committee ‘operated under the patronage of Faith Bandler, Arthur Boyd, Max Dupain, Marea Gazzard, Sali Herman, Wandjuk Marika, David Moore, Les Murray, Axel Poignant, Lloyd Rees, Peter Sculthorpe, Bernard Smith, Thancoupie and Patrick White’, a who’s who of Australian visual, literary, and performing artists, three of them Indigenous.24 Unsurprisingly, it attracted contributions by hundreds of artists. The 1982 exhibition checklist accounts for 392 works by roughly 150 artists of whom six were Aboriginal artists from the Northern Territory.25 The majority of works were drawings, prints, photographs and some paintings by sympathetic white artists who supported Aboriginal claims for land rights. Some submitted works that addressed Indigenous people, sites and issues but most did not. For example, the Sydney-based painter Peter Upward was represented by an abstract gestural work, but his sentiments in participating may well have accorded with those of his sister, Penelope Upward, who had made a film two years earlier, which she called Aboriginal Land Rights – NSW.26 Events such as these continued through the 1980s.27 Fundraising exhibitions were not necessarily dominated by whites. In October 1988, an auction of ‘Aboriginal art traditional & modern’ was held at the Tin Sheds, an autonomous artspace run out of the University of Sydney. Here artists from the newly established Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative as well as many Central Desert and Top End artists, contributed works to raise funds for the Tranby Aboriginal College students’ tour of Central America.28 Amongst the photographers who submitted works to Apmira were Jon Rhodes and Lee Chittick, who would also contribute to After the Tent Embassy (ATTE), a photographic exhibition especially commissioned by Apmira that would tour to Wollongong, Melbourne and Canberra. The Tent Embassy had been established on 26 January 1972 on the lawns outside Parliament House (now Old Parliament House) in Canberra. Instigated by four young Aboriginal men from Sydney, the protest against government inaction on Aboriginal land rights was quickly supported by countless activists from around the country.29 The starting date was significant as officially it signified Australia Day (in 1972 the 184th anniversary of Captain Arthur Phillip’s landing in Australia), a date the protestors argued should be recognised as Invasion Day. Ten years later, in 1984, ATTE showed contemporary photographs from around the country of Indigenous activists and organisations, who welcomed visual documentation of their efforts to transform society. Photographer Wes Stacey and artist Narelle Perroux conducted the photographic research that brought together engaged and engaging contemporary images commissioned by Indigenous communities around the country. They also reproduced images from the historical archives, where sullen demeanours provided unmistakeable hallmarks of the impact of colonisation. Marcia Langton made full use of

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her visual intelligence to carefully cluster new and old, energised, and colonised. The contrasts spoke volumes, as did her punchy text that typically saw one sentence segmented into phrases, each placed under a suite of images, so that viewers could contrast the misery and pointlessness of assimilation with the enthusiasm accompanying self-determination.30 No one could doubt that in the ten years since the Tent Embassy was first established, there was massive change around the nation. Referring to the exhibition nearly 15 years later, Wal Saunders, then in the Indigenous Section of the Australian Film Commission, reflected that although Australia had [a]massed ‘one of the most complete photographic records of the colonial enterprise known . . . [b]rave attempts, like Langton and Stacey’s After the Tent Embassy are a rarity and undeservedly little known outside Australia’.31 Curated by Langton, with a catalogue foreword by Wandjuk Marika, funded by the NSW Premier’s Department, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies [AIAS now AIATSIS] and the AAB, all the contemporary material in the exhibition was by white activist photographers.32 Penny Tweedie, Juno Gemes, Elaine Kitchener (now Syron), and Wes Stacey had worked for some years assisting communities in documenting land claims or more generally informing the wider public of struggles and achievements.33 For this reason, their images were fundamentally relational, in a sense co-authored, and focused on the issues to hand rather than on reputations within the art world. The audience was bi-cultural, with Marika insisting the book was ‘published for Aboriginal people, my people, and I strongly recommend it to you to help us’.34 The commissioning communities and the photographers knew the power of photography to persuade, especially when documenting the rapid societal changes towards self-determination. A two-page spread by AIAS in Art Network was unequivocal: The exhibition is a statement by us about our Aboriginality. . . . The photographic essay explains why we have a strong sense of identity, unity, and why we want real land rights. The statement is what every black person wants to say.35 It was the input here from Langton as much as from the many Indigenous individuals and communities depicted, that enabled an ethos of Aboriginality to win out. At much the same time, there were two other photography exhibitions that by now have dropped out of the collective memory but contributed to a new and evolving art practice. The first, just months before ATTE, was Black Eyes in Focus (August 1982) at Exiles Gallery, Darlinghurst, by the Kempsey Aboriginal Camera Club, Kempsey being a coastal town in northern NSW with a significant Indigenous population. A critic from the Tribune praised the images of ‘Aboriginal life from the point of view of the community’.36 But a prescient response came from one of Australia’s most renowned photographers, Max Dupain, who was also a photography critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. Impressed that for ‘the first time on record we have an aboriginal establishment producing and exhibiting photography’, he also yearned to sense their own ‘symbolic tradition’ within photography, a move that would ‘establish an art without equal. It can be done . . . in their

Shared Motives 137 own terminologies’.37 Mundine would later put it more bluntly: ‘Aboriginal artists had to define themselves, their history, their art’.38 Dupain was writing in 1982 and it is a sign of how quickly things were changing that by mid-decade his dream for a distinctive urban Koori photography had become a compelling reality. The second, underway as Tent Embassy was taking shape, was another project co-examining the old (photo archives) with the new (photographs, as well as creative workshops in fabrics and ceramic murals). Pictures for Cities was essentially a history, craft, community, and visual arts project based at Tin Sheds and focused on the adjacent, then working-class suburbs of Redfern, Waterloo and Chippendale (Figure 8.3).39 Many artists were involved in different aspects of the research and workshops, with industrial themes headed by Geoff Weary and Aboriginal themes

Figure 8.3 A4 poster for Pictures for Cities (1982), a Visual History of South Sydney Project developed at the Tin Sheds, University of Sydney, and shown in numerous venues. Collection of the author.

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headed by the young Tracey Moffatt.40 When requested, Moffatt was able to supplement archival images with informal snaps of her own.41 Again, there was an easy flow between artists and history, between community and experimental art, between community venues and sought-after art spaces. As with Tent Embassy, the photo panels were crowded, and in-between space carried text. This led photographer Catherine Rogers to grapple with the observation that the ‘very elegantly produced’ panels failed to accord with dominant assumptions about art photography, concluding that ‘Politically based photography is apparently not ‘real’ photography, even less so when such work is accompanied by some text’.42 When Rogers caught up with the roving exhibition it was at the artists-run Artspace, where these tensions would have been sensed most acutely. Artspace was also the venue for a radically new exhibition that brought black and white together. Artist Tim Johnson and sociologist Vivien Johnson, both white, assembled the first exhibition by mainly city-based Indigenous artists, most of whom lived in Sydney. Koori Art ’84 was held at Artspace, at that time located close to Central Station and within walking distance from Redfern.43 Most were young, some still at art school, and their diverse materials and expressive techniques heralded a creative frisson. Contemporary accounts suggest it was this exhibition that introduced the disparate Koori artists to one another.44 Of the 25 artists, the majority worked in Sydney even if they were born in rural centres and interstate. Their works hung alongside others from the Northern Territory desert centres of Papunya, Ernabella and Hermannsburg. Trevor Nickolls and Jeffrey Samuels had both exhibited before, but this was the first time most people saw the work of Banduk Marika, Euphemia Bostock, Isabel Coe, Fiona Foley, Fernanda Martins, Avril Quail, Michael Riley, and Gordon Syron. It was through art, poet and author Dr. R.B. (Bobbi) Sykes commented in her introduction, that ‘the Black community can weep and begin the process of recovery’. Addressing the art in the catalogue’s concluding essay, Vincent Butron saw that in their ‘contemporaneity they pass from ritual to politics by the very action of their “exhibition value”’.45 Many of the artists in Koori Art ’84 also participated in Urban Koories: Two exhibitions of Urban Aboriginal Art (1986), held sequentially at the Workshop Art Centre, Willoughby, a suburb close to North Sydney where the Australia Council was then sited (Figure 8.4).46 The curators, Suhanya Raffel and Chris Watson, neither Indigenous, acknowledged funding from the AAB, then headed by Gary Foley. Issues of identity continued to be explored in many works, but perhaps the most compelling was Fiona Foley’s haunting sculpture of The Annihilation of the Blacks. Observed by a white figure on the ground, the nine black corpses dangle by the neck, much like the ‘strange fruit from the poplar trees’ immortalised in Billie Holliday’s famous song of black lynchings in the USA.47 Foley’s figures formally reference carvings of bonyfish and flying foxes made for a ceremony in Aurukun (north west Cape York) in 1962 and now in the National Museum of Australia.48 On her own Badtjala lands, killings were usually with rifles fired by squatter vigilante parties.49 Here, the figures seen hanging from a branch straddling two forked saplings instantly position the atrocity in Australia.50 Was this the first overt reference to Aboriginal massacres in Koori art?51 With an increasing amount of press

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Figure 8.4 Urban Koories: Two exhibitions of Urban Aboriginal Art (1986), curated by Suhanya Raffel and Chris Watson for the Willoughby Art Centre, Sydney. Catalogue cover. Collection of the author.

coverage on Aboriginal deaths in police custody, this allusion by Foley to an earlier massacre at the hands of Native Police in her forebears’ lands in the Maryborough region of south-east Queensland, struck a chord that reverberated across time and place.52 An ever-present mindfulness of history also underpinned National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee’s NADOC’86: Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photography (1986), co-curated by Tracey Moffatt and Ace Bourke at the Aboriginal Artists’ Gallery.53 Like the white activist photographers in Tent Embassy, this exhibition both acknowledged struggles for self-determination and demonstrated a visual panache that caught the collective imagination. NADOC’86 was a game changer: it brought exposure to a new generation of Koori photographers and added value to the bigger photographic and cultural debates. A few of the artists had exhibited before, with Mervyn Bishop already acclaimed as a photojournalist. Subsequently, Moffatt joined the prestigious Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Sydney and continued to stage quirky photographs and films; Bishop’s historic

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1975 image of Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the hand of Vincent Lingiari was rediscovered and transformed into an icon for land rights; Brenda L. Croft forged a stellar career as a curator, photographer, and academic and, in less than 20 years remaining to him; Michael Riley went on to create many beautiful photo series and films, including cloud, installed as part of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris.54 Overnight, it seems, Indigenous photographers were everywhere, contributing to or organising major photography exhibitions. Half the photographers commissioned by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, for their project After 200 Years, were Indigenous. This large Bicentennial project documenting communities around Australia, resulted in a replenished archive, a touring exhibition and a book. Its lasting legacy, however, was the stringent protocols put in place so that image control of who, how and what was photographed and then selected for publication/ exhibition was invested in the communities.55 Meanwhile, Kevin Gilbert, working on behalf of Treaty ’88, took a more political approach for Inside Black Australia, when he assembled ten photographers whose work highlighted ongoing inequalities and resilience.56 By contrast, Bishop’s retrospective In Dreams, curated by Moffatt for the prestigious Australian Centre for Photography in 1991, barely hints at the turbulent 1970s and 1980s.57 Instead, most of the images reflected the opportunities taken by a jobbing photographer working largely outside a political or art milieu. Remarkably, in the five years since NADOC’86, both curator (Moffatt) and artist (Bishop) were enjoying a new-found status as celebrated art photographers. Exhibitions of Koori art seemed to be coming thick and fast, with more names becoming well known and with an expanding aesthetic and geographic repertoire. Following NADOC’86, Bourke continued working on exhibitions for Aboriginal Arts Australia and in that role curated Australia: Art & Aboriginality 1987 for Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth, United Kingdom.58 In the catalogue Bobbi Sykes reiterated her plea that ‘our grief and pain must be acknowledged’ [emphasis in original], and Vivien Johnson reminded the ‘outside world’ that, far from the fiction of terra nullius, Australia boasted the longest continuing art tradition in the world.59 The bicentennial moment may have been charged with politics but the art – paintings, prints, photographs, painted barks and carvings, ceramics, weaving and fabrics – was also aesthetically and culturally assured. It marked the first overseas exhibition of Aboriginal art to include urban art in the mix. It testified to an amazing transformation of the Australian art scene through sustained support from Aboriginal funding agencies, the artists themselves, curators, and others with additional skills to offer. The mix of goodwill and expertise continued to reap rewards. Jeffrey Samuels and Chris Watson’s exhibition of Aboriginal Australian Views in Print and Poster, from later in 1987, showed ever stronger and diverse images on paper.60 For a while it had seemed that entire communities in remote places like Papunya and Ramingining were artists. Now attentive observers of the scene sensed a similar phenomenon in urban centres. There was another consequence of Art and Aboriginality that deserves a mention, if only for the fact that it confirms the impact of such exhibitions well beyond the primary target audience. Portsmouth was the city from which the First Fleet

Shared Motives 141 had sailed 200 years earlier, and the exhibition coincided with the launch of a re-enactment of the Sydney-bound tall ships, destined to arrive in Sydney on 26 January 1988. Tracey Moffatt, one of the artists who accompanied Bourke to Portsmouth for the exhibition, publicly protested the decision to fly the Aboriginal flag on the ships.61 Publicity generated by her brief arrest had immediate ramifications within Australian art. Artist Amanda Holt was a member of the Bicentennial Protest Group that met at Tranby Aboriginal Co-Operative in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe.62 Sparked by the controversy, Holt, in collaboration with Moffatt, designed the poster Tall Ships, Tall Tales (1987), into which she incorporated photographs by Gemes and Kitchener. It is another example of activist collaboration between artists in the lead-up to Invasion Day and the bicentennial year. Further, with support from the Teachers Federation, the poster was distributed to all public schools in NSW in 1988. It is a clear instance of the rich web of connections between exhibitions, even remote exhibitions, and of their impact on Australian culture. Most of the exhibitions had AAB support or some funding from Aboriginal agencies. Since the early 1970s Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd had morphed through various restructures until by 1987 it was operating as Aboriginal Arts Australia Ltd (AAAL).63 AAAL was an enterprise largely run by Aboriginal people, co-funded by the federal government, and employing black and white exhibition officers to run galleries in most capital cities.64 But from early 1987, at the very time that Australia: Art & Aboriginality 1987 was being prepared for dispatch to Portsmouth, there was mounting unrest within the Aboriginal art industry towards the AAAL, though not towards the exhibition programme. Newly announced centralised marketing objectives were perceived in the regions as undermining a broader socio-cultural remit of the art centres, causing artists in the centre and north of Australia to set up their own break-away organisation, the Association of Northern and Central Australian Aboriginal Artists (ANCAAA).65 As already mentioned, many urban-based artists had strong links with regional areas, either through family connections or through community exchange. They too picked up on the unrest within the sector. Urban artists wanted control over the marketing of their art. They needed something that built on the experiences of the community centres that comprised ANCAAA. Some city artists were also aware of the pioneering Aboriginal and Art Gallery (or Aboriginal Peoples Gallery) established in 1980 by storyteller Maureen Watson and other members of the Redfern community, which had aimed to work for the local people, demonstrate the retention of east coast ‘skill and . . . traditional culture’, and project ‘the positive images of aboriginal people today’.66 With these combined models of autonomy front of mind, artists in Sydney resolved to establish a gallery run by Koori visual artists. The result was Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, first launched in Chippendale, close to Artspace and, perhaps more importantly, to Redfern.67 Boomalli served as a meeting place as much as a centre for pan-Aboriginal activism.68 In fact the first ANCAAA Newsletter, from July 1987, recorded the support of ‘Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Residents Ko-operative’ as early as 11 March 1987, when ANCAAA was formed.69 The Newsletter, reproducing an article from Land Rights News, reported a boycott on all sales of art and craft to AAAL outlets

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Figure 8.5 Founding members of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Operative, 1987. Photo by Margaret Olah, reissued in 2017 for the invitation for organisation’s 30th anniversary exhibition, Boomalli Ten.

as ‘announced on April 2 by Sydney Aboriginal artist, Tracey Moffatt, at an AAAL exhibition’, adding that ‘it marked the beginning of discussions between traditional artists and their urban counterparts over the way their art is bought and sold’.70 All this was long before Boomalli actually celebrated its official opening in November 1987 with Boomalli au Go-Go exhibition. The founding members – Moffatt, Jeffrey Samuels, Michael Riley, Euphemia Bostock, Arone Meeks, Bronwyn Bancroft, Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft, Fernanda Martins and Avril Quaill – turned out to be an all-star cast in terms of the future Australian art and curatorial scene (Figure 8.5). Their seminal allegiances to the goals of ANCAAA were expressed late in 1988 with the exhibition ANCAAA and BOOMALLI: Artworks produced and managed by Aboriginal people.71 Non-Aboriginal artists too were engaging with the ‘art of decolonisation’.72 In introducing her exhibition Two Worlds Collide: Cultural convergences in Aboriginal and White Australian Art (Artspace, 1985), Vivien Johnson sought to grapple with the fact that the mid 1980s was experiencing ‘an act of radical imagination’ where ‘art actually runs ahead of social practice’ (Figure 8.6). For this exhibition she bought together 14 local and central desert artists already seen in Koori Art ’84, with six non-Aboriginal artists. At least four of them – Richard Goodwin, Tim Johnson, Peter Myers, and Imants Tillers – had a background in architecture and in differing and sometimes contested ways were developing a relationship with

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Figure 8.6 Two Worlds Collide (1985), curated by Vivien Johnson at Artspace, Sydney. Catalogue list of artists. Collection of the author.

Aboriginal art (Tillers), artists (Johnson), or communities (Myers). For Johnson, the issue was less about naming the convergences or attempted rapprochement than putting the art on show, allowing the public to see how different artists were resisting social conventions and high art choices, and perhaps pointing to a new paradigm receptive to decolonisation. From Little Things, Big Things Grow By 1988, the possibilities for art activism on Indigenous issues had increased exponentially. Artists around the country expressed solidarity with Indigenous communities demanding change. Curator Jennifer Isaacs later noted that by 1988, ‘despite the public face of the boycott of Aboriginal involvement in the bicentenary, Aboriginal imagery, motifs and presence were everywhere, both within the country

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and in the push abroad to establish a cultural profile’.73 Certainly this was seen to be the case in exhibitions that drew on recent activist art. For example, the travelling print exhibition, Right Here Right Now – Australia 1988 (Adelaide and touring) showed artists drawing on family, official and suppressed histories to provoke critical thinking about poverty, social justice, the environment, and overdue land rights.74 Another, using a more historical lens, was A Changing Relationship: Aboriginal themes in Australian Art 1938–1988 (SH Ervin, Sydney) which saw artists and designers respond to a broad spectrum of Indigenous art and issues.75 Both exhibitions attracted contemporary Indigenous artists. When the Queensland Art Gallery mounted its ambitious Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences, much of the protest and cultural critique was both hard-hitting and amusing, and much of the art, whether by black or white artists, showed evidence of cross-cultural exchange.76 In the same year, ‘urban Aboriginal’ artist Trevor Nickolls and Kimberley artist and former cattle stockman Rover Thomas were the first Indigenous artists selected for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. At much the same time, Tracey Moffatt was commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to curate The Image Black (1990) to tour the South Pacific and South East Asia. This small exhibition of just 17 images by black and white photographers was deliberately playful and provocative, with Moffatt insisting that the ‘images do not fit cosily together, and there is nothing uniform about what this show says or how it looks’.77 It brought together culturally grounded and aesthetically exploratory tactics to suggest the diversity of Indigenous cultures to an overseas audience. Profound changes had taken place throughout the decade. Artists in the southeast of the nation had shown themselves and the rest of the nation that their cultures were not lost as a result of concentrated colonisation in the most resettled parts of the country. Were this chapter to have focused on particular art works then it would have been easy to show the many visual exchanges between Indigenous artists across the country, between white and black artists, between curators and artists, and between white and black curators. Indeed, a close reading of almost any exhibition referred to here will bear out this claim. Instead, the focus has been at the exhibition scale where some perceptive curators, sensitive to changing cultural forces and excited by the new art that was also responding to them, provided spaces for new work to be brought before the public. Collectively, the consolidating network of exchanges and friendships was a force to be reckoned with within art and Australian culture. All exhibitions discussed here, many of them small to medium in scale, seemed to incorporate personal and cultural journeys but in such a way that they spoke clearly to audiences about the possibility of a new cultural contract. To use a grammatical analogy, the art and exhibitions collectively used the vocative case to address audiences directly: how would you feel if Australia was more truthful and equitable? Real lives, real stories, real consequences of colonialism, and real opportunities for change, were coupled with aesthetic and intellectual strategies that stretched personal and collective paradigms. These statements from the heart, rendered with wit, agency and urgency, led to what Langton named as a ‘cultural efflorescence’ with national and international repercussions.78

Shared Motives 145 The changes that had taken place during the decade were incremental, cumulative, and ultimately transformative. From little things, big things grow: projects designed for temporary exhibitions found their way into regional galleries and larger art institutions. Avril Quaill curated an exhibition of art by Boomalli artists for Artspace’s contribution to Perspecta ’89’, before turning the exhibition into one that toured regional galleries.79 The NGA became the custodian of the Aboriginal Memorial, an acquisition that carried with it a commitment to always have it on show. The Art Gallery of NSW bought an entire set of prints from Right Here Right Now, one of many art institutions that captured the creativity happening in art workshops all around the country, showing white solidarity with Indigenous demands for change. Indigenous people, many of them artists, were playing more active roles as curators. It changed how Australians saw themselves. Because so much of the art grew from a profoundly collaborative base, it redefined perceptions of Australian culture, both at home and abroad. The consequences of these insights opened a new chapter in Australian art history.80 Notes 1 The opinions expressed, however, are those of the author. The author also wishes to advise First Nations’ readers that this chapter includes the names of people who have passed away. 2 Since that Royal Commission, First Nations death in custody continues at six times the rate of non-indigenous people in custody. See Lorena Allam, ‘“Beyond Heartbreaking”: 500 Indigenous Deaths in Custody since 1991 Royal Commission’, The Guardian (London), 6 December 2021. www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/06/ beyond-heartbreaking-500-indigenous-deaths-in-custody-since-1991-royal-commission. Historian and activist Professor Gary Foley, co-founder of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra (1972) and former director of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service (1981), Aboriginal Arts Board (1983–1986), and Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern (1988), etc., details histories of Aboriginal struggles for justice on his website, KooriWeb: www.kooriweb.org/foley/indexb.html. 3 Barry Morris, Protest, Land Rights and Riots: Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2013), 10. 4 Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, and Catherine Speck, Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2018), chs 2 and 9. 5 The AAB has been renamed First Nations Art and Culture. 6 Jon Altman, Brokering Aboriginal Art: A Critical Perspective on Marketing, Institutions, and the State. Kenneth Myer Lecture in Arts & Entertainment Management, ed. Ruth Rentschler (Burwood, Vic.: Deakin University Centre for Leisure Management Research, 2005); Nina Berrell, ‘Inroads Offshore: The International Exhibition Program of the Aboriginal Arts Board, 1973–1980’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, 24, no. 3 (2009): 13–30. http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/ vol_4_no1/papers/inroads_offshore; Joanna Mendelssohn, ‘40 Years On: How Gough Whitlam Gave Indigenous Art a Boost’, The Conversation, 6 November 2013. http://theconversation.com/40-years-on-how-gough-whitlam-gave-indigenous-art-a-boost-1974 7 Marie Geissler, The Making of Indigenous Australian Contemporary Art: Arnhem Land Bark Painting, 1970–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). 8 See Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’, in A.L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today: An Encyclopaedic Inventory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 287–312. For the

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Australian uptake of these ideas within the discourse on Indigenous art in the postwar decades, see Catherine De Lorenzo, ‘The Hang and Art History’, Journal of Art Historiography, 13, (December 2015): 6ff. See Margot Neale, ‘The Politics of Visibility: How Indigenous Australian Art Found Its Way into Art Galleries’, in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), 483–497; also Mendelssohn et al. Australian Art Exhibitions; Laura Fisher, Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2016). It is these positive connotations of ‘urban’ Aboriginal art that are assumed here, although a wider array of interpretations on Aboriginal art from ‘Urban Australia’ are in Ian McLean (ed.), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art & Sydney: Power Publications, 2011), 146–159. Kevin Gilbert, ‘The Struggle Continues’, Artlink, 10, no. 1 & 2 (1990): 52–53. Fisher, Aboriginal Art and Australian Society, ch. 6; Mendelssohn et al., Australian Art Exhibitions, ch. 9. See Nick Waterlow (ed.), European Dialogue: 3rd Biennale of Sydney 1979: A Commentary (Sydney: Playbill (Australia), 1979). This post-exhibition publication of comments and reviews reveals no mention of the Ramingining artists, other than a brief insert on the art (p. 27) by Peter Yates (then Ramingining Craft Advisor) with Clive Scollay and Penny Tweedie, followed by a very short comment on ‘Aboriginal Art Today’ (p. 28) by Ulli Beier. Bernice Murphy, Australian Perspecta 1983 (12 May – 26 June) (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1983). Djon Scott-Mundine, ‘Black on Black: An Aboriginal Perspective on Koori Art’, Art Monthly, 30 (May 1990): 7–9; [Djon] Mundine, ‘Art Co-ordinator: No Ordinary Job. Interview between John Mundine and Howard Morphy’, Artlink, 10, no. 1 & 2 (1990): 30–31. [Suzanne Pagé and Leon Paroissien], D’un Autre Continent: L’australie la Rêve et le Réel (Paris: Association Française d’Action Artistique, 1983). Satellite activities included Gael Newton’s Re-constructed Vision on contemporary Australian photography, at the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie, Paris, and Andrew Crocker’s Papunya: Peintures Aborigènes du desert de l’Australie centrale, at the Australian Embassy, Paris. The Australia Council for the Arts, Australia Council Annual Report 1983–4 ([Sydney]: Commonwealth of Australia, 1984): 23, notes ‘Aboriginal dancers and musicians from North East Arnhem Land and Central Australia played to packed houses at the Bouffes du Nord theatre [to] . . . popular and critical acclaim’. Pagé and Paroissien, D’un Autre Continent, 23–24. Djon Mundine, ‘Aboriginal Memorial’, in Nick Waterlow (ed.), From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940–1988 (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney in association with The Australian Bicentennial Authority, 1988), 230–233; ‘A Memorial for the Dead: John Mundine Interviewed by Howard Morphy’, Artlink, 10, no. 1 & 2 (1990): n.p. [2pp]; ‘Forest of Memories, Forest of Hope: A Personal Account of the Making of the Aboriginal Memorial’, in Musée Olympique (ed.), Le Mémorial: Un chef-d’oeuvre d’art Aborigène (Lausanne, Switzerland), National Gallery of Australia, Art Exhibitions Australia and Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. Olympic Arts Festivals (Lausanne: Musée Olympique, 1999), 45–53; and ‘The Aboriginal Memorial to Australia’s Forgotten War’, Artlink, 35, no. 1 (2015): 26–33. Mundine, ‘Aboriginal Memorial’ (1988), 230. An excellent account is given by Nigel Lendon, ‘Relational Agency: Rethinking the Aboriginal Memorial’, Emaj Online Journal of Art, no. 9 (May 2016): 28pp. Also, Terry Smith, ‘Public Art between Cultures: The Aboriginal Memorial, Aboriginality, and Nationality in Australia’, Critical Inquiry, 27, no. 4 (2001): 629–661; Susan Jenkins, ‘It’s a Power: An Interpretation of the Aboriginal Memorial in its Ethnographic, Museological, Art Historical and Political Contexts’ (M. Phil., Australian National University, 2003).

