Aboriginal art in Sydney

significant exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Sydney

2012-01-23T15:18:00.000-08:00

1984

Koori Art ’84

Artspace, Wollomolloo

With a curatorial essay by Bobbi Sykes Koori art 84 was a ground breaking exhibition that opened many people’s eyes to the aesthetic value of Aboriginal art. The artists in this show did not exclusively paint on behalf of the communities that they lived in and in many cases the artists in this exhibition had been excluded from the commercial gallery system that was selling aboriginal art at the time because their art did not fit the stereotypical expectations of what Aboriginal art should be (according to non Indigenous curators who often had vested interest in commercial galleries).

Participating artists

Euphemia Bostock, Fiona Foley, Fernanda Martins, Arone Raymond Meeks, Avril Quaill, Michael Riley, Jeffrey Samuels, Gordon Syron, and Banduk Marika.

1986 (precursor to Boomalli):

NADOC ’86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers (curated by Ace Bourke) exclusively profiled Indigenous photographers and became the launching pad for a high-art Indigenous photography movement. This exhibition included 60 photographs by Mervyn Bishop, Brenda Croft, Tony Davis, Ellen José, Darren Kemp, Tracey Moffatt, Michael Riley, Christopher Robinson, Terry Shewring, and Ros Sultan. Brenda Croft, Tracey Moffatt, and Michael Riley were three photographers who would go on to be the founders of Boomalli. This was the first contemporary art exhibition of work exclusively by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander photographers, and it was held as part of the week-long NADOC celebrations. The exhibition was initiated by Tracey Moffatt, following an invitation by curator Ace Bourke. It was held at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Clarence Street, Sydney. In some materials, this show is called the Contemporary Aboriginal and Islander Photographers’ Exhibition.

-also in 1986, an exhibition held at the Workshop Arts Centre in Willoughby (Sydney) called Urban Koories: Two Exhibitions of Urban Aboriginal Art brought together Euphemia Bostock, Fiona Foley, Arone Raymond Meeks, and Jeffrey Samuels.

November 1987-May 1992: Boomalli is located at 18 Meagher Street, Chippendale. Chippendale location was chosen for its proximity to Redfern, with its large Indigenous population, so it could provide community-access gallery space. The premises were a converted sewing factory above an Asian wedding outfitters in Chippendale’s industrial area.

1988:

Boomalli was incorporated. Tracey Moffatt left and Sheryl Connors joined. Fiona was picked up by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (age 24) (stayed with Roslyn Oxley until 2005). Boomalli perceived this Bicentennial year as an opportunity to present art, culture, and politics as integrally linked.

-Michael Riley’s film Boomalli: Five Koorie Artists was commissioned by Film Australia and captured the dynamic energy of the cooperative’s early years; it featured Bronwyn Bancroft, Fiona Foley, Arone Raymond Meeks, Tracey Moffatt, and Jeffrey Samuels, and used footage from the launch of Boomalli au-go-go.

-Bronwyn: the film aimed to get a voice not only of the artist, but the contemporary Aboriginal artist. Explores Aboriginal identity and how the artists express this in their artistic practice/works.

-De Facto Apartheid (August-September) presented the recent work of Boomalli members at the Performance Space in Redfern

-Kempsey Koori Artists (18 October-6 November) was held at Boomalli, featuring artists all from the rural town of Kempsey in northern NSW. Initiated by Robert Campbell Jr (Ngaku), including his work as well as that of Milton Budge (Ngaku), Raymond Button, Mary Duroux, David Fernando (Gamilaroi), and Sharon Smith (Gumayngirr-Banjalang).

-ANCAA and Boomalli: Artworks Produced and Managed by Aboriginal People (ANCAA was the Association of Northern and Central Australian Aboriginal Artists, now known as the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists, or more commonly, ANKAA). This show featured Koori-Yolngu dialogue as vital to the development of a strong Aboriginal art movement in the present and into the future, and included the works of Boomalli artists Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Fiona Foley, Pam Johnston, Fernanda Martins, Arone Raymond Meeks, Avril Quaill, Sheryl Parnell, Michael Riley, and Jeffrey Samuels.

-from Bronwyn: this was a really politically-charged opening, by John Newfong

-from Phemie: these two shows—Kempsey and ANCAA and Boomalli—were two very important shows early on. When we were hanging the ANCAA and Boomalli show, we just put paintings up that complemented each other, and it turned out that ANCAA-Boomalli-ANCAA-Boomalli alternated all the way around the room—quite uncanny

1989:

Members of Boomalli include: Shane Bailey, Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Tracey Bostock, Brenda Croft, Fiona Foley, Danielle Gorogo, Fernanda Martins, Raymond Meeks, Sheryl Parnell (Connors), Rochelle Patten, Frances Peters, Avril Quaill, Michael Riley, and Jeffrey Samuels

-Inside Black Australia (January 20-February 12) was a photographic exhibition by 11 Indigenous artists (premiered at Albert Hall in Canberra in May and then) was shown at Boomalli (to coincide with Invasion Day) before commencing a national and international tour. This exhibition was organized by Kevin Gilbert in 1988 and was exhibited at the Tin Sheds (or at Boomalli in Meagher St?). It explored Aboriginal views of Australia and included works by Brenda Croft, Kathy Fisher, Kevin Gilbert, Alana Harris.

-Gomileroi – Moree Mob (February 22-March 12) was an exhibition by 13 artists of Gomileroi country. The talents of 13 people—painters, carvers, dancers, and didgeridoo players—were showcased, including Boomalli member Michael Riley. Pam Johnston did the design and layout of the exhibition catalogue. Together, the Kempsey and Moree shows were very important as they were the first to showcase regional NSW artists.

-Selections 76-89 (May 6-29) was a solo exhibition of Jeffrey Samuels’ work, held at Boomalli to raise funds for Samuels’ trip to Europe.

-40,000 + 4 (May-June) was a photographic show that opened at Bondi Pavilion with works from 4 Boomalli artists.

-A Koori Perspective (June), curated by Boomalli member Avril Quaill, was hosted by Artspace (Surry Hills) to coincide with the mainstream Perspecta show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and redress the imbalance of Perspecta including only 2 Aboriginal artists

-in June, Fernanda Martins and Jeffrey Samuels ran a printmaking workshop to teach Koori artists new skills ran at Boomalli

-Aboriginal Women’s Show (September 21-October 25) was a selection of mixed media by Aboriginal women from all over the country, including established artists such as Euphemia Bostock, Bronwyn Bancroft, Pam Johnston, and Sheryl Parnell, as well as Tracey Bostock, Daneille Gorogo, Leeanne Hunter, and carvings and paintings from the Arnyingini Congress of Northern Australia. This show was curated by Bronwyn Bancroft, and opened by Euphemia Bostock

-also in October, Boomalli hosted the book launch of Aboriginality, a publication of Aboriginal painting and prints

-in November, Boomalli hosted a showing of works from Melbourne Aboriginal artists Ellen Karen Casey, Ellen Jose, Donna Leslie, and Gayle Maddigan.

-Boomalli Breaking Boundaries (December) was a year-end show curated by Sheryl Parnell (Connors).

-Eurobla was a Boomalli exhibition hosted by the Tin Sheds (University of Sydney)—a group exhibition of Boomalli artists in conjunction with the reconstruction of a carved tree from Warren, NSW, which had been severely damaged by a lightning strike.

Early 1990s:

-through Boomalli, Fiona Foley initiated a curator traineeship with the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney). She was a trainee curator from 1991.

-Boomalli faced a series of closures due to severe cutbacks in funding, but resurrected itself with funding from the Australia Council, the NSW Ministry for the Arts, and the Department of Employment, Educaton, and Training.

-in this period, Boomalli grew from a studio-based gallery and local resource centre into an internationally-recognized arts organization. People from a wide range of backgrounds were represented: young artists, artists in custody, gay and lesbian artists, Torres Strait Islander artists, Indigenous artists from overseas, and artists of color.

1990-1996: Brenda Croft was the General Manager at Boomalli

-Bronwyn: note that this was a big change—from a consensus-based group of 10 artists to having a paid staff-member running the place, paid to oversee the operations of the artist-members and the collective. Brenda secured some funding and became the first Manager at Boomalli, the first person to be paid to run the organization, and it created a bit of a conundrum: cooperative vs. professional management overseeing operations

1990:

-On the Line (April 23-May 19) was the first group show of new members at Boomalli, and it inaugurated the exhibition program for 1990. Featured were Tracy Bostock, Deborah Breckenridge, Gavvy Duncan, Janice Gardiner, Joe Hurst, Keva James, Rochelle Patten, and Susan Vaughn

-Lineage Landscape was a Boomalli exhibition showcasing the work of Bronwyn Bancroft and “promising newcomer” Tracey Bostock. Bancroft’s work in this exhibition was a series of collages in homage to her father; photographs of her relatives showed how she had traced her own identity. The works were veiled with a net, a reference to mourning for her father

-a two week exhibition of Central Australian paintings began September 17

-From the Centre to the Sea (November) was an exhibition that featured paintings from a community near Alice Springs and brought to Sydney for the show

1991:

-Ian Abdulla (Ngarrindjeri) & Harry Wedge (Wiradjuri) (October 1991) was an exhibition curated by Fiona Foley, pairing two great, distinctive narrative painters living in rural communities (in SA and NSW, respectively). Abdulla’s work reflected memories of his early, itinerant life in the Riverland and Murray River region of SA

-Kudjeris (meaning “women” in Northern Australia) (November 13-December 4, 1991) was an exhibition held at Boomalli, curated by Fiona Foley, and featuring the work of Destiny Deacon, Lisa Bellear, and Brenda Croft. Deacon’s work “blak lik mi” coined “blak” here in an effort of reclamation and affirmation of identity. Together, the work of these three artists highlighted the diversity of contemporary photographic practice. Hetti Perkins wrote the text for the poster/catalogue.

-these two exhibitions, curated by Fiona Foley in 1991, were positively formative in launching a high profile for Boomalli. Fiona also curated the end of year show in 1991.

-the Aboriginal Women’s Exhibition was a collaborative effort in 1991, between Boomalli and the Art Gallery of NSW as part of a Sydney festival called “Dissonance, Feminism and the Arts”

1992-1995: Boomalli was under the shared leadership of Brenda Croft and Hetti Perkins. Hetti Perkins was exhibitions coordinator and curator for these three years (while Brenda Croft was Manager), managing an extensive exhibition and events calendar, with in-house, touring, regional, national, and international projects operating simultaneously

May 1992-June 1993: Boomalli maintained an administrative office in the Performance Space (Redfern) and leased occasional gallery space there, but had no permanent home again until mid-1993.

1992:

-In January, looks like Boomalli is going to close. At the end of 1991, the Aboriginal Arts Unit of the Australia Council refused Boomalli’s application for funding; said they needed a 5-year plan, including an upgrade of premises, computers, administrative systems, put on better shows in a better space. Boomalli appealed OzCo’s decision, won, and were offered half of the funding they applied for. Boomalli then decided to close. An article ran in the Sydney Morning Herald on January 7, 1992, and Boomalli got many offers of help. The Aboriginal Arts Unit, led by Lin Onus, called a meeting with Boomalli and sorted things out. Lin Onus goes on the record saying ATSIC should play a role in funding Boomalli.

-Hetti Perkins becomes curator at Boomalli in 1992, invited by Brenda Croft. Brenda has said that Hetti arrived with a vision, and took Boomalli from “smell-of-an-oily-rag community arts centre to putting it on the map with international touring exhibitions”; she changed the whole look of the place, from designing letterhead and business cards to finding the group a really good venue (the Abercrombie Street, Chippendale premises; was a much nicer place, not a warehouse like Meagher Street)

-artist r e a became a member of Boomalli after talking with Hetti Perkins and Brenda Croft about her new series “Look Who’s Calling the Kettle Black.” r e a credits Boomalli for launching her career: “my career wouldn’t be at the level it is if I didn’t connect with Boomalli because the shows in the early days were not about categorizing anyone. They were all about opening up all of the artists as they stood within their practice to a national movement as well as an international movement...” (Half Light catalogue, p107).

-Recent Works by Euphemia and Tracey Bostock (August 5-30) was an exhibition of paintings, textiles, and sculpture, presented by Boomalli Aboriginal Artists’ Cooperative (listed in this catalogue as being located at 199 Cleveland Street, Redfern), and held at Craftspace (88 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney). This exhibition sought to applaud the achievement of a decade of exhibiting by Euphemia and recognize the rise of Tracey’s work in the art world; collectively, their works emphasize matrilineality and the significance of female relationships to their lives and the art world more broadly.

June 1993-1997: Boomalli premises were at 27 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale (just off Broadway), from June 1993 to late 1997 (or early 1998?)

1993-1994: International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a high point in Boomalli’s operations. The events calendar was full to capacity for the whole two years, including: 1) relocation to new premises that included a gallery, artists’ studio, slide and publications library, and archive; 2) the securing of funds for four full-time staff; 3) the organization of 14 in-house exhibitions, 9 exhibitions at other venues, 2 international exhibitions, and several international residencies; 4) the hosting of international exchanges; 5) the production of several publications; and 6) the hosting of forums and events both at Boomalli’s premises and elsewhere.

1993:

-membership really began to change in 1993, as this was the year Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, and Fiona Foley all resigned (Tracey had gone by 1988; Avril left for Canberra in 1992). Jeffrey Samuels and Michael Riley remained involved. Elaine Russell, Harry Wedge joined Boomalli.

-Wiyana/Perisferia (Periphery) (January 7-31) was an exhibition with a catalogue, held by Boomalli Aboriginal Artists’ Cooperative at The Performance Space in Sydney. Curated by Hetti Perkins and Liliana E. Correa, this exhibition consisted of 9 installations by Aboriginal and Latin American artists articulating the ongoing discontent of colonized peoples. It was a satellite event of the 1992-1993 9^th Biennale of Sydney. Featured Boomalli artists were: Bronwyn Bancroft, Brenda Croft, Fiona Foley, Judy Watson, and Harry Wedge.

-Boomalli hosted H.J. Wedge’s major solo exhibition Wiradjuri Spirit Man that instigated a monograph on the artist’s work (exhibition was first at Tandanya in 1992, and then went to Boomalli in 1993). The monograph was published in 1996 by Boomalli and Australia Books with the support of the Australia Council. Wiradjuri Spirit Man was the first exhibition to launch the new Boomalli premises at Abercrombie Street, opening June 18, 1993.

-Boomalli’s exhibitions coordinator, Hetti Perkins, is now also working one day a week as curator of Aboriginal Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Perkins was also the Aboriginal Curator for the 1993 Australian Perspecta (originally intended to be a biennial overview of what is new in Australian art, Perspecta soon became a local knee-jerk response to the internationally-oriented Biennale of Sydney. In 1997, Australian Perspecta reinvents itself as a city-wide festival of contemporary art)

-Sayin’ something: Aboriginal Art in New South Wales (August 5-September 10) celebrated 10 years of land rights in New South Wales, and included works of Shirley Amos, Euphemia Bostock, Tracey Bostock, Treahna Hamm, r e a, Elaine Russell, and H.J. Wedge. The exhibition was co-sponsored by Boomalli and the NSW Aboriginal Land Council (Sydney).

-Boomalli artists Brenda Croft, Fiona Foley, Joe Hurst, Judy Watson, and H.J. Wedge participate in the 25^th Budapest Autumn Festival in September (curated by guest curator Emil Novak). The artists travelled with the exhibition Australian Dreamtime and spent 3 weeks in Hungary.

-Postcards from the Bay: Aboriginal Artists from Long Bay (September 30-October 30) was an exhibition held at Boomalli—the first in what was to become an annual event organized by Boomalli in association with a different gaol each year. This effort was made in response to community interested and requests from artists themselves—who are isolated from opportunities available to those not in custody—and will testify to the endurance of Indigenous creative spirit through the art of the prisoners of an undeclared war.

-Announced November 1, 1993: Sydney is set to get an Aboriginal Performing Arts Centre. The NSW government allocated $1.5million towards it and was to provide the site—at Walsh Bay, bond store no. 3 (until this time, the secondary site to the Art Gallery of NSW of the Sydney Biennale, in Windmill Street)—expecting the tenants to match that $1.5million for a $3million centre to include exhibition and performance space for contemporary Aboriginal arts, as well as house conference and seminar spaces, workshops, studios, a coffee shop, and informational facilities for local and international visitors. The tenants were looking to ATSIC, the Department of Tourism, and other sources to raise the balance of the money. Five organizations and their representatives—Rob Bryant (director of Aboriginal Arts Management Association); Michael McMahon, Kevin Cook, and Jack Beetson (Blackbooks in Glebe); Rachel Perkins, Adam Perkins, and Michael Riley (Blackfella Films); and Jody Chester (acting coordinator of Boomalli); and Bangarra—hope to take possession of the new space in January 1995. Boomalli and Bangarra been lobbying government since 1991 for shared space.

-Been Gone Is (opened November 20) is an exhibition at Boomalli including the work of 5 urban Aboriginal artists (one of whom was H.J. Wedge) linked by their commitment to painting as an important form of political expression.

-December 3-23: work in all media by more than 50 Aboriginal artists from all regions of Australia was showing at Boomalli (Chippendale) and the Performance Space (Redfern)

-sometime in 1993, the Aratjara exhibition was mounted by German curator Bernard Luthi—in Dusseldorf and London (at the Hayward Gallery)

1994-1995: Daphne Wallace, then-curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, commissioned and purchased several major works from Boomalli in the lead up to the Art Gallery’s Yiribana Gallery, including works by r e a, Elaine Russell, and Brenda Croft.

1994:

-in January, it is reported in the press that the future of a proposed Aboriginal Cultural Centre is unclear because of a wrangle of the lease between Aboriginal groups and the NSW state government. The Cultural Centre Executive Committee representing the five groups supposed to move there is now claiming that the government has reneged on its promise of a 99-year lease, only offering a 7-year lease. Secretary of the Committee, Brenda Croft, said a 7-year lease would not be viable because it offers no security for the groups involved, most of whom depend on ATSIC for funding, and ATSIC won’t look at funding anything to refurbish unless it’s a minimum 30-year lease. Spokeswoman for the NSW Minister for the Arts, Mr Collins, says negotiations are continuing (between the Maritime Services Board, the entity responsible for Walsh Bay; the Ministry for the Arts; and the Government’s Property Services Group), and is hopeful a longer lease will be offered.

-Brenda Croft opened Strange Fruit at the Performance Space (Sydney); the exhibition focused on the ‘icon’ of the urban black woman

-Narratives (June 30-July 30) was curated by Hetti Perkins; designed to showcase and draw out the links between Aboriginal women artists of diverse backgrounds: Kerry Giles (Ngarrindjerri), Pantjiti Mary McLean (WA), Peta Lonsdale (Kamileroi), and Elaine Russell (Kamileroi).

-Jumna Millatunth (August 5-20) was an Aboriginal Youth Art Exhibition held at Boomalli

-Boomalli put out an internationally-touring exhibition, True Colours: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Artists Raise the Flag (including 200 tea towels by Brook Andrew, and works by H.J. Wedge), coordinated by Brenda Croft and Hetti Perkins. This exhibition was a collaboration between Boomalli and INIVA (the Institute for New International Visual Art) and Black curator, writer, academic Eddie Chambers, and it toured venues in Britain and Australia 1994-1996. In Britain, funding was from the Greater London Arts Council and the British Council in Australia—enabling Hetti Perkins and r e a to present a series of workshops and lectures in 1994. Further funding from the Australia Council enabled the Australian tour 1995-1996. In May 1995, True Colours showed at Boomalli and at the Performance Space Gallery—it was a deliberately confrontational exhibition designed to explode white myths of Aboriginal pasts and passivity.

-Blakness: Blak City Culture! (October 8-November 6) was curated by Clare Williamson and Hetti Perkins and was held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne, and Boomalli in Sydney. The catalogue won Lin Tobias of La Bella Design 1^st place in Group B Catalogues of the NSW Design Awards. The exhibition featured works by Brook Andrew, Joanne Currie, Destiny Deacon, Peter Noble, Clinton Peterson, and r e a. Using Destiny Deacon’s reclaiming of the meaning and spelling of the word “black,” Blak City Culture is the assertion and exploration of the possibilities of identity, of Blakness. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists who participated in this exhibition elegantly affirmed an interventionist, pragmatic approach to politically-informed aesthetic production.

-Isabell Coe, Robyn Caughlan, David Fernando, and James Simon exhibited their work at Boomalli in October.

-Urban Arty-Facts (December 2-21) was Boomalli’s annual members’ exhibition

-also in 1994: Cheyenne/Arapaho artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds had a two-month residency/cultural exchange with Boomalli. Sixteen Songs/Issues of Personal Assessment and Indigenous Renewal was a show that was held at Boomalli and Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (in Adelaide), Sacred Circle Gallery of American Indian Art (in Seattle), and at a venue in Texas in 1995. The exhibition featured work by Edgar, as well as Boomalli and other Indigenous Australia artists.

Late 1990s: this was a time period that brought many changeovers in staff at Boomalli, as members left to undertake new projects, and the Cooperative underwent several relocations.

1995:

-May 30: Tullagulla Limited was incorporated as a public company limited by guarantee. The name was chosen (suggested originally by Col James) because it was the original Eora name for Dawes Point, which was in the region of Millers Point. In 1993, the NSW Minister for the Arts and State Treasurer Peter Collins had announced, in the 1993-94 budget, the allocation of Bond Store 3 at Millers Point for an Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Sydney. In addition, $1.5 million was committed for the refit and refurbishment of the premises. Lengthy negotiations ensued between the consortium of organizations (originally Bangarra, Blackbooks, Blackfella Films, Bula Bula Arts, AAMA [Aboriginal Arts Management Association, now the National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association, NIMAA], and Boomalli; soon Niki Nali replaced Bula Bula Arts, AAMA withdrew, and Gadigal Information Services was invited to replace them), NSW State Government, ATSIC, and the then-NSW Office of Aboriginal Affairs (which was later the Department of Aboriginal Affairs). It became increasingly clear that Bond Store 3 would not be suitable for the project, given the diverse requirements of the member organizations. A change of government occurred in March 1995, and Tullagulla wrote to the new Premier Bob Carr, requesting that he consider allocating part of Pier 4/5 in Walsh Bay, and the whole of the Earth Exchange premises at Dawes Point, towards the project. Bangarra and Niki Nali separated amicably from Tullagulla in order to negotiate directly with the State Government regarding Pier 4/5, while the other orgs continued negotiations with ATSIC and the State Government over the necessary refit of the Earth Exchange. As of April 1996, ATSIC was to commit $2 million to the refit of the building, and Tullagulla hoped that the lease would be a minimum of 30 years. (Member organizations, as of April 1996: Boomalli, Blackbooks, Blackfella Films, and Gadigal Information Services).

-June 13: Annual General Meeting elected the following Board of Directors: Judy Chester (chair), r e a (treasurer), Elaine Russell (Secretary), and Terri Janke, Gerard Scifo, Brook Andrew, and Rosalie Graham, members. Terri Janke stood down later in the year due to her commitments with the National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association (NIAAA). New artist members: Barrina South, Peter Noble, Leonie Dennis, Ron Griffin, Shane Griffiths, James Simon, and community members Terri Janke, Kerry Reid-Gilbert, and Lee Madden.

-October 10-11: the NSW state budget announced the establishment of an Aboriginal Cultural Centre for NSW, to house Sydney’s major Aboriginal arts and media organizations, and be a major public access point for Indigenous arts and culture. The facility would include a theatrette for Indigenous films and education programs; a public gallery space; artists’ studios; a radio station; publication outlet; and information centre. This is the first mention in the press of “Tullagulla,” the company formed by Blackfella Films, Black Books, Boomalli, Bangarra, and Gadigal Information Services. Tullagulla will manage this new centre, which will be based at the former Earth Exchange Museum building in George Street in the Rocks. Tullagulla hopes to get support from ATSIC and the NSW Public Works staff.

-this budget was the first state budget of Premier Bob Carr

-centre was due to cost $2.4 million (compare this to the $3 million mentioned for a centre in November 1993), and to be built on 2 sites: at the former Earth Exchange in the Rocks (housing Boomalli, Blackbooks, Blackfella Films, and Gadigal Information Services); and at Pier 4/5 in Wash Bay (housing Bangarra Dance Theatre and Nikinali Sounds).

-another $1.5 million was due to come from ATSIC in 1996-97

-the “Deadlys” began at Boomalli in Redfern—originally to recognize achievement in music, but by 2002, the celebration was extended to include excellence in sport, film, theatre, and health. The Deadlys were televised for the first time in 2003, their 9^th year.