Shared Motives 147 22 For more on survivance theory see Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1999), and his edited book, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 23 Marcia Langton, Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television. . . . An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and About Aboriginal People and Things (North Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993), 13. 24 Sandra Symons, ‘A Passion for Justice and Women [Obituary for Guy Morrison]’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 2007. www.smh.com.au/national/a-passion-forjustice-and-women-20071023-gdrel2.html 25 Apmira Exhibition, checklist (author’s collection). 26 Penelope Upward’s 25 min. film forms part of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust Limited – Video Recordings, 1980, 1988 – ca. 1990, at the State Library of NSW, Sydney. This film was not part of Apmira 1982. 27 For example, in 1989 Huw Davies and Jacqui Katona, on behalf of Sydney Bicentennial Protest Group in conjunction with the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations, organised the exhibition 200 and 1: Change/Ing Perspectives (Bondi Pavilion 22–29 January 1989), plus an auction for ‘Aboriginal initiatives in 1989’. 28 The following year, Boomalli artists Michael Riley, Brenda Croft, Pam Johnson, and Sheryl Parnell contributed their works to 40,000+4, (Bondi Pavilion, 23 May–4 June 1989) to raise funds for the Indigenous Women’s Conference, Adelaide in July of that year. 29 Much has been written about the Tent Embassy and its continuing history. Brief accounts can be found on www.deadlystory.com/page/culture/history/Tent_Embassy_ formed and www.reconciliation.org.au/a-short-history-of-the-aboriginal-tent-embassy, both accessed 1 August 2022. 30 Marcia Langton, After the Tent Embassy: Images of Aboriginal History in Black and White Photographs, compilers Wesley Stacey and Narelle Perroux (Sydney: Valadon Publishing, 1983). Langton’s text functioned as captions to the display panels in 1982, a device that was replicated in the publication the following year. 31 Wal Saunders, ‘Feature from Ethnography to Self-Representation’, Realtime, 15, no. 1 (October 1996): 15–16. 32 Marika was chair of the AAB. The post-exhibition catalogue acknowledges the kind cooperation of the Kempsey Aboriginal Camera Club (discussed below), but they are not listed as contributing photos to the exhibition. 33 See Catherine De Lorenzo and Juno Gemes, ‘From Resistance Towards Invisibility’, in Christopher Morton (ed.), Anthropology and Photography No. 3 (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016). www.therai.org.uk/images/stories/photography/AnthandPhotoVol3.pdf 34 Wandjk Marika, ‘Foreword’, in Langton, After the Tent Embassy: 3. 35 The author is cited as Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, ‘After the Tent Embassy: Aboriginal History since 1972 in b&w Photographs’, Art Network, no. 9 (Autumn 1983): 30–31. 36 A.S., ‘Black Eyes in Focus’, Tribune (Sydney), Wednesday, 11 August 1982, 12. The previous year, Reuben Smith, Mary Duroux, and Kempsey Aboriginal Camera Club published ‘Black Eyes in Focus: Seeing Today’s Materialism through Yesterday’s Spiritualism’, Bread and Wine, 38 (March 1981): 12 pp. Mary Duroux’s poetry was later published in Kevin Gilbert (ed.), Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1998). 37 Max Dupain, ‘Black Eyes in Focus: Kempsey Aboriginal Camera Club’, Exiles Gallery, 5 August to 21 August, Typescript, 16 August 1982, in Max Dupain Press Clippings, Australian Art Archives, Art Gallery of New South Wales. The review appears to have remained unpublished.

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38 Scott-Mundine, ‘Black on Black’, 7–9. 39 The South Sydney Visual History Group received grants from the Community Arts Board. See: Australia Council for the Arts, Australia Council Annual Report 1981–1982 ([Sydney]: Commonwealth of Australia, 1982), 97; Anon., ‘Pictures for Cities Project – A Visual and Social History of South Sydney’, Australian Left Review, no. 92 (1985): 24–25; ‘Pictures for Cities’, Uniken, 31 August 1984, 4. 40 Therese Kenyon, Under a Hot Tin Roof: Art, Passion, and Politics at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, c. 1995), 84–86. 41 Geoff Weary (ed.), Pictures for Cities: The Visual History of South Sydney Project (Sydney: Visual History of South Sydney Project, 1984), 8, 12. 42 Catherine Rogers, ‘Pictures for Cities’, Photofile, 3 (Winter 1985): 24–25. 43 Tim Johnson and Vivien Johnson, Koori Art ’84 (5th – 29th September 1984) (Sydney: Artspace, 1984). 44 Fiona Foley and Jennifer Isaacs, ‘Fiona Foley on Aboriginality in Art, Life and Landscape from a Discussion with Jennifer Isaacs’, Art Monthly, 30 (May 1990): 10–12; Vivien Johnson, ‘Into the Urbane: Urban Aboriginal Art in the Australian Art Context’, Art Monthly, 30 (May 1990): 21; Margo Neale, ‘United in the Struggle: Indigenous Art from Urban Areas’, in Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 267–278. 45 Johnson and Johnson, Koori Art ’84, pp. [2] and [22], respectively. 46 Suhanya Raffel and Chris Watson, Urban Koories: Two Exhibitions of Urban Aboriginal Art (May 23 – July 12, 1986) (Willoughby: Workshop Arts Centre, 1986). 47 The quote is from Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit (lyrics by Abel Meerpool, aka Lewis Allen, 1937). 48 See various essays documenting the making, recording, collecting and exhibition of these works in, Queensland Art Gallery, Story Place: Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest (South Brisbane, Qld.: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003). 49 For more on this, see Fiona Foley, Biting the Clouds: A Badtjala Perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897 (St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2020), ch. 3. 50 The forked sticks carry rich metaphors in Aboriginal culture. Singly, they reference male and female symbolism as well as a serpent’s tongue. Here also, the scaled-down model of two forked trees straddled by a crossbar is reminiscent of structurally sound traditional architecture (Djon Mundine in discussion with author, 27 May 2022). 51 This work, now in the National Museum of Australia, was included in Tess Allas and David Garneau’s exhibition With Secrecy and Despatch (Campbelltown (Sydney): Campbelltown City Gallery, 2016), which recalled the first government-sanctioned massacre 200 years earlier. 52 For more details on massacre sites, see Lyndall Ryan et al., Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930, University of Newcastle’s website developed from 2017– 2022: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php. 53 No catalogue was produced for this show. See Geoffrey Batchen and Tracey Moffatt, ‘NADOC 86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers’, Photofile, 4, no. 3 (1986): 24–26. 54 Australian Government and Musée du quai Branly, Australian Indigenous Art Commission: Commande publique d’art Aborigène Musée du quai Branly (Paddington: Art & Australia, 2006). 55 Penny Taylor, and Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988). Selections from this project were shown in exhibitions around the country over the following few years. 56 Kevin Gilbert, Inside Black Australia: Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition (Canberra: Treaty ’88, Assisted by the Aboriginal Arts Board, 1988).

Shared Motives 149 57 Tracey Moffatt (ed.), In Dreams: Mervyn Bishop Thirty Years of Photography 1960– 1990 (Paddington (Sydney): Australian Centre for Photography, 1991). 58 [Anthony Bourke and Vivien Johnson], Australia: Art & Aboriginality 1987: Portsmouth Festival, U.K., 9 May to 14 June 1987 (Sydney: Aboriginal Arts Australia, 1987). Bourke also curated two exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal art for Blaxland Galleries 1986 and 1987. 59 [Anthony Bourke and Vivien Johnson], Australia: Art & Aboriginality 1987: Portsmouth Festival, U.K., 9 May to 14 June 1987 (Sydney: Aboriginal Arts Australia, 1987). Bourke also curated two exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal art for Blaxland Galleries 1986 and 1987, n. p. 60 Jeffrey Samuels and Chris Watson, Aboriginal Australian Views in Print and Poster, July 25–September 17, 1987 (West Melbourne: Print Council of Australia, 1987). 61 Amanda Holt – conc., ‘Tall Ships, Tall Stories – Interview with Amanda Holt’, in Encounters 2020 (Australian National Maritime Museum, 2020). https://vimeo.com/ 430216166. 62 Tranby Aboriginal Co-operative is now known as Tranby National Indigenous Adult Education and Training. 63 For a brief history, see Jennifer Isaacs, ‘The Public Face of Aboriginal Art in the 70s and the 80s’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 56 (December 1991–February 1992): 23–24. 64 Some of the employees of AAL who went on to have major careers are mentioned in: Adrian Newstead with Ruth Hessey, The Dealer Is the Devil: An Insider’s History of the Aboriginal Art Trade (Blackheath NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 2014), 295. 65 In 2016, ANCAAA became known as Arnhem, Northern and Kimberley Artists (ANKA). The turmoil in 1987 provoked much debate by artists, art advisors and social scientists working in the field, and sparked an inquiry: see Jon C. Altman, The Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry: Report of the Review Committee, July 1989 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989). See also Altman’s Brokering Aboriginal Art. 66 Maureen Watson interviewed by Bruce Morris in “Aboriginal Peoples gallery – Maureen Watson interview 1980”, produced at the Aboriginal video workshop Sydney (December 1980). Reproduced and transcribed on https://medium.com/@mattpoll2/ maureen-watson-interview-4c1f1a597a8a, accessed 28 April 2021. See also Theresa Creed and Mervyn Fitzgerald, ‘Blacks Own Art Gallery’, AIM: Aboriginal-IslanderMessage, October 1980. Reproduced on the Redfern Oral History website http://red fernoralhistory.org/Home/Inthepast/AboriginalPeoplesGallery/tabid/261/Default.aspx, accessed 1 April 2022. as yet I cannot ascertain when the Gallery, referred to by various names, closed. 67 Boomalli has relocated several times and is now in Flood St, Leichhardt (Sydney). See also: Brenda Croft, ‘Boomalli: From Little Things Big Things Grow’, in Luke Taylor (ed.), Painting the Land Story (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 1999), 97–118. 68 ‘Fiona Foley on Aboriginality in Art, Life and Landscape from a Discussion with Jennifer Isaacs’, Art Monthly Australia, 30 (May 1990): 10–12. 69 ANCAAA, Newsletter of the Association of Northern and Central Australian Aboriginal Artists, no. 1 (July 1987): p. 3. 70 ANCAAA, p. 16. Ace Bourke (pers. corres. 30 April 2021) recalls the protest took place at the exhibition opening of the AAAL’s A survey of contemporary Aboriginal art (Part II) (Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, 1987), curated by Bourke. 71 Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Ko-operative, ANCAAA and Boomalli: Artworks Produced and Managed by Aboriginal People, November 30 – December 21, 1988 (Chippendale (Sydney): Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Ko-operative, 1988). Boomalli later changed the spelling of its name. 72 Vivien Johnson, ‘The Art of Decolonisation’, in Two Worlds Collide: Cultural Convergence in Aboriginal and White Australian Art (Sydney: Artspace, 1985). See excerpts

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in Ian McLean (ed.), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art (Sydney and Brisbane: Power Publications with the Institute of Modern Art, 2011), 266. Isaacs, ‘Public Face’, 23–24. Julie Ewington and Co-Media Adelaide, Right Here Right Now – Australia 1988 (Adelaide: Adelaide Festival of Arts, 1988). The exhibition toured. [Catherine De Lorenzo and Dinah Dysart], A Changing Relationship: Aboriginal Themes in Australian Art c.1938–1988 (Sydney: S.H. Ervin Gallery, 1988). Michael Eather, Marlene Hall, and Janet Hogan, Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1990). Michael O’Ferrall (ed.), 1990 Venice Biennale, Australia. Artists: Rover Thomas, Trevor Nickolls (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia on Behalf of the Australia Council, 1990); Tracey Moffatt, The Image Black (Canberra: The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 1990). Moffatt’s exhibition had slightly more white photographers than black. It toured the South Pacific and South East Asia, and included just 17 works, one each by Merv Bishop, John Corker, Sue Ford, Donna Foster, Juno Gemes, Ellen Jose, Elaine Kitchener, Jon Lewis, Daniel Moore, and Michael Riley, and 6 by Moffatt. Marcia Langton, ‘The Two Women Looked Back Over Their Shoulders and Lamented Leaving Their Country: Detached Comment (Recent Urban Art) and Symbolic Narrative (Traditional Art)’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 56 (Summer 1992–93): 7. Avril Quail, ‘A Koori Perspective: Artspace’, in Tony Bond (ed.), Australian Perspecta 1989 (31st May – 23rd July) (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1989), 102– 108. This exhibition then became A Koori Perspective Tour (1990–91). An Artspace Touring Exhibition (Surry Hills (Sydney): Artspace Visual Art Centre, 1990). For example, Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century – Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 of 2 vols (St Leonards, NSW: Craftsman House, 2002); Fisher, Aboriginal Art and Australian Society; Mendelssohn et al., Australian Art Exhibitions.

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Decolonisation and Conceptual Art Collaboration, Appropriation, Transculturation in Australian Contemporary Art Ian McLean

It does not have to be an Aboriginal man, could be a white man, any man can come and join us. We can share each other’s history, life, who we are. That hasn’t started yesterday, it’s been 200 years plus. Joseph Williams, Tennant Creek Brio art collective, 20211

Examining the transcultural underpinnings of the current decolonisation of the Australian national imaginary, this chapter takes its bearings from several artists and critics born in the mid-twentieth century whose work exemplifies this decolonial aesthetics. Coming of age during the avant-garde ascendency of Conceptual Art in the latter 1960s and 1970s and the transformative decolonial events of the post Second World War period, their questioning inherited a radical tradition of critical thought that sought to put the racism of colonialism’s Western-centrism on a new cross-cultural footing. An Australian example is the 1980 ABC radio Boyer lecture, The Spectre of Truganini, in which the recently retired doyen of Australian art history, Bernard Smith (1916–2011), pressed for a ‘treaty’ and ‘cultural convergence’ between settler and Indigenous Australians.2 With this startling intervention, Smith effectively renounced the apartheid premise of his life’s work, which up to this point had cemented the idea that Australian art was a mirror to the settler-colonial logic of erasing Indigenous presence. In acknowledging that his epiphany was triggered by W. E. H. Stanner’s (1905– 1981) landmark 1968 Boyer lecture, ‘After the Dreaming’, Smith aligned himself with Stanner’s call for academics to break ‘the great Australian silence’ regarding the nation’s Indigenous history.3 It also aligned Smith with the emergent ‘contemporary Australian Indigenous studies’ agenda, which, argues the current Director of Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, Barry Judd, sprang from Stanner’s determination to position ‘Indigenous people as active agents of history’.4 This newfound agency is epitomised in the ascendency of Indigenous art and the transcultural practices of the artists discussed in this chapter. Navigating the explosive post-empire tailwinds of their time, they would radically reconceive not just their own practices but the reigning assumptions of Western art and civilisation,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-10

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Figure 9.1 Gordon Bennett, Polyptych (Running Man), 1993, detail, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 50.5 × 40.0 cm, collection of Trevor and Karen Korn, Melbourne. Image courtesy: The Estate of Gordon Bennett. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.

ushering in the postcolonial turn and its deconstruction of what Okwui Enwezor dubbed ‘Westernism’.5 The Post-empire Tailwinds This postcolonial turn in Australia and elsewhere in the world was an upshot of what political scientist Adom Getachew called ‘worldmaking after empire’, instigated by ‘a radical rupture’ in global power in 1960, when newly minted postcolonial African nations united under the ideology of Pan-Africanism to transform the United Nations into ‘a platform for the international politics of decolonisation’.6 With the demise of Europe’s empires after the Second World War, the pan-African ideology of ‘black nationalism’ was quick to seize the initiative through its ‘creative and combative relationship’ with ‘the idioms and terms of Western political thinking’.7

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 153 Seeking ‘an egalitarian world order’, these ‘anticolonial nationalists appropriated’ European Enlightenment ideas of self-determination, national sovereignty, and human rights, which they ‘reinvented’ as ‘a novel critique of imperialism that centred on the problem slavery and racial hierarchy’.8 Hence, argued Getachew, ‘staking out the contours of [this] anticolonial reinvention requires rethinking the politics of appropriation as a creative intervention’.9 For W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), known as the ‘father’ of Pan-Africanism and the first African American to gain a PhD, the creative appropriation of Enlightenment ideals was the most effective way of dislodging the cultural premise of imperialism – what he dubbed in 1900 ‘the problem of the colour line’.10 Imperialism was a cultural problem because its racism gave slavery and colonialism a powerful alibi. Further, his own appropriation of Enlightenment notions of selfdetermination, national sovereignty, and human rights, in shaping modern African aspirations effectively used European values against its imperialism and racism. ‘First and foremost . . . a cultural nationalist’, Du Bois took black nationalism beyond Africa and its diaspora, creating black national imaginaries across the world, including in Australia.11 With its founding White Australia policy of 1901, Australia was an exemplary testing ground for Du Bois’ thesis. So too was the slow unravelling of the White Australia policy in the aftermath of the Second World War. By the 1970s, Indigenous and settler Australians were joining in a transcultural dialectic akin to Du Bois’ key notion of ‘double-consciousness’. Rather than an essentialist blackness, Du Bois described his cultural inheritance in terms of ‘twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body’.12 A double consciousness was nothing new for Indigenous Australians. They had been crossing colonialism’s cultural divide since the beginning of the invasion.13 Settler artists had faced an implacable obstacle in imperialism’s racist taboo against this cultural crossing, but the German American literary scholar, Werner Sollors (b. 1943), argued that this impediment was loosened by modernism’s creative ‘playing with doubleness’. Modernism’s ‘ethnic transvestism’, he wrote, was a foremost aesthetic strategy in the ‘linguistic innovation’ and ‘assault on conventions’ that characterised modernist literature from James Joyce and Franz Kafka to the African American Jean Toomer and Filipino José Garcia Villa.14 Similarly, transcultural art found a natural home in avant-garde tendencies. Born in the 1940s Generational differences cut deeply, and no more so than when the inherited language is unable to fathom the new. The desire of the generation born in the 1940s for a new language was echoed in the name of the late 1960s avant-garde Conceptual Art collective ‘Art & Language’ and in the neologisms coined by postcolonial critics such as Walter D. Mignolo (b. 1941) and Homi Bhabha (b. 1949) to reconceptualise colonial cultures. Mignolo diagnosed the ‘pluriversality’ of ‘the decolonial version of a “polycentric world”’, overturning the ‘monocentric’ geopolitics of imperialism that formerly sustained the artworld’s Eurocentrism.15

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Bhabha celebrated cultural differences in a ‘postcolonial’ ‘hybrid cultural space’. Embracing the ‘restless and revisionary energy’ generated by the indeterminate states of its ‘border lives’, the postcolonial condition, he said, was neither an ‘after’ nor an ‘anti’ colonialism; it has no proper name other than the ‘shiftiness’ of the prefixes ‘post’ and ‘trans’.16 ‘Transculturation’ became a buzzword of this generation.17 Coined in the 1940s to explain the rich genetic and cultural intermixing in colonial Cuba, it countered the nineteenth-century anthropological notion of ‘acculturation’ that assumed all others would assimilate to a singular, universal European moral order.18 In 1950s Australia, the Arrernte watercolourist Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) had been the beacon of acculturation, but the generation of artists and commentators born in the 1940s would make him and his art an icon of a new transcultural Australian consciousness. Their argument hinged on the nature of the mediation between Namatjira and his painting partner, Rex Battarbee (1893–1973). John Kean (b. 1954), an art advisor at Papunya Tula in the late 1970s, caught their transcultural intimacy when he marvelled at ‘the spectacle of an angular, old white man and a well-fed Arrernte, sitting abreast on an elevated outcrop, working with shared intensity’ as ‘they conjured the likeness of the Land in front of them’.19 The 1940s-born generation first gained traction around 1970 as avant-garde anti-modernist tendencies operating under the rubric of Conceptual Art were converging ‘into an inchoate international movement’ that searched for a new postaesthetic language in collaborative, performative, and environmental practices. ‘There was’, said Charles Harrison (1942–2009), ‘talk of the “Dematerialization of Art”, of a “Post-Object Art”’.20 Harrison was a prominent figure in the Art & Language collective. So too was Ian Burn (1939–1993) who, unusually for an Australian, earnt a reputation as a leading figure in the Conceptual Art movement in New York, while living there between 1967 and 1976. If Art & Language gathered on ‘the territory of linguistics and the philosophy of language’,21 they also insisted on the politics of their endeavour – as in their late 1960s slogan ‘Not Marx or Wittgenstein but Marx and Wittgenstein’.22 ‘More than any other factor’, said Burn, ‘the conflict between . . . personal political views and the aesthetic ideology’ of post-war US modernism created ‘its own crisis as a necessary climax to its own recent history’: ‘The officially sanctioned styles [of modernism] could not be used in any fashion’, not even, said Burn, in the guise of critique, because their language was the problem.23 This political weakness and inadequacy of modernism was the central message of Information, the Museum of Modern Art’s summer show of 1970, which effectively launched Conceptual Art as the new avant-garde. With two full-page photos of crowds listening to Martin Luther King’s 1963 landmark speech ‘I have a dream’ opening the catalogue, the curator Kynaston L. McShine (1935–2018) drove home Conceptual Art’s political motives. More media photos followed of the Black Panthers, the counterculture, and the Vietnam War. ‘Considering the general social, political, and economic crises that are almost universal phenomena of 1970’, wrote McShine, ‘art cannot afford to be provincial, or to exist only within its own history, or to continue to be . . . only a commentary on art’. It was

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 155 necessary, he said, ‘to extend the idea of art, to renew the definition, and to think beyond the traditional categories‘.24 Tellingly, McShine, who was the first African American to work as a curator in a major US art museum, foregrounded Conceptual Art’s decolonial politics. With more than 150 artists from 15 countries, Information foreshadowed Mignolo’s notion of pluriversality. Because Conceptual Art was producing ‘an international community of artists’,25 McShine wrote, ‘it is no longer imperative for an artist to be in Paris or New York’.26 This was also the spin of the legendary promoter of Conceptual Art, Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013). Conceptual Art, Siegelaub said in 1969, ‘was probably the first artistic movement which did not have a geographic centre’ but ‘appeared simultaneously around the world’.27 In 1969, with Siegelaub as his manager, Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) – the most successful artist associated with Art & Language – made the world his gallery, exhibiting early iterations of his Second Investigation (1968–1974) in 15 locations across nine countries, including in Melbourne. Mostly in the form of mailouts and newspaper advertisements, it didn’t require Kosuth to leave New York, but he was an inveterate traveller and one who went well beyond Western centres.28 By 1972, he had visited every continent. In 2012, Kosuth recalled, ‘I felt I was an egocentric white guy and I had to understand something about culture in another way’. While studying anthropology and philosophy in 1971 and 1972, I went to South America and lived with the Yagua Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, and Alice Springs in Australia, where I lived with Aborigines. I never had the pretence that I would enter their space but I wanted to feel what was the edge of mine.29 In failing to come to terms with the differences of Indigenous Australians, Kosuth tacitly stalled the transcultural potential of his global conceptualism. However, the Australian background of Burn brought a different perspective to global conceptualism. Instead of the decentred world of Siegelaub and Kosuth, Burn acknowledged both the power of the imperial centre and the agency of those it provincialised, diagnosing the ambivalence of the relationship. His landmark conceptualist mirror works of 1967, made in New York but first exhibited in Melbourne in 1968, provided the enduring metaphor for this ambivalence. Presaging Bhabha’s Du Bois-like theory of mimicry as an ambivalent form of decolonial agency,30 Burn questioned the ‘illusion’ that ‘the art of peripheral cultures reappears as a mirror held up to theories “specific” to the centre’.31 Rather, he argued, the local ‘mediation of influence’ employs ‘tactics . . . which are historically distinct and specific to particular cultures’.32 Further, in transcultural fashion, this ‘peripheral vision . . . “cuts across” cultures, producing moments of (seeming) clarity when conflicting cultural traditions see eye-to-eye without appearing to look at each other’.33 This is what Burn saw when he returned permanently to Australia in 1977, ‘possessed by the idea of landscape’ and national culture at a time when Aboriginal Land Rights activists were challenging national sovereignty.34 The Australian

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artworld, Burn wrote in 1984, had ‘been clinging strongly to a notion of “pure” landscape – parallel in some respects to notions of “pure”, uninfluenced Aboriginal art, by which Aboriginal cultures are defined as static and transitional forms devalued’.35 This idea gave Namatjira’s paintings a sudden visibility as contemporary art. Referencing Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of mimicry, Burn undertook with Australian curator and art historian Ann Stephen a highly original analysis of the epistemological frisson at play in the border zone between Namatjira’s Arrernte worldview and that of the Australian ‘Gum Tree’ school and its artistin-chief Hans Heysen (1877–1968).36 As well as recasting Namatjira as a transcultural postcolonial Arrernte landscape artist, Burn reinvented his own Conceptual Art practice in his late appropriated landscapes. Inaugurated by Homage to Albert (South through Heavitree Gap) (1989), these landscapes, wrote Stephen, ‘came out of thinking through the dilemmas of post-colonial discourse and the possibilities entailed in cultural hybridity’: the energy of Burn’s idea ‘lies in its critique of purity and its insistence on working at the intersections between different cultures’37 (Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.2 Ian Burn (1939–1993), Homage to Albert (South through the Ranges – Heavitree Gap, 1952), 1989, Letraset & watercolour on bromide paper, Albert Namatjira painting reproduction on transparency in synthetic polymer sheet, oil on wood, frame, acrylic spacers, and bolts, 23 × 30 × 10 cm. Image courtesy: The Estate of Ian Burn and Milani Gallery. © The Estate of Ian Burn.

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 157 Postcolonial Transculturation in Australia While not all cultures ‘transculturate to the same degree’, said the British-Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall (1932–2014), it’s ‘not the exception but the norm’.38 Transculturation had always occurred on both sides of the Australian colonial frontier, but settlerism’s taboo against it only began to lift in the 1970s. The crack that let the first light in was the 1967 referendum, reversing the constitutional exclusion of Indigenous Australians from the nation’s polity. Radical change followed in the 1970s with the repeal of the White Australia policy and the introduction of multicultural policies. First cab off the rank was the establishment in 1968 of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs and the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). Both pursued Aboriginal self-determination. Including Aboriginal art within its remit of overseeing Australian art, the ACA appointed an Aboriginal Arts Advisory Committee with Aboriginal representatives, restructured in 1973 as the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB). This transcultural turn in the official Australian imaginary was contemporaneous with the advent of Conceptual Art, but well-practiced Indigenous transgressors of the ‘colour line’ were already at work, epitomised in the founding of the Papunya art movement in 1971, which arose from the cross-cultural situation of different Aboriginal groups that congregated at the government settlement of Papunya.39 The ACA’s support of the art movements incorporation in 1972 as Papunya Tula under the control of the painters reflected Ulli Beier’s advocacy. Beier (1922–2011) had been a leading postcolonial cultural activist in Nigeria during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1969, he had been commissioned by the ACA to write a report on the missionary art business in Arnhem Land, which presaged the reforms that the AAB would make in the promotion of Aboriginal art in the 1970s.40 The impetus for self-determination at Papunya was exemplified by the pivotal role of Kaapa Tjampitjinpa (c. 1920–1989), ‘the founding figure of the first generation contemporary artists at Papunya’. With strong Namatjira family connections, John Kean aptly described Kaapa as ‘a “new man”, who (like Namatjira) was ambitious to make his way in a variety of cosmopolitan settings’.41 Papunya Tula was the prototype of the remote art centre model that, from the mid-1970s, underpinned the Aboriginal contemporary art movement. It combined self-determination and a modernising transcultural contemporary art practice, which academic Marcia Langton (b. 1951) explained as ‘incorporating the nonAboriginal world into the Aboriginal worldview or cosmology’.42 Postcolonial transculturation also gained new impetus amongst urban-based Indigenous art. The most compelling, symbolically, was the creation of the Aboriginal flag, by Harold Thomas (b. 1947), first flown at an Adelaide rally in July 1971, as the murals that instigated the Papunya art movement were being painted on the school walls. Thomas insisted that his flag ‘is art’, but he also credited his association at the time with Gary Foley (b. 1950) as the ‘political driver’ for the idea of a flag.43 Foley, a young black nationalist pushing for a pan-Aboriginal politics that transcended clan identities, first proposed Thomas’s design as the ‘Aboriginal flag’ at the Adelaide rally. The next year, it was adopted as a national ensign by the Aboriginal Tent

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Embassy, established on Australia Day in 1972 on the lawn opposite Parliament House. Every embassy needs a national flag. In 1995, the Australian Parliament gazetted Thomas’s flag as an official Australian flag. ‘A true flag, under the Flag Act’, said Thomas: ‘Good on [Prime Minister] Paul Keating, he gave the flag a place in non-Aboriginal institutions’, and he added, ‘it doesn’t impede or prevent the emotion and the belonging’ that the Aboriginal flag arouses in Aboriginal Australians.44 Thomas designed the flag in 1970 when he was working at the South Australian Museum, the first Aboriginal Australian to hold such a position. The previous year, he had been the first to graduate from an Australian art school. The second was Trevor Nickolls (1949–2012), who graduated in 1970 from the same South Australian School of Art. Nickolls complained that its teaching ‘was “Hard Edge [abstraction]”. Syd Ball [1933–2017] had just come back from New York’.45 The influence of Ball’s minimalist geometric colour-structures on Thomas’s design is self-evident, and Thomas listed ‘Op Art and Hard Edge art as particularly influential’.46 As well as describing the flag ‘in formal aesthetic terms’, wrote Mathieu Gallois, Thomas insisted on its ‘black consciousness’.47 The black band at the top, said Thomas, was chosen ‘because we were talking in terms of black consciousness, black awareness, black power . . . and our understanding of what black American culture was all about’, and putting on his artist’s hat, he added, ‘I wanted to make it unsettling. In normal circumstances you’d have the darker colour at the bottom and the lighter colour on top . . . [but] it wouldn’t unsettle you’.48 In 1972, Nickolls’ paintings could also be seen at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. ‘The great innovator of the 70s’, his art would launch the urban-based Indigenous contemporary art movement.49 His magic realist style had a ‘touch of black American panache’ that Beier said ‘was deliberate’, but his breakthrough Machine Time Dreamtime paintings were inspired by his friendship in 1979 with Papunya painter Dinny Nolan (c. 1932–2012). Explaining his subsequent transcultural use of dots and other traditional Indigenous motifs, Nickolls said: Those Papunya paintings, those dot paintings – they’re modern and yet they’re ancient. . . . They’re appropriate in this day and age where you have all the electrical energy around. . . . Modern dot paintings could have been done in New York yesterday.50 Nickolls wasn’t alone. At the same time, Tim Johnson (b. 1947) and Imants Tillers (b. 1950) also began engaging with Papunya ‘dot’ paintings. Like Nickolls, Johnson had initially drawn inspiration from Bob Dylan and other gurus of the global youth counterculture, giving their transcultural engagements with Papunya painting a similar resonance. In Nickolls’ words: My work is cross-cultural and, as far as I’m concerned, by classifying it and saying it is Aboriginal art, by putting it in a box – well, that, to me, is racist. We have to break down that barrier. We have to evolve Aboriginal art as part of Australian art. . . . There has to be a breakdown of the barrier which insists on separating the two.51

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 159 Such transculturation gained wider traction in the aftermath of the 1988 Bicentenary, most evident in the prominence of Indigenous art in gallery spaces formerly reserved for white Australian art. Most notable was the landmark exhibition Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences (Queensland Art Gallery 1990), which, wrote artist Pat Hoffie (b. 1953), was ‘remarkable for its focus on Aboriginal and white Australian collaboration . . . underwritten by . . . a collaborative curatorial that were cross-cultural’ and driven by an outside community of mainly artists, many of them Indigenous.52 From it emerged the ‘Campfire Group’, founded by Michael Eather (b. 1963), Marshall Bell (1956–2013), Richard Bell (b. 1953), and Laurie Nilsen (1953–2020). For the first time, said Nilsen, ‘whitefellas’ and ‘black artists . . . [began] to meet and talk. . . . We just mixed in different circles before that’.53 Eather’s role as a mediator between Indigenous and non-Indigenous contemporary artists is unmatched. Drawn to collaborative projects, he found willing Indigenous partners who mediated him into their life-worlds, including the Bell brothers, Lin Onus (1948–1996), Michael Nelson Jagamara (c. 1947–2020), and, Hoffie added, his first wife Helen Djimbarrwala and their three daughters.54 Predicated on the idea ‘that (Western and Aboriginal) approaches can exist together’, Balance was initially conceived in 1987 as a Bicentennial exhibition in discussions between Eather, his sometime collaborator Onus, and the artist Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). But it was an uneasy coexistence. For some, its museum context and settler inclusions, especially Johnson’s and Tillers’ appropriations of Indigenous art, were neo-colonial obstructions to Indigenous self-determination.55 This pushback against postcolonial transculturation, which came from both sides of the colonial divide, had two arguments. First was an ethnocentrism, which denigrated cross-cultural collaborators and appropriators. Langton dismissed such essentialism as ‘a naive belief that Aboriginal people will make “better” representations of us simply because . . . being Aboriginal gives us “greater” understanding’, which she said is based ‘on an ancient and universal feature of racism: the assumption of the undifferentiated other’.56 The second argument, a form of aesthetic essentialism, had much greater weight because it is the ideological imperative of capitalist commodification, which, in reifying art objects as the fetishisation of individual genius, conceals the collaborative labour of its production, outlawing appropriation as theft.57 This is why Art & Language made collaboration by appropriation a weapon of choice: it interrupted the reificatory processes of art’s commodification. Collaboration and Appropriation in Conceptual Art Describing itself as a ‘community practice’, the Art & Language ‘collective’, wrote Robert Bailey, ‘pursued new collaborators, especially international ones’, and did so within a sociality that was constructed around debate and difference, not solidarity.58 Their concept of collaboration, wrote Harrison, was neither ‘a kind of working-togetherism’ nor bound to a ‘democratically constituted group’, but a volatile hothouse of ideas.59 Exemplary in this regard was the ‘collaboration’ between Tillers and Bennett for the exhibition Commitments (Brisbane, 1993). A project of

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the Campfire Group, on which Langton was an adviser, it featured collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. Eather, a friend of both artists, was keen to organise their collaboration because Bennett, though influenced by Tillers, had recently gained attention for his critique of Tillers’ appropriations, which in his mind lacked the requisite political punch. The crux of their collaboration occurred in an exchange of faxes over a few days in early August, which were featured in Bennett’s contribution to the final work, Ricochets, Manifest Destiny (A Painting for the Distant Future: 2001?); and Window onto a Shadow Universe, (1993) (Figure 9.3). A mixed-media installation, it featured many elements, including direct appropriations from works by Tillers and a reproduction of a signature Bennett motif of mimicry and mirror inversion, Running Man (1993) (see Figure 9.1). Initially playing hard to get, Bennett pushed against Tillers’ proposal that their collaboration be an image Tillers claimed to have received from Bennett via mental telepathy. This telepathic image would be Tillers’ contribution, A Painting for Closed Eyes – an experiment in thought transference

Figure 9.3 Gordon Bennett, Ricochets, Manifest Destiny (A painting for the Distant Future: 2001?); and Window onto a Shadow Universe, 1993, Mixed media installation consisting of (19 × A4) photocopies, 3 colour photographs, 307 × (23 × 30 cm) canvasboards, 1 issue of Eyeline journal No 19, Winter/Spring edition 1992, size variable. Collection: The Estate of Gordon Bennett, Brisbane. Photography: Carl Warner. Image courtesy: The Estate of Gordon Bennett. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 161 from an image received telepathically from Gordon Bennett at 1:30 pm on 27 July 1993 (1993) (Figure 9.4). If Bennett was an ambivalent participant, he was also intrigued, no doubt by the idea of collaborating with Tillers (it wasn’t Bennett’s first collaboration) but also because of certain coincidences documented in the faxes. The first, which he faxed back to Tillers, was that at 1.00 pm on 27 July ‘I was driving through the Central Desert between Yuendumu and Papunya’. Others concerned unconscious appropriations each had previously made of the other’s work. Bennett was eventually swayed by Tillers’ explanation in his follow-up fax that mental telepathy ‘suggested an alternative approach to the idea of collaboration’ that doesn’t require ‘the

Figure 9.4 Imants Tillers, A Painting for Closed Eyes – an experiment in thought transference from an image received telepathically from Gordon Bennett at 1:30 pm on 27 July 1993, 1993, gouache, oil stick, and synthetic polymer paint on 30 canvasboards, nos. 39647–39676, 177.8 × 132.1 cm, University of Southern Queensland. Image courtesy: Imants Tillers. © Imants Tillers.

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conscious knowledge or indeed volition of the other party’. Tillers added that he had ‘collaborated in this way . . . with Sigmar Polke in May 1991’. Significantly, this was shortly after Bennett had won the prestigious Moet & Chandon Fellowship with The Nine Ricochets (fall down blackfella, jump up white fella) (1990), A biting critique and appropriation of Tillers’ The Nine Shots (1985), elements of which reappear in A Painting for Closed Eyes. To ensure Bennett made the connection, Tillers cheekily added that The Nine Ricochets included elements he had transmitted by mental telepathy to Bennett60 (Figure 9.5). Sharing a similar ironic humour, Bennett no doubt knew that Tillers was riffing off the collaborative telepathic performances of Serbian Marina Abramovic (b. 1946) and her German-born partner Ulay (1943–2020). In a widely read essay, Tillers had been critical of the European pair’s pilgrimage to the central Australian

Figure 9.5 Imants Tillers, The Nine Shots, 1985, synthetic polymer paint, oil stick on 91 canvasboards, nos. 7215–7305, 330 × 266 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the artist, 2008. Image courtesy: Imants Tillers. © Imants Tillers.

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 163 desert to divine the Indigenous art of mental telepathy.61 These several months during the summer of 1980–1981 inspired their Nightsea Crossing series of 22 telepathic performances between 1981 and 1986. The first, Gold found by the artists, was performed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales shortly after returning from the desert in 1981. It included mementos of their desert sojourn: a boomerang, a snake, and gold nuggets. The second iteration, Conjunction (1983), performed in Amsterdam, had two additional collaborators, the Papunya painter Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi (1925–1999) and the Tibetan Lama Ngawang Soepa Lueyar.62 Bennett and Tillers each playfully pursued further appropriations of each other’s contribution to their collaboration: Tillers in Izkliede (1994) (Latvian for diaspora) and Bennett in his humorous collage The Wild Post-Colonial Boy (Imants Tillers Controls Gordon Bennett by Mental Telepathy), 199563 (Figure 9.6). This use of appropriation as a means of thinking through the thoughts of others derived directly from the collaborative impulse of Conceptual Art. As a token of respect for these other minds, in July 1993, Burn elevated as collaborators the artists whose works he had appropriated in his late conceptual landscapes, including Namatjira, ‘despite my collaborators being an unknowing, perhaps unwilling, participant’64 (see Figure 9.2). In April 1993, while talking with Tillers, Burn noted that collaboration and appropriation were founding tenets of Conceptual Art because of their ‘opposition

Figure 9.6 Gordon Bennett, The Wild Post-Colonial Boy (Imants Tillers Controls Gordon Bennett by Mental Telepathy), September 1995, oil, acrylic and collage on paper, 80 × 120 cm. Collection: The Estate of Gordon Bennett, Brisbane. Photography: Carl Warner. Image courtesy: The Estate of Gordon Bennett. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.

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to the concept of originality’, which is ‘a myth of modernism’. Like language, art is, Burn explained, ‘a collective enterprise, with artists always building on other artists’ works’. While agreeing with Burn, Tillers insisted on the originality of his appropriations. They were discussing Tillers’ Secret Painting – Red Square (1987). It had appropriated Mel Ramsden’s Secret Painting (1967–1968), a classic Art & Language work by Burn’s close colleague and former collaborator. Tillers said he had made Ramsden’s ‘black square a red ochre, like an Aboriginal colour, to give it a reference in that direction’, thereby changing its meaning.65 ‘What I do is quite original’, said Tillers: ‘A simple dichotomy between appropriation and originality is too simple . . . an opposition to originality isn’t the main issue in my use of appropriation’.66 Tim Johnson said much the same, also seeing appropriation as ‘a development from what was in conceptual art . . . it wasn’t about repeating something or copying something, it was about recreating the process’ in a new register.67 From Conceptual Art to Cross-cultural Transculturation Tillers’ trajectory as an artist intersected at many points with that of Burn, beginning with their first meeting in late 1972 during a short visit by Burn to Australia, when cultural imperialism and provincialism were increasingly preoccupying him. Over the next decade, Tillers would follow suit, first in his breakthrough installation Conversations with the Bride (1974–1975), which via appropriation mediated imaginary intersections (conversations) between the incommensurable practices of two recently deceased artists: New York cosmopolitan Marcel Duchamp and the rustic Hahndorf provincial master of Australian landscape painting Hans Heysen.68 More momentous for Tillers was The Book of Power project, begun in late 1981 and continuing to this day. If he had initially taken his lead from the contemporary Conceptual Art movement – which was the subject of his Honours thesis (University of Sydney, 1972) – by the early 1980s he was being drawn to a much greater range of artists, from Giorgio de Chirico and Colin McCahon to new generation postmodernists and Indigenous Australian Western Desert painting. The Book of Power was designed to accommodate this expanded range. Consisting of numbered sets of small canvasboards, it formed a scaffold upon which to orchestrate a transcultural field of potentially infinite, differentiated voices. It coincided with the first appearance of Aboriginal art in the contemporary artworld. In mid-1982, triggered by state art gallery exhibitions preferencing conceptualist artworks that ‘have the atmosphere of “aboriginality”’, Tillers was critical of ‘contemporary art forms . . . of informal sculpture and performance [which] can approximate more closely the “look” of traditional aboriginal artefacts, rituals and environments’ – in which he included Abramovic and Ulay’s recent performance at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It seemed to him a discredited form of ‘cultural convergence’ previously advocated by ‘the Antipodeans in the 1950s and the Jindyworobak poets in the 1940s, as well as others before them like Margaret Preston’.69 Proposing an alternative form of cultural convergence, Tillers invoked an esoteric scientific theory, Bell’s Theorem (1964), which proves Quantum particles could be in two distant but indeterminate places simultaneously. ‘Local conditions might include

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 165 the continuation of an Aboriginal presence in Australia but equally’, wrote Tillers in 1982, ‘they might include the transference of art information . . . from New York to Sydney’.70 If global communication technology explained current instantaneous transmissions of information, Bell’s Theorem provided an ontology for The Book of Power to mediate the chance differences and variable ideas entering the artworld. It prompted the anonymously curated exhibition Tillers organised in collaboration with Johnson, Waiting for Technology (1983), which included eight paintings and five artists: Johnson and four Papunya artists, Limpi Tjapangati (Tjapangati) (c, 1930–1985), Emily (Nantakutara Nakamarra) Possum (c. 1943–1990), Anatjari No. 1 Tjampitjinpa (1927–1999) and Don Jungari (Tjungurrayi) (1938–deceased date unknown) (Figure 9.7). Each of the four paintings by Johnson depicted one of these artists with their painting, which was juxtaposed with each of the actual

Figure 9.7 Imants Tillers, ‘Waiting for Technology’, exhibition poster for an n-space project, 1983. Image courtesy: Imants Tillers. © Imants Tillers.

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paintings – one pair centred on each wall of the gallery. This axial arrangement gave a conceptual dialogical edge to Johnson’s appropriation, putting the two traditions in conversation. Johnson would pursue such juxtapositions in future exhibitions, such as The Politics of Picturing (1984) at the Tasmanian School of Art Gallery, which included one pair from Waiting for Technology and from which the in-situ installation mock-up in Figure 9.8 is based. The Central Australian fieldwork of Johnson and his wife Vivien, who would become a principal historian of the Papunya art movement, their large collection of Papunya paintings, and Tim Johnson’s own art, made him Tillers’ key mediator into this new movement that offered another lens through which to think the logic of provincialism. At the time he conceived Waiting for Technology, Tillers observed that the Papunya painting movement ‘shares exactly the same historical period in Australia as conceptual art’. The shared conceptual concerns of ‘these two eminently compatible artistic movements came together’, Tillers said, ‘when the conceptual artist Tim Johnson became one of Papunya painting’s chief publicists’.71 Because Papunya still waited for the technological infrastructure to service global media, Tillers insinuated that its painting movement confirmed the universality of Bell’s Theorem.

Figure 9.8 Tim Johnson, mock-up of in situ view of one wall in ‘Waiting for Technology’, featuring Tim Johnson, Anatjari, 1981, 61 × 61 cm; and Anatjari Tjampitjinpa Ceremonial Ground, 1981, acrylic on linen, 183 × 183 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Image courtesy: Tim Johnson. © Tim Johnson.

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 167 Johnson felt the conceptualist pull of Indigenous art earlier and more strongly than either Burn or Tillers. Tillers admitted being ‘a little bit envious of Tim Johnson who had found a way to collaborate with a number of the Papunya artists’.72 First seeing Papunya paintings in 1977, from 1980 on, the Johnsons began regularly visiting and empathetically engaging with the artists. If eight years earlier Kosuth had travelled to central Australia ‘to feel . . . the edge’ of his lifeworld, the Johnsons went to establish intersubjective relationships based on a mutual love of painting. Impressed by the artists and their art, the Johnsons were determined ‘to get it accepted by the art world instead of leaving it in its own isolated category’.73 Further, said Tim Johnson, ‘What the Papunya painters were doing was something I could approach with ideas from conceptual art, it fused art and life and included texts’.74 In 2007, when asked by the emerging Indigenous appropriation artist Daniel Boyd how he gained the trust of the Papunya painters, Johnson said: It just seemed to be there from the beginning . . . because I sat down on the ground next to them, I didn’t stand back and I kept coming back . . . and even when I stopped some of the artists would come and visit me in Sydney so that it became an exchange. . . . When I went to Papunya I noticed the paintings were collaborative, where one person might own the design and paint it, but other people might do the dots. It was there that I asked if it was ok for me to do dots and the people I asked like Clifford [Possum], said ‘sure you can’.75 The Papunya painter Michael Nelson Jagamara was particularly close to the Johnsons, visiting them in Sydney, where he collaborated with Tim Johnson on several occasions. In 1986, Jagamara gave him the design for the Rainbow serpent, water and possum Dreaming, explaining: ‘We can do that between black and white . . . when Tim made this painting, he shared some money with me’76 (Figure 9.9). The impetus for this exchange was the Sydney Biennale that year, for which both had been selected. So too had Tillers. At the Biennale opening, Johnson introduced Jagamara to Tillers so he could meet the artist of the The Nine Shots who had appropriated his painting (Figure 9.5). If, said Vivien Johnson, Jagamara initially struggled to understand the point of Tillers’ painting, he marvelled at how it fused his Five Dreamings with Georg Baselitz’s Forward Wind (1966), such that his snake attacked Baselitz’s image of the distraught soldier. Appreciating it ‘as a gesture of intercultural understanding’ that ‘bore witness to his own reputation’, Jagamara ‘stood ready . . . to shake the hand of a fellow “top artist” with whom he was somewhat mysteriously connected’. ‘It was “alright” this time’, Jagamara told a relieved Tillers, who was aware of the controversy brewing over his appropriation of Indigenous art. Giving his ‘qualified assent to The Nine Shots as an act of cultural exchange’, seven years later Jagamara told Vivien Johnson: ‘He always mentions my name. . . . He’s good artist – doing his own way’.77 When, in 2012 I asked Jagamara about The Nine Shots, he still recalled it vividly: ‘Bit tricky that one, clever one. Really thinking. Put that fella there, with the snake bit ‘im. But shouldn’t take over my painting without asking, it’s wrong,

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Figure 9.9 Tim Johnson with Astrid Mednis and Michael Nelson Jagamara, Rainbow serpent, water and possum Dreaming, 1986, acrylic on linen, 183 × 152 cm. Private Collection. Image courtesy: Tim Johnson. © Tim Johnson.

taking my painting. One day those Sydney people will get him’. But ‘then’, said Jagamara, referring to their later collaborations, ‘we joined our stories together. . . . Any collaborations are about sitting down, good fellas, trust. Friendships. It’s okay, like if a white man is married to an Aboriginal woman, then okay, they can paint together’.78 In their collaborations during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, sustained until Jagamara’s death in 2020, The Nine Shots and Five Dreamings were frequently referenced – as in Fatherland (2008) (Figure 9.10). Vivien Johnson judged the 1986 Biennale a turning point in not just the careers of Jagamara and Tillers but also in the Australian artworld. Opposition to appropriation galvanised a new phase in the politics of decolonisation in which Tillers and Johnson became ‘high profile scapegoats in an ongoing political struggle’ to gain ‘ownership and control’ of decolonial discourse. If, like Johnson and Tillers, ‘any non-Aboriginal artists . . . related to Michael Nelson and his work as they would to any other contemporary artist, they were reviled as cultural colonists and thieves’.79

Courtesy FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane. © The artists, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane.

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Figure 9.10 Michael Nelson Jagamara and Imants Tillers, Fatherland, 2008, synthetic polymer paint and gouache on 90 canvasboards, nos. 81316–81405, 228 × 356 cm. Private collection.