-On a Mission (November) was a Boomalli group exhibition that commissioned five artists to create work on their mission experience—either directly or indirectly. Artists included Michael Riley, Elaine Russell, Leonie Dennis, H.J. Wedge, Julie Dowling, and Julie Gough.

- Re:actions (December 1-20) was the annual members’ exhibition, in which participants grappled with nuclear testing in the Pacific. Artists included r e a, Brook Andrew, H.J. Wedge, Peter Noble, Judy Watson, Brenda Croft, and emerging artists Gordon Hookey and Kevin May.

-Curator Hetti Perkins resigned in December 1995, and Jody Chester acted as Assistant Curator

1996:

-in January, Boomalli provided 8 flagpoles for the Sydney Festival. Designed by member artists, these were to decorate the Opera House’s forecourt; they dealt with the site on which they stood—Bennelong Point—and the tribe whose land it was. Called the Boomalli “Flag Project” or “Banner Project,” it travelled down the Opera House walkways and dealt with the complex and contested set of usages of the Bennelong Point site. Works were by Brenda Croft, Michael Riley, Harold Thomas, and r e a.

-Boomalli membership, as of April 1996: Judy Chester (chair); r e a (treasurer); Elaine Russell (secretary); Rosalie Graham and Gerard Scifo (directors); Brook Andrew (alternate director). Staff: Brenda Croft (general manager); Jody Chester (administrator/acting assistant curator); Rosalie Graham (casual bookkeeper).

-Scenes from the West (April 1996) launched the exhibition calendar at Boomalli, and included the works of Pantjiti Mary McLean and Mangkaja Artists.

-Chip on the Shoulder was a Boomalli group exhibition that included the work of Elaine Russell

-August 15: the future of Boomalli is in doubt following an 85% cut to its annual budget by ATSIC. General Manager Brenda Croft said publicly: Boomalli would have to find $176,000 for its operating costs or face closure. Bangarra and Gadigal Information Services were also facing closure at this point

-Tess McLennan was curator at Boomalli for at least a short while in 1996.

1997:

-fluent (June-September) was Australia’s representative exhibition at the 1997 Venice Biennale, curated by Hetti Perkins and Brenda Croft (and Victoria Lynne at the Art Gallery of New South Wales). The show included paintings by Emily Kngwarreye and Judy Watson, and eel traps woven by Yvonne Koolmatrie. This was the first time Aboriginal women artists would represent Australia at a Venice Biennale, and it positioned Aboriginal work at the forefront of contemporary art

-Boomalli was one of 20 gallery spaces hosting the 1997 Perspecta (August-September)

-installation by r e a at Boomalli entitled Eye/I’mma Blak Piece (September-October), a complex and quirky work consisting of a series of square mirrors organized in a grid on the floor of 2 partitioned rooms. In the middle of each mirror, the artist has placed a glass bottle filled with liquids to symbolize urine, blood, etc. Part of the Festival of the Dreaming, this installation was a reflection by r e a on being an Aboriginal woman. r e a considers oppression, tracing its symptoms in her family history. Her self-portrait, armed with a camera, confronts the viewer: the artist deflects our gaze, making us look at ourselves and question our assumptions.

-Black on Track (opened November 28) was Boomalli’s 10^th anniversary show. Jody Chester is the current administrator.

1998-2000: Bronwyn Bancroft was the General Manager at Boomalli. Boomalli was located in Newtown?

Late 1990s-early 2000s: Boomalli shifted attention to the growing Aboriginal community within Sydney’s western suburbs. First, took temporary space on Parramatta Road (Annandale), and then moved to their own building in Leichhardt—responding to the movement of the Aboriginal community westwards, and catering to the large Indigenous population in Sydney’s west.

1998:

-the Boomalli premises moved to 191 Parramatta Road in Annandale in mid-1998—a temporary relocation until permanent premises could be secured

-Hetti Perkins went on to be the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, and Brenda Croft went on to become the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (in 1999).

-Black Roots (February) was Boomalli’s Mardi Gras exhibition, including the work of Destiny Deacon, Clinton Nain, Deborah Breckenridge, and Jeffrey Samuels.

-Takeback! An Exhibition of Art from the Wik and Kugu Nations (September 2-October 4) was a Boomalli exhibition recognizing the continuity of Wik arts and culture, 20 years after the 1978 Queensland Government’s “Takeover” of Aurukun, in Cape York.

-Black Humour (September 9-26) was a Canberra Contemporary Art Space exhibition that included the works of Bianca Beetson, Brenda Palma, Gerard ‘Bize’ Scifo, Brook Andrew, Julie Gough, Laurie Nilsen, Campfire Group, Darryl (Milika) Pfitzner, Sue Elliott, Gordon Hookey, and H.J. Wedge.

-Women’s Work, Land + Spirit (September 30-October 31) featured the work of Indigenous women from eight countries, from Western Australia to Western Samoa, showcasing the ways in which women’s craft practices sustain and enrich their societies culturally and economically.

-Danceclan (November 10-December 5) was a coming together of Aboriginal art and cultural organizations for an end of year show—held at Bangarra Dance Theatre

-in November, the NSW state government announces its final round of arts funding before going to the polls in March 1999. $14.2 million allocated; within this budget, Boomalli had its annual grant almost doubled to $47,796

1999:

-by March 19: Boomalli is at new premises in Parramatta Road. Press reports that the relocation of Boomalli has seen a change of staff and a drop in its once-impressive profile, but the space is alive and well, fostering and promoting another generation of urban Aboriginal artists.

-Michael Riley’s photography and films opened the new space—Fly blown and Empire (March 19-April 17)

-Leonie Dennis had a Boomalli show, The Art of Storytelling sometime in 1999, reflecting on her own and her husband’s families and visualizing what life was like growing up around Coonamble and Walgett.

-Bolwara: to open the eyes (September 25-December 5) is a Museum of Sydney exhibition featuring a range of boldly designed, brightly coloured images by artists associated with Boomalli: Bronwyn Bancroft, Gordon Hookey, r e a, Shirley Amos, Jeffrey Samuels, Leonie Dennis, Euphemia Bostock, Tracey Bostock, Kym Hudson, Brook Andrew, and Gordon Syron.

2000-2002: Jonathan Jones (Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri) was Curator at Boomalli. During his tenure, he worked on an international exchange with First Nations in Canada.

2000:

-Makeup of Boomalli is as follows:

Euphemia Bostock (director and practicing artist)

Bronwyn Bancroft (director and practicing artist)

Michael Riley (chair and practicing artist)

Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Foley, Fernanda Martens, Jeffrey Samuels, Arone Raymond Meeks (practicing artists)

Brenda Croft (Curator, AGWA and practicing artist)

Avril Quaill (Curator, NGA)

-Members’ exhibition is held in January

-February 14: SMH reports that the plan to move Boomalli into the former Earth Exchange Museum in the Rocks has been abandoned (and instead, this building is set to become the Arts Exchange, housing the Sydney Film Festival headquarters, Symphony Australia, and the Sydney Office of the Australian Ballet).

-Comfort Zone (opens May 24) is an exhibition that considers new media art from within Aboriginal Australia

-New Beginnings, New Ideas (July 11-August 5) was an exhibition that brought together lesser-known and well-known Indigenous artists from around Sydney, covering a huge range of media, including Harry Wedge’s “Cat Painting,” Julie Freeman’s acrylic canvases, and Shirley Amos’s dot paintings

-Mum Shirl: the Sacred Trust of Memory (November 22-December 22) was an exhibition coordinated by Bronwyn Bancroft, in which 68 artists contributed work to pay tribute to Mum Shirl—this was the first time that Boomalli exhibited non-Aboriginal artists in its 13-year existence. There was a sister exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum that ran concurrently (until February 28, 2001).

2001-2003: Lynne Syme was the Manager at Boomalli (and secretary of Tullagulla)

2001:

-Centenary vs. Eternity (February) exhibition held at Boomalli (in Annandale); funded by the Centenary of Federation Committee, this exhibition was designed to give Indigenous people a voice for their opinions, and included a collaboration between Valerie Law and Kevin Butler.

-True! (May-June 2) was an exhibition of photography, video, and digital art held at Boomalli (Parramatta Road, Annandale) to launch and headline the three-week long Message Sticks festival (after it was at Boomalli, it was at the Sydney Opera House June 5-July 4). This exhibition was intended to be a response to white historical documentation of Aboriginal culture—as black photographers gave their own views on history, land, and people. Artists included Peter McKenzie, Brenda Palma, Merv Bishop, Michael Riley, Jenny Fraser, Tracey Bostock, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Bronwyn Bancroft, and Joe Hurst. The curator of this show was Jonathan Jones (then aged 22!)

-also in May 2001: an exhibition curated by Boomalli held at TheWharf2 Gallery of the Sydney Theatre Company, Pier 4, meant to showcase Aboriginal life through large-scale works by Bronwyn Bancroft, Chris Christopherson, Kevin Gilbert, Adam Hill, Gordon Hookey, Joe Hurst, Michael Riley, and Jeffrey Samuels.

-Beyond Federation to a Treaty: Readings (July 10, 2001): an event including Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Norm Newlin, Terri Janke, and Anita Heiss.

-Back to back—black to black (September 9-October 6, 2001): an exhibition held at Boomalli celebrating many years of friendship, motherhood, sisterhood, and artistic endeavour of Bronwyn Bancroft and Euphemia Bostock. Friends for 16 years, they first exhibited together at the Aboriginal Medical Service fashion parade in Sydney in 1987 (and then later at the AU Printemps Department Store parade in Paris). Both have Bundjalung heritage, from northern NSW.

-Phemie: I got into the fashion side of things because I was called in for the community; I never wanted to be a designer. Didn’t have any ambition for that sort of thing.

-only after they travelled to Paris together did they become close; now they speak almost every day; Phemie says of Bronwyn: she’s like another daughter to me, and my daughters feel like she’s a sister to them.

-Reflecting Mission Life (October 31-November 17, 2001): an exhibition held at Boomalli, including works by Elaine Russell and Leonie Dennis. During the same time period, Outer Space and works on paper by H.J. Wedge were showing at Boomalli

-November 16, 2001: Brenda Croft is announced as the new Senior Curator of Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Australia (a position vacated by veteran Wally Caruana), the first Indigenous person to hold this job

-Pacific Wave Triptych Exhibition: In Ya Face (November 29-December 22): an exhibition held at Boomalli featuring Gordon Hookey and Gordon Syron painting a social commentary on important Aboriginal historical and political events that have shaped Australia since 1788. Including Hookey’s paintings and sculptural works, and Syron’s contemporary pieces, as well as works by Christine Christopherson

-Boomalli enters an agreement, in late 2001, with Leichhardt restaurant Blue Potato to show Boomalli works there—put up a few works and had sales.

-also in late 2001, Adam Hill held a solo show at Boomalli

2002-2009: Boomalli is located at 55-59 Flood Street in Leichhardt. The building is a former real estate auction centre, which Boomalli bought for $1.5million (with ATSIC funds) in/around January 2002.

2002:

-Blanket[ed] (January 2002): a 6-person exhibition co-curated by Catherine Mattes (an Indigenous woman from Manitoba, Canada) and Jonathan Jones, as part of an international exchange between Winnpieg’s Urban Shaman Gallery and Sydney’s Boomalli. Image of the blanket and notions of blanketing as a metaphor for the hopes, losses, suffering, political plight, and aspirations shared by Canadian and Australian Aboriginal communities. This exhibition included works by Adam Hill, Elaine Russell, and was shown in Winnipeg.

-A Material Thing (March 1-13): an exhibition held at Boomalli featuring fabric designs, including wearable clothing, handpainted silks, patchwork quilts, and tea towels.

-in March 2002, Boomalli was poised to move to Tullagulla (at the old Earth Exchange Building in the Rocks), when a local philanthropist anonymously granted an interest-free loan to Boomalli to enable the purchase of the perpetual lease to the old Trocadero building in King Street, Newtown. This was to be an ideal situation, close to Redfern and the inner-city gallery circuit.

-Talkin’ About Country (April 2002): Kerry Reed-Gilbert held her first solo exhibition at Boomalli

-May 13-June 2: Boomalli artists Adam Hill and Esme Timbery exhibited their work in the Opera House Studio foyer as part of Message Sticks, the contemporary Indigenous Arts Festival.

-Bringing it Home Nure Style (late September-October 1): an exhibition displaying the new works by Boomalli members (including work by Elaine Russell)

-Kweer Art (October 23-November 30): an exhibition held at Boomalli—the first one mentioned in the press as being held at the new Leichhardt location—a collection of works revealing the diversity of Indigenous Australian artists (including work by Jeffrey Samuels)

-Stories from Australia Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Peoples opened December 7, 2002, in Guangzhou, China (including the work of Boomalli artists Jeffrey Samuels and Joe Hurst).

2003:

-Michael Riley’s exhibition cloud was part of the Sydney festival in January 2003—displayed in banner format at Circular Quay.

-June 2003: Boomalli announces plans for $1 million fit-out of its Leichhardt premises, to include Boomalli, as well as Indigenous Screen Australia and Gadigal Information Services. The centre is provisionally to be called Tullagulla—designed to be a cultural hub with on-air suites, offices, and facilities to launch and screen Indigenous films. It is later announced that Tullagulla is short of the $1 million necessary to execute the plan because the New South Wales Government reneged on a promise made in response to recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. In its official response to the Royal Commission back in 1996, the NSW state government promised to allow Tullagulla to use a former museum in the Rocks (see notes for 1996), and this never eventuated.

-July 30-August 3: Boomalli participated in the Art on Paper Fair at Fox Studios, Moore Park

-Nicole Renee Phillips’ show Reflections was held sometime in 2003. The artist uses multiple mediums to express who she is, and what her two years as an art student has meant to her

-November 19: a “Lightning Strikes” auction is held at Boomalli, selling paintings, prints, and photography from more than 30 artists.

-December 18: Boomalli launches a 25% off stockroom sale, including works by Bronwyn Bancroft, Merv Bishop, Michael Riley, and Harry Wedge. At this time (late 2003), Boomalli curator is Tracey Duncan.

2004:

-Boomalli Members are: Joyce Abraham, Shirley Amos, Bronwyn Bancroft, Debra Beale, Mervyn Bishop, Euphemia Bostock, Cecil Bowden, Sheryl Connors, Danny Eastwood, Jamie Eastwood, Peter Hinton, Joe Hurst, Gary Jones, Neville McKenzie, Nicole Phillips, Carmel Richardson, Michael Riley, Jeffrey Samuels, Brenda Saunders, Dorsey Smith, Jake Soewardie, Izelda Some, Khi-Lee Thorpe, Daphne Wallace, Greg Weatherby, Zona Wilkinson, Lindsay Williams. Staff: Melissa Abraham and Tracey Duncan.

-Urban Myth Members’ Exhibition (January 23-February 10) held at Boomalli. Dot paintings sat alongside figurative and landscape paintings, photography, and lino prints. Artists included Bronwyn Bancroft, Lewis Burns (works include “Surrounded by Society: Part One,” which has a kangaroo perusing the paintings; and “Platypus Mating,” submerges the gallery setting in water).

-February: curator Tracey Duncan (of Sydney Community College) offered workshops at Boomalli on contemporary and traditional Aboriginal art, the history of Boomalli, and the work of co-op members. There were four two-hour sessions. The first one ran February 10^th at the Boomalli premises in Leichhardt.

-July: the Museum of Sydney held an Open Day during NAIDOC week, including displays of Indigenous art by Boomalli members.

-September: Boomalli founder Michael Riley passed away.

-November: the Balmain film festival included a series of Indigenous films and music, hosted by Boomalli at the Balmain Town Hall

-December 9: Boomalli’s annual members’ show opened.

-Colour Power (December 2004-February 2005) was an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square in Melbourne that included prominent works by Boomalli artists.

April 2005-March 2009: Matt Poll was Artistic Director at Boomalli.

2005:

-Boomalli Board of Directors:

Jeffrey Samuels (Chair)

Euphemia Bostock (Co-Chair)

Bronwyn Bancroft (Secretary)

Sheryl Connors, Mervyn Bishop, Lesley Yasso, Geoff Scott (directors)

-founder Fiona Foley is an adjunct professor at Sydney University

-May/June: Boomalli received a $15,000 grant to upgrade exhibition space and improve artworks storage area

-Exhibition calendar opens this year with Gordon Syron’s New and Old Works in July

-July 8: Boomalli collaborated with the Leichhardt Council to host a community barbeque and Aboriginal art exhibition for NAIDOC week.

-August: Dorsey Smith’s first solo exhibition

-September 15: Matt Poll, Judith Ryan, Ray Thomas, and Kamahi Djordon-King are quoted in an SBS piece saying that Australia needs a national institution showcasing Indigenous art (like the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris); Government counters, saying there are no plans to do so at the moment.

-September 22: Like many other Indigenous organizations, Boomalli is suffering in the wake of the abolition of ATSIC. Last week, Federal Arts Minister Rod Kemp announced that Boomalli would receive $100,000 in 2005-06; Artistic Director Matt Poll went on the record saying that this amount would only cover the gallery’s administrative and daily costs. Matt went on to say: we used to have four full-time staff-members, but now with these funding limitations, we can only support one.

-October: Geoffrey Ferguson solo exhibition—showcasing a body of works in the seascape tradition, but with “subtle hints of Aboriginal cultural history” below the surface

-November: Members’ exhibition

2006:

-Boomalli Members:

Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Brenda Croft, Fiona Foley, Fernanda Martins, Arone Raymone Meeks, Tracey Moffatt, Avril Quaill, Michael Riley, Jeffrey Samuels (founding members);

Joyce Abraham, Melissa Abraham, Shirley Amos, Debra Beale, Mervyn Bishop, Lewis Burns, Luke Close, Bev Coe, Sheryl Connors, Leonie Dennis, Adam Hill, Joe Hurst, Jingalu, Martin DeLauney, Brenda Palma, Rita Pearce, Nicole Phillips, r e a, Nyree Reynolds, Carmel Richardson, Elaine Russell, Brenda Saunders, Les Saxby, Jake Soewardie, Barrina South, Izelda Sore, Gordon Syron, Paul Taylor, Vee Thornbury, Brad Webb, Harry Wedge (artist members)

-The Pink, the Black, and the Beautiful (February 9-March 4) was an exhibition held at Boomalli as part of Sydney’s Mardi Gras celebrations, and included video, photography, paintings, and etchings (such as Arone Raymond Meeks’ “Saltwater” series). Mardi Gras chair Marcus Bourget opened the exhibition, and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, and actor/director Noel Tovey were guest speakers. This exhibition considered ideas of the representation of sexuality as well as the experience of being queer, black, and proud. Participants included Luke Close, Destiny Deacon, Karla Dickens, Arone Raymond Meeks, Eric Renshaw, Jeffrey Samuels, John South, Noel Tovey, and invited non-Indigenous artist Elaine Pelot Syron.

-March: works from Boomalli were part of the Ultimo Pyrmont UPTown Festival (which kicked off March 25) 25^th anniversary celebration art exhibition.

-Leichhardt Mining Sacred Ground (March 31-April 14) was an exhibition hosted by Boomalli to raise money for the Mineral Policy Institute (an organization that helps Aboriginal people lobby government for their interests)

-July 3-4: stories, crafts, and films by Boomalli are at the Balmain and Leichhardt public libraries in celebration of NAIDOC week.

-Big Ones Little Ones (July 11-August 1) is a Boomalli exhibition featuring young artists from remote towns in mainland Australia, the Torres Strait, and Palm Island, the show aimed to connect communities. Children from Australia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and New Zealand exhibited their work alongside emerging and established Aboriginal artists including Rosie Barkus, Joe Hurst, Queenie Kenny, Esther Quinlan, James Simon, Veronica Turner, and Daphne Wallace. Also East Timor President Xanana Gusma exhibited a limited edition print of one of his original paintings. After August 1, the exhibition moved to Parliament House in Sydney for display on the Reconciliation Wall for 2 months. Young participants Wesley Simon and Alessio Petrelli (from St. Lucy’s School in Wahroonga) were selected to have their work displayed at the exhibition that travelled to Parliament House.

-Sights Unseen (July 14-October 16), a major retrospective of Michael Riley’s work, opens at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Boomalli lent works for this important exhibition, curated by Brenda Croft, then Senior Curator for Indigenous Art at NGA.

-Slimey Things & Darth Vegas (July) is an exhibition that opened July 27 at Boomalli (charged $10 entry fee).

-Other 2006 exhibitions included: Mobochre—Artists from Dubbo; Christine Christopherson—Blue Print; Euraba Dreaming; Indigenous Landscape Design (in which artists and local councils discussed opportunities for Aboriginal artists to be more closely involved); Arton Water; and Sacred Ground.

-in November 2006, the board is comprised of: Jeffrey Samuels, Adam Hill, Sheryl Connors, Gary Jones; alternate members: Shirley Amos, Barina South

July 2007-March 2009: Darrell Sibosado was the Program Manager at Boomalli.

2007:

-Sights Unseen travelled to the Monash Gallery of Art in Wheelers Hill, Victoria (January 7-February 25)

-February 8: reported in the press that Boomalli received $39,500 from a state of NSW government Cultural Grants Program as part of the state government’s commitment of $29 million in 2007 to support the arts.

-March 1: the work of Indigenous lesbian artists was celebrated at Boomalli, including the works of Destiny Deacon, Jenny Fraser, Mary Munro, Shirley Amos, and Karla Dickens.

-March 8: Boomalli held a dance party to celebrate International Women’s Day—including performances by Deborah Cheetham and Lou Bennett with DJ Gemma.

-March 11: Boonalli hosted an artists’ forum to discuss HIV in female Indigenous communities, held by the NSW AIDS Council

-July: Boomalli held a major Founding Members’ Exhibition, celebrating 20 years of Boomalli; the show then travelled to the Art Gallery of NSW, where “Boomalli: 20 Years On” celeberated the Cooperative’s 20^th anniversary. The show brought together artworks from each of the 10 founding members of Boomalli and provided a reunion opportunity for the remaining 9 members.

-September: a Kamilaroi exhibition surveying artists from the Moree region of NSW

-October: “Storytellers” was a 3-day workshop and seminar (coordinated by Darrell Sibosado) encouraging visual artists and filmmakers to share anecdotes of their working with narrative. Guest speakers included Rachel Perkins, Wayne Blair, Romaine Moreton, and Adrian Wills, with a guest performance by Casey Donovan.

-also in October: the National Indigenous Art Triennial Culture Warriors opened at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, featuring three Boomalli artists

-November-Christmas: Debra Beale (an Aboriginal artist who works in Woolloomooloo but was involved with Boomalli) had two designs in the rotation of projections on the Sydney Town Hall as part of the Christmas Night Light Projections—a free slide show for residents and visitors (as the iconic landmark is bathed in stunning images evoking a truly Australian Christmas). The projections included: eucalyptus leaves, wattle, gumnuts and stars; Sydney summer at the beach; a giant Christmas tree with decorations like the southern cross; a huge Christmas lolly shop; a map of Sydney; children’s illustrations of Australian animals; cockatoos flying over sandy desert. Debra’s contributions were “Gamilaroi” and “Eora.”

Also in 2007:

-3 in 10 was a group exhibition held at Boomalli that included Karla Dickens

-Re-Inscriptions was a collaboration between Boomalli and the Asian Australian Arts Centre that worked to illuminate the two communities’ similarities in challenging dominant orthodoxies within the arts establishment

2008:

Boomalli Board: Jake Soewardie (Chair); George Femia (acting Treasurer); and Sheryl Connors, Chris Richardson, Adam Hill, Djon Mundine (Directors).

-Hand in Hand (February 8-March 4) was an exhibition held at Boomalli, co-curated by Jenny Fraser and Shigeyuki Kihara, to celebrate Mardi Gras 2008. Kihara is an Auckland artist of Japanese and Samoan parentage, and she performed at Boomalli during the exhibition. The exhibition was designed to offer dialogue and aesthetic expression in breaking down the invisibility and marginalization faced by Indigenous gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and Sistagirl, Takatapui, and Fa’fafine people.

-July: Boomalli hosted a group show by Aboriginal and Pacific Islander students from Sydney Secondary College’s Balmain campus

-late July-August 8: Boomalli Chair of the Board Jake Soewardie opened an exhibition at the Ku-ring-gai Art Centre in Roseville. This was an exhibition by urban Aboriginal artists showing non-traditional paintings

-Culture Warriors showed at the Art Gallery of South Australia July 25-August 21, and at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in September

-Adam Hill resigned from the Board of Boomalli in September

-Lines in the Sand: Botany Bay Stories from 1770 was an exhibition curated by Ace Bourke and held at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, including works by Boomalli artists Brenda Croft, Adam Hill, Tracey Moffatt, Michael Riley, Elaine Russell, and H. J. Wedge

-Blooming Arts (November 22-29) was an exhibition held at Boomalli, featuring paintings, sculptures, mosaics, watercolours, and photography created by people with disabilities.