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While Tillers was undeterred from making Indigenous Australian art one of many elements that sustained his art practice, it accounted for ‘less than three percent’ of his appropriations in the decade after Waiting for Technology.80 However, the legacy of colonialism in Australia means that the border crossings of this 3% are Tillers’ most controversial works. His transgressions of the ‘colour line’ taboo gave them a resonance greater than their footprint, amplified by his later actual collaborations with Jagamara, each numbered into the Book of Power. Tillers also entered Richard Bell’s Bell’s Theorem (2002) into the Book of Power, effectively re-appropriating it as a conceptualist collaboration.81 The two artists have a long history dating back to the Balance exhibition, and Bell, who was in on Tillers’ move, has drawn heavily from his example. Bell was present when Tillers and Jagamara undertook their first collaboration at Eather’s Fireworks Gallery in 2001. In response, Bell painted I am it (2001) – IT being Tillers’ initials – which appropriates paintings by Tillers and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. It was shown in Discomfort – Relationships within Aboriginal Art, an exhibition at Fireworks Gallery that also included work by Tillers, Jagamara, and Kngwarreye. By the end of the century, Vivien Johnson thought the taboo against transculturation was easing ‘in the milder “reconciliationist” climate of the mid 1990s’, but this story has a long way to travel.82 In 2005, a portent of the future flashed for new generation performance artists Liam Benson and George Tillianakis when they received ‘a stern letter of complaint from a representative of the Australia Council’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts board’ for their ‘hilarious’ cross-dressed cross-cultural ‘collaborative blackface performance’ which opened Brook Andrew’s Hope & Peace solo exhibition at Stills Gallery, Sydney.83 Cultural borders remain dangerous sites of transgression and trauma; how to transform them into the locations of agency that Stanner and Bhabha imagined is an ongoing struggle, but it is not a lost cause. For example, Bell’s internationally acclaimed Embassy, which appropriates the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, is flying the flag of transcultural transformation and agency. Ongoing since 2013, travelling the world and crossing borders, its open cosmopolitan space is a decolonial imaginary of ever-expanding transcultural relations, a worldmaking after empire, Bell’s own Book of Power. In more modest ways, the Tennant Creek Brio art collective has been making a local splash since their inclusion in the 2020 Sydney Biennale, Nirin, curated by Andrew. Established in 2016 as an Art therapy/ outreach programme by Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corp, the Brio’s website describes them as: a mix of fringe dwellers and cultural leaders . . . [who] work together and often collaboratively . . . drawing on imagery and traditions from the Winkarra (Dreaming), the Old Testament and mythic iconography from around the world.84 Joseph Williams (b. 1978), a founding member of the collective and custodian of Wurumungu Country, where this meeting of different traditions crosses, explained

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 171 their cross-cultural thesis well when he told Alice Springs based journalist Kieran Finnane: ‘it’s in the air we inhale and exhale . . . myself and my people, what we go through in life . . . any of our people, or any people after that, any nationality’.85 Notes 1 Quoted in Kieran Finnane, ‘Breathe in the Brio’s Exceptional Air’, Alice Springs News, 9 April 2021. https://alicespringsnews.com.au/2021/04/09/breathe-in-the-briosexceptional-air/ 2 Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, 1980 Boyer Lectures (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980). 3 W.E.H. Stanner, ‘After the Dreaming’, in White Man Got No Dreaming Essays 1938– 1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 198–248. 4 Barry Judd, ‘From Paris to Papunya: Postcolonial Theory, Australian Indigenous Studies and “Knowing” “the Aborigine”’, in Vanessa Castejon, and Anna Cole, Oliver Haag and Karen Hughes (eds.), Ngapartji Ngapartji in Turn in Turn: Ego-Histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 143–156, 146. 5 Okwui Enwezor defined ‘Westernism’ as the West’s ‘insistence on the total adoption and observation of its norms and concepts’ as ‘the only viable idea of social, political, and cultural legitimacy from which all modern subjectivities are seen to emerge’. Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Black Box’, in Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 42–55, 46. 6 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 14, 73. 7 Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 77. 8 Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 74. 9 Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 77. 10 Quoted in Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 6. 11 Martin O. Itjere, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey as Pan-Africanists: A Study in Contrast’, Présence Africaine, 89 (1974): 188–206, 188. 12 Walter Rucker, ‘“A Negro Nation within the Nation”: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Creation of a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist Tradition, 1903–1947’, The Black Scholar, 42, no. 3/4 (2002): 37–46, 37; W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (London: Constable, 1905). 13 See Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reaktion Press, 2016). 14 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 252–254. 15 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 28–34. 16 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1, 6. 17 For example, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 18 See Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 19 John Kean, ‘Dot, Circle and Frame, How Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura, Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangula Created Papunya Tula Art’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2020), 111. 20 Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 31. 21 Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 76. 22 Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 57–58. 23 Ian Burn, ‘The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath’, in Ian Burn (ed.), Dialogue: Writings in Art History (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 101–124, 104, 110.

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24 Kynaston L. McShine, ‘Essay’, in Kynaston L. McShine (ed.), Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 138–141, 138–139. 25 ‘Acknowledgements’ in McShine, Information, 1–2, 1. See also Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss (ed.), Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999). 26 McShine, ‘Essay’, 140. 27 Quoted in Sophie Cras, ‘Global Conceptualism? Cartographies of Conceptual Art in Pursuit of Decentering’, in Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (eds.), Circulations in the Global History of Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 167–182, 169. 28 See Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), ch. 1. 29 Quoted in Payal Uttam, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Prestige Magazine, no. November (2012): 318–319, 319. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/591f341fcd0f684faca7e841/t/595 d0cbf59cc68c01c7c41f6/1499270336700/Joseph+Kosuth+feature.pdf 30 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28, no. Spring (1984): 125–133. 31 Burn, ‘The Re-Appropriation of Influence’, in Dialogue, 201–215, 215. 32 Burn, ‘The Re-Appropriation of Influence’, 203. 33 Burn, ‘Glimpses on Peripheral Vision’, in Dialogue, 177–200, 200. 34 See Ann Stephen, On Looking at Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn (Carlton, Vic, 2006), 21. 35 Burn, ‘Sidney Nolan: Landscape Art and Modern Life’, in Dialogue, 67–85, 85. 36 Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, ‘Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation’, in Jane Hardy, J. V. S. Megaw and M. Ruth Megaw (eds.), The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992), 249–282. See also an earlier essay they published in 1986: ‘The Transfiguration of Albert Namatjira’, in Dialogue, 52–66. 37 Ann Stephen, ‘Ian Burn: “Valued Added Landscapes” 1992–93’, Australian Journal of Art, 12, no. 1 (1994): 31–36, 31. 38 Stuart Hall, ‘Creolisation, Diaspora and Hybridity in the Context of Globalisation’, in Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo and others (eds.), Créolité and Creolisation: Documenta 11_Platform3 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 185–198, 190–191. 39 See Vivien Johnson, Once Upon a Time in Papunya (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010). 40 See Marie Geissler, ‘Ulli Beier, the Aboriginal Arts Board and Aboriginal SelfDetermination’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 20, no. 2 (2020): 268–287, 272. 41 Kean, ‘Dot, Circle and Frame’, 105. 42 Marcia Langton, ‘Aboriginal Art and Film the Politics of Representation’, Rouge, no. 6 (2005): 1–14, 1. http://www.rouge.com.au/6/aboriginal.html 43 Quoted in Matthieu Gallois, ‘The Aboriginal Flag’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2017), 253–254. 44 Quoted in Gallois, ‘The Aboriginal Flag’, 256. 45 See Ulli Beier, Dream Time – Machine Time: The Art of Trevor Nickolls (Bathurst: Robert Brown and associates in association with the Aboriginal Artists Agency, 1985), 10. 46 Quoted in Gallois, ‘The Aboriginal Flag’, 57. 47 Gallois, ‘The Aboriginal Flag’, 53. 48 Quoted in Colin Galvin, ‘A Sorry Tale: A Story of Conflicted Loyalties and the Origins of a Flag’, The Australian Financial Review, 4 July 2008. www.colingolvan.com.au/ law/law-articles-and-essays/73-a-sorry-tale 49 Lin Onus, ‘Language and Lasers’, Art Monthly Australia Supplement, 30 (1990): 14–19. 50 Quoted in Liz Thompson (ed.), Aboriginal Voices: Contemporary Aboriginal Artists, Writers and Performers (Marleston: J. B. Books Australia, 1999), 109–110. 51 Quoted in Thompson, Aboriginal Voices, 107.

Decolonisation and Conceptual Art 173 52 Pat Hoffie, ‘Twenty Years On’, Broadsheet, 41, no. 4 (December 2012): 141–143, 141. 53 Quoted in Linda Carroli, ‘The Campfire Group’, Artlink, 23, no. 2 (2003): 48–49, 49. 54 Pat Hoffie, ‘The Rise and Rise of Michael Eather’, Artlink, 19, no. 2 (June 1999): 21–23, 21. 55 See for example, Louise Dauth, ‘Balance 1990’, ibid., 10, no. 1 & 2 (Autumn/Winter 1990): 74–75; Juan Davila, ‘Aboriginality: A Lugubrious Game?’, Art & Text, 23/4 (1987): 53–56. 56 Langton, ‘Aboriginal Art and Film the Politics of Representation’, 5. 57 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 47–59. 58 Robert Bailey, Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 173. 59 Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 60–61. 60 Quotes are from the faxes, in the possession of The Gordon Bennett Estate. The work and two of the faxes are reproduced in Una Rey, Black White & Restive: Cross-Cultural Initiatives in Australian Contemporary Art (Newcastle: Newcastle Art Gallery, 2016), 54–55. 61 See Imants Tillers, ‘Locality Fails’, Art & Text, 6 (Winter 1982): 51–60. 62 See Charles Green, ‘Group Soul: Who Owns the Artist Fusion?’, Third Text, 71, no 6 (November 2004): 596–608. 63 See Imants Tillers, ‘Poetic Justice – A Case Study (Due Allocation of Reward of Virtue and Punishment and Vice’, Midwest, 5 (1994): 10–15. 64 Ian Burn, ‘Notes on “Value Added” Landscapes’, in Ann Stephen (ed.), Artists Think: The Late Works of Ian Burn (Sydney: Power Publications, 1996), 8–9, 8. 65 Ann Stephen, ‘Ian Burn and Imants Tillers in Conversation’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 159 (May 2003): 16–19, 16–17. 66 Stephen, ‘Ian Burn and Imants Tillers in Conversation’, 19. 67 From a transcript of a conversation between Tim Johnson and Daniel Boyd in 2007, supplied to the author by Tim Johnson. An edited version of the conversation was published as ‘Two Artists Talking: A Transcript of Dan Boyd & Tim Johnson’, Get This, 1 (2007): 74–78. 68 See Coulter-Smith, The Postmodern Art of Imants Tillers. 69 Tillers, ‘Locality Fails’, 53–54. 70 Tillers, ‘Locality Fails’, 55. 71 Imants Tillers, ‘Fear of Texture’, Art & Text, 10 (Winter 1983): 8–18, 16–17. 72 Tillers, ‘Poetic Justice’. See also Fred Myers, ‘Collecting Aboriginal Art in the Australian Nation Two Case Studies’, Visual Anthropology Review, 21, no. 1 and 2 (Spring/Fall 2005): 116–137, 130. 73 Tim Johnson, ‘The Hypnotist Collector: An Interview Conducted by Richard Macmillan’, in The Painted Dream: Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings from the Tim and Vivien Johnson Collection (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1990), 21–37, 22. 74 Johnson, ‘The Hypnotist Collector’, 25. 75 ‘Two Artists Talking’, 78. 76 Quoted in Vivien Johnson, Michael Nelson Jagamara (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997), 73. 77 Johnson, Michael Nelson Jagamara. 78 Notes taken of a conversation between the author, Michael Nelson Jagamara and Una Rey on 20 March 2012 at Michael Eather’s Fireworks Gallery. See also Ian McLean and Una Rey, ‘Black and White: A Tale of Two Cities and Men’, in The Loaded Ground: Michael Nelson Jagamara and Imants Tillers (Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2012), 29–40. 79 Johnson, Michael Nelson Jagamara, 74–75. 80 Tillers, ‘Poetic Justice’, 11. Johnson’s collaborative reach also expanding well beyond Papunya, increasingly towards Buddhism. 81 Bell and Tillers were each in the Balance exhibition, and Bell, who was present when Tillers and Jagamara were undertaking their first collaboration in 2001 in Eather’s

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Fireworks Gallery, has drawn heavily from Tillers’ example in his own appropriation art – notable in I Am It 2001 (spelling I Am Imants Tillers), which was exhibited in Discomfort – Relationships within Aboriginal Art, an exhibition at Fireworks Gallery that also included work by Tillers, Jagamara, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Johnson, Michael Nelson Jagamara, 74. See, for example, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, ‘Drag Race Riot on Liam Benson’, Runway, 16 (2010): 11–15. Due to complaints about this essay, the images on the online version have been redacted and a formal apology made by the author. See www. danmudcun.com/criticism/drag-race-riot The Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre website, www.nyinkkanyunyu.org.au/brio Finnane, ‘Breathe in the Brio’s Exceptional Air’.

10 Widening the Aperture Cross-cultural Collaboration – A Perspective from Borroloola Wendy Garden

In a black-and-white photograph, Cain O’Keefe, a young Garrwa man directly faces the camera, naked from the waist up (Figure 10.1). Across his bare chest is the word, ‘sovereignty’ written in white ochre, which drips from an overloaded brush down his chest. Taken in 2017, the photograph is from the series Open Cut featuring portraits of Garrwa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa people from Borroloola in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region of the Northern Territory. In each photograph, the person directly faces the camera against a simple black monochrome backdrop. The series, by Darwin-based artist Therese Ritchie, was featured in an exhibition that brought attention to the contamination of Gudanji and Yanyuwa land by the expansion of the McArthur River Mine, 60 kilometres southwest of Borroloola. It featured narrative paintings by Garrwa elder, Jack Green, who appears in one of the portraits, together with a large timeline that took up an entire wall of the gallery. The timeline spotlighted politicians and leaders who, over the years, had prioritised economic development over the community’s rights to land, or had turned a blind eye to the frontier violence carried out by white pastoralists and colonial state agents during the ‘wild times’ of the early cattle industry.1 Conceived as a joint project between Green, Ritchie, and non-Indigenous anthropologist, Seán Kerins, the exhibition was a cross-cultural collaboration that combined historical research, documentation, and artworks to create awareness of the continuum between past atrocities and injustice today. The exhibition is an important instance of the ways in which cross-cultural collaborations can play a pivotal role in truth-telling and create opportunities for collective agency. By giving First Nations perspectives a prominent voice through spotlighting personal accounts, together with photographs that give a face to the people affected, the exhibition created dialogue across image economies to interrogate injustice. Open Cut opened in Darwin at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, coinciding with the launch of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Acting as a counterpoint to the NATSIAA’s celebration of culture, this overtly political exhibition opened with singing and dancing by Garrwa, Gudanji, and Yanyuwa people. Green spoke at the opening, gave regular floor talks, and, with fellow artists and elders from the community, participated in a panel discussion.2 Amplifying the voices of Aboriginal collaborators was important to mobilise DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-11

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Figure 10.1 Therese Ritchie, Cain O’Keefe, from the series Open Cut, 2017, pigment print. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Cain O’Keefe.

their agency and provoke a deeper understanding amongst viewers of the issues. Ritchie took a back seat during these events, and her role was often overlooked in the collaboration. In this context, the portraits were seen to provide powerful depictions of the people affected. However, when several of the portraits were shown out of context in subsequent exhibitions, Ritchie encountered a variety of responses, ranging from stony silence to hostile questioning that interrogated her role as a non-Indigenous photographer.3 For instance, when giving artist talks, she was often asked if the people in the Open Cut series had consented to having their portraits taken. Other visitors felt uneasy about a perceived presumption on Ritchie’s part to speak on behalf of others. There was often an underlying tone of suspicion and disapproval to their queries. Questioning the willingness to participate of those who feature in the photographs, effectively elides the sitter’s contribution to the

Widening the Aperture 177 image and ignores their agency. This perpetuates a victim narrative and stereotypical expectations. So why do photographs of First Nations people by a non-Indigenous artist generate such overt mistrust? Are anxieties specific to the medium of photography? And if so, are there circumstances that can mitigate these? Ritchie’s ongoing project has been to call attention to colonial structures of inequity and the systemic racism inherent in white society, both historic and current. But is colonial revisioning limited by an artist’s position within society and best left to those from cultural groups who are the victims of injustice? Are cross-cultural exchanges always susceptible to some form of symbolic colonial domination? This chapter sets out to interrogate these questions by investigating the cross-cultural collaborations between Therese Ritchie and artists, elders, and residents from the remote township of Borroloola. Fear and the Camera Unease around the ethical status of photographic portraits took on a new intensity in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Photographs were increasingly policed, and the circumstances of their production were interrogated. As photography historian Melissa Miles notes, throughout much of the twentieth century, social documentary photographers were afforded latitude when photographing people in public space, whereas today photographers are more likely to be questioned, threatened, or even abused, simply for holding a camera in public.4 This can be understood as part of a broader shift towards perceiving photography as some sort of threat. Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, a hypervigilance of public space extended to photographers. A few years later, innocuous photographs of children and adolescents posted by family members on social media were discovered on paedophilic and pornographic websites, amplifying the fear and paranoia around photographs. A spate of controversies over artists’ photographs ensued, with exhibitions featuring prepubescent or child nudity being closed down and artists being threatened with charges under the Crimes Act.5 This occurred regardless of the relationship between the artist and those depicted, and even a number of artist-mothers were vilified for photographing their own children naked.6 In a culture of fear, photographs were seen as exploitative, and those who were imaged by the camera, as being in need of protection. While today, 84% of people possess a smart phone camera, and close to a billion selfies are reportedly taken each day,7 people are also cognisant that a self-portrait can be used against them. Increasingly, debates around photography in Australia are underpinned by beliefs in proprietary rights over one’s own face.8 However, under the Privacy Act 1988, no specific law prevents the unauthorised use of photographs of a person’s face unless the use is defamatory.9 In 2000, the Copyright Act 1968 was amended to enable provisions for moral rights, including the right to be identified as the author of an image. Although the Act does not include people who appear in photographs, both Arts Law and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) recognise Indigenous Cultural and

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Intellectual Property Rights (ICIP), which outline the right to self-determination, and that photographic material, even when already in the public domain, should not be published or reproduced without the consent of relevant community members.10 In one instance, an installation by non-Indigenous artists Michelle Usser and Helen Johnson at the 2006 Melbourne Art Fair. became the centre of controversy because it included a drawing based on a 1963 photograph by non-Indigenous photographer, David Moore, of children climbing on rocks at Ernabella Mission – a Presbyterian mission for local Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people. Complaints were made by a participating artist, Christian Thompson, on the basis that the drawing contravened cultural protocols because the permission of the people depicted in the photograph had not been sought.11 The offending drawing was pulled from display, and the decision was discussed in industry journals, including Eyeline, Art & Australia and The Monthly.12 Issues of copyright, institutional racism, censorship, and ethics were debated by artists, curators, academics, and lawyers in the media. Johnson spoke of her collaborator’s fear of offending Aboriginal people, but upheld her belief in the importance of using uncomfortable photographs on the grounds that not doing so risked perpetuating a ‘culture of dishonesty and amnesia’.13 This can be seen as a valid argument, because restricting scrutiny of colonial history to the perspective of First Nations artists risks ghettoising the past as an Indigenous problem. Yamatji curator and academic Stephen Gilchrist explained ‘[i]f reconciliation is to remain a national aspiration then we all have a responsibility to confront our nation’s past . . . questioning what we as a nation choose to remember and what we are forced to forget’.14 He argued that restricting representation only to Aboriginal artists runs the risk of creating a situation where Indigenous issues are largely avoided and ignored by the Australian public.15 Yet there are instances of non-Indigenous artists creating inept and poorly conceived work that is seen to perpetuate colonial violence and inequality. A recent example is the controversy that ensued over Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s plan to immerse a British Flag in blood donated by Australian Aboriginal people for an installation at Tasmania’s Dark Mofo Festival in 2021. While Sierra claimed the intention was to make a statement against colonialism, the proposal created outrage for its insensitivity, with many claiming it recreated rather than critiqued colonisation.16 This gives weight to the catchphrase ‘nothing about us without us’ and the importance of prior, informed consent, mutual respect, and cross-cultural engagement in projects. Even artists with Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage are not immune from criticism. For instance, conceptual artist Brook Andrew was upbraided for appropriating archival portrait photographs into his work without following cultural protocols. Andrew repurposed a nineteenth-century portrait from the studio of commercial photographer Charles Kerry into a large digital print entitled Sexy and Dangerous 1, 1996.17 Andrew remade the portrait, which is believed to be of a Djabugay man from Barron River in North Queensland, into a large sepia-toned transparency printed on to Perspex, bleached the backdrop, and across the man’s chest placed three Mandarin characters and the English words that give the work its title.18 It quickly became an iconic image, winning the Kate Challis RAKA Award for excellence in 1998. It was hung in the National Gallery of Victoria in

Widening the Aperture 179 the colonial section of the permanent gallery as an ‘intervention’, where it was seen by thousands of visitors each year.19 It gained international exposure during the Venice Biennale in the summer of 1999, when it featured in an exhibition at the Palazzo Papadopoli. Displayed on advertising billboards and illuminated nightly on the facade of the building, the Djabugay man became something of a pin-up boy for the exhibition. A flare-up followed several years later when critics argued that Andrew contravened ethical guidelines because he had not attempted to identify the man or contact his relatives for permission to use the portrait.20 Described as a form of ‘double colonising’,21 controversies such as these cemented photography’s status as a contested terrain. The cross-cultural collaborations of non-Indigenous artist Therese Ritchie and the reception of her photographs are informed by this history of controversy. The incidents discussed above generated thorny questions that continue to have purchase today about who can and cannot speak about the colonial past, the moral and cultural rights of people depicted in photographs, issues of informed consent, and the right to self-determination. But there is also something in the very nature of the medium of photography itself that underpins the ambivalence some people experience about these images. Portrait photographs, perhaps more than any other medium, are embedded in relational transactions. Portrait photographs hinge upon interactions between people, and this has long been seen as a hierarchical relationship of unequal power. Colonial Photography Since photography’s inception in 1837, portrait photographs have comprised a photographer and a sitter – a subject of the gaze and an object of the gaze. Early photographic discourse reinforced the notion of the sitter’s passivity in contrast to the active decision making of the photographer. Sitters were directed to adopt poses and expressions, don or discard clothing, and hold props at the photographer’s discretion. Furthermore, by framing the scene and directing attention through focus, depth of field, lighting, and compositional decisions, the photographer was thought to control the image, thereby perpetuating understandings of an inherent power imbalance that privileged the photographer. In the colonial encounter, when photographs depicted First Nations sitters, this was interpreted as a relationship of violence. Throughout much of the twentieth century, colonial photographs were described as tokens of the ethnographic hunt, shot by the lens of the camera. Even in the 1970s, cultural critic Susan Sontag used the metaphor of the gun when discussing photography. To photograph people is to violate them, seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder.22 Beliefs in the veracity of the camera held sway throughout its early history because of photography’s genesis as a scientific invention. Understood to provide

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unmediated truths to all who possessed vision, colonial portrait photographs played a central role in the racialisation of First Nations men and women by providing what was considered at the time to be irrefutable evidence of difference. During the colonial encounter, the desire for photographic documents of First Nations peoples was propelled by a growing interest in race. Photographs were exchanged by museum curators, anthropologists, and ethnologists who recorded, schematised, indexed, and labelled physiognomic features, creating knowledge economies that privileged western information systems. Robbed of their individuality and subjectivity, the people depicted were reduced to the status of objects for comparative analysis. These types of portraits were largely used exploitatively, either mobilised to further the careers of white scholars or sold as souvenirs or collectibles by commercial photographers. Many were reproduced as postcards, which were inexpensive and produced in their millions in the early years of the twentieth century in response to a collecting craze around the world.23 Many portraits were still for sale decades after they were originally made, consolidating perceptions that First Nations peoples were from a past era and not part of contemporary society. The original nineteenth-century portrait of the Djabugay man, by the studio of Charles Kerry, was sold as a carte-de-visite, a postcard, and a cabinet print. It was still available for purchase through Kerry’s catalogue, 40 years after it was originally taken. It was pasted into an album by one collector, now held at the State Library of New South Wales. It remains highly collectible, and today it fetches large sums at auction. It is interesting to consider this portrait in the context of Ritchie’s Open Cut series. While over a hundred years separate the portraits of Cain O’Keefe and the Djabugay man, the compositions of the photographs are almost identical. Both men are around the same age. They are both positioned against a monochrome backdrop and face the camera directly. Like the portrait of O’Keefe, the man from Barron River is depicted naked from the waist up, with white ochre painted across his chest. Body paint was applied for ceremonial occasions when going into battle or hunting, and markings also functioned as carriers of information about the status of the person and their level of integration into their community of knowledge.24 Designs could be gender-specific and were localised to individual clans within regions. For colonial viewers, body designs conveyed exotic otherness, adding to the collectability of the image. This may be the reason the designs appear on the man’s body in the nineteenth-century portrait. Kerry witnessed a Bora ceremony performed in New South Wales, and it has been suggested that he attempted to replicate the ceremonial markings he saw on the men’s bodies by painting designs directly on to the glass plate negative of the portrait.25 If this is the case, the markings on the man’s body can be seen to represent Kerry’s desire to fix differences. Rather than a portrait of a unique individual, the man has become a canvas for colonial projections of primitivism. The portrait of O’Keefe can be seen to talk back to this colonial history, firmly asserting his people’s formidable resistance and demanding recognition of the strength of his people and culture today, together with their rights to land and selfdetermination. While body paint remains an expression of living culture, featuring

Widening the Aperture 181 in dance and ceremony, the white paint across O’Keefe’s chest provides a voice and asserts his subjectivity. He explains ‘sovereignty – it’s a big word. It takes everything in – it’s for every community on Australian soil, that’s why I chose it’.26 Many of the words featured in the portraits were taken from propaganda literature published by Glencore, the McArthur River Mine’s operator. Kerins and Ritchie, in discussion with Green and the others, extrapolated words from brochures and reports that deceptively promoted the benefits of the mine to the community. This created a list of words from which each person selected.27 Green decided to be photographed first so that others could see the result and decide for themselves if they wanted to participate.28 Over the week, people came up with their own words. There were sensitivities around ensuring younger ones were not portrayed as victims, with senior men selecting more confrontational language and children conveying messages of hope.29 Scott McDinny, Stewart Hoosan, Nancy McDinny, and Isa McDinny chose Garrwa language, ensuring that their bodies bear meaning within a Garrwa cultural framework, while also speaking to the failures of past assimilation policies that tried to eradicate language. (Figure 10.3) Green is depicted with the phrase ‘Cut Open’ across his chest and white ochre tears running from the corners of his eyes, in a portrait that conveys the emotional toll on people. (Figure 10.2) Gadrian Hoosan chose the text ‘Intergenerational Despair’ and Timothy Lansen selected ‘Secrecy’, while others featured words such as ‘Sulphur Dioxide’ or ‘Lead’, to speak directly of the contamination that is occurring. The text, painted in white ochre, mobilises a historical consciousness informed by images such as the nineteenth-century studio portrait and Brook Andrew’s reinterpretation of it in Sexy and Dangerous 1. This is further reinforced by the decision to render the portraits in black and white. For Ritchie, purging colour focuses attention on the face. However, it also mimics the aesthetic associated with the realist ethnographic project, which fortifies the portraits’ lineage with a colonial past. Black and white photographs are understood to fix time, creating temporal distance with the present moment, unlike the implicit contemporaneity of colour photography. In this respect, the history of settler exploitation and the colonial photographs it gave rise to can be seen to echo through Ritchie’s photographs. Like a haunting, the composition subliminally calls colonial tropes into play. This may account for much of the unease some viewers experience when encountering the portraits in the Open Cut series. First Nations Photography In the late twentieth century, a deep-seated mistrust of portrait photographs taken by non-Indigenous photographers of First Nations people fuelled calls for First Nations people to take up the camera. Controlling the means of representation was seen as an important step to return agency and redress the history of colonial exploitation. Since the 1980s, increasing numbers of First Nation artists have turned to the camera as their preferred medium to broaden the bandwidth of representation and contest racist stereotyping. Artists including Mervyn Bishop (the first professional Aboriginal photographer30), Brenda L. Croft, Tracey Moffatt, and Michael

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Figure 10.2 Therese Ritchie, Jack Green Cut Open, from the series Open Cut, 2017, pigment print. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Jack Green.