2009:

-Boomalli member Les Saxby passed away on February 8, age 37.

-Still Black (February-March) was the annual Mardi Gras exhibition, curated by Darrell Sibosado, and presented by Boomalli in partnership with ACON’s (AIDS Council of NSW) Aboriginal Project. This exhibition was a visual statement by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists of various sexual textures, exploring the concepts of categorizing, profiling, and identifying—about accepting the various aspects of personhood while refusing to be kept in one little box.

-Quattro (March 18-April 4) was a collaboration between Boomalli artist Joe Hurst and 3 Italian artists (Armando Favrin, Gino Nalini, and Francesco Petrolo)—all of whom know each other and have long exchanged ideas about art and social interventions

Aboriginal art in Sydney

Boomalli – it’s a NSW thing

2010-08-05T23:17:00.001-07:00

Boomalli Art Gallery has a history similar to that of a political party – its members and supporters have changed many times and while the message is still the same the means of communicating has changed numerous times and needs to change again. Boomalli was a foundational moment in the history of Aboriginal self determination that saw a group of artists became a gallery, then become a company, and then become nothing – a victim of its successes and a champion of its failures.

Several people deserve some credit but Fiona Foley should be duly credited with being the driving force of the creation of the Boomalli art gallery as a permanent exhibition space for Sydney based Aboriginal artists. Foley, along with Fernanda Martin, Michael Riley, Avril Quaill, Jeffrey Samuels and Aarone (Raymond) Meeks had all studied tertiary level visual arts and had a very important message to deliver to the Sydney commercial art galleries.

“Fuck off”

The Boomalli founding members were artists who had sensed a passive aggression from sectors of the commercial art industry that did not believe that Aboriginal people who did not live in remote communities could tell them anything about Aboriginal culture that they did not already know. In 1987 the experiences of Aboriginal people who had lived in capital cities (in many cases for several generations) were thought to be trivial compared to the exotic, noble savage, dreamtime expectations of academics and international visitors to Australia.

In its first year the artist membership increased to 10 with Bronwyn Bancroft, Brenda Croft, Tracey Moffatt and Euphemia Bostock adding a new dimension to the original concept of the organisation which moved from an exhibition space for painting, printmaking and sculpture towards curatorial, community engaged artistic practices that represented issues that were at the Heart of the Aboriginal social and political struggles of the times. Black deaths in custody, the stolen generations, equality in access to housing, healthcare and education are in many instances issues still being raised today. In the exhibition program from 1988 – 1998 these themes loom large in the artworks and exhibitions that took place in the galleries base in Redfern/Chippendale.

That an art gallery could also act as a political instrument by community members was quite radical in that not many commercial galleries would last more than four years if they were closely aligned with the political parties of the day. The clash between Aboriginal political representation and the need for government funding to operate a community organisation is at the heart of the current malaise that the organisation exists in where the choice between two evils is no choice at all.

The representation of Aboriginal culture is the primary issue that has defined the success and failures of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative. Aboriginality is as diverse as any Aboriginal person says it is. The problems occur when non Aboriginal people speak on behalf of Aboriginal people that they do not know and especially when they profit financially from the intellectual property of an Aboriginal person or community.

Boomalli can’t be everything to everybody, the divide between community arts and fine arts is necessarily large and transforms into something different as soon as it is defined. For an Aboriginal community centre to exist in Sydney it needs to be able to represent the experiences of Aboriginal people in their own words or images. It is against the spirit of the foundational concept of Boomalli for non-Aboriginal non- participants to define its history.

The community activism curatorial agenda marked a new direction for the gallery that was to have devastating consequences for the organisation when its success showed a need for increased government support and funding.

The financial operations of the gallery in its first inception were small – it was a $5000 grant by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts board in 1987 that allowed for the rental of the first premises in Marr st and it was expected that all members would help out with the installing of exhibitions and volunteer time to work at the reception and assist with sales etc.

Increased professionalism required the incorporation of the gallery as a company and the employment of a full time curator Hetti Perkins allowed the organisation to be as accountable as any other commercial gallery in Sydney. Many commercial galleries were jealous of the legitimacy of an aboriginal owned and operated art gallery as the most direct way to make a sale is for buyers to trust that the artist they want to support is receiving.

By 2002 when Boomalli moved into the Leichhardt premiss that it now occupies it sometimes had up to 4 full time staff members and the delivery of service to members and audiences was at its peak. Unfortunately the main problem that is the cause of its current economic downturn is that has never owned a premises from which it could operate from. Why a certain other Sydney based Aboriginal organisation would deny Boomalli the right to own the Leichhardt premises is hard to comprehend. In a strange parallel to the Aboriginal land rights cause that so many of its exhibitions have championed, the native title of incorporation does nothing but allow for a welfare model of patronage to be the main way for the organisation to secure operational funding from state and federal arts funding bodies.

Many of the people involved in Boomalli over the years have differing points of view and Divisions among some of the founding members have grown over the past 23 years and are no different to differences of opinion that exist in any artistic community in Australia. Some of Boomalli’s harshest critics are members of the Aboriginal community who feel that the gallery is being white anted by non Aboriginal agendas.

During 2005 – 2009 proposed changes to the structure of the board to allow non Aboriginal people to act on the board were opposed by members and directors who thought that Aboriginal owned and operated means just that - Aboriginal owned and operated

Being Aboriginal owned and operated is the legitimacy that allows Aboriginal people who are unsure about the Aboriginal art industry to look to trusted and respected Aboriginal community members for information about what exactly is Aboriginal art.

The need for community support of the organisation has caused numerous issues as to the quality of the exhibition program and the ever present lure of escaping the welfare cycle that many artists are forced to live in will inevitably ensure people who are not artists will make decisions about what is good art.

With the plethora of “arts” events that are associated with NAIDOC week across the state growing each year it is interesting to have a look at the history of the Boomalli gallery as in many ways it was ahead of its time in bringing new and modern ideas of Aboriginal cultural engagement that were not paternalistic or sanitised versions of what non Aboriginal people wanted Aboriginal people to be.

Boomalli is more than an art gallery, it is a concept – why else would shameless self promoters highlight their involvement with Boomalli in their biographies even when they haven’t set foot in the gallery in ages.

In the 1980’s Aboriginal artists were still thought to be bark painters living in remote communities, the reality for many Aboriginal people was far from this and was not so easily defined. The legacies of insensitive and cruel government intervention and control of the lives of Aboriginal people is a very real reality for many generations of Aboriginal people and although 1967 was officially the year that Aboriginal people were “allowed” to be recognised by the government of the day as Human beings change did not occur automatically or even at all for many Aboriginal people.

The Tent embassy founded in 1972 was a result of nothing changing for Aboriginal people for 5 years after the referendum and was one of the first occasions where Aboriginal people had used the media coverage of their political ideologies to their advantage.

Here's hoping that 5 years after the apology to the stolen generation a new political agendas will occupy our next generation of artists and we can once and for all be done with the history wars of the conservative Howard government era.

Aboriginal art did not evolve as a niche market within modernist art history as some would like to believe. Artists such as Margaret Preston was very aware of the aesthetic significance of Aboriginal cultural artefacts and the most commercially successful art of this era was the bush scene landscape (In both representational and abstract art) essentially the most popular Australian modernist artworks were paintings of the lands where the stereotype of the Aborigine were supposed to exist, but not to be seen.

Several commercial art galleries had started to make a very lucrative income stream through matching “authentic” aboriginal art to well educated collectors. In the 1950’s when Albert Namatjira’s watercolours first came to prominence in the consciousness of Australia, the political landscape of Aboriginal Australia was well under-way and ready for the increase of Aboriginal involvement in Australian cultural industries.

It is no surprise that that when the world’s attention is focused on Australia as it was in 1988 (bicentenary) and 2000 (Olympics) that the genuineness of Aboriginal culture is supported by all sides of government yet domestically no political leader goes near an Aboriginal issue without a clearly defined exit strategy.

These two events created a gold rush of Aboriginal art and crafts that saw some Aboriginal artists rewarded but mostly fuelled resentment among aboriginal community members as to why people were so into this art stuff when for the most part of their lives they or their family had been deliberately excluded from the art and cultural industries in Australia.

The idea of Aboriginality being a unique selling point has long been in development, in the 19^th century several museums in Europe and America had extensive collections of artefacts and even human body parts that were used as instructional tools on the evolution of mankind. Looking at the permanent collections of several prominent museums it is fascinating to wonder what it was they were actually looking for in collecting these artefacts – with 20/20 hindsight it is easy to see the racism that permeated scientific and academic thinking of the times yet the people who documented and recorded Aboriginal culture have left legacies that have been reworked by Aboriginal people today into political tools to argue for the increased support for legal and social agendas. In some cases to reclaim culture that was believed to be lost and to reproduce artistic styles or dance movements and ceremonial protocols in ways that were unimagined before 1980

Sydney and Melbourne have long been separated from the myth of the Australian outback, and the idea of Aboriginal people living in cities was hard for many to understand. To be “Aboriginal” was to be outside of the progressive real world that Australia wanted to embody. Aboriginal people were depicted as fringe dwellers prior to 1967 they were forced to live in missions and reserves and were subject to constant harassment from police and the welfare authorities.

Anthropological and ethnographic disciplines had very different ideas to commercial art galleries as to what was being represented in the art of Aboriginal people and were surprised that audiences were paying significant sums of money for the visual beauty of an artwork – not for the scientific information that it provided.

The ethnographic context of Aboriginal art puts rock art in the same category as prehistoric art that can be seen in Europe, Africa and America, however the cultures that created the international versions of prehistoric art had long been displaced and very few cultures lived in such close proximity to the evidence of their millennial occupation of many places that Australian Aboriginal people did.

A gold rush mentality was still attached to many get rich quick schemes of the 1980’s and the art market was no different. It’s frightening to imagine how much money has been made by non Indigenous people selling Aboriginal inspired souvenirs and trinkets without any regard for the poverty of the people that they are misrepresenting.

The Australian Aboriginal souvenir trade is no different to a photographer taking photos of homeless people and selling them for large sums of money. It is not ethical to represent other people or other cultures in ways that humiliate or objectify the subjects as anything other than who they really are.

Ironically it is this souvenir market that was first used by missionaries and later by Aboriginal such as Bill Onus to create a financial income for Aboriginal people to produce products

Artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Gordon Bennett and Brook Andrew confound these stereotypes of what is an Aboriginal artist through making art that does not look Aboriginal. Their artworks are equal to any other artist practicing and pose strong arguments for judging an artwork on its artistic merits rather than on the ethnicity of the artist.

This example does not occur at the community art level though – when a local council wants to celebrate Aboriginal culture the event needs to look Aboriginal – with traditional dancer’s, elders providing thoughtful insights and the fair skinned Aboriginal people either standing in the background or covering their fairness with white clay and red headbands

As artist Joe Hurst has aptly put it

“The Hello dance and the Goodbye dance are essentially the same – just wave your hands at the audience and walk in a slow unusual manner – there is nothing spiritual in these ‘ceremonial’ performances”

The days of sympathy for the poverty that Aboriginal communities exist in need to come to an end and serious questions need to be asked about the divide between Aboriginal Australia and mainstream Australia that still exist today. To purchase a piece of Aboriginal art as an act of atonement for the cruelty of previous generations supports a welfare mentality that locks Aboriginal people into cycles of poverty that prevent them from taking for granted the freedoms that all Australians are supposed to share.

Australians like to think that they have a better understanding of what really happened to Aboriginal people in NSW but this is rarely discussed in ways that are publicly accountable. Boomalli is one of the few community organisations to have the power and legitimacy to make these changes – it is crucial that the organisation adapt to an openly accountable administration system. This does not mean that anyone can walk in off the street and demand change but there needs to be processes in place to allow greater engagement between the Aboriginal community and the audiences who genuinely want to contribute something to the fabric of true cultural engagement in contemporary Australia.

If Aboriginal art is now entering a ‘post political’ era as some have commented then the political must change from the personal to the community oriented. Once again it is remote art centres that are educating the Cities, not the other way around as many would like to believe.

Interventionism

2010-08-05T22:45:00.000-07:00

   Dianne Jones "Shearing the rams" 2002

My proposal is that Aboriginal art has itself been an intervention into Australian art history.  The reasons for this intervention are both historical and political however the main focus of much writing about this process have been too focused on the economic outcomes of this process without acknowledging the profound cultural shift that this has entailed and how the intervention of Aboriginal culture into Australian art history.

Between 1980 and 2000 federal and state Australian governments departments have proactively provided funding for the development of community art centers in regional in Australia primarily in areas where large populations of Aboriginal people live. These centers were created on the basis of creating economic outcomes for communities rather than economic outcomes for individuals.

Many Aboriginal people who do not live in remote art centers have challenged the presumptions of this process and the label of Urban Aboriginal art has sometimes been accepted and rejected by Aboriginal people.

If the personal is political what does this mean when the art that is being produced in remote art centres is government funded?

The positive experiences of remote regionally based artists having their own visual language to record and document local knowledge and their own first person account of their own history in a symbolic language that is protocol based has been one of the few positive examples to emerge from decades of government interventions into Aboriginal communities.

In an international art historical context Interventionism can be both a visual aesthetic and curatorial strategy that manipulates pre-existing structures of representation and presentation of art. Over the past three decades post modern and post colonial aspects of many Australian museums and galleries exhibition programs have strategically positioned Aboriginal art as separate from Australian art.

Interventionism is most often a political, economic or medical term that applies to the external influence of a situation to produce better outcomes and sadly it is no surprise that Aboriginal people today are still subjected to an intervention by the Australian federal government in order to improve international perceptions of obvious Aboriginal disadvantage.

The northern territory intervention that has been in place since 2007 and has been openly supported by both sides of government has not changed anything in the day to day lives of the Aboriginal people that it is meant to change.

Numbers of non Aboriginal Australian farmers living in remote areas are comparatively the same size to the Aboriginal populations living in remote areas yet they are still treated very differently to Aboriginal people living in remote communities and contrary to popular opinion receive much less financial support from the government.

Welfare quarantining, accusations of squandering taxpayer money on alcohol, drugs and pornography used to enact the intervention on Aboriginal people belie a deeper racism that still exists in the Australian community in regards to the government’s responsibility to provide basic services for Aboriginal people in remote areas and perceptions of corruption leveled against Aboriginal organisations and communities.

In 2006 the Australian wheat board gave US$222 million dollars to Sadam Hussein’s government during a time when Australia was at war with Iraq in order to break trade sanctions that were affecting Australian farmers. Australian Farmers were not blamed or punished for these massive failures of government to protect their interests so why are Aboriginal people in remote communities being subjected to draconian penalties that have been resisted when proposed to be applied to non Aboriginal families living in similar social circumstances in other areas of Australia?

The apology to the stolen generations was simply correcting the mistakes of the previous government – it was not a new initiative of the 2007 Labor party and the same governments decision to carry on with the suspension of the racial discrimination act and to continue the previous governments “intervention” shows a fundamental lack of originality in their approach to Indigenous affairs.

Intervention can be seen most clearly in installation art where the artist as aware of the social and political construct of the gallery or museum space their work is being exhibited in. The pro active inclusion of contemporary art produced by Aboriginal people acted as a counter point and an institutional critique to the not insignificant Australian art historical cannon.

It has only been within the last 30 years that Aboriginal art has been taken out of a sterile ethnographic museum context and recognized as an aesthetic and cultural expression as unique as the landscape that it often depicts. Australian Aboriginal arts international recognition and reception provides the first of hopefully many new genres of categorizing Australian art history.

The interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art especially in relation to exhibitions, theatrical productions and new historical narratives can create a platform for Aboriginal people with limited exposure to educational and training opportunities in the arts to contribute to the cultural legitimacy of government funded arts opportunities for all Australians.

It could be said the development of Aboriginal art has itself been an intervention into Australian art history through its overwhelming commercial success and positive critical reception among academic and federal arts funding sources.

Many of the social initiatives such as the Aboriginal legal and medical services were interventionist strategies by Aboriginal community members that had seen to be effective from international black power movement in the United States and South Africa.

There is a tendency to separate the history of Australia from the history of Aboriginal people but the role that Aboriginal people played in the shaping of all aspects of this nation is crucial to understanding many of the disputes over land rights through historical accounts and records that exist today.

This is an exhibition of New South Wales based Aboriginal artists who are directly intervening or whose work itself is an intervention into expectations of what Aboriginal people can say about the Northern Territory intervention. NSW Aboriginal people are silenced from speaking about issues affecting Aboriginal people in the Remote Australia through respect for Aboriginal protocols in relation to the representation of cultural information from particular areas.

This exhibition presents artworks that are directly responsive to the fact that intervention affects all Australians and that if an intervention is at all necessary it is into the short sighted and paternalistic approach that is always applied to issues regarding Aboriginal people who choose to live in remote communities.

new transnational histories for 21st century Australians

2010-07-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

“one of the many tragedies of race relations in Australia is our failure to accord any space to the stories of people of colour who were not Aboriginal, especially those from the African diaspora. How much richer and more complex our national definition would be if we could encompass the multi-ethnic diversity of our colonial past.”

1500 - 1876

Macassen fishermen (Indonesia - Northern Territory)

Makassan traders began trading with the indigenous people of the Northern Territory for trepang from at least the 18th century onwards, and very likely for 300 years prior to that. Evidence for this can be seen in rock art depicting fisherman and their ships in sacred art sites of the coastal Arnhem land region. Makassar is also a major fishing center in Sulawesi. One of its major industries is the trepang (sea cucumber) industry. Trepang fishing brought the Makassan people into contact with the Yolŋu people of Northern Australia.

C. C. MacKnight in his 1976 work entitled Voyage to Marege: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia has shown that they began frequenting the north of Australia some time around 1700 in search of trepang (sea-slug, sea cucumber, Beche-de-mer) an edible Holothurian. They left their waters during the North-west Monsoon in December or January for what is now Arnhem Land, Marege or Marega and to the Kimberley region or Kayu Djawa. They returned home with the South-east Trades in April. A fleet of between 24 and 26 Macassan prahus was seen in 1803 by the French explorers under Nicolas Baudin on the Holothuria Banks in the Timor Sea. In February 1803, Matthew Flinders in the Investigator met six prahus with 20-25 men each on board and was told that there were 60 prahus then on the north Australian coast. They were fishing for trepang and appeared to have only a small compass as a navigation aid. In June 1818 Macassan trepang fishing was noted by Phillip Parker King in the vicinity of Port Essington in the Arafura Sea. In 1864 R.J. Sholl, then resident magistrate for the European settlement at Camden Sound (near Augustus Island in the Kimberley region) observed seven ‘Macassan’ prahus with around 300 men on board. He believed that they made kidnapping raids and ranged as far south as Roebuck Bay (later Broome) where ‘quite a fleet’ was seen around 1866. Sholl believed that they did not venture south into other areas such as Nickol Bay (where the European pearling industry commenced around 1865) due to the absence of trepang in those waters. The Macassan voyages appear to have ceased sometime in the late nineteenth century and their place was taken by other sailors operating from elsewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago.

The Macleay Museum art collection has several examples of bark paintings that reference this knowledge

1606

(Portugal - Cape York)

Louis Vaez de Torres and his ships San Pedro and Los Tres Reyes that sailed through Torres Strait

1606

(Dutch - Cape York)

In early 1606 Janszoon encountered and then charted the shores of Australia's Cape York Peninsula. The ship made landfall at the Pennefather River in the Gulf of Carpentaria. This was the first authenticated landing on Australian soil and for the first time all the inhabited continents of the world were known to the European science of geography. Janszoon is thus credited with the first authenticated European discovery of Australia. The ship sailed back to Bantam.

1771

(English - East coast Australia)

Captain James Cook encounters the east coast of Australia

January 26 1788

(English - East Coast Australia)

Through brute force and sheer will power the English colonisation of Australia displaced and transformed the Aboriginal categories of social structure, language and territoriality. The Australian colonization was the result of tried and tested techniques that had been implemented by imperial representatives in the America, Canada, India, and several African Nations.

Between 1788 and 1850 the English sent over 162,000 convicts to Australia in 806 ships. Interestingly African Americans were among the members of these first settlers to Australia – some being sent from the Americas to England for siding with the british in the

Non English people who were part of the first convict arrivals in Australia

West India Caribbean colonies of the United Kingdom

Born in the West Indies, John Caesar fled to England to escape plantation slavery. Ironically, he soon found himself transported to Australia on the first fleet where he once more faced a life of slavery. A huge man, the small rations of the colony compelled him to steal in order to sustain himself. David Collins, the colony's Judge-Advocate, wrote in July 1789: " This man was always reputed the hardest working convict in the colony; his frame was muscular and well calculated for hard labour; but in his intellects he did not very widely differ from a brute; his appetite was ravenous, for he would in any one day devour the full rations for two days. To gratify this appetite he was compelled to steal from others, and all his thefts were directed to that purpose." (Collins). On 29 April 1789, Caesar were tried for theft. A fortnight later Caesar, described as "an incorrigibly stubborn black," bolted with some provisions, an iron pot, and a soldier's musket. Garden robberies became frequent. "Caesar stole a musket ... from Abraham Hand, a marine, and took to the bush. However, any intention he had of living off the land was soon abandoned because of the scarcity of game. Instead, he began prowling around the outskirts of the settlement with a loaded musket, stealing what food he could find. On May 26 he narrowly escaped capture after he had helped himself to the rations of a gang who were making bricks at Brickfield Hill, and on the night of June 6 he was caught by a convict named Wm. Saltmarsh while attempting to steal some food from the house of the colony's assistant commissary for stores, Zachariah Clark."

Records show that there were around 12 African American people in the first fleet – in other cases African Americans were treated very differently to Aboriginal people and worked in distinguished positions.

January 29 1788

France - East Coast of Australia

La Perouse was named after the French navigator Jean François de Galaup de Lapérouse [1] (1741-88), who landed on the northern shore of Botany Bay west of Bare Island in January 1788 only days after the first fleet of convicts arrived in Australia . King Louis XVI of France had commissioned Lapérouse to explore the Pacific (L’expédition de Lapérouse, 1785-1788, réplique française au voyage de Cook [2]). In April 1770 Cooks expedition had sailed onto the east coast of Australia whilst exploring the south Pacific searching for Terra Australis or ‘Land of the South’. Upon King Louis XVI's orders, Lapérouse departed Brest, France, in command of L’Astrolabe and La Boussole on 1 August 1785 on a scientific voyage of the Pacific Inspired by the voyages of Cook. La Perouse in Sydney's south is named after the leader of this French expedition.

1851 - 1871

China - New South Wales/Victoria

In 1852 alone, 370,000 immigrants arrived in Australia and the economy of the nation boomed. The 'rush' was well and truly on. Victoria contributed more than one third of the world's gold output in the 1850s and in just two years the State's population had grown from 77,000 to 540,000! The number of new arrivals to Australia was greater than the number of convicts who had landed here in the previous seventy years. The total population trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871.

1860 – 1906

Numerous South Pacific Islands - Queensland/Northern NSW

Pacific Island labourers

Beginning in the 1860s, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders were brought to Australia as low paid labourers. By the early 1890s, 46,000 labourers had arrived in Queensland, and up to 62,000 labourers arrived in all. Many of these people were forcibly removed from their homes, in a process called "blackbirding", by which Islanders were either kidnapped or deceived into travelling to Australia. They were brought to fuel the growing need for cheap labour in the sugar industry, since white labour was scarce and expensive. The majority of labourers were employed under indentured labour arrangements, whereby they received either no pay or extremely small amounts of pay. The Act prohibited any Pacific Islanders from entering Australia after 31 March 1904, and required all those entering before then to have a license. During the year 1902, the maximum number of licences that could be issued was limited to three-quarters of the number of Pacific Islanders who left Australia in 1901. During 1903, this license quota lowered even further, to half of the total departures in 1902. Any person who brought a Pacific Islander into the country contrary to the Act could be fined GBP 100. Any Pacific Islander found in Australia after 31 December 1906 could be deported immediately by order of the Minister for External Affairs, and any Islander found in Australia before that date, who had not been employed under an indentured labour agreement at any time in the preceding month, could be deported immediately. It was an offence to employ a Pacific Islander in any other way than an indentured labour agreement, punishable by a fine of GBP 100. All such agreements were cancelled on December 31 1906
wiki

1875

America - Australia

Civil rights act in the United States - international
Chevert expedition North East Australia, South Pacific, Torres Straits, Papua New Guinea
Port Essington Bark paintings presented to the Linnean society of NSW

1879

Torres Strait annexed by Queensland

The Torres Strait Islanders possess a heritage and cultural history distinct from Aboriginal traditions. The eastern Torres Strait Islanders in particular are related to the Papuan peoples of New Guinea, and speak a Papuan language.[12] Accordingly, they are not generally included under the designation "Aboriginal Australians." This has been another factor in the promotion of the more inclusive term "Indigenous Australians". Six percent of Indigenous Australians identify themselves fully as Torres Strait Islanders. A further 4% of Indigenous Australians identify themselves as having both Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal heritage.[13]
The Torres Strait Islands comprise over 100 islands[14] which were annexed by Queensland in 1879.[14] Many Indigenous organisations incorporate the phrase "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander" to highlight the distinctiveness and importance of Torres Strait Islanders in Australia's Indigenous population.