Riley, amongst others, exhibited together in one of the first exhibitions of Indigenous photography, NADOC ’86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers, curated by Anthony (Ace) Bourke. Commenting on the exhibition over 20 years later, Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist and curator Jonathon Jones notes: The NADOC ’86 exhibition empowered Indigenous artists for the first time to promote their rights and a vision of self-representation in an act of postcolonial intervention that openly challenged non-Indigenous propaganda. For many audience members, this exhibition was the first time that black faces were seen in photographs outside racially bogus scientific/anthropological journals, kitsch/postcard imagery and, more often than not, negative news and media stories.31

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Figure 10.3 Therese Ritchie, Nancy McDinny, from the series Open Cut, 2017, pigment print. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Nancy McDinny.

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First Nations photographers, speaking from a position of Indigeneity, are understood to bring a deeper understanding through lived experience and kinship ties, together with a vested interest in the integrity of the photographic outcome, which endows legitimacy to their images. This gives rise to another set of questions around Ritchie’s cross-cultural collaborations. Are photographs by settler-migrant photographers always limited by what curator Penny Taylor described as the ‘cultural bias of the photographic perspective’,32 regardless of the circumstances in which they are taken? Can the photographic outcomes of cross-cultural collaboration overcome cultural bias, or are they necessarily skewed by the perspective of the person holding the camera? Commenting on the landmark photographic project After 200 Years, instigated by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1985 for the bicentenary of settlement, Taylor reflected on the ‘unavoidable subject-object dichotomy inherent in photography’.33 While only eight of the 22 photographers selected for the project were Aboriginal, it was critical that the shoot-and-run approach that characterised documentary photography be avoided. She outlined a process of negotiation that provided the community with more involvement in the images. This included billeting photographers with local families and allocating a period of time when they were not permitted to take any photographs at all. This created a space to build familiarity and understanding, which also helped empower the community to direct the types of photographs that were produced. As an early example of cross-cultural collaboration, it set out to ensure people were not subordinated or disenfranchised by the camera. By facilitating opportunities for feedback and discussion, it marked a departure in the types of representations created, with one elderly man observing ‘[t]hese are nice photos; they are real. You didn’t want us to take off our clothes and get in the water’.34 Despite the success of the project, many settler-migrant artists have retreated from creating depictions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, fearing that to do so only perpetuates colonial inequalities. This is premised on understandings of authorship that privilege the role of the photographer. The rise of the photographer as auteur coincided with the modernist project that aggrandised the creative genius of the artist while diminishing the role of studio assistants and technicians. It was also bound up with photography’s push throughout the twentieth century to be recognised as an art form. The battle for photography’s acceptance as art promoted the camera as a tool that, like a brush and palette, as Abigail SolomonGodeau writes, could ‘express the subjectivity and unique personal vision of the photographer’.35 This understanding underlies photography’s eventual acceptance as an art form while perpetuating a binary paradigm between the photographer and those who appear in photographs, in which the photographer is the privileged term. Relational Photography Recent theories of photography embrace a more expanded notion of authorship, based on a participatory, collaborative model in which the viewer of a photograph also plays a pivotal role. Cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay conceives of

Widening the Aperture 185 photography as a ‘colabouring’ – an activity that at its core is based in relationships.36 Azoulay argues that a photograph does not have a single individual author, but rather records encounters between people at a particular place and moment in time.37 It is not an image of people, but rather an image taken with people, whereby one person is holding the camera while another is(are) the person(s) photographed. This understanding acknowledges the presence of people outside of these positions who may also affect the outcome. It returns agency to those in front of the lens, acknowledging their contribution, through the adoption of pose and the gaze that they return, and their decisions of where, how, and in what situations they will be photographed. In this respect, while the shutter freezes a moment in time, the photograph itself captures a more complex activity marked by duration, the unique histories and relationships of the individuals who come together, and the place and circumstances in which they meet. By reconceptualising photography as a participatory process, in which all involved in the photographic act are actively contributing to the photographic outcome, the standpoint of those before the camera shifts from a passive to an active position. In terms of Ritchie’s practice, this provides a more constructive framework from which to consider the photographs in the Open Cut series. Rather than photographs taken by Ritchie, colabouring encourages us to consider the photographs as an outcome of a collaboration of many people, gathered together in time and space. Indeed, when responding to criticisms directed at Ritchie’s involvement in the project, O’Keefe argues, ‘we took the pictures’.38 This also speaks to differences with Aboriginal societies, in which an emphasis on communalism lies in stark contrast to the preoccupation with individualism in western culture. The Borroloola Projects The portraits from the Open Cut series were taken over a period of a week at Borroloola and were informed by lengthy discussions in the preceding weeks. The social interactions between those before and behind the camera, together with a web of relations with other family members, were crucial to the outcome. During the week, Kerins, Ritchie, and Green travelled out to the homelands to speak to key people, who were at first reluctant to participate. The issue of the mine, one of the largest zinc and lead deposits in the world, is embroiled in divisive politics.39 Kerins recalls there was ‘lots of talking’ with Green and other senior men and women over the week.40 Four different language groups reside at Borroloola, and it was important that representatives, with the appropriate custodial authority from each, were included. They showed the senior elders portraits, which had already been created, and they discussed the aims of the project. While some people agreed to being photographed, others nominated relatives to be their photographic proxies.41 All of the language groups were represented in the final series. The discussions and negotiations that took place over the week and in the preceding period were pivotal, for without them the series would not have eventuated. They are nevertheless invisible in the final portraits, which reduce a complex and protracted process into an instant. Indeed, the advocacy played by Green, in particular, was a critical

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element in the authoring of the photographs. Without both Green’s and Kerins’s involvement, the series would not have existed. The Open Cut series was created because of Green’s desire to bring attention to the harm the McArthur River Mine was inflicting on sacred sites, water, air, and food resources and to how the mine was working to undermine customary law and decision making. The expansion of the mine, from an underground operation to an open cut pit, was approved in 2006, despite a Federal Court appeal by a number of the elders.42 It involved diverting five kilometres of the McArthur River, affecting an important Dreaming site of the Rainbow Serpent, effectively cutting the snake in half. Green explains, ‘it’s the spirit of the land where they cut him in half. That matters to us in a way white people don’t understand’.43 He adds, ‘they cut open not just the snake but us ceremony people too’.44 The huge waste rock dump near the river had been spontaneously combusting, spewing clouds of toxic sulphur dioxide into the air.45 Yet the mine’s operator, Glencore, was seeking approval to increase the height of the rock pile from 80 to 140 metres. Green, an astute activist, who has lobbied both the federal and Northern Territory governments, states he paints ‘so that I can get my voice out’.46 He explains: I want to show people what is happening to our country and to Aboriginal people. No one is listening to us. What we want. How we want to live. What we want in the future for our children. It’s for these reasons that I started to paint. I want government to listen to Aboriginal people. I want people in the cities to know what’s happening to us and our country.47 Green’s narrative scenes document both the frontier encounters between his people and white authorities and the effects of the mine on sacred sites and customary decision-making institutions. Brought up on cattle stations, he was denied ‘whitefella schooling’ and, as a result, can’t read and write. Hence, visual storytelling is an important means of communication and an avenue for expressing his concerns to a wider audience.48 For O’Keefe, the project represented an opportunity to fight back. Way back then our ancestors were uneducated and the mining people made them sign papers and they couldn’t read or write and didn’t know what they were signing. We are educated and we are fighting back. We are taking pictures for the old people.49 In a subsequent series, Lead in My Grandmother’s Body, 2020, photographic portraits by Ritchie were exhibited with paintings by Green and Yanyuwa artists Nancy McDinny and Stewart Hoosan. The exhibition included a timeline, researched by Kerins, featuring portraits of white settlers from the 1860s to the present day, which exposed the authorities who exercised power over communities through policy and manipulation. The exhibition set out to draw parallels between the ‘fast violence’ of the massacres that took place in the Gulf Country between 1870 and 1910 and the ‘slow violence’ enacted by poorly regulated mining that contaminates drinking

Widening the Aperture 187 water in town camps with lead leached from the waste rock dump.50 The title for the exhibition was inspired by McDinny, who reflected ‘it’s not the first time they put lead in our bodies, they put lead in my grandmother’s body when they shot our families’, referring to a bullet lodged in her grandmother’s upper arm that was never removed.51 Photographed over a six-day period, a makeshift studio was set up, and people arrived daily to be photographed. The only prop they had was a 338 bullet, and each person decided whether or not to use it and how they wanted to pose. The bullet spoke directly to the violence experienced in the Gulf country and the use of high-calibre firearms. Historian Tony Roberts estimates that at least 600 men, women, children, and babies, amounting to one-sixth of the population of the Gulf region at the time, were murdered in various massacres during the establishment of the pastoral industry.52 Yet, until recently, this history was elided in white narratives of peaceful settler expansion. Commenting on the exhibition, Jack Green stated: They used the bullet to shoot us down. We are using our art like a bullet to fire back at people, to speak like a tongue, to get people to understand what they done to us and how they keep destroying our land. We are fighting back.53 The paintings document significant events from contact history, preserved through collective memory, and provide a powerful testimony to the violent displacement attempted by settlers. The photographs are similar in composition to the Open Cut series; however, this time, instead of discrete slogans, white ochre sourced from a sacred kangaroo Dreaming site was applied all over the body, symbolising preparation for battle (Figure 10.4). Hoosan explains the old people ‘[t]hey used to paint themselves all over. This meant that they really mean it. They go to kill them’.54 It is a practice that accrues power and provides a form of protection from Ngabaya, an ancestral being from the Dreaming, often referred to as a devil devil.55 Green explains it applies to anyone ‘who messes about with country and damages things – it can be a mine operator, an Aboriginal person on a grader or a government bloke . . . anybody, they are dangerous because they don’t understand, they interfere and cause trouble’.56 The preparations for the photographs were carried out with ceremonial importance. The men painted each other, while mothers, fathers, and grandparents painted the children. This preparation was an important part of the process, controlled by the people concerned, and is another way in which colabouring not only was fundamental to the outcome of the photographs but also demonstrates the empowerment and agency of those involved. Cross-cultural Collaborations While Azoulay argues that photography mediates social relations between people,57 equally the social relations between people mediate photography. The portrait photographs in both the Open Cut and Lead in My Grandmothers’ Body series

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Figure 10.4 Therese Ritchie, Jack Green, from the series Lead in My Grandmother’s Body, 2019, pigment print. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Jack Green.

Widening the Aperture 189 were possible only because of years of collaboration between Kerins and Green, and Ritchie and the Aboriginal people of the Gulf region. Kerins first came to know Jack Green when working at the Northern Land Council, 20 years earlier, and since this time he has regularly travelled to the community up to six times a year. Ritchie’s involvement began even earlier, in 1988, when she was sent to Borroloola on assignment to document a seven-day walk from Borroloola to Manankurra, through pastoral country that Yanyuwa people had been locked out of for 70 years. Ritchie was invited along to help them record the journey. She describes being mesmerised watching them ‘wake up’ Country through song.58 She described this experience as life changing and it led to an awakening that underpins her social consciousness. On another occasion, she returned to teach photography, through an adult education course, creating a makeshift darkroom and giving people her cameras to use. The students documented their surroundings. Ritchie reflected: That’s when I realised that the way they see the environment and what they value and what’s important and they choose to focus on is different and I have no idea. If I’m going to teach them anything I have to drop everything. I just have to forget what I know. That was a good way for me to learn how to actually work with and for Aboriginal people.59 Throughout the 1990s, as co-director of Green Ant Research Arts and Publishing with Chips Mackinolty, Ritchie worked as a photographer and illustrator for Land Rights News for the Northern and Central Land Councils. She documented the Second World Indigenous Youth Conference held in Darwin in 1993 and the Bringing Them Home Conference in 1994. Green Ant became the go-to place for Aboriginal organisations for the development of print media, newsletters, logos, and T-shirts and she also worked with government health organisations on awareness campaigns for remote communities, creating visual material promoting the benefits of organ transplants and dialysis treatments. A recent project has been working with the Yolƞu community on the Illustrated Handbook of Yolƞ u Sign Language of North East Arnhem Land, a bilingual publication illustrated with Ritchie’s photographs.60 For Ritchie, cross-cultural collaborations are embedded in a web of obligations. She scans and returns every photograph to the community and ensures prior and informed consent for each display context. Photography is embroiled in schisms between the expectations of settler society and First Nation communities around issues of permission. For most non-Indigenous organisations and individuals, documentation is binding to various degrees, whereas for many Aboriginal communities it is provisional. Permission is an ongoing process that needs to be constantly negotiated according to the context of the display and can be revoked at any time. For a recent survey exhibition, Ritchie tracked down each individual or their relatives to seek permission to include the portrait. She discussed where the portrait would be hung in relation to others and followed cultural protocols that dictate the proximity of certain portraits in relation to kin affiliations. This is part of the relational transactions at the heart of cross-cultural collaborations.

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Kerins’ and Ritchie’s longstanding relationships were central to the exhibition projects. The collaborations were enabled by the mutual trust that had been built over a long period and the faith people placed in the integrity of Kerins and Ritchie. But this carries a flip side, and Ritchie is cognisant of non-Indigenous people who claim privilege or a special place, knowledge, or relationship with community groups that is then leveraged to accrue some kind of authority. She consciously forgoes her artistic ego and indeed often finds herself invisible because of her non-Indigenous status. She acknowledges that it is an unusual space to inhabit as an artist. Bandjalung curator Djon Mundine raised concerns about the inequities of people’s histories, lived experience, and careers in collaborations between non-Indigenous artists and artists from remote communities. He states, ‘in any collaboration the central point should be the power balance between the artists involved and who benefits from such a meeting’.61 This is interesting to consider in terms of the Borroloola collaborations. For Ritchie and Kerins, it is as much about empowering the people involved and facilitating their message. It is not about speaking on behalf of others or denying others a place from which to speak, but rather creating a forum for dialogue that brings attention to the ongoing injustices they experience. Relationship with the Viewer While the creation of a photograph involves colabouring, the motivation to create a photographic image is predicated on subsequent viewing acts. This means that it is not just the photographer that people address, but rather future viewers of the image. For Azoulay, this is the civic space of the gaze, which is at the heart of photographic encounters. She discusses photography in terms of a civil contract – a knowing exchange between the photographer, photographed persons, and viewers of photographs that is ongoing because the potential to view a photograph is never complete. Azoulay notes that within the citizenry of photography, even those alienated by nation states can become participant citizens in a photograph.62 This is particularly pertinent for First Nation peoples for whom citizenship remains a partial status.63 The photographed subjects of numerous photographs participate actively in the photographic act and view both this act and the photographer facing them as a framework that offers an alternative – weak though it may be – to the institutional structures that have abandoned and injured them, that continue to shirk responsibility towards these subjects and refuse to compensate them for damages.64 Photographs can play a powerful role by offering a place from which to speak. Because of their inherent reproducibility, photographs exist simultaneously across diverse viewing platforms, which multiplies and disperses the address to viewers across time and space. Furthermore, because the meanings of photographs are contingent on viewing contexts, they remain open-ended, multivalent, and subject to

Widening the Aperture 191 change over time. For this reason, responses to photographs are often influenced by the circumstances in which the viewer encounters them. It is important to note that the agency of the people depicted in the portraits was never questioned when they were present. Green and others regularly sat in the gallery during the Open Cut exhibition in Darwin, talking to visitors about the artworks and the issues with the mine. One visitor observed: it was this direct encounter with the subjects of the photograph that held, for me, the strongest resonance with their statements. In particular the presence of Garawa leaders Nancy McDinny and Jacky Green filled the gallery with a commanding energy. In this way, appearing less as politicised images and more as autonomous subjects, Garawa, Gundanji, Marra and Yanyuwa people held the space – and it was as if by entering the exhibition, by meeting the faces and artworks of Borroloola in the white cube of the gallery space, one came into relation with protocols from a different place – the sovereignties of southern Gulf Country.65 Green’s and McDinny’s engagement with visitors gave rise to understandings of their self-determination, which informed how viewers responded to the photographs on the walls. It underscored the collaborative nature of the project, privileging the sitters’ stake in the images. For Azoulay, looking at photographs generates its own set of questions. Why are these men, women, children and families looking at me? Why have they agreed to be photographed so as to look at me? What am I supposed to do with their look? What is the foundation of the gaze I might turn back toward them? Is it my gaze alone, or is their demand directed toward the civil position I occupy? What happens to my citizenship in its encounter with this look? What happens to it in this encounter with their catastrophe, knowing that they are more vulnerable than I to catastrophe?66 These are questions about the space of privilege that white viewers occupy. The portraits straddle the tensions between inequity and advantage, creating awareness of how we are constructed through the gaze of others. This brings to the fore the viewer’s potential complicity in the plight of those depicted by virtue of our place within structures of colonialism and global systems of exchange. For some viewers, focusing on issues of authorship can create a distraction that avoids addressing complicity. For others, responding to the look can produce a different mode of engaging and thinking about the past that may replace certainty with contingency, ignorance with compassion, and ignite a desire to take action to rewrite past and present wrongs. Past photographic practice has been seen as an isolated occurrence, fleeting, and removed.67 Central ingredients to meaningful cross-cultural collaboration are embeddedness, duration, and direct experience. Rethinking the photographic moment as colabouring, shared between the photographer, those who appear in a photograph, and the viewers of the photographic image, disrupts the historic binary that privileges the

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photographer. Instead of a relationship of unequal power, the civil contract promotes an expanded understanding of authorship whereby collaboration restores agency to those depicted. Photography is not shackled to who is holding the camera but rather is a mechanism for engagement that opens a space for a multiplicity of voices. In this respect, photography, rather than being demonised as a tool of colonial oppression, can today provide opportunities for meaningful cross-cultural exchange that shift dialogue and polarised ways of thinking, centring Aboriginality in exchanges that allow for more nuanced and balanced understandings of our shared past. Thank you to Therese Ritchie and Seán Kerins for their helpful comments and suggestions. Many thanks also to Jack Green, Cain O’Keefe, Nancy McDinny, and the residents of Borroloola. Notes 1 The timeline was devised by Kerins in consultation with Green. A copy was drafted and illustrated by Ritchie with portraits of each of the perpetrators. It was taken to Borroloola in advance and discussed with the community, which decided who should be removed and who should be added. Seán Kerins, conversation with the author, September 17, 2021. 2 The exhibition subsequently toured to galleries in Melbourne and Sydney; however, Green was not able to travel and play such a prominent role in these exhibitions. 3 Ritchie gave numerous floor talks during a survey exhibition, Therese Ritchie: Burning Hearts, held in Darwin at the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory during 2019 and 2020. The exhibition featured a number of the Borroloola portraits. 4 Melissa Miles, ‘Introduction’, in Anne Marsh, Melissa Miles and Daniel Palmer (eds.), The Culture of Photography in Public Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 9. 5 For instance, 20 photographs by Bill Henson were seized by police prior to an exhibition opening in 2008 on the grounds they contained child pornography. Police stated they intended to launch criminal proceedings under the Child Protection Act. The matter was considered by the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions, which recommended not laying charges. Les Kennedy, ‘Henson Show Charges’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May 2008. In 2013, police removed images from an installation by artist Paul Yore at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Art. Yore was charged with child pornography because he had pasted the faces of boys over adult bodies. The charges were dismissed by the magistrate. Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, ‘Child Pornography Charges Against Artist Dismissed’, Artnet, 1 October 2014. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ child-pornography-charges-against-artist-dismissed-119583 6 For instance, Polixeni Papapetrou’s photographs of her daughter Olympia became the centre of controversy when one photograph depicting Olympia naked was reproduced on the cover of Art Monthly in 2008. Perth artist Connie Petrillo was also subject to police prosecution for photographing her boys naked in 1995. Other artists subject to hostility over portraits of their children include Sally Mann, Nan Goldin, and Betsy Schneider. 7 ‘Global Addiction: Selfie Facts and Moments from Around the World’, The Economic Times, 16 June 2019. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/miscellaneous/ global-addiction-selfie-facts-and-moments-from-around-the-world/click-click-click/ slideshow/69810065.cms 8 Martyn Jolly, ‘The Face in Digital Space’, in Marsh, Miles and Palmer (eds.), The Culture of Photography in Public Space, 153–154. It is not an offence to photograph someone without permission in Australia. 9 In some circumstances, a person’s image can constitute personal information, resulting in a breach of the law if a photograph is published without consent. Refer, ‘Information

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Sheet: Street Photographer’s Rights’, Arts Law. www.artslaw.com.au/informationsheet/street-photographers-rights/, accessed 23 October 2021 and ‘Information Sheet: Unauthorised Use of Your Image’, Arts Law. www.artslaw.com.au/information-sheet/ unauthorised-use-of-your-image/, accessed 23 October 2021. ‘Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP)’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. https://collection.aiatsis.gov.au/photographic, accessed 23 October 2021 and ‘Information Sheet: Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP)’, Arts Law, www.artslaw.com.au/information-sheet/indigenouscultural-intellectual-property-icip-aitb/, accessed 23 October 2021. Refer also to Terri Janke, Visual Cultures: Protocols for Producing Indigenous Australian Visual Art and Craft (Canberra: Australia Council, 2002). Refer to Justin Clemens and Max Delany, ‘Of Tents and Tenets: Some Relations Between Art and Politics’, Art and Australia, 44, no. 3 (Autumn 2007): 430. A forum in Eyeline included contributions by Alexie Glass and Ulanda Blair from Gertrude Contemporary Art Space; exhibiting artists Helen Johnson and Michelle Ussher; Robyn Ayres, Executive Director, Arts Law Centre of Australia; Tamara Winikoff, Executive Director, National Association for the Visual Arts; Richard Bell; Justin Clemens; Stephen Gilchrist; and Zara Stanhope. Eyeline, no. 61 (Spring 2006): 17–21. Refer also to Clemens and Delany, ‘Of Tents and Tenets’, 428–433 and Justin Clemens, ‘The Law That Cannot Be Enforced’, The Monthly, March 2007. www.themonthly.com.au/ issue/2007/march/1173827326/justin-clemens/law-cannot-be-enforced#mtr Michelle Ussher, ‘What Should White Australians Do with “Bad” Images?’, Eyeline, no. 61 (Spring 2006): 18. Gilchrist in Eyeline, 21. Gilchrist in Eyeline, 21. Kelly Burke, ‘“We Made a Mistake”: Dark Mofo Pulls the Plug on “Deeply Harmful” Indigenous Bloodwork’, The Guardian, 23 March 2021. www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/mar/23/we-made-a-mistake-dark-mofo-pulls-the-plug-on-deeply-harmfulindigenous-blood-work Michael Aird has recently questioned the provenance of the image and whether the man is from Queensland. He also queries the attribution to Charles Kerry, because Kerry never visited Queensland. Michael Aird, email to the author, June 30, 2022. However, Kerry did employ a number of photographers who took images around Australia for the studio, and Kerry also purchased photographs from other photographers and on-sold them under the Kerry name through his catalogue. The characters loosely translate as ‘shifting femininity/female cunning’. Daniel Thomas, ‘S & D at NGVA’, Art Monthly, no. 157 (May 2003): 27. It was considered so important that the work remain on continuous display that the gallery bought another edition of the image so that it could meet its conservation requirements. Isobel Crombie, Conversation with the author, 11 July 2008. The image has also been used on the covers of publications including Stephen Muecke, Ancient and Modern, Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: University NSW Press, 2004). Refer Djon Mundine, ‘Nowhere Boy’, Artlink, 30, no. 1 (March 2010): 91–93. Fiona Foley, ‘When the Circus Came to Town’, Art Monthly, no. 245 (November 2011): 5. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1987, first published 1977), 14. Over a million postcards were sent in the mail in NSW alone in 1902 and by 1910 twelve million postcards were mailed in Australia. This figure does not reflect the number actually bought because many were kept, while others were sent with a letter. Nicolas Peterson, ‘The Popular Image’, in Ian Donaldson and Tasmin Donaldson (eds.), Seeing the First Australians (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 167. Worldwide production of postcards reportedly doubled every six months between 1907 and 1915 with sales averaging 860 million per year by 1910. Robert Lenman (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 518.

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24 Anthropologist Howard Morphy argues that body paint encodes meaning about the ancestral past and was one of the ways in which people gained knowledge of the events experienced by past ancestors. Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 75. According to Bandjalung curator Djon Mundine only specific members of a clan could paint designs on a person’s body depending on their relationship to each other. Djon Mundine, Four Women (I do belong) Double (Lismore: Lismore Gallery, 2017), 13. 25 Alan Davies, former Curator of Photographs, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Conversation with the author, 18 September 2007. 26 Cain O’Keefe, Conversation with the author, 30 June 2022. 27 Therese Ritchie, Interview with the author, 25 April 2019. 28 Therese Ritchie, Conversation with the author, 26 October 2021. 29 Seán Kerins, Conversation with the author, 17 September 2021. 30 Bishop began working at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1963. 31 Jonathon Jones, Half Light: Portraits from Black Australia (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008), 9. 32 Penny Taylor (ed.), After 200 Years Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia Today (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), xv. 33 Taylor, After 200 Years, xvi. 34 Taylor, After 200 Years, xix. 35 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1991), 79. There was a lack of institutional support for photography in many galleries and art museums in Australia up until the late twentieth century, and even actual hostility towards the acceptance of photography as art. The first art-curatorial photography department was not set up until 1972, when the National Gallery of Victoria established a department under Jennie Boddington. The Art Gallery of New South Wales appointed a curator, but not a department, in 1976. Refer Judy Annear, Photography: Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), 9. 36 Ariella Azoulay, ‘Photography and its Citizens’, Aperture, no. 214 (Spring 2014): 56. 37 Azoulay, ‘Photography and its Citizens’, 53. 38 Cain O’Keefe, Conversation with the author, 30 June 2022. 39 The McArthur River Mine Community Benefit Trust is meant to provide annual funding for local socio-economic development. It has an independent board including five representatives from the Gudanji, Garrwa, Yanyuwa, and Marra people. But there are claims the funds have mostly been used for government infrastructure projects and a mine jobs programme and that many Aboriginal funding applications have not been supported. Aaron Bunch, ‘Glencore Community Funds Allegedly Misused’, Cowra Guardian, 27 June 2021. www.cowraguardian.com.au/story/7314947/ glencore-community-funds-allegedly-misused/ 40 Seán Kerins, Conversation with the author, 17 September 2021. 41 O’Keefe was asked to participate by his mother’s cousin. 42 Gina Fairley, ‘Aboriginal Art Takes on Mining Giant Through Paintings’, ArtsHub, www.artshub.com.au/news/news/aboriginal-artist-takes-on-mining-giant-throughpaintings-243245-2324877/, accessed 30 September 2021. 43 Jack Green interviewed by Paul Davey, ‘Jacky Green: “Nothing Has Really Changed Since Whitefellas Came. First it was Horses Now Bulldozers”’, The Guardian, 30 March 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/30/jacky-green-nothing-has-really-changed-since-whitefellas-came-first-it-was-horses-now-bulldozers, accessed 14 September 2021. 44 Jack Green quoted in Gareth Lewis, ‘Broken Promise Men: The Malevolent Absence of the State at the McArthur River Mine, Northern Territory’, in Nicholas Bainton and Emilia E. Skrzypek (eds.), The Absent Presence of the State in Large-Scale Resource

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45 46 47 48

49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67

Extraction Projects (Canberra: ANU Press, 2021). https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n8574/html/ch08.xhtml?referer=&page=13# Green quoted in Lewis, ‘Broken Promise Men’. Jack Green, ‘Flow of Voices’, Arena, no. 124 (June 2013): 32. Jack Green quoted in Seán Kerins, ‘Challenging Conspiracies of Silence with Art: Waralungku Arts, Borroloola, Northern Territory’, Art Monthly, no. 266 (Summer 2013): 51. Green experienced the attention exhibitions can bring to issues through exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra including the project Flow of Voices, which involved three separate exhibitions held at the Arena Project Space in Melbourne and Crossarts in Sydney over a two-year period. Cain O’Keefe, Conversation with the author, 30 June 2022. Lead in My Grandmother’s Body, www.leadinmygrandmothersbody.com/paintings, accessed 20 October 2021. Refer also Seán Kerins, ‘The Borroloola Portraits’, in Wendy Garden (ed.), Therese Ritchie Burning Hearts (Darwin: Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2019), 54. Nancy McDinny quoted in Lorena Allam, ‘Lead in My Grandmother’s Body: Damage from Mining Reflected in Northern Territory Exhibition’, The Guardian, 20 December 2020. www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/20/lead-in-my-grandmothersbody-damage-from-mining-reflected-in-northern-territory-exhibition. Tony Roberts, ‘The Brutal Truth: What Happened in the Gulf Country’, The Monthly, November 2009. www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1330478364/tony-roberts/ brutal-truth#mtr Jack Green, ‘Artist Statement’, Lead in My Grandmother’s Body, www.leadinmygrandmothersbody.com/paintings, accessed 20 October 2021. Stewart Hoosan quoted in Kerins, ‘Challenging Conspiracies’, 49. According to anthropologist Gareth Lewis, Ngabaya is ‘an anthropomorphic spirit figure of ambivalent nature’. Lewis, ‘Broken Promise Men’. Jack Green quoted in Seán Kerins, ‘Open Cut Speak Truth to Power’, Land Rights News, no. 4 (October 2017): 12–13. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 116. Therese Ritchie, Interview with the author, 24 May 2019. She also contributed to the film Buwurrala Akarriya (Journey East), 1988. Therese Ritchie, Interview with the author, 5 June 2019. Bentley James, Elaine Maypilanna, and Marie Carla Dony Adore, Illustrated Handbook of Yolnju Sign Language of North East Arnhem Land (Melbourne: The Australian Book Connection, 2020). Djon Mundine, ‘White Face: Blak Mask’, Artlink, 25, no. 3 (September 2005), www. artlink.com.au/articles/2007/white-face-blak-mask/. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 17. There has been much concern raised about the federal government’s Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory policy implemented in 2012 in terms of how it curtails the citizenship rights of Aboriginal people, particularly through such schemes as the Compulsory Income Management Plan. Refer to Shelley Bielefeld, ‘Compulsory Income Management, Indigenous Peoples and Structural Violence – Implications for Citizenship and Autonomy’, Australian Indigenous Law Review, 18, no. 1 (2014–15): 99–118. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 18. Kate Leah Rendell, ‘An Unsettled Settler Response to Open Cut’, un Magazine, no. 12.1 (May 2018): 28. Azoulay Civil Contract, 18. For instance, Azoulay refers to the ‘authorial position of one who shoots and runs away with his photographs’. Azoulay, ‘Photography and Its Citizens’, 55.

11 Wrecking Culture Australian Iconoclash 2020 Helen McDonald

Tony Albert’s videoclip, You Wreck Me, was commissioned to coincide with the Invasion Day/Australia Day celebrations on 26 January 20201 (Figure 11.1). The Federal and New South Wales governments had planned a 50-million-dollar memorial to Captain James Cook at Botany Bay and redevelopment of the site at Kurnell where Cook and his crew first set foot on Australian soil, 250 years ago.2 In the videoclip, Albert, an artist of Girramay, Yidinji, and Kuku Yalanji ancestry, performs a racial stereotype – the ‘painted up’, semi-naked Aborigine who is regularly asked to grace white Australia’s official ceremonial occasions.3 Swinging on a silver exercise ball attached to a chain, he sings a dissonant send-up of Miley Cyrus’s notoriously sexualised ‘Wrecking Ball’, itself a provocation that Cyrus had hoped would destroy the popular image of her as a child performer.4 Behind Albert there is a moving-image backdrop of Sydney Harbour, with Cook’s ship, the HMS Endeavour, cruising into view. Albert assumes position on the chain, facing the camera and singing to the accompaniment of a harpsichord, followed by a piano. He swings back and forth recklessly as though raging through the decades since British invasion. Mocking Cook and his telescope, Albert picks up a large bone and topples three fake Cook statues, one by one. Each statue stands for an actual Cook monument in Adelaide, Cairns, and Sydney, respectively, filmed in situ. Back above Sydney Harbour, Albert steers himself on his swinging ball towards the horizon, crashing into what has now become a pathetically bobbing, paper model of the Endeavour, until it sinks. Although not overtly sexual, as Cyrus is in her video clip, Albert plays a seductive trickster, acting up to the camera, performing ludicrous moves on his ball and chain. It is hilarious ‘blak’ humour, to use the term coined by Destiny Deacon, and, like Deacon’s ‘koori kitsch’, it is barbed.5 ‘All you ever did was wreck me . . . yeah you!’, screeches Albert, glaring at the camera in close-up and looping the chain suggestively against his neck. The gesture conjures the mental image of early photographs documenting First Nations people in neck locks and chains, and the heinously disproportionate number of First Nations prisoners who have died in Australian gaols, despite the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) (1987–1991). You Wreck Me is also a scream into the future; since the video was released, many more First Nations people have died in prison.6 DOI: 10.4324/9781003284765-12

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Figure 11.1 Tony Albert, You Wreck Me, still from video work, Sullivan + Strumpf June 24 2020.

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Although overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Albert’s decolonial parody of Cook’s legacy was extremely timely. By June 2020, its significance had escalated to a global scale after two real-life attacks on art and culture – Rio Tinto’s destruction of a 46,000-year-old Indigenous sacred site at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara, Western Australia, and the graffitiing of statues of Cook in the country’s major cities during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations. The attacks were described in the global news media as ‘cultural vandalism’, and ‘iconoclasm’ respectively.7 All three attacks – Albert’s parody, Rio Tinto’s blasting, and the BLM graffitiing – can be understood as symptoms of the same underlying problem: the settler colonial legal fiction of terra nullius, or denial of Indigenous sovereignty. As historian Patrick Wolfe has argued, this foundational denial has resulted in continual systemic abuse of First Nations people, including widespread destruction of their material cultural heritage.8 The motives for the three types of culture-wrecking appear to fall into two opposing political camps. Rio Tinto wanted to extract iron ore from Indigenous land to enrich its investors and expand its reach, while Albert and the BLM protesters wanted to draw attention to human and land rights abuses against Indigenous people. Positioning the perpetrators in a dualistic, First Nations versus non-Indigenous, ideological contest, however, would only serve to distort their differences and deny ambiguity. In each instance of iconoclasm, both the attacking and defending parties were a mixture of First Nations and nonIndigenous participants, whose motives were often uncertain. This chapter uses Bruno Latour’s definition of ‘iconoclash’ – from his catalogue essay ‘What is Iconoclash? or Is there a world beyond the image wars?’- as a lens through which to analyse the motives of the Australian iconoclasts and the responses of those affected by the attacks.9 Latour asks, ‘what has happened that has made images (and by image we mean any sign, work of art, inscription, or picture that acts as a mediation to access something else) the focus of so much passion?’10 As a violent practice inflicted on visual forms of material culture, iconoclasm can be traced to sectarian disputes during the Byzantine Empire, when the images of idolators were attacked on grounds of heresy. These ‘classical’ iconoclasts are against all images, explains Latour, they are wishing ‘if only one could get rid of all mediations and if one could jump directly into contact with the original, the ideas, the true God’.11 In the twenty-first century, with the global proliferation of visual images and an increase in attacks on visual culture during war, cultural analysts have become interested in the ambiguity associated with iconoclasm. Latour distinguishes iconoclash from iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is when we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations for what appears as a clear project of destruction are; iconoclash, on the other hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.12 By focusing on uncertainty, Latour hints at the nihilism of iconoclash, particularly in contemporary art, which he says is a supreme example of it; ‘Nowhere else but

Wrecking Culture 199 in contemporary art has a better laboratory been set up for trying out and testing the resistance of every item comprising the cult of image, of picture, of beauty, of media, of genius’13 Latour’s question, ‘is there a world beyond the image-wars?’ is another way of asking if ‘the pure world’ of Truth, Nature, God, and Art, to which images claim to provide access, exists, or can indeed be accessed. In other words, is transcendence possible via the mediation of the image?14 He does not suggest an answer, but regrets that critique in contemporary art has become cheap. He imagines a soundscape and vision – a continuous cacophony of iconoclastic destruction and an uninterrupted cascade of images. He suggests image lovers, including, presumably, art lovers, curators, and art historians, belong to a group of image warriors called B people, who ‘do not believe it possible nor necessary to get rid of images. What they fight is freeze-framing, that is, extracting an image out of the flow, and becoming fascinated by it, as if it were sufficient as if all movement had stopped’.15 Latour distinguishes the B person’s ‘economic’ management of the flow of images, in religion, politics, and art, from the management of images in ‘the world of goods’, by which he surely means commodity capitalism.16 While it is important to acknowledge the Eurocentrism of Latour’s essay, his ‘rough classification of the iconoclastic gesture’ applies well to the Australian context.17 Albert’s You Wreck Me is an example of contemporary art as a productive iconoclash; Rio Tinto fits the category of ‘vandal’, or ‘D person’, a self-proclaimed image-lover, destroying out of ‘lust for profit’; and the BLM graffitists are shown to be ‘C people’, who have ‘nothing against images in general: they are only against the image to which their opponents cling most forcefully’.18 The Parodying Tony Albert is a master of the iconoclastic gesture, subverting stereotypes, distorting genres, and smashing colonial narratives. His You Wreck Me not only enacts iconoclash it is about it. Latour acknowledges the positive aspect of contemporary art as iconoclash; ‘Out of this obsessive experiment to avoid the power of traditional image making, a fabulous source of new images, new media, new works of art has been found; new set-ups to multiply the possibilities of vision’.19 Albert’s culture-wrecking parody builds on a powerful archive of iconoclashes by First Nations artists lamenting Indigenous deaths in custody and the Stolen Generation. These traumatic stories are told as a process of truth-telling through images that destroy the sanitised, Eurocentric images of Australian art history. Trevor Nickolls’ Death in Custody, 1990, painted in an expressive mixture of realist styles, for instance, is a direct appeal for justice, while Gordon Bennett’s triptych, Bloodlines, 1993, is a sophisticated postcolonial critique of colonisation.20 Rea’s Definitions of Distance, 1994, is a series of photo images subverting the stereotype of the gay white male model, while honouring queer women and women of colour who have been victims of settler Australia’s genocidal, homophobic history.21 Yamatji woman Ms Dhu, who died in custody, is venerated by artist supporters who project images of her face onto symbolically prominent buildings throughout Perth, reclaiming colonial space for First Nations women.22 Destiny Deacon’s photo image

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Escape, 2017, plays on the uncanny resonances of two baby dolls, the brown one wearing Aboriginal colours, pinned behind a grille, a reminder that First Nations children are nine times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous children in Victoria.23 Ngarrindjeri man, Cedric Varcoe’s paintings and etchings convey his ‘personal story of imprisonment, the incarceration and deaths of his brothers, intergenerational absence and belonging’, forming part of a large collaborative art project, Contested Space at Fabrik Arts Lobethal 2020 (6 November–5 December) ‘in which 500 painted concrete shrouds hover in silent tribute to 438 recorded Aboriginal deaths in custody since 1989’.24 The success of iconoclastic art by First Nations artists has led to the decolonisation of museum practices. Some of the above artists are now funded by major government art institutions. In 2020, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane commissioned Albert’s You Wreck Me, and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne held a survey of Deacon’s work, with First Nations curator Myles Russell-Cook.25 Deacon’s show was the NGV’s first major survey of work by a First Nations woman artist. The 22nd Sydney Biennale 2020, NIRIN, was directed by Brook Andrew (Wiradjuri), the first Indigenous director of the event.26 With these changes, contemporary Australian art has become a significant platform for structural reform and recognition of the rights of First Nations people in Australia. Latour warns, however, there is a risk of iconoclastic art becoming fetishised and ‘impossible to buy’.27 Museums are apologetic places, he says, ‘as if we wanted suddenly to stop destroying and were beginning the indefinite cult of conserving, protecting, repairing?’28 In Australia, museums are compromised by the patronage of mining companies. Woodside Energy and Rio Tinto provide grants to artists and museums, but, compared with mining profits and damage inflicted on Indigenous land, the grants are negligible.29 Museums sometimes misread the sensitivities of First Nations artists. In 2020, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), in Tasmania, commissioned Spanish-born artist Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag, featuring the Union Jack soaked in the donated blood of peoples colonised by the British. Sierra hoped to encourage reflection on ‘the material on which states and empires are built’, and show ‘all blood is equally red and has the same consistency, regardless of the race or culture of the person supplying it’.30 Instead, his call for donors, ‘We Want Your Blood’, prompted a black boycott and the withdrawal of several already-commissioned First Nations artists.31 The author of Terra Nullius, Claire Coleman, said using the blood of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would be ‘abusing, colonising and re-traumatising’.32 Professor Anita Heiss, a Wiradjuri woman, labelled the proposal ‘insensitive and ignorant’.33 and Trawlwulwuy artist, Fiona Hamilton, who for seven years was a cultural advisor to Dark Mofo and MONA, joined the boycott.34 Union Flag qualifies as iconoclash by attacking the British flag, yet the outrage it occasioned begs Latour’s question, ‘Why does the iconoclast’s hammer always seem to strike sideways?’35 Sierra accused Australian journalists of triggering a ‘public lynching’ of his work.36 Performance artist Mike Parr attacked the festival for its ‘cowardice and lack of leadership’,37 and the chair of Tasmania’s Aboriginal Land Council expressed disappointment when the artwork was withdrawn.38

Wrecking Culture 201 The Blasting The sacred site in Juukan Gorge was of deep cultural significance to the traditional owners, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) peoples. Comprising two ancient caves, it constituted an image, in Latour’s typology, in that as a place of visual culture, containing artefacts of cultural, spiritual, and historical significance, the site was a mediation to access Indigenous culture, myth, and ontology. Having blasted one of the caves, the multinational mining company, Rio Tinto, fits Latour’s category of D person, who is ‘a most devious case’, a ‘vandal’, who destroys out of ‘lust for profit’.39 Using the example of architects, Latour explains that ‘vandalism is a term of spite invented to describe those who destroy not so much out of a hatred of images but out of ignorance, a lust for profit and sheer passion and lunacy’.40 Latour’s category ‘innocent vandal’ fits Rio Tinto less comfortably But the innocent vandals are different from the normal, ‘bad’ vandals: they had absolutely no idea that they were destroying anything. On the contrary, they were cherishing images and protecting them from destruction, and yet they are accused later of having profaned and destroyed them!41 Rio Tinto was an innocent vandal only in that it acted within the law. In every other sense, it was culpable. In 2013, the company was informed unofficially by archaeologist Michael Slack that the site was of great archaeological significance, yet Rio Tinto sought and received permission from the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to destroy it.42 The permit, in accordance with the infamous Section 18 of the Aboriginal Heritage Protection Act, meant the company could not be prosecuted for ‘excavating, destroying, damaging, concealing or in any way altering any Aboriginal site’.43 There was also a gag clause, preventing the PKKP from speaking publicly about their concerns. In 2014, Slack provided documentation to Rio Tinto and the PKKP, stating the Juukan-2 (Brock-21) cave, which was the one they later blasted, was rare in Australia and unique in the Pilbara. He said it contained cultural sequence spanning over 40,000 years, with a high frequency of flaked stone artefacts, rare abundance of faunal remains, unique stone tools, preserved human hair and with sediment containing a pollen record charting thousands of years of environmental changes.44 Furthermore, there was DNA present at the site likely to match the local PKKP. It was immediately clear to horrified observers around the world that Rio Tinto had committed a grievous offence against humanity. Unlike Latour’s ‘innocent vandal’, the company did not have ‘absolutely no idea’ it was ‘destroying anything’.45 In 2015, Rio Tinto funded a documentary video about the archaeological significance of the site.46 In the video, entitled Ngurri Minarli (In Our Country), various PKKP people, who are employees of the company, stand at the site speaking to camera, explaining their ancestral connection to the caves while also explaining the caves’ archaeological value.47 One interviewee is unequivocal in his

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despair, and it is clear he and other PKKP regard the blasting as, in Latour’s words, a ‘profanation’, ‘desecration’ and ‘sacrilege’.48 In June 2020, the Senate referred to the Joint Committee on Northern Australia an inquiry into the destruction of the caves.49 The Parliamentary Inquiry (PI) heard evidence that Rio Tinto failed to present options to the PKKP that would have allowed mining activity without destruction of the caves,50 and misled the PKKP about the necessity and timing of the blasts.51 Yet by sponsoring Ngurri Minarli, Rio Tinto presents an image of itself as a good corporate citizen, concerned about the PKKP and recognising their connection to place. The medium of a documentary reinforces this image of Rio Tinto’s sincerity and benevolence. As Afro-American artist and cultural critic Okwui Enwezor argues, documentary ‘often refers to a set of techniques and types of images directed at and drawn from the “real”’.52 It is precisely the image of the ‘real’ that Rio Tinto has deployed to assuage criticism of the company’s destructive purpose, a strategy used in the early 1980s by Sir Roderick Carnegie. As Chief Executive Officer of Rio Tinto’s earlier incarnation, Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia, Carnegie invited revered modernist landscape painter, Fred Williams, to paint the Pilbara. Carnegie’s stated intention was to enable the rest of Australia to see the beauty of the remote and sparsely inhabited region. Carnegie is a genuine patron of art, but it is significant that at the time he approached Williams, he was also taking steps to respond to criticisms of the mining industry and his company, which included changing the company’s ownership structure and producing a film entitled Into the Fiery Furnace, about the history and importance of mining in Australia.53 Globally shamed after the Juukan blasting, Rio Tinto’s Chief Executive Officer and two senior executives apologised to the PKKP, before resigning.54 Meanwhile, the company sponsored Ngaarda Media to update the 2015 film. Entitled Ngurri Minarli Puutukunti – Juukan Gorge now and then, the updated film includes a gutwrenching epilogue, in which the same PKKP people who featured in the 2015 film, speak to the camera in front of the destroyed cave.55 The previously outspoken man tearfully warns viewers never to trust Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto apologises, in large subtitles, for the distress the film might cause the PKKP, and in a postscript, states it was the man’s final visit to the site before he died. Rio Tinto has issued public apologies for the blasts at Juukan, and its website details its cooperation with the PI, and the steps taken to address the findings of the PI and its internal board review of its cultural heritage practices.56 Rio Tinto’s apparent atonement involves constantly replacing its last corporate image with an updated, new image to account for its latest wrongdoing. Hence, Rio Tinto is also Latour’s B Person, managing a flow of images and refusing to freeze-frame. The flow is regulated, however, according to capitalist imperatives. Whether or not Rio Tinto atones for the irreparable damage it has caused is ultimately irrelevant to its primary aim of making money. The PI recommended that Rio Tinto negotiate a restitution package with the PKKP for the destruction of the rock shelters, and the company stated publicly that it was engaging with the PKKP on this, including funding the PKKP to participate in the negotiations.57 On August 2021, it was reported that no payments had been made and that details of the financial component would

Wrecking Culture 203 be confidential at the request of the PKKP.58 Rio Tinto made a record profit in 2020–2021, an outcome that, despite our discomfort, has benefitted all Australians financially.59 The PKKP also benefits financially from the fortunes of the mining industry. Burchell Hayse, Director of the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation, said, ‘we are not opposed to mining however we want to ensure that we are around the table when it comes to making decisions about the impact on our country. We will not let this happen again’.60 Heritage protection laws had established an image of the Juukan Gorge site and its cultural value through legal definitions and concepts. Although the image operated as mediation, in Latour’s sense, it was distorted and detrimental to the site.61 The Law Council of Australia (LCA)’s submission to the PI explains that the laws do not adequately represent the cultural interests, values, and beliefs of First Nations Australians. They are deficient ‘in their ability to identify relevant Aboriginal parties . . . to ensure appropriate First Nations representation or meaningful consultation, which would include the ability to seek review of a decision’.62 Further ‘the heritage value of sites such as the Juukan Gorge has often been viewed in terms of an archaeological and historical context, rather than as an integral part of First Nations’ cultures, traditions and law’.63 Related to this ‘is the tendency to see cultural heritage as something that is entirely tangible and that can be divorced from the present time and the surrounding land and waters (including) a connection to ancestors and ancestral beings’.64 Given this cultural blindness, as noted by the LCA, it is not surprising that, when archaeologists ‘salvaged’ or removed the ‘priceless’ artefacts from the site for ‘safe storage’, the PKKP were very distressed.65 The Graffitiing In June 2020, Australian Black Lives Matter demonstrators illegally graffitied colonial monuments, particularly statues of Captain James Cook, in capital cities and towns around Australia. The Statue of Cook in Hyde Park, Sydney, and another on Belmore Road, Randwick, New South Wales, were spray painted.66 In Melbourne, memorials to Cook were graffitied in the inner suburbs of St Kilda and North Fitzroy67 (Figure 11.2). In solidarity with global demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd in Texas, USA, on 25 May, the principal grievance of the Australian protestors was 30 years of government inaction on the recommendations of the RCIADIC. Applying Latour’s definition, an image of Cook is a mediation to access the ideology of Australian settler colonialism, which, as Wolfe has argued, requires ‘the elimination of the native’.68 Latour is ‘interested in representing the state of mind of those who have broken fetishes’.69 As the Uluru Statement from the Heart (USH) demonstrates, First Nations Australians have been articulating their state of mind since the Referendum in 1967, demanding justice while extending the hand of reconciliation, which in the USH would take the form of Makarrata, a Yolgnu word approximating treaty.70 When in 2017, the Prime Minister of the day, Malcom Turnbull (Liberal) rejected the USH, Stan Grant, who is a journalist and

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Figure 11.2 Defaced Captain Cook Statue, Edinburgh Gardens, Fitzroy, Victoria (Sydney Morning Herald, 14 June 2020). Photographer, Penny Stephens.

a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, spelled out why images of Cook are the focus of so much passion. How in Australia do we maintain the ceremonial fig leaf of welcomes to country while a statue stands in the centre of our largest city proclaiming to the world that no one here mattered until a white person ‘discovered’ the land? That is the problem with Australia, a land of gestures and tokens with no substantial recognition of Indigenous peoples and our history, no treaties (the only Commonwealth country without one) and now a go-slow on constitutional reform that would give Indigenous peoples a voice in our founding document that was originally written to exclude us.71 The BLM graffitists fall roughly into Latour’s classification of C people. C people have nothing against images in general: they are only against the image to which their opponents cling most forcefully . . . it is enough to attack what is most cherished, what has become the repository of all the symbolic treasures of one people. . . . Flag-burning, painting-slashing, hostage-taking are typical examples. . . . Box cutters and plane tickets against the United States of America.72

Wrecking Culture 205 Latour claims iconoclasts and image-defenders ‘recognize the image in question as a mere token; it counts for nothing but an occasion that allows the scandal to unfold’.73 This was true of the BLM graffitists. The sculptor of Cook in Hyde Park, Thomas Woolmer (1825–1892), was hardly mentioned in the news media or championed by critics of the attack. Nobody defended his skill. Nor was the European practice of memorialisation per se under attack. As historians Bronwyn Batten and Paul Batten point out, ‘Indigenous people are creating their own ways to memorialise the past that are appropriate to them, and these may or may not feature European styles of memorialisation’.74 Sadly, there is a counter-history of racist attacks on European-style memorials of famous First Nations identities, including those of Edward Koiki Mabo in Townsville (1995) and Yagan on Heirisson Island, in the Swan River near Perth (1984, 1997). The attacks demonstrate the image is not always regarded as ‘a mere token’, and that the distinction between representation and referent is not always recognised by the protagonists in the heat of the moment, be they iconoclasts or offended image lovers.75 Mabo, whose High Court legal action prompted the 1992 native-title decision, symbolises victory for the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement after decades of bitter struggle. Vandals removed the bronze relief of Mabo’s smiling head and scrawled ‘Abo’ and swastikas in red paint on the grave.76 Lowitja O’Donaghue, Yankunytjatjara woman and chairwoman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, collapsed image and referent when she described the attack as ‘an act of violence against a man who fought for the rights of his people’.77 She said it showed there was ‘still a great deal of racism in this country that we all need to deal with’, and hoped it would reinforce in the minds of those opposed to the proposed racial hatred legislation (enacted later that year in 1997) that there was ‘an even greater need for it’.78 Similarly, the collapsing of representation and referent was a feature of responses to vandals beheading Robert Hitchcock’s 1984 statue of the famous Nyungar warrior, Yagan. Yagan, the man, was beheaded by white settlers in 1833.79 His severed head was smoked, taken to Britain, paraded as an anthropological specimen, and eventually buried in Liverpool. It was exhumed and repatriated in 1997 and buried by Ngungar descendants. A week later, the statue was beheaded by an anonymous attacker claiming to be a British loyalist.80 A new head was attached to the statue, which was beheaded a second time in 2002 and later restored. The attacks on the monuments to Mabo and Yagan were more violent and hurtful than the BLM graffitiing because the image was of a person, whose family was still grieving. The image had become not only ‘the repository of all the symbolic treasures of one people’, but also a stand in for the man himself, imbued with his affect.81 David Martin described the removal of the statue of Yagan’s head as ‘an act which speaks not only to the continuance of white settler racism but also to the power of mimesis to invigorate our modern memorials and monuments with a life of their own’.82 The ambiguity of this ‘life of their own’, is an aspect of iconoclash. The desecration of the Myall Creek Memorial in 2021 was directed at the idea of reconciliation rather than at an individual. Intended as a place of healing and reconciliation, the memorial commemorates the only known case of a massacre in Australia where white perpetrators were hunted down, convicted, and hanged. Founding member of