1901

Federation of Australia
Implementation of the White Australia policy in Australia until 1975
Implementation of the Pacific Island labourers act in Australia until 1906

At this time more Aboriginal people had learned to speak English than English had learned Aboriginal languages. There are many instances of settlers who had communication abilities to converse with Aboriginal people but this was more often used to displace other Aboriginal people than

1907

African American boxer and hero of the African American community Jack Johnston visits Melbourne and Sydney meets with members of The Aboriginal community Fred Maynard (syd) Trevor Nichols (mel) who go on to found

1914

international influences on Aboriginal self determination

Marcus Garvey founds the universal Negro improvement association formed to improve the living conditions of people from the African Diaspora especially 2nd and 3rd generation people descendants of slaves

1937

The Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), an all-Aboriginal body, was formed in New South Wales with Jack Patten as president and Bill Ferguson as secretary.

1938

Day of Mourning protest on Australia Day organised by the APA

1957

International influences

Anti segregation movement in the United States alerts the world to the overturning of any government legislation that promotes apartheid

1961 – International influences

Freedom rides in the United States protest segregation in the American South

1965

Students for Action on Aborigines including first Aboriginal University graduate Charles Perkins undertake freedom rides across regional NSW

1966

Gurindji strike Aboriginal stockman protest unequal wages in the pastoral industry

1967

Referendum for the equal rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia

1968

Black Power in inner city Sydney movement initiates the Aboriginal legal service (1969) and Aboriginal medical service (1971) in Australia

1972

Tent embassy marks the Aboriginal self determinations’ government model and direct political action by Aboriginal people

1975

End of the white Australia policy implementation

1977

A non-statutory NSW Aboriginal Land Council was established in 1977 as a specialist Aboriginal lobby on land rights. It was formed when over 200 Aboriginal community representatives and individuals met for three days at the Black Theatre in Redfern to discuss land rights.

1988

Bicentenary of Australia re-enacts the colonisation of Australia and the establishment of the British Penal colony in Australia in 1788.

1992

Mabo decision handed down by the High court of Australia revokes the legal fiction of Terra Nullius in Australia and recognises Edie Mabo’s ownership of land. Eddie Mabo was from Mer or Murray Island in the Torres Strait, which the famous Mabo decision of 1992 involved.[14]

2008

Apology to the Stolen Generations by the Australian prime minister

General time periods for reference material

General overview of time frames

Prior to 1914

Ethnographic and Anthropological history of subjecting Indigenous peoples to scientific scrutiny and the use of science in creating racial hierarchies between races of people.

1914 – 1945

Aboriginal peoples involvement in both world wars

1950’s

Maralinga nuclear testing in Aboriginal communities, fears of the communist influences in Aboriginal political consciousness, the art of Albert Namatjira.

1960's

Political consciousness and confidence of Aboriginal people informed by international community’s anti apartheid and anti segregationist movements.

1980’s

Strengthening of the Aboriginal self determinationist movement grows as an opposition to the bicentenary galvanises Aboriginal Australians, creative control of artistic and media representations of Aboriginal people, Boomalli, Bangarra, Black Books, Indigenous screen Australia etc

2000’s

Dissolution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander commission ends government appointed representative body on behalf of Aboriginal affairs,marks the beginning of the history wars in Australia.

2008

Apology to the stolen generations, the Northern Territory intervention begins

Terminologies and definitions

2010-07-21T21:28:00.000-07:00

The fluid nature of Aboriginal languages means that there is no unified language shared across all of Australia - there are many instances where words from different language groups have similar meanings. This list is meant as a basic guide to the terms used throughout these essays

Aboriginal refers to individuals born on the mainland of Australia with direct family lineage to known Aboriginal language groups and nations.

Torres Strait Islander refers to individuals born on the Islands of the 14 islands of the Torres Strait stretching from Thursday Island to the northern most.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent refers to individuals with direct family lineage to known Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language groups and nations not living in the geographic locations of their family heritage.

Indigenous refers to the legal definition of Individuals ethnic origins used in the international context of first nation’s peoples.

Koori (or Koorie) in New South Wales and Victoria (Victorian Aborigines)

Ngunnawal in the Australian Capital Territory and surrounding areas of New South Wales

Murri in Queensland

Murrdi Southwest and Central Queensland

Noongar southern Western Australia

Yamatji in central Western Australia

Wangai in the Western Australian Goldfields

Nunga in southern South Australia

Anangu in northern South Australia, and neighbouring parts of Western Australia and Northern Territory

Yapa in western central Northern Territory

Yolngu in eastern Arnhem Land (NT)

Tiwi on Tiwi Islands off Arnhem Land.

Anindilyakwa on Groote Eylandt off Arnhem Land

Palawah (or Pallawah) in Tasmania.[6]

Australian South Sea Islander refers to descendents of the South Sea Island nations who were brought to Australia between 1840 and 1901 and worked as indentured labourers in Queensland and northern NSW.

notes on Emily paintings at NGV international

2010-07-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

“We paint to show that we own this land – and that this land owns us”

Statement by Manduway Yunipingu in 1963 when handing over the bark petitions to the government of Australia.

1 – From Museum to Art Gallery

Apart from the work of Tommy McRea in the 1860’s and William Barak in the 1880’s the oldest artworks held in any museum in the world are the barks paintings in from Port Essington that were collected in 1876 and were presented to the Linnean society of NSW. The Linnean society is a natural history society that documented and recorded the flora and fauna of Australia and by default collected many artefacts as well as historical information and in some cases even the body parts of Aboriginal people to be discussed and debated among its members. These artworks were collected and discussed as scientific specimens that depicted animals such as dugong and crocodiles and their spiritual and cultural meaning that their makers held for them.

These bark paintings were taken from a wet season wind shelter used by Aboriginal people in the port Essington area. 8 of these paintings are held in the permanent collection of the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney. The other two are held by the British Museum along with thousands of other Aboriginal cultural artefacts. The British Museum are overly protective of their collections – we only need to look at the issue of the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles that has dominated debates around Museum collections and their repatriation to communities that has been a major issue for museums world wide since the 1990’s.

Originally aboriginal painting were held by museums and studied by anthropologists and ethnographers. Anthropology and ethnography are scientific disciplines that study cultures and people as separate and distinct cultural groupings and are part of the larger social Darwinism that held sway in the 19th and early 20th century

The groundwork for the Aboriginal art industry had been set by anthropologists in the 20 the century and their work was based on simular work undertaken in Indigenous societies in North and South America as well as in the South Pacific and the Torres Strait during numerous scientific expeditions undertaken by Museums and private citizens to every corner of the globe. By the 1960’s nearly every corner of the world had been studied catalogued and photographed to feed an insatiable desire by western nations to understand the exotic and other cultures that were so different to their own Christian westernised capitalistic world. The discovery of resources such as gold, diamonds or oil was well under way by the early 19th century and the scientists that discovered these materials used spurious laws such as terra nullius to transform the landscapers that many Indigenous cultures had lived and evolved in over millennia.

In between 1940 and 1974 a comprehensive list of the Aboriginal tribal groupings and language boundaries of Aboriginal Australia was compiled by the non indigenous anthropologist Norman Tindale who was working at the South Australian museum at the time. Many Local Aboriginal land councils in Australia were formed in 1984 with the use of this information and many native title cases depend on the information that was collected at this time.

“Tindale's reaction was to dedicate his research efforts for the next two decades towards proving that Aboriginal groups did relate territorially to distinct regions that could be successfully mapped. His tribal map of Australia, first published in 1940 and revised in 1974 together with his encyclopaedia of Aboriginal tribal groups, was radical in its fundamental implication that Australia was not terra nullius - decades before the Mabo judgement made it a national issue.”

http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/page/default.asp?site=2

In opposition to Tindale who from a modern perspective can be seen as progressive in relation to his understanding of Aboriginal culture is one of Australia’s most famous (and notorius) anthropologists A P Elkin. Elkin was a senior administrator of the Aborigines protection board and trained a generation of Anthropologists in a very conservative manner that did not oppose the white Australia policy and was heavily involved in the controlling of the movements of Aboriginal peoples and their families.

Elkins involvement as president of the Association for the Protection of Native Races oversaw the implementation of the policies that created the stolen generations. It is important to note the division in the aboriginal community that existed at this time as during 1930 – 1967 Aboriginal people in Australia were exclusively rural. Aboriginal people could not own property and were not free to move between towns in New South Wales without coming under the attention of the Natives protection act. This was enforced by any member of the community not just the police and Aboriginal people could find themselves in lots of trouble for daring to take for granted the rights that were allocated to white Australians.

In 1957 one of Australia most celebrated artists Albert Namatjira was denied the opportunity to own a house in Alice Springs, it didn’t matter that he could easily afford it or that he had had been celebrated by art enthusiast in Sydney and Melbourne or even that he had officially met Queen Elizabeth the 2nd on her 1957 visit. This was the discrimination that Aboriginal people speak about prior to 1967,

Art galleries and museums in Australia were bastions of European culture up until the 1980s and many sections of the commercial art industry were resistant to the art of Indigenous peoples being taken out of the sterile museum collections and displayed in art galleries as examples of a language and culture that told histories that that many colonial cultures were very keen to hide. The transition from souvenir art and to fine art painting with acrylic on canvas was simultaneously embraced by several aboriginal communities in the lead up to the 1988 bicentenary – a year that saw the Australian art movement maturing into a self determination’s approach to the participating in the Australian art industry.

Many commercial galleries in Sydney at this time did not recognise Aboriginal people who had grown up in urban environments as having any cultural authority and preferred to deal with artists who had been sanctioned through the scientific fields of anthropology and ethnography.

2. There are two definitions that have determined Aboriginal art - traditional and contemporary

Traditional art is largely created in the community art centre model – where an artist is given the role on behalf of their family. There are protocols that have been in place for thousands of years as to how information is shared in a community. Traditional painting is based on the role of drawing in the sand and symbolic mark making that was painted onto bodies or inside of bark shelters.

Artists from the traditional model include Michael Nelson Jakkammara , Clifford possum, rover Thomas and regions including the Yolngu (Northern Arnhem land) wetern desert, kimberly region. Traditional art is largely based on the oral transition of local knowledge’s, creation stories and important information that is used by communities to create symbolism mark making on bodies or on the ground that can sometimes provide information as to water holes or secret sacred places

That we know as tradition painting is painting that is informed on song cycles and secret sacred information that has been passed down by male members of a tribe. In recent years there have been examples of Daughters being trusted with this information when there is no male to pass this information to.

The self determination of Aboriginal artists is an important new development. In today’s milieu the representation and scientific explanation of Indigenous cultures without any legitimacy or valid authorization is highly frowned upon and disrespects the living memory of the Indigenous cultures that are meant to be being acknowledged –the most recent case being the bewilderment expressed by Aboriginal Australians in relation to Russian ice skaters wearing “Indigenous” costumes as part of their Olympic ice skating routine that were based on Aboriginal skin tones and a languid attempt at representing ceremonial body painting.

Australia in the period between 1950 and 1975 produced numerous films, theatrical performances and educational of “exotic” cultural experiences for international and local audiences. The Australian ballet company’s production of “Corroboree” in which the principal dancer playing the character of a young Aboriginal boy was an American Woman was seriously researched by Beth dean who was advised by Sydney Universities A. P. Elkin to visit the communities of Ernabella and Yuendumu.

3 urban Aboriginal Art

Urban Aboriginal art refers to art that is made by artists from Brisbane, Sydney , Melbourne and made by Aboriginal people who may not now of their family connections to land through the policies of assimilation that existed until the 1970’s Gary Foley has said that the 1972 tent embassy was a result of nothing changing for Aboriginal people after the 1967 referendum and the five years after the Referendum that gave Aboriginal people full citizenship rights saw no real changes in the discrimination that Aboriginal people experienced.

It has only been within the last 30 years that Aboriginal art has been taken out of a sterile ethnographic museum context and recognized as an aesthetic and cultural expression as unique as the landscape that it often depicts. Australian Aboriginal arts international recognition and reception provides the first of hopefully many new genres of categorizing Australian art history.

The interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art especially in relation to exhibitions, theatrical productions and new historical narratives can create a platform for Aboriginal people with limited exposure educational and training opportunities in the arts to contribute to the cultural legitimacy of government funded arts opportunities for all Australians.

It could be said the development of Aboriginal art has itself been an intervention into Australian art history through its overwhelming commercial success and positive critical reception among academic and federal arts funding sources.

Many of the social initiatives such as the Aboriginal legal and medical services were interventionist strategies by Aboriginal community members that had seen to be effective from international black power movement in the United States and South Africa.

There is a tendency to separate the history of

Australia

from the history of Aboriginal people but the role that Aboriginal people played in the shaping of all aspects of this nation is crucial to understanding many of the disputes over land rights through historical accounts and records that exist today.

Emily’s early work is defined by the “Dot” painting style that had been brought in prominence by the Papunya Tula artists collective. This is the most recognisable feature of Aboriginal art apart from bark paintings and has caused several disputes among communities as to who can paint with this style. It is largely accepted that urban Aboriginal artists should not use this style of painting as it is considered to be a symbolic tool of Aboriginal people who use English as a second or third language to communicate information to people from all across the world.

Her later work is shown as having a more restrained style simular to abstract expressionism that was very prominent in America in the 1950’s. Aboriginal art is often compared to Abstract art from many international sources such as America or Europe.

4 A broader definition of the diversity of Aboriginal art practices and histories

During the 1980s in Australia things were leading up to the Bicentenary of the British colonisation in 1988 and there had been a real interest in

Australia

and overseas about the art of Aboriginal people. In the 1980's there had been exhibitions in North America and Europe about Aboriginal art, putting it on the international stage and including it as a post colonial curatorial strategy which redressed in some cases centuries of unethical appropriations of Indigenous cultures around the world. It has only been within the last 30 years that Aboriginal art has been taken out of a sterile ethnographic museum context and recognized as an aesthetic and cultural expression as unique as the landscape that it often depicts.

During the 1980’s many Indigenous organizations were formed in regards to the promotion Aboriginal cultural expression in media (CAAMA, Gadigal, and Indigenous Screen

Australia

) dance (Bangarra, NAISDA) politics (Aboriginal Provisional government, ATSIC). There was this real grassroots movement in Sydney by Aboriginal artists to have their own Aboriginal owned and operated artists co-operative. Boomalli was formed in 1987, a year before the Bicentenary. It was set up by Aboriginal artists who wanted to exhibit art on their own terms.

From around mid 1970 some of them had been included in shows that were just too general, they were included in shows which centred on Northern Territory artists, or criticized because they didn't make paintings that dealt with a traditional or spiritual subject matter. The urban Aboriginal artist's cooperative was for artists who had their own story to tell. For artists who didn't believe the tourist brochure representations of "genuine" Australian Aboriginal culture.

Boomalli was a gallery for Aboriginal Artists and Curators to have the freedom to own the means of representing art which represented the living history of Aboriginal people. There were many aboriginal people who didn't believe the hype of a unified nation celebrating 200 years of 'progress' and achievement. Aboriginal people renamed the Australia day celebrations Invasion day and used the opportunity of world attention on Australia to highlight Australia's secret history of oppression of Aboriginal people. In

Australia

it was the Bicentenary which galvanized these forces – In South Africa it was the Anti Apartheid movement.

The positive experiences of remote regionally based artists having their own visual language to record and document local knowledge and their own first person account of their own history in a symbolic language that is protocol based has been one of the few positive examples to emerge from decades of government funding and political interventions into Aboriginal communities.

The commercial art industry in Australia has a bad reputation in its dealing with Aboriginal people – the term in the industry is carpet baggers who by paintings from artists who are in desperate need of money and will pay the artist $1000 and then sell the work in Sydney for many times more than this. There have been horrific stories of artists being paid money to sign blank canvases and then forgeries in the style of the artists are created in cities and sold. The only way to be 100% sure of the legitimacy of a work of art is to purchase it from a community art centre where the money is distributed to the artists in a fair way. As depicted in the movie Samson and Delilah the pressures put on artists to provide money for other members of their community is immense and can damage the reputation of an artists when they make paintings that are rushed or not as properly constructed as they should be if the artist were painting for pleasure.

5 big money and corporate social responsibility

By the time the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye first came to public attention in 1998, Aboriginal art had been re assessed from post modern and post colonial viewpoints as the most exciting development in Australian art history over the past 30 years. For the first time in Australia’s history Aboriginal perspectives of their cultural and kinship connections to areas of Australia were taken seriously by the art world and the commercial art industry in general.

Between 1989 and 1996 Emily Kame Kngwarreye produced close to 3000 paintings. The sheer physical demands that this would take on anyone let alone an 80 year old person is astonishing and the reasons for this prodigious output will be discussed in detail towards the end of this essay.

Prior to her use of acrylic paint on canvas Emily had been involved in the batik painting at the Utopia art centre 200K North of Alice Springs. The Utopia art centre has been active since the 1970’s providing opportunities for Aboriginal people to earn income through the production of arts and crafts such as batik fabrics. In the 1970’s there were less than 10 aboriginal art centres in Australia – today artwork production provides income for over 100 remote art centres and collections of Aboriginal art are held in nearly every major museum and art gallery collection in the world.

An ironic aspect of Emily’s career is that the companies and individuals that acquired her work – were mining companies and often the same companies responsible for the destruction of Aboriginal lands and sacred places. The mining companies see the land as an asset to be economically used – where as for Emily connection to country and the lands that she depicted in many of her paintings were life itself. Aboriginal perceptions of land have only been acknowledged by the wider community for the past 30 years and the visual arts is the main way that many non Aboriginal people learn to see the Australian landscape through the perspective of an Aboriginal person

There is an underlying sinisterness in elder people becoming artists as it is shown in all countries that when an artist dies the value of their work increases because there will be no more artworks made by them. It may be cynical but the lessons to be learned from the career of Emily for younger generations are to nurture and encourage their artistic abilities instead of depending on the art for economic security. A “last of the Mohicans” narrative underpins many accounts of Aboriginal artists being “the last of their tribe” and is often used as a selling point when selling the work of older artists. It is unfair towards Younger artists that their art is not given as serious respect as it should.

One glimmer of hope for Aboriginal artists in the future is that The Australian government has conducted a senate enquiry in 2008 and implemented 14 recommendations known as the Australian Indigenous art commercial code of conduct that legally enforce ethical dealings between Aboriginal artists and the commercial galleries that market and promote their work.

Beth Dean Voyager or voyeur

2010-05-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

The Macleay Museum holds over 140 objects in its collection that were personally donated by Beth Dean and her husband Victor Carrel in 1984 during the development of the exhibition South Pacific Islands.

Beth Deans vocation as a performer and educator of unique dance practices sourced from diverse parts of the pacific between 1950 – 1970’s is a chronicle of the growth of the knowledge of Indigenous Pacific Island cultural practices in the imagination of modern Australia.

The collection of items donated to the Macleay museum in 1984 spans over 30 years of cultural documentation, performance, authentic costumes and dance practices of Aboriginal, Papua New Guinean and Pacific Island communities. Some highlights include costume and percussion instruments used by the Cook Island dancers who performed the opening ceremony for the Opera House, a diverse range of musical instruments made with traditional techniques and ceremonial costumes that signify social standing and amazingly skilful fabrication practices of fibres and textiles of the pacific.

The expressive gestural communication that modern dance embraced after the 1950’s echoed movements in the visual arts internationally where abstract expressionism and the influences of primitivism that had came to the visual arts via anthropology and ethnography created new aestheticisms that reached out into fashion, literature and popular culture.

In today’s milieu the representation of other cultures without any legitimacy or valid authorization is highly frowned upon and disrespects the living memory of the Indigenous cultures that are meant to be being acknowledged –the most recent case being the bewilderment expressed by Aboriginal Australians in relation to Russian ice skaters wearing “Indigenous” costumes as part of their Olympic ice skating routine that were based on Aboriginal skin tones and a languid attempt at representing ceremonial body painting.

Beth Dean’s first appearance in Australia was in the touring production of “Annie Get Your Gun” ironically playing the character of the expert female sharpshooter who deliberately looses a sharpshooting competition to secure the love of her male rival. In reality, Dean and her husband and professional Partner Victor Carrel (who was an accomplished opera singer) worked in many productions as senior artistic advisor across Australia and the South Pacific. One of their greatest accomplishments was their involvement in the inaugural South Pacific arts festival held in 1972.

Australia in the period between 1950 and 1975 produced numerous films, theatrical performances and educational attempts of “exotic” cultural experiences for international and local audiences. The Australian ballet company’s production of “Corroboree” in which Beth Dean was the principal dancer playing the character of a young Aboriginal boy was seriously researched over a number of months by Beth dean who was advised by Sydney Universities A. P. Elkin to visit the communities of Ernabella and Yuendumu.

Conservatism of the western world in the 19th and early 20th century, especially in relation to women’s behaviour and appearance in public was challenged by female performers such as Beth Dean and in an earlier sense Annette Kellerman. Kellerman graced the worlds stage as a mermaid in one piece bathing suits that exposed the female body in ways that “offended moral decency”, however from the 1950’s onwards Australian culture was in the process of embracing and creating their own adaptation of “island style” or “surf” culture that was shown in American Gidget and Elvis movies or in the music of the beach boys. A new youth subculture swept across coastal Australia that was in opposition to the military influenced surf life saving clubs that had existed along the east coast since the popularity of bathing and the internationalisation of the “Australian crawl” – a little acknowledged fact of many early descriptions of Aboriginal people around Sydney Harbour describes their strong swimming abilities.

It is impossible to describe the work of Beth Dean in any single category as her experiences and intentions were as diverse as the cultures that she represented, The collections of Beth Dean are held in numerous institutions in Australia including the Australian National Museum, the NSW Maritime Museum and Screen/Sound Australia.

Trumpet used by Beth Dean during Performances
Macleay Museum

NSW Aboriginal language groups links and basic info

2010-04-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

this is hardly comprehensive but I will be adding more info as information becomes available

further information about the language group is hyper linked in the underlined language name

at this stage I have only listed one town that is withibn the boundaries of this language group

for more detailed information regarding contemporary issues and to contact community members contact the local Aboriginal land council representatives

Language                 Current Towns associated with Language group

Anaiwan   Tingha

Arakwal   Byron Bay

Awabakal   Lake Maquarie, Newcastle

Badjalang   Grafton / Clarence River

Banbai Wattle Ridge

Baranbinja     Bourke

Baraparapa    Hay, Murrumbidgee River

Birpai            Taree, Hastings Valley , Manning Valley

Barindji         east of the Darling River, Ivanhoe

Barkindji       Willandra lakes

Dainggati       north of the Macleay river, Kempsey

Darkinjang     south of hunter river, Cessnock

Daruk           North Western Sydney

Djiringanj      Merimbula to wallaga lake

Eora               Inner Harbour of Sydney

Gandangara   Napean River western Sydney

Geawegal     Muswellbrook

Jeithi             Jerilderie

Jiegara          Clarence River Grafton

Jitajita           Balranald

Jotijota          Deniliquin

Jukambal      Glen Innes

Kalibal          Murwillumbah

Kamilaroi    North west NSW

Karenggapa Tibooburra

Kawambarai Dubbo

Kitabal          Tabulam

Kula               Bourke

Kumbainggiri Coffs Harbour

Kureinji          Northrn bank of the Murray River

Kwiambal       Ashford

Maljangapa     Milparinka

Maraura          Wilcannia

Milpulo           Wilcannia

Minjungbal     Wollumbin Mountain

Morowari        Culgoa river

Muthimuthi     Balranald

Nari Nari         Hay

Naualko          Darling River

Ngaku             Macksville

Ngamba          Port Macquarie

Ngarabal         Glenn Innes

Ngarigo           Monaro

Ngemba          South bank darling river

Ngunawal       Monaro tableland

Parundji          Brewarrina

Tharawal        Campbelltown

Thaua             Merimbula

Ualarai           Walgett

Wadikali         Lake Pinaroo

Walbanga        Shoalhaven river

Walgalu         Tumut River

Wandandian Shoalhaven

Wanjiwalku   Tongo Lake

Weilwan        Cuddie Springs

Wembawemba Booroorban

Weraerai        Inverell

Widjabal        Lismore

Wiljakali        Broken Hill

Wiradjuri       Largest language group in western NSW

Wodi Wodi    Illawarra

Wongaibon    Narromine

Wonnarua     Singleton

Worimi         Port Stephens

draft response to arts NSW discussion paper

2010-02-24T21:24:00.000-08:00

NSW Aboriginal arts and cultural strategy
January 2010

read the discussion paper here

Question 1

What do you consider are successful examples of arts and cultural training and professional development opportunities that assist Aboriginal people in NSW to participate in:

Aboriginal arts and cultural activities?