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the memorial committee, Marilyn Isaacs, a descendant of massacre survivors, said, ‘this place is about reconciliation, I just feel sorry for these people’.83 Keith Munro, also a descendant of survivors of the massacre, spoke of his people and place, as though they shared a mutual wound: ‘The blood of my family and the descendants of Gomeroi and Wirrayaraay people are soaked into the earth up there’.84 Although the BLM demonstrations around Australia were organised by First Nations leaders, there is no evidence that any of the graffitists was a First Nations person. One iconoclast was identified as a Greens party staffer, Xiaoran Shi, who spray painted ‘No pride in genocide’, on the statue of Cook in Hyde Park, and ‘sovereignty never ceded’ and a drawing of the Aboriginal flag on the three sides of the monument’s base.85 Police arrested Shi in the act, and she was subjected to anti-Asian and misogynist abuse on social media. Latour would explain this unplanned turn of events as another example of the iconoclast’s hammer striking sideways. Deputy chief magistrate Michael Allen deplored the abuse levelled at Shi, claiming ‘That’s not the sort of society that I sit here to uphold or indeed to protect . . . and not the sort of society I want to live in’.86 Allen fined Shi nevertheless, observing that her guerrilla tactics undermined the ‘absolute, unquestionable’ right to peaceful protest.87 Latour suggests C people are misguided; ‘They see themselves as prophets but maybe they are mere “agents provocateurs”’.88 His description of them initiating a scandal, however, does not speak to the non-violent open discussions that played out extensively on the social media and news media before and during the BLM graffiti attacks. The unprecedented, global, dialogic feature of the BLM demonstrations contrasts with Latour’s example of the 9/11 terrorists, for instance, who planned their destruction of the Twin Towers in strict secrecy, taking the world horribly by surprise. It was the unfolding over many decades of public campaigning and their contemporary mediated and global manifestation, that distinguished the BLM attacks on monuments in Australia. In the early days of the BLM demonstrations in Australia, people became aware that statues of colonial figures and administrators were vulnerable to attack. Most of them, such as Cook in Hyde Park, had been attacked previously or were the subject of public demands for their removal. Thousands signed a petition launched by Kaanju, Kuku Ya’u, and Girramay woman Emma Hollingsworth to remove the statue of Cook in Cairns, which she said was ‘a slap in the face to all Indigenous people’.89 The statue of former premier of South Australia and architect of the White Australia policy, Charles Cameron Kingston, in Victoria Square, Adelaide, was targeted.90 Adnyamathanha and Ngarrinjeri woman, and curator Jacinta Koolmatri posted a photo of the statue on social media, ‘Anyone else been thinking about which statues in their city would be targeted after seeing so many taken down? I have’. Kaurna, Narungga, Ngarrindjeri, Noongar woman and actress Natasha Wanganeen addressed a crowd in front of the statue, saying it was a negative ‘trigger’ for Indigenous Australians.91 ‘Mental health is a massive issue in Australia right now, especially for Indigenous Australians. . . . Why can’t we replace these racist people and their statues with people who actually tried to bring our state together?’92 Ms Wanganeen suggested replacing them with Adam Goodes, Aunty Josie Agius, or Uncle Stephen Goldsmith. Historian Bruce Scates recommended ‘dialogical memorialisation’, such as

Wrecking Culture 207 at the Explorers’ Monument in Fremantle, which now includes a plaque noting that the original memorial did not mention ‘the right of Aboriginal people to defend their land, or of the history of provocation which led to the explorers’ deaths’.93 Removing the statues altogether, Scates claimed, ‘removed that opportunity for discussion’.94 Similarly, historian Lisa Murray Taylor questioned whether graffiti should have been left on the Hyde Park statue.95 Latour observes that image-defenders are often spurred to exaggerated loyalty to a particular image: ‘Before you wanted to attack my flag, I did not know I cherished it so much, but now I do’.96 Although minimal compared with the United Kingdom and the United States, the Australian BLM attacks on monuments played out as a cat-and-mouse game between graffitists and police. Mounted police surrounded Cook’s Cottage, in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens, anticipating an attack on the statue within, following a previous attack in 2014.97 After the attack in Randwick, the then NSW Premier (LNP) Gladys Berejiklian, threatened to tighten laws to prevent such attacks. ‘I want to stress that it’s only a very small percentage of the population that’s engaging in this activity, the vast majority of us don’t condone it, we think it’s disrespectful, it’s unaustralian’, she said.98 The accusation un-Australian is adapted from the North American word un-American and is a warped appeal to nationalistic pride. Applying Latour’s reasoning, responses such as Berejiklian’s could make the C people uncertain about the impact of their image destruction. Shi took full responsibility for her actions, however, releasing a statement to the press that ‘the real crime is that nobody has been convicted for an Aboriginal death in custody’.99 Racial Reckoning For some decades, racial politics in Australia have drawn inspiration from international campaigns against racism. The success of the anti-apartheid demonstrations in New Zealand in 1983 against the Springbok Tour, for instance, emboldened Australian First Nations activists, who had crossed the Tasman Sea to lend support to the New Zealand activists.100 The image of George Floyd dying in 2020, and his final words, ‘I can’t breathe’, resonated with First Nations campaigners; the words were those uttered by Dunghutti man David Dungay before he died in the Long Bay Correctional Facility in 2015.101 In July 2022, Linda Burney, the first woman to become Minister for Indigenous Affairs in Australia, met with New Zealand Minister for Māori Development, Willie Jackson, to discuss New Zealand’s approach to treaty and reconciliation and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.102 At the same time, successive conservative Australian prime ministers mirrored the backlash against anti-racist initiatives in North American debates around Critical Race Theory and the so-called culture wars. These include John Howard and his idea of a black armband view of history,103 Tony Abbott’s claim that the first fleet was good for Aboriginal people,104 and Scott Morrison’s claim that there was no slavery in Australia.105 Global media reported the BLM demonstrations in Australia were the largest outside the USA. This coverage seems to have forced the Australian government into action. On 17 June 2020, New South Wales established the Select Committee

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on the High Level of First Nations People in Custody and Oversight and Review of Deaths in Custody to review how deaths in custody are investigated. In early July, South Australia introduced a custody notification service (CNS), making it mandatory for police to notify the state’s Aboriginal Legal Service whenever an Aboriginal person is taken into custody. South Australia was thereby the secondlast state to implement a recommendation that had been made by the RCIADIC in 1991. Tasmania is the remaining state. In late July, the federal government also announced a target of moving 15% of Indigenous adults out of prison by 2031. These legal developments and widespread debates about racism were cause for optimism in 2020, and US newspaper headings proclaimed a new ‘racial reckoning’. Journalist Michelle L. Norris of The Washington Post cautioned ‘an epiphany is not the same as a reckoning. We can’t increase racial equity without eradicating white supremacy; we cannot fix the anti-Black and anti-brown racism that underpins policies and decisions that drive hiring, mortgages, transportation grids, WiFi access, education and accumulation of wealth . . . the race toward equality has barely begun.106 Australian First Nations people, too, had little cause for optimism. The push to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 is still unresolved, despite international pressure from the UN. On one count, 80% of all 10-year-olds in Australian prisons are First Nations children, and 94% of children in detention aged 10 to 12 returned to prison before they were 18.107 ‘Closing the Gap’, and recommendations of the RCIADIC are still on the table. Hopes were raised in May 2022, when the Australian Labor Party was voted into government, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese immediately promised to act on the recommendations of the Statement from the Heart, to install an Indigenous Voice in Parliament, to begin the process towards a treaty, and to establish a nationwide truth-telling process.108 Conclusion In 2020, Australia’s systemic racism and neglect of its First Nations people were exposed to the world through a series of spectacular attacks on art and culture. As a legacy of the nation’s violent colonial history, the attacks occurred on three different fronts – mining, memorialisation, and contemporary art. Latour’s notion of iconoclash has been a useful guide to understanding the status of the image in these controversies. Rio Tinto was shown to be protected in its violence through the mediation of a Eurocentric legal image of the Juukan sacred site, an image that prioritises mining at the expense of First Nations voices and self-determination, failing to account for the holistic, interconnected, and intangible aspects of First Nations culture and ontology. The company’s constant updating of its corporate image, including through the reality effect of documentary video, facilitates its capitalist enterprise. The BLM graffitists are not against images generally, they are against the public images of colonial figures, especially the image of Captain Cook as the colonial discoverer and hero, an offensive image that conservative Australian

Wrecking Culture 209 governments celebrated and perpetuated while ignoring First Nations rights and ongoing suffering. This corrosive colonial image is attacked in contemporary art, such as Tony Albert’s You Wreck Me, through parody, performance, subversion, reversal, and blak humour. New images such as Albert’s are recognised for their timeliness and truthfulness and have been inducted into public galleries and museums to be celebrated amongst the nation’s finest achievements. The global exposure of these Australian instances of iconoclash has had a positive effect on debates about colonialism and race in this country, not only by widening the terms of reference to include parallels with other First Nations experiences but also by shaming Australian governments and exerting pressure on them to enact change. Changes include new anti-racist legislation, updated heritage protection laws, and decolonial policies in art institutions and museums. It has become clear, however, that there are unexpected consequences to iconoclasm. The contemporary artist must be wary of the compromise that secure patronage brings, and all Australians, including the PKKP custodians of the Juukan Gorge caves, have been forced to acknowledge that we are all participants and beneficiaries in the capitalist economy, which Rio Tinto supports. Xiaoran Shi’s graffitiing of the Cook statue in Hyde Park backfired, encouraging an online counterattack by anti-Asian racists and misogynists. This and earlier attacks on Mabo’s and Yagan’s memorials are a reminder that graffitiing and monument destruction occur on both sides of politics. The recent desecration of the Myall Creek Memorial has been interpreted as a self-defeating rejection of the process and idea of reconciliation. Prime Minister Albanese’s embrace of the Uluru Statement from the Heart could still reinstate confidence in the process and hope for its success. Latour leaves us with a seemingly unanswerable question; ‘How is it possible to go beyond this cycle of fascination, repulsion, destruction, atonement, that is generated by the forbidden-image worship?’109 Given that iconoclash has occurred at flashpoints around the world for centuries, possibly longer, it may be a necessary component of visual culture. Perhaps it was iconoclash when the artists of Australian archaic rock art painted or carved motifs over those by earlier artists? Or perhaps it will be iconoclash when the first Australian on Mars is an artist of First Nations ancestry creating an image of the future? Back on Earth, in Australia today, one thing remains clear: iconoclash of 2020 emerged from the enduring injustice of the preceding 250 years, the denial of Indigenous rights and abuse of First Nations people. As to how artists, art historians, and curators proceed from here, Fiona Hamilton offered hope, with her desire to put a positive spin on her resignation as cultural advisor to MONA after the Sierra affair. She said it is ‘not about retribution but a desire for institutions . . . to “do better” – to work constructively and deal more equitably with First Nations people’.110 Notes 1 Sullivan + Strumpf, ‘Tony Albert, You Wreck Me (2020)’, https://vimeo.com/428332201, accessed 1 June 2020. 2 Lisa Visentin, ‘Sydney to Get New Captain Cook Memorial as Part of $50m Revamp’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 2018. www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/

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Helen McDonald sydney-to-get-new-captain-cook-memorial-as-part-of-50m-revamp-20180428p4zc64.html. ‘Tony Albert’, Art Gallery New South Wales. www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/ artists/albert-tony/, accessed 1 June 2020. Benjamin VanHoose, ‘Miley Cyrus Says “Wrecking Ball” Feels “Like a Lifetime Ago” on Song’s 7th Anniversary’, People, 26 August 2020. https://people.com/music/mileycyrus-celebrates-wrecking-ball-7th-anniversary/. Michael Hann, ‘Miley Cyrus’s New Wrecking Ball Video Says Young Women Should be Sexually Available’, The Guardian (Australia), Tuesday 10 September 2013. www.theguardian.com/music/ musicblog/2013/sep/10/miley-cyrus-wrecking-ball Myles-Russell Cook, ‘Destiny: The Art of Destiny Deacon’, National Gallery of Victoria. www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/destiny-the-art-of-destiny-deacon, accessed 20 July 2020. See Laura Doherty, ‘Deaths in Custody in Australia 2020–21’, Australian Institute of Criminology, Statistical Report no. 37, Canberra, https://doi.org/10.52922/sr78436, accessed 28 July 2022. Noel Pearson, ‘Rio Tinto’s Poor Excuses on Juukan Gorge’, The Australian, 30 September 2021. https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/cultural-vandalismregulated-destruction-aboriginal-cultural-heritage-new; Binoy Kampmark Scoop, ‘Rio Tinto Turns Cultural Vandal: The Destruction of the Juukan Gorge Caves’, Independent News, 14 September 2020; Enzo Traverso, ‘Bringing Down Statues Doesn’t Erase History, It Makes Us See It More Clearly’, The Wire, 27 June 2020. https:// thewire.in/world/statues-racism-history-protests Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–349. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 14623520601056240 Bruno Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash? or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?’, in Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (eds.), Iconoclash, Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge, MA: ZKM and MIT Press, 2002), 14–37. www.brunolatour.fr/node/64 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour says ‘The “E” People are Simply the People: They Are Indifferent, Mocking Iconoclasts and Iconophiles’, in ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. Trevor Nickolls, Death in Custody (Canberra: National Art Gallery, 1990); Bloodlines (triptych) 1993, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Rea, Definitions of Difference, 1994, illustrated in Helen McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art (Routledge: London and New York, 2001), plate 31, 140. https://www.routledge.com/Erotic-Ambiguities-The-Female-Nude-in-Art/McDonald/p/ book/9780415170994 Ethan Blue, ‘Aboriginal Lives Matter: Art Project Puts a Powerful Spotlight on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’, Croaky Health Media, 17 March 2016. www.croakey.org/ art-project-puts-a-powerful-spotlight-on-aboriginal-deaths-in-custody/ Simone Fox Koob, ‘Indigenous Kids Nine Times More Likely to be in Custody than Non-Indigenous Children in Victoria’, The Age, 20 January 2021. www.theage.com. au/national/victoria/indigenous-kids-nine-times-more-like-to-be-in-custody-thannon-indigenous-children-in-victoria-20210120-p56vlt.html

Wrecking Culture 211 24 Peta Doherty, ‘A Group of Artists Are Honouring Every Indigenous Australian Who Has Died in Custody’, SBS News, February 2021. www.sbs.com.au/news/agroup-of-artists-are-honouring-every-indigenous-australian-who-has-died-incustody/45de6e85-6c58-4b0a-ae3a-3a7a7bcea0cf 25 Myles Russell-Cook, ‘Destiny: The Art of Destiny Deacon’, www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/destiny-the-art-of-destiny-deacon/, accessed 18 July 2022. 26 ‘Brook Andrew Appointed as Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney’, Artist Profile. https://artistprofile.com.au/brook-andrew-appointed-artistic-director-22ndbiennale-sydney/, accessed 12 November 2020. 27 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 28 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 29 Rio Tinto’s and Woodside’s arts funding obligations are discussed in Helen McDonald, ‘In the Landscape of Extinction: The Life of Murujuga’s Ancient Rock Art’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, 19, no. 2 (2019): 242. 30 Santiago Sierra, quoted in Broede Carmody, ‘“Left Without a Voice”: Artist Behind Blood-Soaked Flag Attacks Decision to Cancel It’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March 2021. www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/left-without-a-voice-artist-behind-bloodsoaked-flag-attacks-decision-to-cancel-it-20210325-p57dv4.html. 31 Selina Ross, ‘MONA’s David Walsh Apologises for Dark Mofo Flag Controversy as Calls Grow for Carmichael to Go’, ABC News, Wednesday 24 March 2021. www. abc.net.au/news/2021-03-24/david-walsh-apology-over-mofo-blood-flag-controversy/ 100023988 32 Claire Coleman quoted in Carmody, ‘Left without a Voice’. 33 Anita Heiss quoted in Carmody, ‘Left without a Voice’. 34 Fiona Hamilton, interviewed by Daniel Browning, in Rudi Bremer, ‘This is Not Retribution it’s about “Do Better”’, ABC Listen: Awaye, Saturday 17 April 2021. www.abc.net. au/radionational/programs/awaye/this-is-not-retribution-its-about-do-better/13307240 35 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 36 Santiago Sierra, quoted in Carmody, ‘Left without a Voice’. 37 Mike Parr quoted in Carmody, ‘Left without a Voice’. 38 Carmody, ‘Left without a Voice’. 39 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 40 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 41 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 42 Greg Borschmann, ‘Report Reveals Rio Tinto Knew the Significance of 46,000Year-Old Rock Caves Six Years before it Blasted Them’, ABCRN Breakfast, Friday 5 June 2020, 7.08 am. www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-05/rio-tinto-knew-6-years-agoabout-46000yo-rock-caves-it-blasted/12319334. 43 Borschmann, ‘Report reveals Rio Tinto knew’. 44 Borschmann, ‘Report reveals Rio Tinto knew’. 45 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 46 John Cherryman, ‘Rio Tinto Destroys Important 46,000 Year Old Indigenous Site’, Business News, 5 June 2020. https://australiabusinessnews.com.au/news/rio-tintodestroys-indigenous-site/ 47 Ngurra Minarli, video, 2015, was revised after the blasting in Ngurra Minarli Puutunku Juukan Gorge then and now, 2020. www.facebook.com/NgaardaRadio/videos/ngurraminarli-puutukunti-juukan-gorge-then-and-now/1548236238897139/ . . . 48 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 49 ‘Inquiry into the Destruction of 46,000 Year Old Caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia’, Parliament of Australia. www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Northern_Australia/CavesatJuukanGorge, accessed July 2022. 50 Calla Wahlquist, ‘Rio Tinto Did Not Tell Traditional Owners Blowing up Juukan Gorge Site Was Just One Option for Mine’, The Guardian, 7 August 2020. www.theguardian.

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Helen McDonald com/australia-news/2020/aug/07/rio-t into-did-not-tell-traditional-owners-blowingup-juukan-gorge-site-was-just-one-option-for-mine Lorena Allam, ‘Devastated Indigenous Owners Say Rio Tinto Misled them Ahead of Juukan Gorge Blast’, The Guardian, 12 October 2020. www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/12/devastated-indigenous-owners-say-rio-tinto-misled-them-ahead-ofjuukan-gorge-blast Okwui Enwezor, ‘Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 4, no. 2 (2003): 27. Roderick Carnegie, ‘Introduction’, in Heartlands and Headwaters, exh. cat. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2016), 1. ‘“Clearly There Was a Misunderstanding”: Rio Tinto Apologises for Blasting Juukan Gorge’, Radio interview on RN Breakfast with Hamish McDonald with guest, Chris Salisbury, Chief Executive of Rio Tinto Iron Ore, 5 June 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/ radionational/programs/breakfast/clearly-there-was-a-misunderstanding:-rio-tintoapologises/12324192 Ngurri Minarli Puutukunti – Juukan Gorge Now and Then, video 2015, revised 2020. www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1548236238897139 ‘Juukan Gorge’ on Rio Tinto’s Website. www.riotinto.com/news/inquiry-into-juukangorge, accessed 18 July 2022. ‘Rio Tinto’s Position on Recommendations Issued by the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia’, website. www.riotinto.com/-/media/Content/Documents/ News/RT-JSCNA-recommendations-Dec20.pdf?rev=526bdba666374cae83b238c0fd 20183d Melanie Burton, ‘Rio Tinto Yet to Pay Compensation Over Sacred Site Destruction’, Mining Dot Com, 26 August 2021. www.mining.com/web/rio-tinto-yet-to-paycompensation-over-sacred-site-destruction/ Financial Review, 19 January 2021. www.afr.com/companies/mining/rio-reaches-forrecord-exports-profits-as-iron-ore-booms-20210119-p56v4h Louise Miolin and Laura Birch, ‘Juukan Gorge Traditional Owners Say Money Can’t Replace Site’s Value One Year on From Blast’, ABC News, 18 May 2021. www.abc. net.au/news/2021-05-18/one-year-on-from-rio-tinos-juukan-gorge-blast/100145712 The Oxford English Dictionary defines law as ‘the system of rules which a particular country or community recognises as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties’. As such, I argue, the law is a form of mediation – that is legal representation, the process of lawyers representing their clients’ interests in court to access justice. Law Council of Australia, ‘Inquiry into the Destruction of 46,000 Year Old Caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia’, 21 August 2020, 6, paragraph 3. www.lawcouncil.asn.au/resources/submissions/inquiry-into-the-destruction-of-46-000-year-old-caves-at–the-juukan-gorge-in-the-pilbara-region-of-westernaustralia Law Council of Australia, ‘Inquiry into the Destruction’, 10, paragraph 16. www. lawcouncil.asn.au/resources/submissions/inquiry-into-the-destruction-of-46-000-yearold-caves-at–the-juukan-gorge-in-the-pilbara-region-of-western-australia Law Council of Australia, ‘Inquiry Into the Destruction’, 24, paragraph 75. www. lawcouncil.asn.au/resources/submissions/inquiry-into-the-destruction-of-46-000-yearold-caves-at–the-juukan-gorge-in-the-pilbara-region-of-western-australia Anna Henderson, ‘Indigenous Artefacts Pulled Out of Juukan Gorge Before Rio Tinto Blast Sitting in Shipping Containers, Inquiry Hears’, ABC TV News, 28 August 2020. www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-28/indigenous-artefacts-juukan-gorge-cavesstorage-concerns/12605566

Wrecking Culture 213 66 Danute Kozaki, ‘NSW Government to Consider Tightening Laws after Second Captain Cook Statue Vandalised’, ABC News, 15 June 2020. www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-15/ second-captain-cook-statue-vandalised-in-sydney/12354896 67 Carolyn Ebb and Rachel Eddie, ‘Captain Cook Memorial in Edinburgh Gardens Vandalised’, The Age, 14 June 2020. www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/captain-cookmemorial-in-edinburgh-gardens-vandalised-20200614-p552i2.html 68 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’. 69 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 70 ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, website. https://ulurustatement.org 71 Stan Grant, ‘Stan Grant: It is a Damaging Myth that Captain Cook Discovered Australia’, ABC News, 23 August 2017. www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-23/stan-grant:damaging-myth-captain-cook-discovered-australia/8833536 72 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 73 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 74 Bronwyn Batten and Paul Batten, ‘Memorialising the Past: Is There an Aboriginal Way?’, Public History Review, 15 (2008): 113. 75 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 76 Ian Henderson, ‘Outrage at Desecration: Vandalism of Mabo’s Grave “A Racist Act”’, The Canberra Times, 5 June 1995. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/ 127528703# 77 Henderson, ‘Outrage at Desecration’. 78 Henderson, ‘Outrage at Desecration’. 79 Hannah McGlade, ‘The Repatriation of Yagan: A Story of Manufacturing Dissent’, Law/Text/Culture, 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 245–255. 80 ‘Vandals Cut Off Head of Warrior’s Statue’, The Irish Times, 8 September 1997. www. irishtimes.com/news/vandals-cut-off-head-of-warrior-s-statue-1.104180 81 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 82 David Martin, ‘Of Monuments and Masks: Historiography in the Time of Curiosity’s Ruin’, Postcolonial Studies, 10, no. 3 (2007): 311–320. 83 Nadine Silva, ‘Police Investigate Damage to Myall Creek Massacre Memorial’, NITV News, 2 October 2021. www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2021/10/01/police-investigatedamage-myall-creek-massacre-memorial 84 Silva, ‘Police Investigate Damage’. 85 Heath Parkes-Hupton, ‘Xiaoran Shi; Greens Staffer Convicted for Defacing Captain Cook Statue’, news.com, 17 July 2020. www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/courtslaw/xiaoran-shi-greens-staffer-convicted-for-defacing-captain-cook-statue/news-stor y/0d0f044467a11743c5ca5a66b7cd7492 86 Parkes-Hupton, ‘Xiaoran Shi’. 87 Parkes-Hupton, ‘Xiaoran Shi’. 88 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 89 Joe Hinchcliff, ‘Infamous Captain Cook Statue in Controversial Pose Removed from Queensland Street’, The Guardian Australia, 24 May 2022. www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2022/may/24/infamous-captain-cook-statue-in-controversialpose-removed-from-queensland-street 90 Cameron Slessor and Eugene Boisvert, ‘Black Lives Matter Protests Renew Push to Remove “Racist” Monuments to Colonial Figures’, ABC News, Wednesday, 10 June 2020. www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-10/black-lives-matter-protests-renewpush-to-remove-statues/12337058 91 Natasha Wanganeen quoted in Slessor and Boisvert, ‘Black Lives Matter Protests’. 92 Natasha Wanganeen quoted in Slessor and Boisvert, ‘Black Lives Matter Protests’. 93 Bruce Scates, quoted in Slessor and Boisvert, ‘Black Lives Matter Protests’. 94 Slessor and Boisvert, ‘Black Lives Matter Protests’.

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95 Andrew Taylor, ‘Historian Questions Whether Graffiti Should Have Been Left on Captain Cook Statue’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2018. www.smh.com.au/national/ nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti-indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html. 96 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 97 Samantha Dick, ‘Police Near Captain Cook’s Cottage’, News Daily, 20 June 2020. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/06/15/statues-racism-protests/ attachment/police-near-captain-cooks-cottage/ 98 Gladys Berejiklian quoted in Parkes-Hupton, ‘Xiaoran Shi’. 99 Xiaoran Shi quoted in Heath Parkes-Hupton, ‘Xiaoran Shi’. 100 The Halt all Racist Tours demonstrations in New Zealand (1981) were the subject of Merata Mita’s feature-length documentary film, Patu! (1983). 101 Helen Davidson, ‘The Story of David Dungay and an Indigenous Death in Custody’, The Guardian, 11 June 2020. www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/11/thestory-of-david-dungay-and-an-indigenous-death-in-custody2020 102 Dana Morse, ‘Australia Begins Bilateral Treaty Talks with New Zealand’, ABC News, 7 July 2022. www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-07/australia-begins-bilateral-treatytalks-with-nz/101213612 103 Tony Birch, ‘“Black Armbands and White Veils”: John Howard’s Moral Amnesia’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 25 (December 1996): 8. 104 Tony Abbott quoted in ‘First Fleet Was “Good for Indigenous People: Abbott”’, SBS News, 22 January 2018. www.sbs.com.au/news/article/first-fleet-was-good-forindigenous-people-abbott/xwls7qr33 105 Morrison later qualified this statement and apologised for any offence it caused, quoted in Katharine Murphy, ‘Scott Morrison Sorry for “No Slavery” Claim and Acknowledges Hideous Practices’, The Guardian, 12 June 2020. www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2020/jun/12/scott-morrison-sorry-for-no-slavery-in-australia-claimand-acknowledges-hideous-practices. 106 Michelle L. Norris, ‘Don’t Call it Racial Reckoning. The Race Toward Equality Has Barely Begun’, The Washington Post, 19 December 2020. www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/dont-call-it-a-racial-reckoning-the-race-toward-equality-has-barely-begun/ 2020/12/18/90b65eba-414e-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html, accessed 18 July 2022. 107 Oliver Gordon, ‘Australia Urged by 31 Countries at UN Meeting to Raise the Age of Criminal Responsibility’, ABC News, Thursday 21 June 2021. www.abc.net.au/ news/2021-01-21/un-australia-raise-the-age-of-criminal-responsibility/13’078380 108 Dana Morse, ‘Anthony Albanese Promised Action on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. So What is the Proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament?’, ABC News, 24 May 2022. www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/federal-election-anthony-albaneseindigenous-uluru-statement/101092816 109 Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash?’. 110 Fiona Hamilton, quoted in Carmody, ‘Left Without a Voice’.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure. Aboriginal Advancement League 113 Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) 130, 136, 138, 157 Aboriginal flag 141, 157–158 Aboriginalism 116, 118, 121, 124 Aboriginal monuments, desecration of 205 Aboriginal Protection Board 109, 123 Aboriginal Tent Embassy 9n6, 135–136, 145n2, 147n29, 157–158, 170 Aboriginal terminology 7–8 Aborigines Progressive Association 112 activism/activist art 6, 124, 129–131, 135, 141, 143 Agius, Aunty Josie 206 Aiston, George ‘Poddy’ 82, 87–88, 91n16 Albanese, Prime Minister Anthony 54, 208–209 Albrecht, Pastor Friedrich 80–81 appropriation 61, 69–71, 74, 93, 98, 115, 118 artists: Abramovic, Marina and Ulay 162, 164; Albert, Tony 7, 122, 196, 197, 199, 209; Andrew, Brook 3, 170, 178, 181, 208; Apuatimi, Jean Baptiste 98; Aspden, David 143; Baker, Nyukana 94; Ball, Syd 158; Bancroft, Bronwyn 99, 142; Barak, William 4–5, 45–58; Baselitz, Georg 167; Battarbee, Rex 121; Bell, Marshall 159; Bell, Richard 3, 57, 159, 170, 193n12; Bennett, Gordon 6, 152, 159–163, 199; Benson, Kanytjupayi 73; Benson, Liam 170, 174n83; Bishop, Mervyn 124, 138, 140, 181; Bonney, Frederic 14; Bostock, Euphemia 138, 142; Boyd, Dan 167; Breton,

Andre 64; Bunguwuy, John 131; Burn, Ian 6, 154–156, 163–164, 167; Chittick, Lee 135; Clarke, Maree 10–25; Clear, Madeleine 97; Coe, Isabel 138; Cooper, Revel 32, 112, 117; Coulthard, Kristian 70; Coulthard, Ted 70; Counihan, Noel 121; Croft, Brenda L. 140, 142, 147n28, 181; Deacon, Destiny 12, 196, 199–200; Downs, Jarinyanu David 33; Dupain, Max 136–137; Eather, Michael 159–160, 170; Edmond, Martin 5; Erliklyika 64, 65; Evans, Megan 13, 21–22, 22; Fairweather, Ian 65; Favell, Rosalie 20; Fencer, Lorna 102; Fisher, Selina Napangnka 103; Foley, Fiona 138–139, 142; Gascoigne, Rosalie 12; Gemes, Juno 136, 141; Gibbs, Yala Yala 40; Goodwin, Richard 143; Graham, Dan 23, 26n15; Gribbin, Jacqueline 99; Guérard, Eugene von 18; Hamilton, Fiona 200, 209; Heysen, Hans 156, 164; Holt, Amanda 141; Hoosan, Stewart 181; Hsieh, Tehching 14; Jagamara, Michael Nelson 6, 159, 167–170, 173n81; Jangala, Ben 102; Johnson, Helen 178; Johnson, Pam 147n28; Johnson, Tim 138, 142–143, 158–159, 164, 166–168; Johnstone, H. J. 64; Jones, Jonathan 31, 64, 182; Juli, Mabel 37; Kennedy, Karlissa 98; Kerry, Charles 178, 180, 193n17; Kerry, Paula 112, 117; Kitchener, Elaine (see Syron, Elaine); Kite,

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Index Jim (see Erliklyika); Kngwarreye, Audrey 96; Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 96, 170; Kngwarreye, Rosie Kunoth 96; Kosuth, Joseph 155, 167; Kulitja, Rene 1; Kuyata, Yipati 94; Lane, Elaine Wanatjura 73; Lee, Glynis 98; Lewis, Niningka 5; Loureiro, Arthur 50; Luther, Maurice Jupurrula 134; Lye, Len 65–66; Mackinolty, Chips 189; Malangi, David 131; Mansell, Byram 5, 6, 109–125; Marika, Banduk 138, 143; Marika, Wandjuk 135–136, 147n32; Marshall, Charlie 143; Martin, Judy 102; Martins, Fernanda 138, 142; Meeks, Arone 142; Milpurrurr, George 131; Moffatt, Tracey 38, 130, 138–139, 140–142, 144, 181; Moonee David 67; Moore, David 135, 178; Morris, Jerusha Nungarrayi 103; Morris, Murdie Nampijinpa 103; Mowaljarai, David 29, 37; Myers, Peter 143; Nadjamerrek, Lofty Bardayal 66; Nakamarra, Daisy Leura 143; Namatjira, Albert 5, 75n5, 80–81, 86, 92–93, 110, 112, 120–121, 154, 156–157, 163; Nangala, Entalura 143; Nappurula, Narpula Scobie 143; Nicholson, Mandy 52–53; Nicholson, Tom 64; Nickolls, Trevor 138, 143–144, 143, 158, 199; Nolan, Dinny 158; Northern Editions Studio 98; Numbulmoore, Charlie 65; Onus, Bill 5, 6, 109–114, 116–125; Onus, Lin 109, 122, 125; Parr, Mike 200; Perroux, Narelle 135; Peters, Rusty 37; Petyarre, Gloria 104–105; Petyarre sisters 96; Pike, Jimmy 101–102; Possum, Emily (Nantakutara Nakamarra) 96, 165; Preston, Margaret 114, 117, 164; Puruntatameri, Eddie 97; Pwerle, Lena 96; Pwerle, Minnie 102; Quail, Avril 138, 142, 145; Ramsden, Mel 164; r e a 143, 199; Rhodes, Jon 135; Riley, Michael 138, 142, 147n28, 150n77, 182; Ritchie, Therese 6, 7, 176–177, 179–186, 188–190, 188, 192; Roberts, Tom 64; Robertson, Julie

Nangala 103; Rubuntja, Wenten 81; Rupert, Jillian 94; Ryan, Davy 67; Ryan, Winne 70; Samuels, Jeffrey 138, 140, 142; Sandy, William 143; Saunders, Andrew (see r e a); Searles, Nalda 73; Shewring, Terry 143; Sierra, Santiago 178, 200, 209; Simon, Jason Paul 124; Simon, Jim 143; Singleton, Lynette Nangala 103; Stacey, Wes 135–136; Stewart, Brendon 143; Syron, Elaine 136, 141; Syron, Gordon 138; Thomas, Harold 157; Thomas, Rover 144; Thompson, Christian 178; Tillers, Imants 6, 142–143, 158–170, 173n81; Tipungwuti, Giovanni 97; Tjampitjinpa, Anatjari 165–166, 166; Tjampitjinpa, Kaapa 156; Tjampitjinpa, Maxie 143; Tjanpi Desert Weavers 8, 72, 74; Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum 81, 131; Tjapaltjarri, Mick Namarari 40, 143; Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura 82, 131; Tjapangati, Charlie 131; Tjapangati, Limpi Putungka 165; Tjungurrayi, Charlie Tararu 163; Tjungurrayi, Don Jungari 165; Tjupurulla, Turkey Tolsen 143; Toomath, Alma 112; Tracker Nat 70–71; Traill, Jessie 80; Tregonning, Len 14, 20–21, 24; Tucker, Albert 65; Tuckson, Tony 114; Tungutalum, Bede 97; Tweedie, Penny 136, 147n13; Usser, Michelle 178; Varcoe, Cedric 200; Watson, Lawrence Jangala 103; Whiskey, Cathleen 143; Williams, Fred 202; Williams, Joseph ‘Yugi’ 70, 151, 170; Williams, Yipati 95; Wilton, Henry 67; Yirawala, Billy 66 art movements: ‘Aboriginalia’ 5–6, 69, 118, 122; Australian ‘Gum Tree’ school 156; Conceptual Art 151, 153–157, 163–164, 166–167, 178; Desert Art movement 82; ‘dot painting’ 81, 130, 158; Papunya Tula movement 5, 81, 94, 154, 157; surrealism 64, 66; textile design 92, 94, 105–106; Tjanpi soft sculpture movement 61, 72–74; Western Desert carving movement 61–62, 67; women’s batik 92–96

Index art therapy 13–14, 20, 170 artworks/installations/exhibitions: Aboriginal Art 114; Aboriginal Australian Views in Print and Poster 140; Aboriginal Memorial 132, 134; After 200 Years 140, 184; After the Tent Embassy 135–136; Arreyonga Paddock, James Range 121; Art and Soul 37; Art of Arnhem Land 28; Ash on Me 122; Australia: Art & Aboriginality 1987 140–141; Australian Coat of Arms 72; Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences 144, 159, 170; Birrundudu drawings 1; Black Eyes in Focus 136; Bloodlines 199; The Book of Power 164, 170; Boomerang 34; A Break Away 64; Carrolup Revisited 32; Ceremony (Barak Painting) 54; Ceremony (exhibition) 3; A Changing Relationship 144; Colony: Frontier Wars 3; Commitments 159; Conjunction 163; Contested Space 200; Conversations with the Bride 164; Corroboree (Women in Possum Skin Cloaks) 45–47, 50–51, 55; Culture Warriors 3; Death in Custody 199; Definitions of Distance 199; Discomfort – Relationships within Aboriginal Art 170; Djang’Kawu Creation Story 98; Embassy 3, 137–139, 170; Escape 200; Eternal Eclipse 99; European dialogue 131; European Vision and the South Pacific 2; Evening Shadows 64; Everywhen 1; Figures in Possum Skin Cloaks and Lyrebird 51–52, 52; Five Dreamings 167–168; Forward Wind 167; Homage to Albert 156; Hope & Peace 170; Hunter attacking Opossums in a Tree 118; I am IT 170; The Image Black 144; In Dreams 140; Information 154–155; Inside Black Australia 140; Izkliede 163; Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson 100; Katjailen (The Serpent) 66; Koori Art ’84 138, 142; Koori Possum Skins Cloak Project 10, 20; Lead in My Grandmother’s Body 186–188, 188; Machine Time Dreamtime

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158; Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories 4, 10, 11, 15, 24–25; Milingimbi: A Living Culture 35; The Nine Ricochets 162; The Nine Shots 162, 167–168; Nirin 3, 170, 200; Nyungar Landscapes 29; Objects and Representations from Ramingining 131; Oil Paint and Ochre 54; Open Cut 175–176, 180–183, 185–187, 191; Out of the Boxes and into the Desert 40; A Painting for Closed Eyes 160–162; Parrying Shield 47, 55; Pictures for cities 137; The Politics of Picturing 166; Rainbow Serpent 66, 167–168; Ricochets, Manifest Destiny 160; Right Here Right Now – Australia 1988 144–145; Running Man 152, 160; Sexy and Dangerous I 178, 181; Sorry 122; Stockyards and Saddles 39; Tjanpi 61, 72–74; Two Worlds Collide 142–143, 143; Undisclosed 3; Urban Koories 138–139, 139; Utopia – A Picture Story 96; Waiting for Technology 165–166, 170; Wandjina Spirit 65; The Wild Post-Colonial Boy 163; Window onto a Shadow Universe 160; Yirrkala drawings 27; Yondi lifting the sky 123; You Wreck Me 7, 196–197, 197, 199, 209 assimilation, government policy of 6, 71, 109–110, 114, 118, 120–121, 123, 125, 181 Australia Council 7, 36, 129–130, 138, 170 Australia Day/Invasion Day 135, 158, 196 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) 23, 36, 136, 140, 177, 184 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 111, 120 Azoulay, Ariella 7, 184–185, 187, 190–191, 195n67 Bandler, Faith 135 Bardon, Geoffrey 5, 81, 89 Bark paintings 35, 64, 66, 79, 82, 90, 94, 97, 114 Barwick, Diane 49 Baum, Tina 3 Beier, Ulli 157 Bennett, Mrs M 94

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Index

Berenembah (ballet) 115 Berndt, Catherine 4, 27–29, 33, 38–39 Berndt, Ronald 4, 27–29, 33, 38–39 Berndt Museum of Anthropology 4, 27–37, 39–41 Berry, Graham 49 Bhabha, Homi 153–155, 170 Bicentennial/Bicentenary of white settlement in Australia 1788–1988 130, 141, 143, 159, 184 Black, George Murray 11 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests 7, 198, 203 Blandowski, Wilhelm von 10, 17 Bon, Anne Fraser 49 Boomerangs 24, 34, 53, 67–69, 80, 84, 101, 109, 113, 116–118, 121, 123–125, 163 Borroloola, NT 7, 100, 175–177, 185, 189–192 Brassey, Thomas 49 Brereton, Leo 94 Bryce, Suzie 95 Burton, Robert 98 Captain Cook monuments 196–198, 203–204, 206–207 Charles, Jack 113, 121 Colbung, Ken 29 Communism/communists 119, 121 Conroy, Diana Wood 97 Cooee Art 102 Cook, Belinda 103–105 Cooper, Carol 48, 58 Cyrus, Miley 196 Dawn magazine 109–110, 116, 123–125 Deakin, Alfred 49 decolonisation 142–143, 151–171, 200 de Pury family 5, 47, 50, 53–54, 56–57 Diggins, Lauraine 103–104 Djimbarrwala, Helen 159 Documenta 15 3, 19 Du Bois, W. E. B. 153, 155 Dungay, David 207 Edmonds, Fran 24 Eel traps 14 Elkin, A. P. 28, 123 Enwezor, Okwui 152, 202 fashion designers/owners: Aydin, Bunyamin 99; Beale, Debra 106; Culley, Stephen 101–102; Dickinson, Kristy 106; Franks,

Camilla 101, 103; Gorman, Lisa 104; Jackson, Linda 93, 98–101; Johnson, Colleen Tighe 106; Kee, Jenny 93, 99–100; Kerry, Paula 112, 117; Lee, Grace Lillian 106; Moriarty, John and Ros 100; Morrissey, Peter 100–101; Norris, Adrian 102; Pemmaraju, Roopa 5, 93, 101–102, 105; Robinson, Edwina 102; Wroth, David 101 fashion labels: Aje 102; Balarinji Design Studio 5, 93, 100–101; Bima Wear 98; Buluuy Mirrii 106; Bush Couture 106; Camilla 5, 93, 105; Deboriginal collection 106; Desert Designs 5, 93, 100–102; Dolina Fashion Group 99; Gorman 93, 101, 103–104; Haus of Dizzy 106; Kirrikin 106; Liandra Swim 106; Native Swimwear 106; Ngali 106 films: Ablaze 109, 113, 125; Aboriginal Land Rights – NSW 135; Cloud 140; Free Radicals 66; Into the Fiery Furnace 202; Ngurri Minarli (In Our Country) 201; Ngurri Minarli Puutukunti – Juukan Gorge Now and Then 202; The Overlanders 118; The Peanut Vendor 66; Tusalava 65–66; White Justice 118 First Nations, terminology 7–8; Foley, Gary 138, 145n2, 157 Freedom Ride, NSW 1965 123–124 Freud, Sigmund 14 Gilbert, Kevin 131 Gilchrist, Stephen 1–2, 39, 42, 178 Gillen, Frank 65, 88, 113 Gooch, Rodney 96 Goodes, Adam 206 Goulburn Islands 28 Green, Jack 6, 175, 181–182, 182, 185–189, 191, 192n28, 195n48 Green, Jenny 95, 100 Gumbula, Dr Joseph Neparrnga 44n28 Gunbalanya see Oenpelli Gurirr-Gurirr (Krill Krill) ceremony 37 Hercus, Luise 87 Herder, Johann 82 Hilliard, Winifred 92, 94, 96 Hillier, Harry 5, 78–79, 82, 84–87 Hollingsworth, Emma 206 Howitt, Alfred 49, 83, 87 Hunter, Uncle Colin 53

Index iconoclasm 198, 209 Indigenous Art Centres/Collectives/ Co-ops: Aboriginal Enterprises 109–110, 112–113, 116–117, 119, 122, 125; Apmira Artists for Aboriginal Land Rights 135; Art & Language collective 153–155, 159; Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative 135, 141–142, 142, 145, 147n28, 149n67; Campfire Group 159–160; Fremantle Arts Centre 32; Gillawarra Gift Shop 122–123, 125; Jilamara Arts and Crafts 98; Mangkaja Art Centre 93, 103, 105; Maruku Arts, Yulara 73; Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre 40; Munupi Arts and Crafts 98; National Aboriginal Art Gallery 3; Ngurra 3; ProppaNOW 122; Tarrakarri 3; Tennant Creek Brio art collective 151, 170; Tiwi Design art centre 97–98; Utopia Women’s Batik Group 95–96, 104; Warlukurlangu Aboriginal Arts Centre 103 Indigenous Fashion Projects 105 Indigenous language groups/clans: Adnyamathanha 61–62, 67–68, 70, 206; Alyawarr(e) 95, 102; Anangu 73; Anmatyerre 95; Aranda (see Arrernte); Arrernte 2, 31, 64–65, 80, 83, 86, 89, 110, 120, 154, 156; Awelye 96, 102; Badtjala 138; Bilatapa 87; Biripi 5, 121–122, 124; Boonwurrung 17; Bundjulung 99; Dieri 5, 77–79, 83–84, 86–90; Djabugay 178–180; Dunghutti 207; Garrwa 6, 175, 181, 194n39; Gija 4, 30; Girramay 196, 206; Gomeroi 206; Gudanji 94n39, 175; Gulumirrgin 3; Gurang Gurang 3, 56–57; Gurindji 3; Jiman 3, 56; Kaanju 206; Kalkadoon 2–3, 31; Kamilaroi 3, 31, 56, 64, 182, 204; Karajarri 3; Kaurna 206; Kooma 3, 56; Kuku Ya’u 206; Kuku Yalanji 196; Larrakia 3; Loritja 83; Malngin 3; Marra 175, 191, 194n39; Maruku 1; Meriam 57; Mooro 28; Mudburra 3; Mutitjulu 1; Mutti Mutti 17; Narungga 206; Ngaanyatjarra 67, 73; Ngambri 8; Ngarinyin 4, 30, 65; Ngarrindjeri 200, 206; Ngunnawal 8; Nucoorilma 5; Nyungar/Ngungar/

219

Noongar 36, 112, 205–206; Pinikura 201; Pitantjatjara/ Pitjantjatjara 5, 72–73, 93–95, 178; Puutu Kunti Kurrama 201; Trawlwulwuy 200; Walmajarri 101; Wamba Wamba 17; Wangkangurru 83, 87; Wardaman 3; Warlpiri 132, 134; Warlukurlangu 103; Warumungu 70–71; Wiradjuri 3, 8, 31, 64, 109, 182, 200, 204; Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung 4, 46–48, 50–54, 58; Wuthathi 57; Yamatji 1, 178, 199; Yankunytjatjara 73, 178, 205; Yanyuwa 100–101, 175, 186, 189, 191, 194n39; Yarluyandi 87; Yidinji 196; Yolngu 203; Yorta Yorta 17, 109 Indigenous Voice in Parliament 208 Jackson, Michael 77, 89 Janke, Terri 57 Johnson, Vivien 138, 142, 143, 166–170 Jones, Jennifer 122 Jones, Philip 86–87 Jones, Uncle Ron 54 Juli, Mabel 37 Juukan Gorge 7, 198, 201–203, 209 Kakadu 79 Kangaroo-tooth necklaces 15 Katanning 29 Kean, John 75n5, 154, 157 Keating, Paul 130, 158 Kenny, Anna 89 Kerins, Seá n 7, 175, 181, 185–186, 189–190, 192 Koorie Heritage Trust 19, 53 Kopi/skull caps 3–4, 10–15, 19–21, 25 land rights 124, 130, 135–136, 140–141, 144, 155, 198, 205 Lane, Carly 3, 8 Langton, Marcia 7, 134–136, 144, 147n30, 157, 159–160 Latour, Bruno 7, 198–204, 206–209 Lingiari, Vincent 140 Lock, Tracey 64 Lueyar, Ngawang Soepa 163 Lyons, Robert 63, 66, 68 Mabo decision of High Court 130 Mabo, Edward Koiki 205, 209 Makarata: bringing the past into the future 35, 44n28, 203 Makarata Commission 1

220

Index

Massacres 138–139, 148n52, 186–187, 205–206 McDinny, Nancy 181, 183, 186–187, 191–192 McLean, Ian 68, 71 Meanjin magazine 109 Mendelssohn, Joanna 31 Milingimbi 36 mining 7, 61, 175, 186, 198, 200–203, 208 missions/reserves/settlements: Balcanoona Station 70; Bethesda, Killalpannina SA 5, 77, 80, 83; Bungarun, WA 69; Carrolup Native Settlement, WA 29, 32, 112, 116–117; Cherbourg, Qld 69; Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, Vic 45, 47–51, 54, 57, 58; Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve 112–113, 124; Ernabella 5, 72, 92–96, 105; Gibb River Station 30, 39; Hermannsburg (see Ntaria); Lake Condah, Vic 18; Lake Tyers, Vic 18; La Perouse, NSW 69; Momba Station 14; Nepabunna, SA 67, 69–70; Ntaria, NT 5, 77, 80–81, 83, 86, 88–89; Papunya, NT 5–6, 40, 73, 75, 77, 80–82, 89–90, 130–131, 138, 140, 154, 157–158, 161, 163, 165–170; Phillip Creek, NT 70; Purfleet, NSW 122–124; Ramingining, Arnhem Land 131, 133–134, 133, 140; Utopia, NT 5, 92, 95–96, 100, 102, 104–105; Warrabri, NT 70 Mitzevich, Nick 62 Morgan, Alec 109 Mountford, Charles 114, 116 Mundine, Djon 6, 30, 57, 129, 131, 137, 143–144, 143, 190, 194n24 Murphy, Bernice 131 Murphy Wandin, Aunty Joy 58 Murray, Julia 95–96, 100 Nakata, Martin 45 Neale, Margo 37 Newstead, Adrian 102 Nicholls, Pastor Doug 112, 122 O’Donoghue, Lowitja 205 Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) 5, 28, 77, 79–80, 82, 90, 118 O’Keefe, Cain 175, 192 Onus, Tiriki 109, 125 Out of the Dark: An Aboriginal Moomba (play) 111–112

Pagé, Suzanne 132, 134 Paroissien, Leon 131–132, 132, 134 Perkins, Charles 123 Perkins, Hetti 2–3, 31, 37 Possum-skin cloaks 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 50–51 postcolonial 19, 65, 152–154, 156–157, 159, 182, 199 Quagliotti, Aunty Winnie 48 railways 109–110, 120 reconciliation 20, 170, 205 Redfern, Sydney 6, 129–130, 134, 137–138, 141 Referendum, Voice to Parliament, 2023 1 Referendum, ‘Yes’ Campaign for Aboriginal Rights, 1967 124–125, 130, 157, 203 repatriation 23–24, 35, 57 Reuther, Pastor Johann 5, 78–79, 82–84, 86–90 Reuther, Pauline 83–84 Rio Tinto 7, 198–203, 208–209, 211n29 rock art 30, 114, 118, 209 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 130, 145n2, 196 Russell-Cook, Myles 12, 200 Sayers, Andrew 49 Sculthorpe, Gaye 13 settler colonial, settler colonialism 2, 7, 198, 203 Siebert, Otto 83 Simon, Ella 122–125 Slade, Lisa 62, 66 Smith, Bernard 2, 135, 151 sovereignty, Indigenous 3, 42, 50, 73, 153, 155, 175, 181, 198, 206 Spencer, Walter Baldwin 65, 79–80, 88–90, 113 Stanner, W. E. H. 151, 170 Stanton, John 28–30, 33 Stephen, Ann 156 Stolen Generations 113, 120–121, 123 Strehlow, Carl 83–84, 86–89 Strehlow, Frieda 84 Strehlow, Ted 86 Sykes, Bobbi 138, 140 Taree, NSW 109, 112, 121–122, 124 Taylor, Luke 90 Tjurunga 86, 89 Toa 5, 77–78, 78, 80, 82, 84–90 Toussaint, Sandy 27, 30, 33, 38

Index transculturation 6, 71, 73, 154, 157, 159, 164, 170 Trucaninny 64, 66 Tucker, Margaret 113

Watson, Chris 138–140 White Australia Policy 153, 157, 206 Whitlam, Gough 124, 140 Wolfe, Patrick 198, 203 Woureddy 64

Uluru Statement from the Heart 1, 203, 209 Warmun, WA 37 Waterlow, Nicholas 131, 134

Yagan 205, 209 Yashchenko, Alexander 84 Yuendumu 161

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