NPWS cultural tourism and ethno botanical education projects, Australian Museum outreach project lightning ridge, CDEP Brewarrina, Mutual obligation projects for long term unemployed within arts sports and cultural facilities, Boomalli Aboriginal artists Co-operative

The wider arts and culture sector?

State records – in living memory

What do you consider are the barriers to successful arts and cultural training and professional development opportunities?

Lack of interest in supporting local councils and businesses that have ignored community member’s wishes and interests previously

Lack of understanding of the benefits and outcomes of supporting non Indigenous stakeholders through a long term project

No financial incentive to give local knowledge and intellectual property to non indigenous stakeholders

Profits from cultural projects do not go direct to community members who they are designed to benefit

Question 2

Are existing programs supported under arts NSW Arts funding program providing effective support for Aboriginal arts and culture? Which programs are most effective? Which programs are not effective?

Yes - Sydney has the capacity to provide great services to artists of national and international significance but the development of the local Aboriginal arts industry seems to be the sole responsibility of non indigenous owned commercial art galleries. A majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists do not attend higher education institutions and in reality a lot of people begin their art careers at Aboriginal education institutions such as Tranby or EORA College. There is statistical evidence that Aboriginal people who have applied for University and were unsuccessful in their application do not apply again – tertiary training that is culturally specific needs more improvement.

Question 3

What is needed to increase and strengthen Aboriginal arts and cultural infrastructure in your community and across NSW?

State funded and independently coordinated branding and promotion of Aboriginal cultural products in NSW.

There needs to be assistance for this because every time responsibility is handed to the private sector they ignore the importance of community protocol’s regarding the legitimacy of a particular design, symbol or intellectual property and outsource production it to a wholesaler who has no financial incentive in acknowledging Aboriginal intellectual property – this is shown in the lack of quality associated with boomerangs, textiles designs, licensing agreements for reproduction of Aboriginal artists work in a commercial context and tourism experiences that are not supported by the local community members from which these designs are supposed to represent.

Access to affordable Sydney based sales opportunities in non fine art/souvenir and tourism market is a crucial step for regional based artists to apply the skills learned in business administration and trades/arts based production in items including artefact production in woodwork, fibres for paper based products, textile design, licensing of graphic design for commercial reproduction.

Sales of commercial products such as crafts, food products, fashion and jewellery under distinctive regionally based branding is not an easy objective for a regionally based community to undertake on its own and the administration of the branding and promotion of the products should be regulated by an independently accountable decision making process. These products should be underlined by a tertiary education program that explores legitimate and cultural protocol specific for all of the Aboriginal language regions in NSW.

The implementation of the Indigenous Australian Art Commercial Code of Conduct should be a perfect opportunity to create a best practice business administration template in relation to the production and sale of arts and craft products in NSW that can be administered by non arts based indigenous organizations such as TAFE, Community Cultural centres, keeping places, NPWS information centres, Schools and Aboriginal Land Councils.

Creating product for wholesale markets and distribution is not suited to every individual artist and the main risk would be in setting up a remittance system that is acceptable to the participating artists but also risk adverse for the merchants who sell the products. Authenticity labels in NSW did not work because they were easily forged and not independently verified by a publicly accountable organization.

Question 4

How can we increase the profile of NSW Aboriginal arts and culture?

Centralised organisation of branding, licensing agreements, contact information for community representatives, event booking and commissioning of artists etc, compliance with the IAACCC and an independent ombudsman approach to the helping individuals and community groups to develop goods and services.

Regional arts production in New South Wales is disconnected from the Sydney commercial art gallery system and the tourism souvenir and trade market and long term strategies need to be implemented to create connections between the production of an authentic and significant expression of the Aboriginal culture of regional New South Wales and the expectations of a vibrant and audience driven exhibition program of Sydney’s long term tourism strategies.

This should take into account the historical aspect of increasing awareness in regional New South Wales of the significant achievements of many generations of Aboriginal people in most regional towns and cities.

Respectfully and ethically acknowledging the history of Aboriginal dispossession in ways that allow Aboriginal and non Indigenous people to move forward on mutually agreed terms. The local knowledge and knowledge of traditional cultural practices are Indigenous knowledge’s that have to often been undervalued by nationally focused programming of state galleries and museums.

Television documentaries such as the first Australians have shown that there is an Aboriginal history to every town and city in New South Wales and that Aboriginal people have contributed far more to the history of the state than has been officially recognised.

Age and generation appropriate film/television and local content media production is crucial as there is a big difference between older generations of Aboriginal people and the younger generations of people in NSW. This generation gap is parallel to the City/country divide amongst most Aboriginal people and affects the confidence of individuals and the legitimacy of cultural participation in events for the wider community.

Question 5

What do you consider are successful examples of existing programs run by the NSW state cultural institutions to support Aboriginal arts and culture?

Developing opportunities in NSW needs to be a two way street between regional NSW and Sydney. The 14 regions of the regional arts NSW network are important for breaking down regional areas into which areas are performing well and which areas need attention.

What do you consider are the barriers to successful programs?

Access to affordable Sydney based sales opportunities is impossible for organisations that are not based in Sydney especially in the non fine art/souvenir and tourism market. This is a crucial step for regional based artists to apply the skills learned in business administration and trades/arts based production in items including artefact production in woodwork, fibres for paper based products, textile design, licensing of graphic design for commercial reproduction and media/digital arts production.

Question 6

What do you consider are successful examples of the work of existing peak bodies in advocating for the development of the Aboriginal arts and cultural sector in NSW?

NSW premier’s art prize has been the only state-wide survey of NSW Aboriginal art that has been legitimised by community participation.

NAIDOC week planning committee’s that are coordinated by local councils and producing substantial programming that is part of larger strategic planning activities associated with local councils community engagement strategies.

Community participation in the Repatriation of cultural artefacts and ancestral remains with support from the non Indigenous community through local council assistance.

TAFE education programs in tourism, business management, office administration, bookkeeping that incorporate on the job training with existing cultural institutions

The Deadly awards and practically any other award that acknowledges the hard work that community members contribute towards ensuring that the community supports the development of other community members.

What do you consider are the barriers to successful programs?

There is a danger in that Aboriginal people who have demonstrated experience working on cultural projects can develop a sense of volunteer fatigue, quite often there is no financial incentive for the person to participate in community representative capacities. There have been situations involving public artworks consultations, community consultative committees or NAIDOC week events where it has actually cost the community member more of their own money than they have earned to put on workshops or cultural performance type activities.

Question 7

What do you consider are successful examples of arts and cultural programs as part of existing community cultural engagement programs within your community across NSW?

Welcome to country signage, NAIDOC Week, genealogy services administered at libraries and community centres, matching social awareness campaigns to artist groups

Aids council of NSW sponsoring the annual Mardi Gras exhibition at Boomalli Aboriginal artists Co-operative and providing a space for marginalised members of the community to produce a event aimed at educating the wider community.

Question 8

What could Arts NSW do to ensure arts practice is an integral part of programs designed to improve the social and cultural well being of Aboriginal people?

Funding for state institutions such as AGNSW, MCA, MOS, Australian Museum to produce more historical and contemporary exhibitions and public programs that focus on the History of Sydney.

Local Government association – NAIDOC week planning committee

Dept Education and Training – Tourism NSW – TAFE NSW

to deliver course on the heritage, history and contemporary experience of Aboriginal people in NSW to increase awareness of information sources for further development of successful projects

Facilitate Archaeological and historical education and information public events that are relevant and designed specifically for small communities – this gives community members a sense of ownership over the cultural information that can be learned from these sessions and develop the knowledge base of community members that would like to participate in tourism based activities related to the Indigenous heritage of their community.

Assisting museums and education institutions to provide ‘digital repatriations’ of information that is relevant to Indigenous communities so that the access rights and governance of this information is administered at the community level.

An Aboriginal owned and operated art gallery and art history keeping place that is specific to NSW Aboriginal art i.e. - Re instate operational funding for the Boomalli Aboriginal artist co operative

Question 9

What linkages can be improved between arts NSW and other NSW government departments and agencies to support community cultural engagement?

Greater publicity of the DAA regional action plan, the ICC national arts and craft industry support program and arts NSW funding objectives in ways that allow feedback to be incorporated and acted upon in quicker timeframes than those currently existing.

Develop a regional representative consultative committee administered by communities NSW or the Local government association that exists independent of the arts community but acts as a keeping place for the corporate knowledge of the development of arts productions in the whole state. This organization can also facilitate regionally based artists and communities access to collection s of Aboriginal material culture that are already held in institutions such as the Australian Museum, AIATSIS

Using general categories based on north east south west allows greater diversity in the type of art that is produced to represent these regions without placing scrutiny on individual areas that may fluctuate with the qualities or quantities of a particular product.

Community consultation should be undertaken by both organizations and reported separately to the state-wide community consultation committee to identify where priority areas for the development of particular industries and where promotional opportunities for arts production in the state should be developed. These organizations can identify the costs involved in maintaining industries such as TAFE courses in arts production, men’s shed style workshops, community centre arts activities and grant assistance private individuals who have successfully developed businesses to meet demands in particular areas.

Question 10

What community cultural development priorities require a partnership approach by funding agencies and funding sources?

More Partnerships should be encouraged local government and federal funding sources that take into account education, health and social justice campaigns that need to reach as wide an audience as possible. Partnerships that produce broad nationaly focused objectives outcomes (usually printed information brochures and posters that no one reads or notices) should be discouraged in favour of increasing financial support for free internet services and portable media devices that allow people to communicate with each other rather than being told what to do.

Question 11

How can we develop opportunities for employment and business, including Aboriginal creative industry businesses, to increase:

- Local Jobs
- National and international export communities;
- Cultural tourism?

Public art and Indigenous Landscape design in regional communities

Opportunities are already available for federally mandated dual naming and welcome to country signage that is commissioned by Aboriginal communities in NSW yet there are few benchmarks to monitor best practice and numbers of actual community participation.

Public liability insurance needs to be amended to differentiate between advice about cultural protocols being given community consultation capacity and the advice given by structural engineers and architects etc given in the construction of public art. In many cases the onus of compliance is on the artist to be responsible for covering these costs of engineering and structural compliance with development applications and these should actually be covered by local councils.

Too much red tape significantly reduces the financial incentive for artists to participate in small scale public artwork opportunities which have the potential to significantly increase aboriginal community involvement in a community consultation process regarding Indigenous landscape design and Indigenous knowledge systems being respectfully and ethically incorporated into the design of public spaces such as housing developments parks and public spaces.

Opportunities for communities to have a greater role in the commissioning process of basic council services and facilities and incorporating more creative and innovative design into public spaces will create work opportunities for CDEP type projects that are already in existence as well as provide practical experience for experienced artists to realize projects on a grander scale than is possible in the more competitive Sydney public art environment.

The development of innovative sculpture and photography based mediums is highly suited to an environment like regional NSW which has the potential to realize projects not possible in other parts of the country. The diversity of Aboriginal cultural information that is available for artists, curators, performers, digital content producers is practically limitless if undertaken under the guidance of genuine community monitored and publicly accountable standards.

Opportunities for Sydney based artists regionally

Regional based communities are often seeking access to professional development opportunities that are perceived to be in abundance in the city this is far from the reality of the situation.
Increasing experienced artist’s participation in community services development of regional areas in NSW.

Residencies can be organized quite easily by local councils as the most prohibitive expenses for individuals is the rent and insurance liabilities of using a space for the production of art. Larger scale projects can also be realized through access to materials or workshop facilities used in innovative ways by contemporary artists seeking to develop bodies of work that are connected to architecture, media, ecological issues, science and fields of non traditional arts production.

what happened to Boomalli ?

2010-02-04T21:04:00.000-08:00

“Boomalli was an Aboriginal art movement that saw ten artists galvanize a number of initiatives. Currently, there are huge historical gaps; my association to Michael Riley has been reduced to a sentence, which states, “Fiona Foley was picked up by the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery”. What this means in effect is that there is little analysis of the social, economic and philosophical contribution that we made during this time. “

Fiona Foley 2007

For Many people “Real” Aboriginal Australia is in the Northern Territory or in the “outback”. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art is the largest collective art movement in recent Australian art history. There has never been a movement so diversified both geographically and aesthetically yet also having a unified common cause of representing the artistic practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in order to accurately tell a history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia that is acceptable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Black Power activists in Redfern in the 1970’s who were influenced by social justice actions taking place in the USA and in South Africa at the time saw gaps in the Australian system that directly led to Indigenous disadvantage. This led to the Aboriginal Legal service and the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Centre being founded to provide services for Aboriginal people and more importantly, to be administered by Aboriginal people.

This was hugely influential for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Sydney. The formation of Boomalli was no different to today’s artist run initiatives. Artists who had been excluded from the commercial art system formed their own exhibition space to exhibit their art on their own terms.

This was not unusual as during this decade many Indigenous cultural and media organizations were formed primarily for the promotion of Aboriginal cultural expression in media (CAAMA and Indigenous Screen Australia) Dance (Bangarra, NAISDA) politics (Aboriginal Provisional government, ATSIC).

From around mid 1970 some of them had been included in shows that were just too general, they were included in shows which centered on Northern Territory artists, or criticized because they didn't make paintings that dealt with a traditional or spiritual subject matter. The urban Aboriginal artist's cooperative was for artists who had their own story to tell. For artists who didn't believe the tourist brochure representations of "genuine" Australian Aboriginal culture.

Boomalli was a gallery for Aboriginal Artists and Curators to have the freedom to own the means of representing art which represented the living history of Aboriginal people. There were many aboriginal and non Indigenous people who didn't believe the hype of a unified nation celebrating 200 years of 'progress' and achievement during the bicentenary.

Aboriginal people renamed the Australia day celebrations in 1988 Invasion day and used the opportunity of world media attention to highlight Australia's history of oppression of Aboriginal people was in fact apartheid plain and simple. Even in the year 2010 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people face serious opposition to their version of history by academics and Government lobbyists.

The unprecedented bloom of Aboriginal art in Australia in both its local and international contexts and shows how these two very different aspects of the business are in some ways tearing each other apart in a race to be the first to live up to the impossible expectations of art and its supposed role as an economic savior for Indigenous communities neglected by failures of state and federal policies. This leads to the question was it commercial galleries or government funded arts programs that encouraged increased participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the arts or was it the artists themselves that created an industry that was worth $900 000 annually in 1975 into 100 million dollar industry in the year 2000?

“ Aboriginal owned and operated art centers emerged in an era of Indigenous self determination and in response to strong community need. Nationally their numbers have grown from a handful in 1970 to an estimated 16 in 1980 to over 100 Australia wide today”

Christina Davidson CEO ANKKAAA – Australian Art collector 2009

The answer lies in the fact in New South Wales and Sydney in particular there seems to be a disadvantage when it comes to harnessing the progress of existing institutions programs of representing Aboriginal cultural material and developing Sydney as a place where Aboriginal people can draw on the local knowledge’s relating to political, ecological or ideological influences in the production of art.

Sydney has a fascinating Aboriginal history yet there is alsoi the perception that the Aboriginal people who live in Sydney today are not descendants of the Eora people who lived in Sydney prior to colonisation so why should their art be any better than other non aboriginal artists who have lived in Sydney their whole lives.

A lot of Indigenous arts programming in Sydney Galleries and Museums is aimed towards educating an international audience rather than a local audience and in the end this is more rewarding for the institution that for the Aboriginal communities represented. The commercial art gallery system also links into government subsidized arts programming that favors an ethnographic nationalistic approach to the representation of Aboriginal culture in Australia and is the main barrier that prevents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as individuals from representing more fluid and dynamic contexts and definitions of Aboriginality in the commercial and public art gallery and museum industry.

It is fair to note that Aboriginal art in particular is one of the most unregulated markets to have existed in recent years. Allegations of corruption have tainted the industry to the point where a senate enquiry was called by the federal government and the Australia Council is to implement a commercial code of conduct that puts it in law that representatives of galleries are to pay artists with money rather than personal favors.

It’s interesting that Aboriginal artists cop a lot of the blame for corruption in the industry when so few Aboriginal people or communities own and run Sydney based art galleries. The only galleries that are owned by Aboriginal people are in remote communities and are not in any of our capital cities like Melbourne or Sydney.

The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co operative has juggled the interrelations between the commercial gallery system and federal government influences in the industry for over 20 years, however not being able to secure a permanent tenancy over this time and genuine exhaustion and frustration by many dedicated and committed members and stakeholders involved over the years has lead the organization into a necessary introspection as to how the organization is to exist in the future.

What sets Boomalli apart from the commercial gallery system in Sydney is that it is recognized in the Aboriginal community as an Aboriginal art gallery. Boomalli’s legitimacy came from its aim of an Aboriginal peer assessed artistic program and the not insignificant achievement that Aboriginal membership and stakeholders of the gallery had determined that this was the art that they wanted to be represented by.

2009 NSW Premiers art Prize

2009-11-25T19:25:00.000-08:00

The awarding of this year’s Prize to Roy Kennedy is a long deserved recognition of the historical substance that exists in so much of the art that is produced by Aboriginal people from New South Wales. Over the last four years there has been an diverse selection of shortlisted works for each year’s prize with many surprising introductions to work by artists that have not had the same exhibition opportunities as Sydney based artists. The exhibition is an interesting snapshot of the surface of Aboriginal art production in New South Wales but fails on some levels to give an indication of the scale of the project of developing an aesthetic and history that is independent of the institutions that are often charged with representing Aboriginal Art in New South Wales.

Compared to the Telstra art awards held in Darwin Annually ovwere the past 26 years the NSW premiers prize exhibition is a much smaller affair. Each year’s show is a testament to the work of regional development officers whose encouragement and assistance produces works referencing the local histories of some of the most geographically diverse regions to be put under the category “New South Wales.

New South Wales has many geographical contrasts from the snowfields to the desert to the semi tropical coastal areas and the social and cultural contrasts of the art produced by artists working in these diverse regions makes it difficult to bring a one size fits all approach to an evaluation of the Aboriginal art of New South Wales.

There are many regional towns and places that Sydney based Aboriginal artists have personal or family connections to and this connection to country is a reoccurring theme in many of the artworks entered in each tears art prize.

The Influx of Aboriginal people to Sydney throughout the 20th century has been documented buy several other sources but it is visual artists in particular who are finding ways of describing the emotional and geographical connection that many people feel towards the areas that they have lived or grown up in. The period after 1967 when the inalienable human rights of Aboriginal people in New South Wales were recognised in law that a growing self determined movement by Aboriginal people towards actively participating in the economic development of townships and urban centres in New South Wales began.

Prior to 1967 the “kitch” movement of representing Aboriginal people as an exotic other on velvet wall hangings, ceramic ashtrays and reproductions of artefacts were all non Indigenous craft industries that found a niche distributing an Aboriginal “influenced” product. Aboriginal art from New South Wales does not have the same ethnographic validation that exists for art from the remote areas of Australia and is therefore labelled as inauthentic by many non indigenous owned commercial galleries who maintain that real Aboriginal art is produced in a community art centre model and nowhere else. As Richard Bell aptly put it – “Aboriginal art - it’s a white thing” the validation and legitimacy of much of the art that is produced in New South Wales is not through peer assessment by New South Wales Aboriginal communities but purely through the commercial success of the artists work.

As noted by Coo-ee gallery director Adrian Newstead– (a commercial gallery that has operated in Sydney for over 20 years) in Australian Art collector Sept 09

By insinuating that the provenience of independently produced works is unsafe, they undermine more than 50 percent of the art currently being produced and a vast number of works created in the past that are sold through outlets other than elite exhibiting galleries and auction houses.

Aboriginal art in New South Wales is not produced in the same community art centre model that the more recognisable forms of Aboriginal art from remote regions is produced. Aboriginal art from New South Wales is far more individual than community based. It would be interesting (though pointless) for aboriginal artists in each suburb of Sydney to nominate an artist that is able to represent the community experience on behalf of the others that live in that community. How does one artist represent the Redfern experience in a way that encapsulates everyone else’s point of view?

Aboriginal art in New South Wales has been shaped by many political and social forces that have shaped the industry in ways both positive and disastrous. Political art in this exhibition was overshadowed by a more ecologically conscious art that shows a growing awareness among regional communities of the local impacts of global industrialised forces that impact everyone in the community.
The diversity of experiences between the generations is also sharply felt in the urban areas as it is in the remote art centres.

With all the galleries clamouring for the prestige of hosting the touring exhibition its surprising that there is no associated promotional material apart from the exhibition catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. While many art lovers will appreciate the historical associations that Roy Kennedy brings to his winning work the battle to change the perceptions of NSW audiences in relation to that Aboriginal art that is produced in their own regions is far from over. In some ways this exhibition validates the regional cringe of exhibiting in the big smoke. Many artists say it is difficult to be taken seriously by their local communities and would rather wait for the legitimacy of an expert in the City telling them that it is art than take a chance on working with their own community to produce local vernacular of artistic expression.

Adam Hill

Once again this year Adam Hill has thrown another “truth bomb” into the exhibition space by creating artworks that not only challenge what Aboriginal art is supposed to look like but also interrogates a common reality shared by many in relation to home ownership. While two thirds of the non indigenous community are owner occupiers the figures for Indigenous home ownership in New South Wales put the rate at around 1 in 3 for Aboriginal people. Playing with the concept of the welcome mat this work rather effectively brings complex social issues into stark reality These homely mass produced messages of “welcome” “come on in”. Housing has always been a sore point for regionally based Aboriginal Australians, the sad reality of Albert Namatjiri being a nationally recognised artist yet not being allowed to own a home in Alice Springs even though he could afford it is an example of the distrust that many Aboriginal people feel in participating in the housing market.
The great Aussie dream of owning a home has not become a reality for many Aboriginal Australians. there is a lingering memory associated with Aboriginal housing that passed through urban folklore in recent years in that ATSIC would build houses for Aboriginal family’s who would destroy them for firewood. Whether this ever actually happened is not as relevant as the fact that it has been used as a reason for excluding Aboriginal family’s from the rental housing market in many areas around Australia.
The welcome mat is an interesting aspect of urban life that implies a social interaction. Aboriginal housing is a social issue that has never been dealt with properly and many people think that Aboriginal people choose to live in squalid conditions as part of their rejection of mainstream culture.
In recent years Adam Hill has moved away from his bold painterly visual style that expressed his earlier work and broadened the artistic palette that he usages to create artworks that challenge received wisdom that is fed through the mainstream media and politics.
Having been shortlisted in numerous art Prizes in recent years it is disappointing that further recognition of the artistic risks that Adam Hill has shown with his photography and Installation and should be taking as their career matures are not recognised or rewarded by a sometimes conservative award structure.
Each year the premiers art prize is heavily dominated by painting, sculpture and photography are present but there is an element of risk in awarding a $20 000 prize to a work that challenges the majority of the audiences expectations of what a $20 000 artwork might look like. Hills work this year consists of three doormats - boldly declaring visitors “UN welcome”. Adam challenges the judges and the community with this work as we all like to think that Aboriginal art in New South Wales is on a par with the best of international contemporary art however the rejection of re evaluation of the primacy of painting seems to be a long way away for many New South Wales Artists

Bronwyn Bancroft

Bancroft is an artist whose skill lies in an ability to create visual abstractions of the conceptual representations of much of the social relationships that underpin kinship and connection to country. Bancroft’s recent work involves muted colours that bleed together – sometimes into grid like formations and sometimes into free flowing assosoiations and meditations on country, place, space and time. Bancroft’s work works best on a large scale where the interplay and tensions created by contrasting and jarring blocks of color that sometimes loosely reference networks of kinship affiliation and alliance.
In relation to the other artists in this show Bancroft’s work almost appears as an Aboriginal modernism in comparison with the more graphic and representational approach which seems to be the preference of other participating artists. Bronwyn has initiated and participated in several group approaches to making art (Designer aboriginals, Boomalli Aboriginal artists co operative, The strength of women art collective). Bronwyn has developed a style of her own that is easily recognisable to any seasoned Aboriginal art aficionado, there is no doubt that her work would be a necessary inclusion in any representative survey of the art of New South Wales over the past two decades and recognition of the work that Bronwyn has put into community initiated arts projects is evident in the several protégés that have worked alongside Bronwyn and with her guidance throughout recent years.
The influences of Bronwyn’s artistic has permeated through many younger artists colour palate and her use of colour is used in a much softer tone than the hard edge line work that is prominent in the paintings of Adam Hill or the be seen in several other artists work in this exhibition such as Natalie Bateman, Karla Dickens or Donella Waters. Bancroft incorporates the community responsibility of sharing knowledge especially among women as a way of including the community in the

Debra Beale

Artist Debra Beale photographic work for this years prize is a refreshingly different approach to a larger theme that was seen in several works in this year’s show - the ecological aspect of rural life in New South Wales. These photographs reference the ecological realities of water and land use agreements in the murray darling river system of western New South Wales. Beale simply yet effectively uses the bottled water as a metaphor for the traditional connections between language groups both upstream and downstream. For an authoritative traditional person in Western New South walse the river system acted like a modern broadbnand connection providing information about climactic events in other areas. As a source of food and sustenance.
The medicinal and utilitarian uses of botanical and animal life that existed along the river excist in many examples of information that was shared between women and the food gathering skills of women and the knowledge associated with this is a fascinating area to explore in opposition to a paternalistic male centric view of the land as a resource to be farmed and the water mentality of who gets to it first owns it as well as the traditional crafts of woodwork fibre making and that were used in fishing. That this water is pre sold for commercial industrial purposes is an interesting point and that the long term interests of the preservation of the river itself do not seem to be taken into account.

Roy Kennedy

Roy Kennedy has produced a substantial body of work since 1995 documenting memories of life growing up on missions and reserves in Western New South Wales. Roys artwork present an “in living memory” perspective of times both good and bad and the living conditions that Aboriginal people who grew up under the Aborigines protection act. Roy was 35 years old when the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights was enacted and has spent just over half his life being classified as a citizen of Australia. Encouraged by the Eora College of TAFE in Redfern’s Visual arts program he began to document his memories the missions that his mother and father lived on. Since 1998 Roy has produced over 42 etchings that depict various aspects of the
Missions were run by the church whereas reserves were ran by the state and the difference between the two styles of administration varies from indifference to hostile assimilations
The importance of firsthand accounts of the experience of life on the missions and reserves of New South Wales cannot be underestimated. “In living memory” is a curatorial premise that has been used by documentary photographer Mervyn Bishop in recent years to produce a series of exhibitions that add a firsthand indigenous perspective of the collections of cultural materials that are owned by non Indigenous cultural institutions. Roy’s vignettes on daily life growing up on a mission produce bitter sweet reactions to the blatant discrimination faced by Aboriginal people in Western NSW prior to 1967.
A first person perspective is often dismissed as unobtainable by major institutions that are working with cultural materials and it is a disgrace that artists such as Roy Kennedy, Elaine Russell and Harry J Wedge are not supported more widely by the Commercial art gallery system in Sydney. There is no shortage of high priced art centre artists whose work shares an affinity with first hand perspectives of community yet the experiences of New South Wales Aboriginal people producing art outside of a community art centre model are too often dismissed as “fake” and “contested” . Much like the work of Alex Black lock Roy Kennedys

Traditional NSW Language groupings of participating artists

Language group representation in the premier’s art prize 2009

Bundjulung/Djanbun I (F)
Yuin/Gadigal I (F)
Boon Wurrung/ Yorta Yorta / Gamiliroi I (F)
Ngarabal I (M)
Ngarabal/birpai III (F) (M) (M)
Kamiliroi IIII (F) (M) (F) (F)
Thunggutti I (M)
Wiradjuri IIII (F) (M) (M) (F)
Goomeroi IIII (M) (M) (F) (M)
Gumbayngirr II (M) (M)
Weilwan/Gamillaroi I (F)
Dharug II (F) (F)
Jerringa I (M)
Dhungatti II (F) (M)
Yaegl I (F)
Bundjulung I (M)
Wodi Wodi I (M)
Ngiyampaa I (M)
Gamilaraay II (M) (F)
Wailwan I (M)
Birpai/Worimi I (M)
Birpai I (M)

Aboriginal art galleries in Sydney

2009-11-25T19:04:00.000-08:00

This essay aims to provide definitions of the difference between traditional Aboriginal art, Urban Aboriginal art and commercial Aboriginal art. The history of Aboriginal art in Sydney is influenced by many factors - historical fact, cultural protocol, legitimacy and commercial sales.

In setting out an outline of how to determine what has played the largest influence in the development of Aboriginal art in Australia over the past 25 years it is important to understand the political contexts in which Aboriginal art has existed.

The under representation of Aboriginal artists in the history of Australian art was shown to be the result of entrenched racism that existed in Australia (blatantly prior to 1967 silently after this date) where Aboriginal people were excluded from many areas of cultural production such as media the arts and performing arts.

The impact of the growth and increase of Aboriginal art on the Australian commercial gallery scene over the last couple of decades has been developed largely outside of the tertiary education system. The conservatism of the commercial art industry is is evident in the skeptisism shown by many contemporary Aboriginal artists as to the actual benefits of the development of Aboriginal art as being beneficial for the Aboriginal community. Bell's theorem

That Aboriginal art has developed outside of the tertiary arts education system in Australia is not unusual in that the most commercially successfull and peer recognised Aboriginal artists are artists educated with English as a third or fourth language. This also highlights the use of the english language by an Aboriginal artist as being a factor in the determination of legitimacy in relation to whether an individual is an authentic representative of an original Aboriginal perspective.

Aboriginal art is not a unified art movement in the same context we know other art movements that have existed in Australia such as modernism. Aboriginal art in many cases arose out of the post modern and post colonial re evaluations of Modernist art history of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Left wing political influences on the development of Aboriginal art have not been as easily accepted by Aboriginal artists as is widely believed. Aboriginal academic Romaine Mortein and others have highlighted the philosophical ambiguity of the use of the term "wilderness" as excluding Aboriginal knowledge sytems from ecological frameworks and being a construction of a priveledged western engagement with land use.

Successful collaborations between green and environmental agendas and Aboriginal land rights have become bogged down in clashes between wildlife conservation groups and proponents of traditional hunting rights of Aboriginal people. Also alliances between Aboriginal communities and mining companies as well as other multinational focused corporations produces unease within green groups who have a very different agenda in relation to community and cultural development.

Outside of the political construction of an Aboriginal art industry there have been many changes in recent decades that do not have anything to do with the political advancement of a unified Aboriginal australia and are contained with in a regional and individual proactive asertion of local knowledges. In 1987 the commercial aboriginal art industry in Sydney entered a transitional phase where opportunities for artists, curators, galleries and museums changed exponentially.

International interest and in the art of Aboriginal people was either met by the serious ethnographic art specialists that had existed in Sydney since the 1800’s or by a growing network of commercial art galleries in Sydney and Melbourne that developed international connections for their galleries through

The history of selling Aboriginal culture is disturbing in that there are too many examples of people whose culture was being sold being excluded from the process at all levels. Throughout history up until the 1970's the selling of everything from artefacts, body parts, souveniers, weapons and cultural material to institutions and individuals has created a secondary market where the vast majority of these artefacts are owned by non indigenous people and can be sold in the auction markets of the world along side artefacts from many Indigenous cultures for very large profit margins is sadisticly ironic given the historical treatment of the individuals who have produced these objects.

2010 marks a new era in the history of Aboriginal art in Australia. The Indigenous commercial code of conduct and the droit de suite programs being instigated by the federal government offer to bring a new sense of accountability top the Aboriginal art market. Selling fake Aboriginal art is nothing new in the 1980’s scientific testing showed that several skeletons held by institutions and bought in the 1800's as Aboriginal skeletons were actually European skeletons that had been sold to an unsuspecting trader as Aboriginal remains - a small sign towards a positive change might be that today unscruplulous art dealers sell artworks not body parts or stolen matrrial.

The success of remote art centres based thousands of Kilometres from the urban centres is astounding. There are many Aboriginal owned art centres that turn over more sales of artworks in a month than some commercial galleries do in a year.

This is an example of the distortion that many people see when they engage with Aboriginal art through the capital city commercial galleries. The sheer volume and variety of works produced leaves the Audience confused as to where the history of the movement begins and ends.

Was it commercial galleries, government funded arts programs that encouraged increased participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the arts or was it the artists themselves that created an industry that was worth $900 000 annually in 1975 into 100 million dollar industry in the year 2000?

Factionalism and in a sense tribalism’s exist within the industry where alliances are everything when it comes to the sharing of commercial in confidence information.

Contested and manufactured histories regarding seminal points in the development of the industry remain largely unexplained and while there have been several noteworthy exhibitions in recent years that have been curated by Indigenous curators.

However in New South Wales and Sydney in particular there seems to be a disadvantage when it comes to harnessing the existing professional arts and cultural institutions programs of representing Aboriginal cultural material and sharing the progress made with this with regional based Australians. Most programming in Sydney Galleries and museums is aimed towards an international audience rather than a local audience and is reflected in programming that intensively reserachs an area before moving onto the next. this is more rewarding for the institution that for the Aboriginal communities as the development of a domestic Aboriginal art market is more expensive than"plugging in" to the existing international Indigenous art market.

as evidenced by the increasing number of commecial aboriginal art galleries During the 1980’s Aboriginal art moved from an ethnocentric to commercial context. This was the result of several competing influences, and there were disagreements as to the best waty for the industry to proceed. The existence of ATSIC provided the primary unified national representative body for Aboriginal people that acted as a mediator between Aboriginal community representatives and federal and state public service institutions. and it was during the time that ATSIC existed that a sense of trust was developed between many aboriginal communities and representatives of a federal government that benefited the careers of many unkown artists.

ATSIC worked towards rectifying issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with a nationally focused and regionally coordinated approach to address recognised disadvantages faced by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community such as housing, health services and proactively asserting Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander people into business and professional development opportunities. Whether these policies have been succesful it is difficult to determine howevwer it is important the industry recognised that exploitative business practices where non Indigenous people and institutions profited from Aboriginal cultural information, objects and knowledge’s was not going to be ignored in a legal sense.

The work done by the Arts Law centre NSW, Viscopy and NAVA reflects the need for impertial juddgement of the business activities of all involved in the Aboriginal arts industry,

Since 1987 There have been several other non Aboriginal owned commercial art galleries in Sydney that in terms of business management have been far more successful in promoting Aboriginal art to international audiences so why didn’t an Aboriginal owned and operated art gallery such as Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative succeed?

There is two types of Aboriginal art in Sydney - there is Aboriginal art that is community recognised as Aboriginal art and then there is Aboriginal art that is commercially recognised as Aboriginal art. Commercial galleries and the Aboriginal community do not have the same agenda when it comes to the development of Aboriginal arts.

it is certainly not in any interests of a commercial gallery to work against a communities wishes but it is also not in their interests to be involved to closely either. The danger is in dividing the community un necessarily and setting up a communities expectations too high.

Failure to recognise that the Aboriginal community in Sydney and the Aboriginal community in the wider context of Australia have never been in a unified position in regards to collective decision making. Ignorance of the attitudes of "country" people and "city" people towards each other in Australia is a sign of a government propaganda that emphasises the national identity of all Australia over the local knowledge that shape the differences between the "city" and the "country"

Legitimacy is the keyword when it comes to determining Aboriginal artworks integrity.

Is there anything that we can learn from comparisons of the commercial art galleries, the Aboriginal community art centre model and the current buzzword in federal arts funding "artist run initiative"?

Why are Artist Run initiatives are classified as a different type of organisation that Aboriginal community art centres is an interesting point to start with. young urban artists are in a way being ghettoised in the sanmem way as aboriginal communities in the funding providers insistence on a collective identity that is legaly accountable to the funding provider in order to develop a relationship with the provider.

It would be hard to image that race is not a defining character in the distinctions between success and professionalism that are fundamental concerns when creating an operational plan or membership constitution for Artist run initiative or an Aboriginal community art centre.

It is obvious that some commercial art galleries dislike the fact that community art centres receive government funding to operate and are allowed to commercially sell art as well. This is protectionism that would never exist in any other industry.

One of the criteria that separate commercial art galleries from community art centres is this distinction – commercial galleries are not eligible to apply for funding to develop an artist’s work in the same way that remote community art centres are.

It is important not to transplant the remote community art centre model onto metropolitan commercial and public art galleries.

“Re territorialisation” seems to be the strategy of some state and federal arts funding bodies that use the success of the commercial art centres in remote settings as a benchmark and organisational template for the performance of the metropolitan Aboriginal art production that it encourages through its funding programs.

The “re territorialisation” of the community art centre model that has been attempted to be replicated by the commercial art gallery system through programming that favors an ethnographic nationalistic approach to the representation of of Aboriginal culture in Australia is the main barrier that prevents Aboriginal people as individuals from representing wider contexts and definitions of Aboriginality in the commercial and public art gallery and museum industry.

The optional operating model for a community based membership system of publicly funded art galleries is an organisation like Boomalli as it exists as a mid way point – a proving ground where artists who were serious about art were able to learn from more professional artists as well as learn from assisting other artists.

What set Boomalli apart from the commercial gallery system in Sydney was when peer assessment by other Aboriginal artists determined the importance and by participation and involvement in the development of their fellow artists career. Boomalli’s consistency came from its aim of an Aboriginal peer assessed artistic program and the quiet legitimacy that Aboriginal members of the gallery had determined that this was the art that they wanted to be represented by.

Legitimacy is the key to the success of an Aboriginal art gallery.

Commercial legitimacy is very different from community legitimacy and is a cause of division among many arts administrators who have no way of verifying the legitimacy of a particular type of Aboriginal art without offending the artist.

Commercial art galleries often “cherry pick” from community art centres – out of a group of 20 artists there may be one artist whose work outshines everyone because of its subject matter, composition or personal story of the artist putting the work in a context that makes it commercially viable in a way that the other artworks produced members of the group is not.

Many artists run initiatives as well as remote art centres for Aboriginal art are the same in that that the success or lack of success that comes with experienced artists exhibiting regularly needs to be part of a constructive critical feedback loop for the newer members.

It is not uncommon to see Sydney based Aboriginal artists praised for their courage and visionary mystical aspects of their work by audiences who are doing this to make themselves feel better about the plight of Aboriginal people in the remote communities. Can you imagine if artists in the different suburbs of Sydney had to run for election to be allowed to paint scenes of Sydney Harbour and portraits of the Sydney community? (Would Ken Done still occupy prime real estate underneath the harbour bridge if this were the case?)

Sydney has a fascinating and largely unknown Aboriginal history that can be told through stone tool artefacts, rock art, archeology and contemporary art yet there is a perception that because the Aboriginal people who live in Sydney today are not descendants of the Eora people who lived in Sydney prior to colonisation "why should their art be any better than other non aboriginal artists who have lived in Sydney their whole lives?". In the context of access to educational support for technical proficiency this is probably true, but this sentiment fails to take into account the community and social aspects of Aboriginal people living in Sydney today and the wider connections that family and history that these artists bring into their work.

Recently there were complaints from members of the Australia council’s indigenous commercial code of conduct committee that the membership of the administering board did not have any Indigenous members on its board.

It’s interesting that Aboriginal artists cop a lot of the blame for corruption in the industry when so few Aboriginal people or communities own and run Sydney based art galleries. The only galleries that are owned by Aboriginal people are in remote communities and are not in any of our capital cities like Melbourne or Sydney.

It is non Indigenous people that are the rogue elements in the industry, it is implied that Aboriginal artists and their susceptibility to corruption should provide the guidelines and frameworks that will be enforced in relation to determining the legitimacy of players in the industry.

It is not Aboriginal gallery owners that are responsible for the illegal practices that initially brought the senate committee to establish and implement a commercial code of conduct. It is the commercial gallery system that is entirely owned and operated by non indigenous stakeholders that have the most to lose from a commercial code of conduct so why is the burden of policing the industry put onto Aboriginal artists and not onto the thousands of non indigenous people that work in the arts industry already?

The most blatant examples of carpet bagging and insider trading were committed by auction houses and fly by night “dealers” selling artworks by established artists to art dealers for prices way higher than what the artist was paid.

It is fair to note that Aboriginal art in particular is one of the most unregulated markets to have existed in recent years. Allegations of corruption have tainted the industry to the point where a senate enquiry was called by the federal government and the Australia Council is to implement a commercial code of conduct that puts it in law that representatives of galleries are to pay artists with money rather than personal favours.

Allegations of corruption in the Aboriginal art industry are racist in the extreme – in 2005 the Australia wheat Board (read Australian Farmers) gave $300 million dollars to Sadam Hussein during a time of war. The AWB was not disbanded and its supporters vilified like what happened with ATSIC in fact the Australian Government at the time increased its financial support of the organisation to ensure administrative transparency.

Why the double standards when a successful Aboriginal industry attempts to regulate itself? The aboriginal communities and artists are the first to be blamed for all that is wrong with the industry. There is nothing remotely on this scale in the administration of Aboriginal Land councils or arts organisations in general yet the commercial art galleries in particular pass the blame onto “Rouge carpet baggers” definition: people other than them doing the same thing.

The disconnection between the Auction houses and high end commercial art galleries is so far from the lives of the people who are sustaining the industry that there is something very wrong with the administrative policies of the federal and state organisations that whose sole existence is to support artists and develop the industry.

For the scale of money involved in the Aboriginal arts industry the fact that it has been so unregulated has allowed profit to influence production in a way that has not sustained the industry.

Aboriginal artists face a contradictory attitude when it comes to commercial representation in Sydney. Both ends of the spectrum (the auction house and investment gallery) are locked into a ethnographic and historical market that is legitimate but has no conection with the everyday lives of the culture they represent.

To further compound the problem the handmade craft/tourism and souvenir market has been outsourced and commercialised by the tourism industry to the point where local producers end up with no financial model of successfully competing with the “Aboriginal style” wholesale mass produced artefacts that can be especially lucrative when at the right place at the right time.

Government arts funding providers will tell you that they spend millions of dollars each year supporting Aboriginal art in New South Wales but when you look at the actual allocation of this money more than 90% of it is allocated to established museums and galleries so that they can add Indigenous content to their existing programming of representing a nationally focused Aboriginal art.

There is no need to rehash the argument for a dedicated Aboriginal museum and gallery in Sydney – no politician will ever touch the issue, we had one for 22 years known as Boomalli and still the funding bodies would ask the organisation every year to argue its case for existence.

The National gallery of Australia will rectify this in 2010 by building ten dedicated permanent exhibition spaces for the purpose of exhibiting their collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. While this is commendable it is fair to say that it will not have the same international exposure as an exhibition space of the same calibre put in Sydney or Melbourne. A tourist art shop in Manly or Bondi will get more vistors in the long term than the galleries in canberra

every state needs an institution like Boomalli to exist as incubators – spaces where market forces or political influences cant shape the day to day operating activities of creating art for arts sake. of encouraging the growth and development of Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander art into a system that is an exemplary model for all Australian artists.

ARI’s and Aboriginal Art centres cannot become complacent when it comes to grants and government arts funding. This type funding needs to be tied to specific projects and not to annual operating budgets as it can create a welfare mentality among organisations that are not encouraged to seek income sources outside of the safe arts grant funding system.

References

- The formation of ATSIC – a national representative body for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (10 dec 1987) ATSIC encouraged the self determination by Aboriginal artists, performers, authors and academics
- The Aboriginal Memorial Ramangining community (d. Mundine 1987–88)
- the national bicentenary acknowledgement that was being planned by a Federal Labour government (1988)
- Magicians de la Terre centre Pompidou Paris (1989)
- The Formation of Boomalli Aboriginal artists co –operative (1987)
- This decade saw the rise of several Aboriginal owned and operated initiatives in media, art and performance such as Boomalli, Bangarra, Black Books, NAISDA, Indigenous Screen Australia

The Political constrction of Aboriginal art in Australia

2009-11-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

This essay is a snapshot of the political construction of Aboriginality in Australiapost 1967 is based on the shared memory of a people, not in the representation of the body of an individual.

It has been said in may contexts that the personal is political however do these political experiences shape the type of art that is commercial y viable? The mix between politics and Aboriginal culture can take many dangerous forms. There is a long history of animosity and antagonism between Aboriginal people and the various governments and their administration of Aboriginal affairs that exists.

In 2007 the racial discrimination act was withheld in Australia to allow the federal government to perform an “intervention” in order to save Aboriginal communities from themselves. At this same there was a senate enquiry into the visual arts and craft sector which has ultimately led to the establishment of the Australia council for the arts Indigenous commercial code of conduct. Regulating a multimillion dollar industry in the interest of creating a sense of fairness between Aboriginal artists Aboriginal communities and the commercial gallery system in Australia

The political achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in modern Australia are not recognised by many sections of the Australian community especially in relation to business administration and property management. The only defining factor on whether an art that represents a people or not is legitimate is whether it as seen as commercially successful in the eyes of "others".

Between the referendum for aboriginal rights in 1967 and the Prime ministers formal acknowledgment of the injustice of the policies of previous governments towards Aboriginal people in 2008 there existed many challenges from those who sought to change the inequitable conditions that many Aboriginal people found themselves living in. The perception of Aboriginal people in the wider Australian community has been largely negative, without there being a unified aboriginal voice to present an alternative.

An interesting reference in recent history is to compare the public reaction between the two formal apologies that were delivered by the federal parliament in 2007 to the stolen generations of Aboriginal people and to the apology to the forgotten generations in 2009

"This week, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull united to deliver moving apologies to the so-called "Forgotten Australians": the hundreds of thousands of people abused in state care, often after being torn from their parents and sent to Australia against their will.

The ceremony recalled a previous moment, when Rudd, soon after winning election, apologised to the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children.
But there was one big difference between the two occasions: when it came to the Forgotten Australians, there was no-one objecting"

Is there a role for non-Aboriginal people in the construction of Aboriginality as a legal and internationally recognised subject? How do Aboriginal people develop a level of regulating the control over the histories that are produced?

In this essay I will show painting as metaphysical history, and photography as anthropological history. Within the different variations of Aboriginal symbolism Different symbolic structures which are opposed to history and the great binaries that divide any social group.

Art as cultural capital becomes non localisable and the relationship between museums and exhibitions develop the ability to transform each other. ‘Art’ is what is found within institutions and sites of legitimate cultural production based on concentrations of capital and geo-political locations.

It could be said that literally anything could be labelled ‘art’, but whether it will be accepted or recognized as art will be an entirely different matter. If the museum is a discourse of art as object, the audience is a discourse of art as theory.

What makes Aboriginal art such a successful medium and platform for cultural interaction and engagement

the dominant discourse of legitimisation is the commercial art market and auction house - is this imposed by state and private institutions such as schools, art galleries, museums, dealers and buyers?

Real art it seems always exists in the past whereas the art of the present is always debatable. Contemporary art is already grounded in the art of the past, which provides a locality for the intensive practice of art as a spatial extension. Art as an object in itself is no longer necessary; all that is required is the objective standards of quality and quantity.

There is no individual subjectivity within the most commercially succsful sales of Aboriginal art.

When thinking of art as an object the individual does not automatically assume the role of a subject. It is simply the case that the majority of the audience will have control over the majority of subjectivity produced?

The experiences of Aboriginal Australia and its participation with world history, art is not the only possible way of demonstrating the difference between subjectivity produced by Aboriginal art and Aboriginality as experienced by an individual artist. expose dominant power relationships but most importantly, provide examples of the idea that subjectivity is politically constructed by the individuals’ relationship to the objectives of the dominant state apparatus.

Art and academic theory of art have not always nor will they ever be the same thing.

Contemporary arts do not necessarily rely on an object at all. Conceptual art is purely about ideas and the nature of thought itself. It is not the idea implicit in the artwork, which is the ‘cause’ of a specific subjectivity; it is the subjectivity itself which is the ‘cause’ of the idea.

At which stage does an individual take control over the possible choices of subjective positions? The placing of the object in a gallery or a museum will create an associated idea that ‘ other people think this is art’. The majority of people will always desire the desires of others.

Indirectly, politics and art have several shared components; economic protection, aesthetic conservatism and harnessing of the social engineering forces which have shaped the history of Australian artists as well as Australian Aboriginals.

Aboriginal artists are no different to Australian Artists. In much the same way early Australian artists sought their own Australian identity unique but not separate from the trends and fashions of European and American art, Aboriginal artists are today in a similar position of constructing their own identity.

The emergence and continuing production of Aboriginal Art is a turning point in the cultural production of subjectivity in Australia.

The internationalisation of Aboriginal art is synonymous with the capitalization of Aboriginal art. The production of art is essential to the production of subjectivity. Within the context of history and photography the subjective positioning of Aboriginality is going through continual change. The production of the subject through text and the production of the subject through images will offer examples about the process of how subjects are created through the production of art.

Within Australian political history Aboriginal people had been denied involvement in the production of their own political voice until 1967. Aboriginal art flourished in the period after 1967 partly because of the success of Albert Namatjira but also because of the changing social conditions that were sweeping the world, reaching remote stations in Australia such as Papunya and Hermansburg. A perceptual shift occurred between Aboriginal Australians and the state apparatus. Art that has been produced from this period onwards has indicated how this process has been experienced.

The idea of the Australian Aboriginal history which has existed within itself but which also has a place within the realm of world history.

Art is not necessarily a visual space but can be a sensory experience that gives an individual an understanding of the world as experienced by others. This space is not reducible to the canvas but is more of an event, where many separate factors are needed to uniquely identify objects and subjects within a particular cultural context.

“Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land surveying and map making, even of countries yet to come”

Delueze

In modern world history, war has played a larger role than art in producing objects and ideas that have facilitated cultural thought and expression. Many modern conveniences are the by-products of military planning and defense force budgets. Throughout history, the invention and introduction of more powerful weapons have shaped the politics of the nation state and geographic maps of the world.

Art is perhaps recognized as the power of ideas.

Hitlers claims that many of the modern artists of the time were ‘degenerate’ artists are an example of a fascist aesthetic influencing cultural production.

In many ways, the war artist has occupied a similar position to that of the contemporary Aboriginal artist. The war artist produces art objects for the purpose of constructing and identifying with a specific subjects’ nationalism.

Many political notions of Aboriginality expressed through contemporary art directly challenge the Australian mythological relationship to the land.

“In Fascism, as Benjamin has demonstrated, the political remains as a site for determinate judgement, by analogy with the determinate judgements of the beautiful which may be made about art. The political is conceived in terms of criteria which are claimed to be drawn from art (the ugly should be eliminated).”

The line between a weapon and a tool can be determined by its extension into the real world; hammers knives, and ropes have been building blocks as well as repressive tools in the shaping of cultural expression. Like the surgeon’s knife, which cuts as it heals; our modern society has grown out of military strategy as much as human endeavour.

The subjectivity produced by Aboriginal art is not a war machine in military terminology, but an abstract machine producing flows of symbols and images outside of state based thought. It makes connections and produces flows that state based thought systems do not recognize.

Dominant practices of Technique, style, and artistic forms of expression are philosophies of the state. Visual arts practice is a performative space where ideas are projected and deflected. The artwork and the associated time period, which the artist expresses, is an abstract interpretation of the present.

The use of photography for social documentation affected another essential factor in the production of artworks – patronage. Portraits were now attainable by the working class, affecting the artists’ privileged role documenting aristocracy. Whether artists were conscious of it or not, the use and abuse of history is evident in all styles of modernist and contemporary art. Perhaps this is why the political philosophy of art centres on the problem of legitimacy.

It would seem most people are comfortable accepting paintings rather than photographs as art. The history of painting has a broader subjective positioning available in terms of the production of cultural capital. Painting is more obtuse than photography whose subjective positioning is more precise and accurate. Photography is an internalising narrative. The eyes of the photographer are suggested to be in a similar positioning to that of the spectator.

The idea that an artwork has a particular value because it cannot be replaced is very flexible in post-modern painting and photography. The experiences in the artists’ life, which led them to paint this particular image at this particular time, plot the subjectivity of the artist in a way that can never be repeated. The artwork itself can very easily be reproduced. It is the individuality of the artist that legitimises a particular artwork.

How is post-modern art a type of cultural criticism? Post modernism can be described as a revision of modernism. A re thinking of the grand narratives and utopian promises of social history as expressed through art in the 20th century. That Aboriginal art is being recognized as a fine art has only properly happened within the last 25 years – apparently after modernism had ended. Aboriginal art has therefore played a role in defining postmodernism in Australia.

The geographic demarcation that is optically defined by the Greenwich meridian is the first example of a striation of the earth through the universal imposition of longitude and latitude. By 1788 all distances on the globe were measured from Greenwich meridian.

The reterritorialisation of geographic regions caused a significant part of the displacement and confusion Aboriginal people felt as they continued to live in their traditional cultural milieu. Unbeknown to the Aborigines the landscape had metaphysically changed forever. Previously the language spoken by the members of the tribe defined Pre-colonial tribal and geographic regions. The individual belonging to a particular regionally defined territoriality and subjectivity.

Aboriginal Australians were continually imposed upon by the dominant striated perspective of modernism until their haptic nomadic way of life was replaced by the building blocks of capitalist society - fences, cages, chains, and guns. Aboriginal people were reterritorialised and divided from their kinship groups to live on missions and stations. They became the unrecognised domestic help and farm hands – unpaid disrespected and continually driven away from any valuable or even usable space which would allow them to continue uninterrupted their ancestral cultural practices.

Imposing new codes of language and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist processes that were used to effect the processes were not brought into question themselves.

“Technology is a process of machinic relations, an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs. Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to be come coextensive with the fields of nature history and society.”

Phillip Goodchilde

Capitalism is a perfect example of history operating as a counter memory. An object or desire is invested with cultural capital based upon its quantifiable or qualifyable elements.

Deleuze and Guattari note the work of Pierre Clastres whose work dealing with pre state societies they feel to be underrated. They note nomad societies are not pre state societies, but groups who ward off the formation of the state at every possibility. It is not that Aboriginal Australia lacked a national identity but that they refuse such a totalitarian concept.

The existence of a purely national art is a concept that is irrelevant to most contemporary artists. Ian McClean differentiates between the picturesque and the sublime in landscape representation – picturesque refers to an inhabited and cultivated landscape. Because the picturesque created a synthesis of nature and culture, it was the ideal aesthetic for representing the redemptive scene sought by colonization.

Aboriginal art is anti picturesque representation.

A question worth asking at this stage is ‘how is it possible to include Aboriginal art and Australian art in the same cultural context when they can be seen to be telling different versions of the same story? How is it possible for non-Aboriginal artists to portray Aboriginality outside of a collaborative context?

There is no simple dualism between Aboriginal and Australian art that is used to categorize a particular work. How is it possible to break down the perceived separation between Aboriginal and Australian art into descriptive aesthetic terms. In this way art history is like a cultural psychoanalysis.

Aboriginal societies aesthetics operated in a system that used art as a type of graphism, pictorially using images and symbols to demonstrate perceptions and ideas (quantities). Whereas western art aesthetics could be thought more as a progressive statistical aggregate of qualities.

Terms and labels are temporal; they are like codes shared between a sender and a receiver. How an audience receives an artwork can be influenced by varied factors. An artwork’s interpretation may change several times during the artwork’s existence, conversely some artworks are deliberately created to be re interpreted, and some that will be perpetually re-interpreted (re-territorialised).

‘Cultural capital’ is the ability to read and understand cultural codes; but this ability and hence cultural capital is not distributed equally amongst social classes. A work of art has interest and meaning only for those who posses cultural capital and can read the codes into which it is encoded … Identity is largely a ‘social imaginary’, which divides various cultural groups into ‘imagined communities’ by bonding them together in literary and visual narration’s located in territory, history, and memory.

I would like to borrow ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the notion of cultural and relate the production of cultural capital with art production. Art is not always metaphor; art renders visible the forces of chaos continually surrounding us, and in which we live in. Art can produce maps, guides, and warnings to possible future abstract relations.

Freud, Darwin, and Marx and interestingly, these among many other prominent philosophers of the state referenced the Australian Aboriginal to reinforce their notions of primitivism. These early 20th century giants among philosophers of the state shared a unique fascination with primitivism and the desires and lifestyles of those unfortunate enough to be labelled tribal or from stateless societies.

Art does not provide us with a universal truth; there is no universal context. All thought is localizable to a particular space, time, and combination of the two. State philosophy is a belief that knowledge can be gained from reason. A belief that a transcendent (metaphoric or subliminal) device will act as a point of Subjectification allowing an individual to “know” concepts, read images, and combines the two as ideas.

How much they are learned and appreciated by others is a matter of value. If we say that quality is the effect of quantity over time, we could say that accumulations of particular knowledge would grow in environments conducive to particular growth. The qualities of the image are not necessarily aesthetic. Qualities are the properties that define an essential aspect of the image.

I would like to propose that in any case, Aboriginal art is more effective than the English language in expressing notions of Aboriginality. Within the context of the English language, 26 phonetic symbols can be re-territorialised into quantum theory, or the complete works of Shakespeare.

Why is it problematic to understand that the graphism of Aboriginal art (dots and rark) is referring to knowledge and history that is as complex and significant?

Photography is perhaps the shared visual perspective where the aesthetic differences between Aboriginal and western art are flattened out. With the proper consultation, non- indigenous people have access to representations of Aboriginality free of repressive subjectivities.

Traditional photography is characterized as being distinctly landscape or portraiture. The photographer’s mechanical eye could reproduce images that were pure constructs most often re creations of famous events. Ironically in some cases, what many people remember as historical events were actually dramatic recreations staged for the camera.

In contemporary photography, it is standard for the photographer to allow his subjects to choose how they wish to be portrayed. The subject selects the background or objects they wish to be associated with in the image, as well as the subject having the final say of which images are exhibited.

This freedom of subjective positioning has not always been the case. In a post-modern reading of the point of Subjectification and the vanishing point, they can be seen to rigidly express a fixed subjectivity. During renaissance painting, they were often merged with the face of Christ being the point of Subjectification through which everything else in the painting was subordinated.

Today it would be used more as a stylistic device, but in Renaissance art the vanishing point and the point of Subjectification were often merged. The point being to suggest a direct line between the viewer (subject) Christ (artwork) and god (transcendental signifier). The point of Subjectification can also be alluded to metaphorically by the positioning of lines of sight. Apart from this some artists have suggested the crucifix like quality of hanging artworks on the wall. The portrait providing the vertical and the landscape the horizontal for the Greenwich meridian like plotting of Christian subjectivity.

A great many Artists living in Australia deal with ideas of belonging and not fitting into the dominant modes of cultural expression in Australia. There are similarities between the experience of migrants and the experience of Aboriginal people in that they both existed outside the heterogeneous dominant philosophy of the state. I would describe these as post modern experiences as they produce new ideas of Australian identity while at the same time while at the same time rejecting traditional assumptions about art and cultural identity.

There is no universal context (yet) to measure the quality of one art object and compare it to any other existing artwork, which does not rely on the history if the intermediary (subject) being involved.

Deleuze and Guttari in the smooth and the striated, example the difference between the smooth and the striated as the difference between the haptic and the optic. Put simply these terms refers to the distance between the subject and the perceived object. The close range perspective is that of the haptic. Haptic can refer to the tactile but also to the tracings where your vision is so close to the perceived object it fills the entire space of vision. No grounding, no vanishing point, no edges or surroundings.

I have previously set up a dualism between Aboriginal art (smooth space/haptic) and what I have referred to as striated, metric or linear art (striated/optic). The opposite of the haptic is the optic. Optic space is best described as linear perspective or panorama, it always contains the universal limit of the vanishing point. Haptic is the space of the near seer’s, optic is the perspective of the far seer’s.

In Aboriginal art a symbol may be open to several interpretations. Concentric circles provide a good example; they could refer to growth rings in the tree or the growth rings in the sand as the seed grows into a tree. It may refer to a water hole or the flow of water over time. Smooth space art deals with movements over time, the graphs of events rather than signs and unitary signifiers.

The difference between haptic and optic is the difference between the optic linear perspective’s subordination to the vanishing point, and the haptic, which is subordinated to its proximity to the real or the actual. This is the fundamental difference, which these two artistic perspectives express.

Aboriginal art does not necessarily challenge capitalist technology. In a post-modern way, it criticizes without destroying. Deluze and Guattari claim that with 20/20 hindsight capitalist technology has become Retroactively projected to be co-extensive with the fields of nature history and society. Therefore, it is possible to escape the dichotomy of Aboriginal art and non-Aboriginal art in favour of opening out onto a new economic plane of immanence.

Aboriginal art denies the codes that capitalist technology uses to over code all flows of exchange production and recording and thus presents a perspective which is closer to the lived real experiences of individuals and the society they are situated in.

“Art therefore has a role analogous to psychoanalysis: It aims to bring the social unconscious into consciousness by making the recipient feel the implicit presuppositions that are at work in various social situations.”

Phillip Goodechild

There is representation from within an Aboriginal discourse, and representation of the Aboriginal discourse. Through representation, Abstract and ideological ideas are given concrete form. Representation from different perspectives can be used to demonstrate and affect other perspectives.

Capitalism deterritorialises Aboriginality by subverting the traditional roles that would limit and control social relations and productions (e.g. kinship, language, and geography). Capitalism reduces all social relations to universal equivalence. Capitalist technology itself has falsely been thought of as a natural process – the “progression” from tribal to despotic to capitalist society.

If technology is a process of machinic relations, Aboriginal Art is an abstract machine component, in the economic production of art, in the sense that it is a process of the deterritorialisation of pre capitalist Aboriginal Australia. This was achieved by means of the imposition of a new symbolic order, Aboriginality is therefore reterritorialised within present day capitalist society.
Everyone desires the desires of others. The individual is the desire of others. There is no individual.

“The problem is that the self isn’t real. The self is a necessary illusion that allows us to function in time, to create law, morality, art and the rest of civilization. But it was never meant to save us from death, or imbue our lives with meaning and purpose. The self is the root of selfishness, and selfishness is what makes us unhappy. Too much concentration on ourselves makes us anxious, because the self cannot support the weight. That is the difference between the self and the soul.”

David Samuels

“Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to account for so called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central state apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institutions.”

Deleuze and Guattari

Desire is social rather than familial. Desire is learnt through experiences within the external world. The world makes our mind up for us. Desire is the underlying motivational force in the individual, within the experiences in their early childhood and in their family life.

Desire explains how the individuals relationship to their Mother, Father and authority figures is played out in micro scale, within the family unit and childhood. And the how these experiences can then express themselves in the macro scale of the behaviour of the individual within the authoritarian institutions of the socius; school, office, army, factory, hospital, prison. The mechanosphere. A medical, scientific, sexual, socio, technological, chemical, militarial, industrial, capitalistic machinic arrangement. The world before our eyes and senses is the external collective consciousness that our subconscious connects into.

How does desire progress from the familial to the social?

The focus on the self by both the individual and their society is primarily concerned with sub - individual body parts and their supra - individual connection because these processes are a qualitative and quantifiable figurative object that can be used by paranoid institutional agencies to measure individuals and regulate their desire.

The production of desire is a question of why do we do what we do, what are the drives, motivations and forces behind all of our everyday actions. There is no such thing as fate. Consciousness is the product of unconsciousness. Speech is the product of memory. Language is the product of history.

Multiplicity, creation and desire are the principal elements of the social unconsciousness for D & G.

Desire is a primary force rather than a secondary goal. Pleasure and happiness is a by-product, desire is immediate and more profound than pleasure. Desire is co-extensive with the individual and the collective social energy. Desire is a will to power the external world by de-intensifying the internal self.
Desire is a material it is not imaginary. Desire is indifferent to personal identity or linguistic expression. Desire is pure multiplicity independent of any unity. Desire is immanent to a plane that it does not pre-exist.

Deleuze and Guttari divide the experience of the socius and the individual into three interconnecting planes of consistency.

3 TYPES OF DESIRING PRODUCTION
SUPRA- INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
Social interconnections “this is where “lack” “scarcity” is created
Society, the world, external, you

INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
tc \l5 “INDIVIDUAL LEVELSelf or ego and all it’s guises (this is where lack is lived)
Me, myself and I, the body.
tc \l5 “self or ego and all it’s guises (this is where lack is lived)

SUB INDIVIDUAL LEVEL / ELEMENTAL LEVEL
Bodily parts and other fragments
Virus’, language, molecules, matter. Internal

A plane of interconnections at the sub-individual level gives a body consistency enough for the individual to connect with the supra individual level of the external world.

To use a political analogy we would look at the three assemblages above as being federal, state and local government. The three parts intermix to construct the nation state (self) and the individual particular to a specific environment.
Desiring Production - nothing that involves concrete content or substance lacks anything, psychoanalysis bases desire on a perceived lack. Freudianism focus is on the individual level. Marxism focus is on supra – individual. Science Fiction focuses on the sub individual

DELUZE and GUTTARI totally leave out the individual level and work with a single realm of desiring production. Much like the abolition of State government would increase federal and local government through placing responsibility on the individual within the commonwealth to regulate their own desire.

Never trust a triangle. Dualism’s and paradigms are bad enough. The most useful form of desiring production is by accelerating a multiplicity of possibilities that crack open both society and the individuals desire to repress themselves and others.
Freud elaborated a method of restricting, regulating desire within the family unit. The Oedipal complex is a triangular family structure which psychoanalysis reinforces within its interpretation of the subject. The Oedipal triangle is a rivalry and is set up in the family in a way in which one part plays against the two-thirds. Through Jealousy or fear.

The Oedipus complex replays itself in all types of social relations. At work, whether through fraternal office rivalries or the authoritative imperatives of the big boss. Many other examples are possible. The triangulation of desire exists in all types of rivalries. Another embodiment is where one part of the triangle can know the Oedipal structure and play against the other two parts for the greater good of all three. Guilt - law.

Knowledge of Oedipalisation and how to Oedopolize is first learnt in the family and is reproduced during different situations in social life. Take the duality between Psychoanalysis and institutions. An orphan or the child of a single parent has historically suffered the stigma of bastardisation. This reinforces pre existing methods of desiring production rather than breaking them by always reconstituting the subject within the family as being a part of the society of the family that is the dominant cultural code.

The production and reading of cultural code and cultural capital. The impositions of the dominant cultural codes are prostheticaly imposed on the individual during early childhood. Things like nursery rhymes, times tables, playgrounds etc. all introduce the child to cultural codes and the different ways an individual accepts or rejects reading and manipulating them. Coupled with the child’s home life where they are learning the codes of the family unit the child forms ideas about the individual and about the limits to experience and the consequences of different actions and thoughts.

Imposing new codes of languages and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist process itself was used to effect these changes and was not brought into question itself. Technology is a process of machinic relations; an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs will describe art as a process of machinic relations. Capitalist technology is retroactively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history and society. Known afterwards as retrospective projection.

Capitalist technology is retroactively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history, and society. Further, explain the re-territorialization of geographic regional languages and social relations that were imposed on Aboriginal people through capitalist technology.

Cultural objects have always work as facilitators of desire. A weapon or tool is a physical extension of an embodied idea. The freeing of the hand was similar to the freeing of the face. The hand ad voice become separate from each other. The free hand allowed symbols to be modified and manipulated. Technologies became the substance of the content matter made by the hand.

The anthropomorphic strata

The voice could make a range of sounds which had a form imposed through the sequencing of sounds. Words became the expressive substance that could represent things.

A collective semiotic machine forms as the product of both hand and voice to construct a machined arrangement or a regime of signs. There are always different ways of controlling the flows, of machining them.
A semiotic machine and collective enunciation are examples of abstract machines withdrawn from an event. Not necessarily metaphysical or transcending the event

THE DETERRITORIALISATION/ RE-TERRITORIALISATION OF DESIRE

Capitalism reduces all social relations to universal equivalency (currency, gold). Capitalism itself was a universal equivalent.
Capitalism deterritorialises desire by over coding traditional roles, ideas and laws that limit and control existing social relations and productions. (E.g. kinship roles)

Capitalism deterritorialises the old class structures (religious, traditional, folk) and then reterritorialises them in the form of capital currency and value. Creating signs and semiotic chains reduced to the dominant cultural code of capital.
Capitalism deterritorialises schizophrenic fluxes, scraps of things like body parts machines and factories and constructs assemblages that are then re-territorialzed in a neurotic Oedipal triangle. Triangles leave no positive way of acting on desire and will always end up lost in an internal involution towards itself.

DESIRING PRODUCTION

The assemblage and production of language is where the ideas of needs (of food warmth and nourishment) transform into language. Language is constructed in order to fill a lack created by the need for nourishment, warmth filling a void.
Desire will exist in the inability of language to express a need or want. We can never achieve what we desire as desire will be continually replaced, desire will always exist as long as there is a want or need. Desire is a flow, it cannot be blocked or stopped. Desire can be diverted internally through repression or flow externally through expression. We can sometimes choose which external stimuli we respond to and sometimes we cant. Positive desiring production is to be aware of the process, to watch what is happening, to engage with difference rather than negating it. Putting trust in ideological constructions alone can lead one into a false sense of security. A theo-retical (logical?) reliance on text rather than the spoken word will lead to assemblages favoring one aspect of the binary.

There is a proliferation in our language (possibly through the influence of advertising) of endless signifiers where lack is there only use value. The products lack a home, a family, or the home or family lacks a product, directly proportional to the liability the advertising company is legally bound to. Meaning advertising has no effect when they are selling petro-chemicals, alcohol or legal drugs yet to business and government who pay billions of dollars worldwide for advertisements they are priceless.

Some might think of the history of advertising as a tautology because the only way to discern between the two is be actively working in either of these
The reterritorialisation of geographic regions was a significant part of the confusion Aboriginal people faced when trying to continue living in their traditional cultural milieu. Pre-colonial Aboriginal boundaries were limited by the amount of members in the tribe. The persons who spoke a particular language rather than the colonial method of mapping geographic locations signified Territorial limits.

Imposing new codes of languages and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist process used to effect these changes was not brought into question itself. Technology is a process of machinic relations an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs will describe art as a process of machinic relations. Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history and society.

Aboriginal art deals with subjects that are timeless (compared to western conceptions of “time” and “history”.

The discourse of Aboriginal art and the other flows/discourses it intersects, reflects or generates, (Language, politics, ecology, familial relationships)
“ Art galleries serve the cultivated elite class, and this privilege is legitimized by claiming a distinction between good and vulgar taste, legitimate and illegitimate styles. Aesthetic judgements do not follow some kind of objective autonomous aesthetic logic, they substitute distinctions of taste for class distinctions and thereby fortify the divisions between classes and assert the right of the ruling class to sanction their authority over other classes.

Bourdier uses an economic metaphor to make his point.

“Cultural capital is the ability to read and understand cultural codes; but this ability, and hence cultural capital is not distributed equally amongst social classes”

The working classes have little cultural capital and systematically lose out in the battle for cultural power. When cultural capital is invested in the exercise of taste it yields both a high profit both for those that posses it and a “profit in legitimacy” which is the justification of the ruling class to be the ruling class.
A work of art has interest and meaning only for those who posses cultural capital and can read the codes into which it is encoded.

Also, look at aboriginal art in the sense that it is a smooth space that is reimparted by the striated discourse of western art and science.
The first interpretations of Aboriginal art (from the perspective of the non-Aboriginal) were when it was located with anthropological discourses. Anthropologists and archaeologists “discovered” Aboriginal rock carvings and paintings as well as noting descriptions on the insides of clothing or inside bark huts, artifacts and ceremonial body painting as a type of “primitive art”. These markings were not even regarded as a primitive form of art, signs/symbols, and language.

These early art forms were exhibited in museums as examples of traditional Aboriginality “broken remnants of a dead culture” they served no aesthetic purpose except to educate white people how technologically advanced they were. These reinforced ideas of what is the proper version of society and what is primitive gone forgotten a dark corner in the history of the mind.

Outlines exhibition Macleay Museum

2009-11-04T21:40:00.001-08:00

Sydney is home to one of the largest outdoor rock art sites in Australia, and the largest population of Aboriginal people anywhere. Across Aboriginal Australia is a great diversity of art and belief practices. This exhibition brings together painting tools, ochres, shields, spears and clubs that all have their provenance in Aboriginal language regions of New South Wales, such as the Bundjulung, Wiradjuri and Dharug. The exhibition also includes stone tool artefacts from the Penrith lakes area thought to be around 15,000 years old.

From the deep past to today the exhibition highlights the continuing artistic traditions of Aboriginal people of New South Wales.

This exhibition brings together painting tools, ochres, stone tool artefacts, shields, spears and clubs that all have their provenience in the regions of NSW. The stone tool artefacts in this exhibition provide grounding for evidence of millennia of Aboriginal cultural practice in the region of NSW. This exhibition aims to highlight the largely untold story that these objects can tell us about the regional knowledge's of NSW and their traditional custodians.

On level 2 of the stairway into the Macleay Museum is a cast of an Aboriginal rock carving from the Hornsby area of North Western Sydney (FIGURE 1). There were many thousands of existing rock art sites in Sydney and today there are still some publicly accessible sites. However this cast is of a rock art site that was destroyed for a road that was to be built. Its presence acts as a reminder of the many thousands more that have been destroyed over the last two centuries in Sydney.

The title of the exhibition "Outlines" is drawn from the two different styles of art that are most predominant in the region we know as New South Wales today. Petroglyphs (rock carvings) and dendroglyphs (tree Carvings).

Ornamentation, decoration and the transformation of practical everyday items into cultural practices that span generations of Aboriginal people are all evident in the objects on display in this exhibition. In an ethno botanical context there is much more that can be learned and discovered about the traditional knowledge's or medicinal purposes that these artefacts give evidence to.

Aboriginal art is the largest art movement in recent Australian history; Aboriginal art has been one of the most successful economic strategies employed by Aboriginal people in Australia to communicate in their own with National and international communities. The objects in this exhibition where originally collected in an ethnographic or anthropologic classificatory context that did not value the meanings that these objects held for the people that owned them. Modern museum and cultural studies have created proactive strategies that engage with Indigenous communities on their own terms and highlight the priority of first Australians having a first decision as to the extended interpretation or public presentation of these objects and artefacts.

This exhibition also aims to increase awareness about the art that existed in New South Wales and engaging community members to bring their own knowledge of these objects and materials in an effort to increase awareness of the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal art production in New south Wales today.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members are strongly encouraged to bring their interpretations and understanding of the meanings associated with these objects to the Macleay Museum.

Please note that all descriptive terms for objects in this exhibition have been described with Dharug (EORA) language which is specific to the Sydney Region and does not indicate the language that was used to describe these objects in their place of production.

Bundjulung

Coraki

The objects in this selection were presented by the Bundjulung people of the North East coast of New South Wales to Hugh James. James worked closely with New South Wales Government Chemist, Arthur Penfold developing technologies now associated with the development of an antiseptic produced from the cultivation of the tea tree plant.

The development of this industry essentially transformed (without any open attribution) information that was definitely known to the local Bundjulung people as having the medicinal properties of an antiseptic. The melaleuca tree (ti tree) is one of the largest industries in the Ballina region today. It appears that Hugh James had an amicable relationship with the local Bundjulung people as he was presented with a set of weapons made in specifically for him that demonstrated the tradition techniques of the Bundjulung people from the area.

The plant that this oil is made from is also casually referred to as Cabbage tree and Cabbage tree Island is the name of the mission that Aboriginal people in the Ballina region were moved onto in the 1890's. Whyralla and Coriki are areas where the Bundgulung people of the far north coast were displaced as the nearby urban centres of Lismore and Ballina grew. According to Bundjalung oral tradition, during the 1890s a group of Aboriginal people in north-eastern New South Wales (NSW) walked from Wyrallah near Lismore and crossed to Cabbage Tree Island. They aimed to take possession of the land and clear the thick scrub to begin cane farming.

... There's a real big fig tree there, that used to be there, when the boats used to come into the Ballina Harbour here, but the fig tree was their guide, way they'd see it from out at sea, the really huge fig tree on top of the hill. Well, the trees up there now, they used to camp around there and also at Wyrallah, they had a big bora ring at Wyrallah and Tuckean swamp. They used to live down at Tuckean swamp there, a lot of Aborigines, but then they came down this way, down near Cabbage Tree.''

Uncle Lewis Cook, interview 26 January 2005, Boundary Creek

For thousands of years the Bundjalung Aborigines from the north coast of NSW used Tea Tree as a medicine. The crushed leaves of Tea Tree were inhaled to treat coughs and colds, or were sprinkled on wounds after which a poultice was applied. In addition, Tea Tree leaves were soaked to make an infusion to treat sore throats or skin ailments

(Low, 1990; Shemesh & Mayo, 1991).

Wiradjuri / Kamilaroi

Murrumbidgee

This Parrying shield is from the Murrumbidgee River region of NSW, artist Roy Kennedy grew up on the Warrengesda mission during this period and many of his works focus on his memories of growing up on the Murrumbidgee River. This river separated two missions and Roy's father lived on one mission while his mother was made to live on the other. The Murrumbidgee River features strongly in the work of contemporary artist Roy Kennedy.

Kennedy's work rare memories of life growing up on the missions and reserves of the Darling River region in the 1930's and 40's. These objects are exhibited side by side to show that the stylistic influence of tradition cultural objects held by museums can provide interesting reference material for practicing artists.

Carved trees are becoming rarer in NSW as trees decay and fall over or are burnt. Aboriginal people used carved trees to mark burial and ceremonial sites. Usually a section of the bark of the tree was removed and a carving made on the exposed wood. These trees are still significant to particular Aboriginal groups.

These artworks by artist Roy Kennedy depict memories of his life growing up in places such as the Warangesda mission and the many activities that centred on the Murrumbidgee river

Artworks by Roy Kennedy in this exhibition include

Nulla Nullan

Warialda

Warialda is an area that sits in between the traditional language boundaries of the western Bundjulung and the Eastern Kamilaroi language groups of Northern NSW. This selection of ochres, pigments and ironstone show a brief glimpse at the artistic palate of the NSW region of the Gamilaraay. They are specifically from the town of Warialda and were presented to the university of Sydney Museums by Thelma Bush. The colour palette of these pigments ranges from yellow, umber, ochre, red, orange and purple. White clay was also used a pigment but is not from the same ironstone source as this selection of objects.

Painting existed in New South Wales on bodies, shields and on rock surfaces evidence of this was recently found in the Hawkesbury region of NSW with representational Charcoal paintings of a eagles dated at several thousands of years old.

The grinding stone in this exhibit also references the utilitarian purposes of these artefacts grinding stones were not only used in the production of food such as the grinding of seeds or root vegetable but also in the grounding of ochres to produce pigment.

Background: One of the earliest technologies that humans invented was the making of paint. By using different coloured earth, or grinding soft rocks to a powder, early people could make pictures of different colours. The first use of minerals was for cave painting. The Egyptians used minerals in their cosmetics and for tomb painting. Australian Aboriginal painters used earth colours - reds, browns, and yellows, black and white - from ochres and other minerals. Early humans used coloured pigments removed from the earth to paint their bodies and implements, and the caves in which they lived. Graves unearthed by archaeologists showed bodies covered in red pigment. Red was a colour associated with blood and symbolised life's meaning and end. The word haematite is derived from the Greek word haema meaning blood. As iron oxide (haematite) did not fade unlike vegetable dyes, people sought and mined the red pigment - haematite. (source HSC online).

It is also interesting to note that on the 21^st of september 2009 the town of Moree (around 80 Kilometres from Warialda) held a corroboree Yanay to Gamilaraay, This particular type of ceremony had not been publicly held in New South Wales since 1938. On the 23^rd September 2009 one of the largest dust storms in recorded history swept over large parts of the entire eastern coast line of NSW between Sydney and Brisbane – dancing up a storm perhaps?

Giba (ke-ba) stone or rock

Stone Tool artefact from the Dharug

(Western Sydney/Penrith Lakes region)

Macleay Museum Object # 85-5-82-4 (above)

"A pebble chopper found in situ at the base of the gravels, when pumping allowed inspection below the water table and the discovery of bog-preserved logs nearby (Stockton and Holland 1974:65). These were then dated to about 30,000 B.P. Subsequent work on the geomorphology of the terrace by Nanson and Young showed that the dated samples had been contaminated with younger carbon in the ground water" (Nanson et al. 1987).

The modified pebble (object 85-5-82-4) which is shown above is a worked uniface pebble (presumably incipient or unfinished) which was interpreted as having being flaked with the intention of forming a chopper tool. This pebble is Figure 7a in Stockton and Holland (1974) and Figure 5a Nanson, Young and Stockton (1987). Stockton and Holland (1974, p. 52) described this as a flat pebble of weathered rhyolite, measuring 12 x 10 x 3 cm, with three flakes dislodged by conchoidal fracture, one overlapping, in a series on one face along a straight 7 cm side.

They stated that "obvious pitting from age covers all surfaces (cortex, flake faces and ridges)" The thirteen or more items from the gravel bed at Upper Castlereagh which are in the Macleay Museum' Stockton collection as broken-up pebbles and cobbles of a variety of rock types include the above core of large broken porphyry clast (cobble) that has been 'smashed' in a number of places. (Object 85.5.82.9) This discovery at Upper Castlereagh discovery was made by Fr Eugene Stockton, and it has been published on by him and others.

The Triumph of the Anti-Heroic

2009-01-31T16:50:00.000-08:00

Surf Culture in Australia is a social abstraction derived from all classes with a shared use of one of the largest body of water on earth - the Pacific ocean. In a simular way to the experience of Aboriginal arts challenges to the dominant Australian art establishment over the past quarter of a century surf culture was a challenge to the conservative traditional authority systems tha t administered Australian culture prior to the 1960's.

The post war period (from 1945 - 1967) saw Austaralian people tentatively challenging the moral disciplines that shaped most of Australian society through the relaxing of conservative social values. It wsn't until the 1950's that youth culture in Australia publicly emvraced the the popular cultural influences of 1950's america and renounced the traditional bond with the Brittish colonial syatem that had sustained the developemt of Australian art and academia.

James dean and Marilyn Monroe celebration of delinquency and utopian thinking athat has allegedley radically transformed social relations that excluded practicaly anyone who was not white middle class reasonable man as defind in the legal system.

The social landscape in Australia became charged with an energy that willed a modern engagement with Aboriginal Australia and supported (certainly not unanimously but it can be said that there have been non Indigenous people all periods of post colonisation Australian history that did not support the decisions made and dominant positions in regards to decisions made regarding intercultural relations between Aboriginal people and the colony.

In the same way that freestyle swimming was once known as the australian crawl there are indigenous practices that have been appropriated by non Aboriginal australia in ways that have profoundly changed the way people have engaged with the environment that they live in.

Artists in contemporary society have the same ability of being able to create information that influences the way people think about issues that have been presented to them from different contexts such as politics or history.

The philosophy of this visual experience is that the human is not separate from the landscape – they are constantly shaping and interacting with each other. This perceptual shift allowed many people to understand the experience of the representation of the landscape by Aboriginal artists on their own terms. Aboriginal Art is one of the first times that non Aboriginal people have “seen” Aboriginal people in a purely Australian context

A mythology of the Australian continent existed in the imaginations of many cultures in Europe, the pacific and Asia. Bernard Smith in His work “European Visions” clearly charts the existence of the Antipodes in the philosophy and literature from the Greeks to the British and more.

Recognition of other international experiences by the Dutch, Spanish, Indonesian or Chinese explorers and their experiences prior to British colonisation have only recently been explored in greater depth by museums and cultural studies projects and are changing Australians perspective of its place in the international history of the world free from colonialist, Nationalist agendas that limit recognition of non dominant histories and perspectives.

Contemporary Australian art has embraced the addition of Aboriginal perspectives of things like landscape, social relations and local histories. Aboriginal art has also empowered Aboriginal people to communicate ideas with each other through visual experiences and not relying on the English language or a knowledge of the history of western art, this is the type of non verbal system with is more in tune with the Aboriginal oral histories which have survived the colonisation experience and provided a link for Modern Aboriginal people to there Traditional cultural histories.

exhibition review - Ngadhu, Ngulili, Ngeaninyagu. A personal History of Aboriginal Art in the Premier State

2009-01-18T19:30:00.000-08:00

Exhibition information with images

This exhibition is the second statewide artistic survey curated by Djon Mundine that has been exhibited at Campbelltown Arts Center in recent years. Djon Mundine is one of the few curators who has both the expertise and first hand knowledge of the history and development of Aboriginal art in Australia to dare attempt such a broad and complex objective of a curatorial survey based on the simple premise of Aboriginal artists born in NSW.

As the title suggests, this exhibition is a personal selection from what would probably be thousands of Aboriginal artists that have connections both personal and artistic to the state of NSW. The show succeeds in showing the audience that the art of Aboriginal people in NSW is mature and significant, yet also contradictory and isolated from the more recognizable forms of what is known as Aboriginal art in Australia.

To attempt to define art from the region known as NSW today is to bring together many diverse nations that prior to colonisation had very different utilitarian practices that would today be classified as art or craft. Body painting, representational rock carving, dendrogliphs (wood carving), hand made fiber and organic textiles production all existed in diverse forms in NSW and the translation of these traditional knowledges into the subject matter and object based representations of contemporary Aboriginality shows that the process of constructing a unified statement as to its meaning is still in the process of defining itself.

An interesting way to begin is to compare and contrast this exhibition against the first of this series which was a survey of Queensland Aboriginal Artists. An obvious difference for me was the lack of political urgency in the subject matter of NSW as compared to their Queensland counterparts such as Richard Bell or Gordon Hookey. There is almost a sense of defeatism that lingers in the lack of overt political nature of many of the works in the exhibition or maybe it is the lack of a unified voice or shared common goal that is more prevalent among Aboriginal communities in "the premier state". The reasons for this can not be simply explained although one reason for there being a diversity of experiences is that access to different cultural perspectives other than the local or the dominant are more readily available to aboriginal people in NSW as compared to Aboriginal artists in remote communities and regional areas across Australia.

On a trip to Townsville in 2008 I was stunned at the level of malice directed against "southerners" in the local papers and on the radio. among mainstream community media, jokes about the stupidity of people in Sydney and Melbourne were prevalent and the reception among locals when being as introduced to some locals as being from Sydney was a barely concealed hostility. There was a sense of wasted privilege in the south or that we we were beholden to foreign agenda's that undermine the "real Australia" that regional and country communities across Australia strive so hard to preserve.

The History of NSW as recently shown in the documentary first australians shows that there are far more complex social arrangements than the master/slave or victor/victim paradigms that has often been presented as examples of the experiences of Aboriginal people in NSW through art, music and in literature.

The inclusion of film makers from NSW in this exhibition such as Jerry Bostock and Darlene Johnston highlights the prevalence of the representation of Aboriginal people in non traditional mediums and how this practice is far more suited to extrapolating on the complex webs of connections that make the prevalence of Aboriginal struggles for recognition so significant to the question of "is there a common aesthetic concern among Aboriginal art from NSW?"

One of the most interesting ideas that Djon Mundines essay ( premier state: First State, First People ) references is debates surrounding the use use of the color blue in an anthropological art theory context. The premise is that the color blue (or words for any particular color) do not exist in any Aboriginal languages and therefore did not exist in the art of Aboriginal people. Mundine succinctly neutralizes this idea as absurd as this fails to take into account the use of blue in feathers, shells, flora and numerous other organic "products" that were used in Aboriginal society. By this reasoning one would think that bower birds only decided to collect blue objects for their nests after colonisation. The extrapolation of this concept is an exhibition in itself yet this exhibition offers a tantalizing glimpse of this concept through the work of Elaine Russell, Mickey of Ulludulla, Gordon Syron, Bronwyn Bancroft and Jeffrey Samuels.

Much Like Djon Mundines most comprehensive and Protocol driven Aboriginal curatorial project "The Aboriginal memorial" lets hope these exhibitions are only the start of a series of localised surveys of the history of artistic practice by Aboriginal people of Australia that are instigated by Aboriginal curatorial initiatives and that will one day make a more cohesive picture for all of us of the extraordinary cultural significance of Aboriginal visual arts both within Australia and internationally.

Brook Andrew

Over the past decade Brook Andrew has developed a body of work that is diverse in its mediums yet consistent in its interrogation of Identity, perception and representation. Andrew's work is not "about" Aboriginality, it is an active engagement with how Aboriginality operates on visual, social, cultural and historical level in contemporary society. Andrew makes work that exists in an international context yet is strongly grounded in the local experience of being overly categorized and analysed by modern expectations held by non Indigenous agencies.

The tree in the Australian landscape has been subject to misinterpretation and appropriation ever since it was first depicted in Australian art. although the botanical drawings of Joseph banks are mostly faithful representations there were many artists that couldn't see the tree as it actually existed and painted European stylized trees into the Australian landscape in an effort to anglosize the representation of the landscape.

"Conventionally, the first artists to represent Australia accurately are held to be the impressionists. They, it is claimed, first depicted its light and open spaces. Why did it take 100 years, until the 1890s, to accomplish this simple feat? I have suggested (in White Aborigines, 1998) that the light and open spaces of impressionist paintings was more metaphorical than literal: it depicted a whitewashed Australia; free of both its Aboriginal and convict origins.

There were, of course, plenty of artists working in Australia before the impressionists. Bernard Smith, who repeats the impressionist myth, pointed out that one early colonial artist, John Glover, did a fairly good job at depicting the gum trees and light of Tasmania in the 1830s. He also prefigured them in the art of whitewashing. Glover was a free and wealthy immigrant, and one of the first professional artists to settle permanently in Australia. He depicted two types of Tasmanian scenes which befitted his position and romantic disposition: paintings of his estate which showed a glorious cultivated landscape, the picturesque achieved in the Antipodes, and depictions of a precolonial Tasmania showing Aborigines enjoying what he considered their primitive and colourful pastimes. He was sorry for their fate, but in his paintings they added cultural capital to his property and enterprise. They were his own local version of the Greek Arcadia which nurtured his and his fellow Englishmen's sense of civilization and destiny.
Ian McClean link to original

In the artwork YOUVEALWAYSWANTEDTOBEBLACK II Andrew references the stylistic patterning of the dendrogliphs that have been identified as key examples of the Wiradjuri nation of NSW. Andrew creates an allover background using the wall of the exhibition space to reference this dendroglyph patterning and in a way removes the historical baggage of the tree in Australian art from the context of painting and creates an installation that uses taxidermy species of native birds from Australia to complete the"picture".

The placement of taxidermy native birds attached to branches along this surface creates a contemporary representation of a the "tree" that is more personal and individual rather than subjective and removes us as as a viewer from the historical complacency of the representation of the landscape in Australian art.

Both the tree and the birds referenced in this artwork can also be considered as endangered in a ecological context, and this presents another dimension of reading that is critical the way many people prefer to "see" the cultural landscape that Andrew is creating.

That the actual locations of most of the trees that contain historical dendroglyphs are protected from public knowledge to ensure they are not vandalised or damaged is a sad fact of modern day cultural heritage. That the only way we can know about the many species of birds that exist and have previously existed is through the sterile ethnographic context of taxidermy also says a lot about the actual respect for this landscape that Australians continue to profess.

Bronwyn Bancroft

In 1981 the television series women of the sun brought the harsh realities of injustice that Aboriginal women faced into the consciousness of mainstream Australia for the first time. For the first time issues such as the stolen generations, the importance of land rights and the deplorable living conditions that government services created were brought to the attention of the mainstream media. In NSW in the seventies and eighties many Aboriginal people were sharing similar experiences of moving from the country to the urban centers of Sydney or Canberra and in many cases were the first generation of their families to be able to participate with institutions and educational facilities that had been denied to previous generations.

The works in this exhibition grandmothers country and the voices of the dead will never be silenced while ever their blood is within us are testament to the solidarity and unbreakable bonds among family that all Aboriginal people have faced when learning of the history of their ancestors in this state. prior to the 1967 referndum the state and federal governments (as well as local police, pastors, neighbors, concerned citizens etc...) attempted to break with the bonds of the Aboriginal family unit through policies such as the forced removal of children( subsequently creating the stolen generations) and the denial of being able to practice traditional culture openly in communities in NSW. Giving voices of the repressed is an apt way to describe the subject matter of many of Bancrofts work over the years as her practice is intricately woven with the role of women in contemporary Aboriginl society.

Bronwyns most recent paintings refer to the concept of identity in the age of DNA the interpretation of this historicalk information is often contested and only highlights the importance of family conections to land and cultural memories of place. These paintings also show a new direction in Aboriginal art byproviding a platform for painting to operate within the context of womens role in community as a facilitator of social relations.

The scientific investigation of identity that is available now through genetic testing places the confirmation of identity in a different context to those systems that have been used throughout the history of Aboriginal cultre. The process of the establishment of cultural identity using scientific means has useful but also complex ramifications for artistic investigations of identity.

Badger Bates

In 2008 Badger bates was selected as part of the statewide survey show Ngadhu, Ngulili, Ngeaninyagu curated by Djon Mundine, this exhibition emphasized the diversity of artistic production techniques that have always existed in New south Wales. Badgers work for this exhibition was a selection of over 20 Boomerangs that when displayed on the wall created a negative space of patterning that echoed the patterns on shield designs and dendroglphy (Tree marking) that is more familiar to the regions east of Bates hometown of Willcania however the influences of the symbolism and the utilitarian use of this material have been used by Bates in his extensive body of work.

The boomerang is more than likely the most internationally recognizable object that works as a representation of Australian Aboriginal culture in the world today. The history of the Boomerang is far from comprehensive and apart from the instructional cartoons of Lin Onus and several traditional pieces that depict it as both a utilitarian and as a ceremonial object, artworks that deal with the publicly available meanings and descriptions of the history of this object are few and far between. The horrifying labeling of some plastic Frisbees as boomerangs buy overseas producers shows that the cultural history of this object needs to be carefully managed by Aboriginal custodians.

The Boomerangs that Bates has produced for that exhibition are far different from the boomerangs that are mass marketed to tourists visiting Australia. The main differences being that they actually work and they do not break on the first throw. The boomerang is intricately bound with hunting and the majority of the three dimensional work produced by Bates is directly referencing the animals of his country – their uses as food but also of the parts of the animals that can be used for more ceremonial or utilitarian purposes.

The woodwork tradition that Bates has works in has been shaped by many forces sometimes out of necessity – sometimes for economic benefit yet the styles and techniques that Aboriginal people have used several of Bates sculptures use found pieces of hard wood which can accentuate the organic shape of the materials he is using. One of Bates most popular artworks is a tree branch that he sands down into the shape of the snake, creating amazingly lifelike representations of the serpent from the form that already exists as the branch.

Another interesting development that Bates has is the three dimensional sculpture of the kangaroo which on one side is shaped from a piece of wood but on the other has an X Ray style pattern of the internal organs made from recycled steel materials. This is literally a three dimensional version of the paintings that many people are familiar with and one that allows endless possibilities for other pieces of bates work use discarded tools and industrial equipment to produce the effect of Echidna quills or the claws of a bird.

An interesting cultural comparison can be made between the Boomerang as a representative of Aboriginal culture and to bagpipes as cultural representation of Scottish culture. It is interesting to note the controversy of the use of the Boomerang does not appear to match that of the use of the Didgeridoo. Apart from their obvious difference, (the boomerang is a weapon whereas a didgeridoo is a musical instrument). The cultural significance of the bagpipes is known as Scottish (another nation colonized by the British prior to the Aboriginal nations) yet it is increasingly used in military, political and civil ceremonies and circumstances internationally. Why don’t the same cultural protocols that surround the use of the didgeridoo apply to the Bagpipe player as well? Aboriginal Australia might be recognized internationally yet it is not "known" internationally.

The didgeridoo is the perfect aural symbol for the growing sense of ecological awareness developing internationally and in the same way as the bagpipes are used in formal and funerary ceremonial purposes in many countries outside Scotland the Aboriginal didgeridoo and boomerang need to be able to be shown in the ecological contexts around the world as well.

Bates artwork is also informed by his “real” job as a senior archeological consultant for National parks and wildlife in Broken Hill. The areas of western NSW are an area that doesn’t give up secrets easily, it was in 1974 that remains were found that threw the ideas about Aboriginal migration across the continent askew by providing radio carbon evidence of a burial ceremony at least 40 000 years ago in these areas. The evidence of this cultural history still remains today - that the actual locations of most of the trees that contain historical dendroglyphs are protected from public knowledge to ensure they are not vandalized or damaged is a sad fact of modern day cultural heritage.

Frances Belle Parker

Frances Belle Parkers installation Finding Ulgundahi uses an ordinary domestic appliance of the clothespeg as a marker for the identity of her people The Yaegl of the Clarence river in Northeastern NSW.

What at first looks like a knot of driftwood often found at the mouth of a river along the coastal region of NSW turns into an irregular concentric loop of hand inscribed clothes pages that taken on the whole, resembles shapes such as a coolamon or even the symbolism of western desert painting, however a literal interpretation of the shape of the work is not required. This work is about the connection to place and is a personal intervention into what is a largely unmapped area of artistic production in NSW.

"My art comes from the various aspects of my Aboriginal culture. In some ways it may seem to be traditional, but these have been combined with the contemporary aspects of today's society like materials, colours, etc. Most works combine the two aspects of my culture - tradition and contemporary urbanisation of the Aboriginals. Every piece of my art has a meaning or story to tell."

Since winning the Blake prize in 2000 Belle Parkers work has matured into a confident use of non traditional materials while still being grounded in an exploration in local identity. The work in this exhibition is an exciting development in the career of of a North Coast NSW artist.

Adam Hill

In this exhibition Adam Hill has made a stark departurefrom his more regnisable bold and colourful paintings and transformed his political subject matter to exhibit a photographic series of secnes of the backstreets in Redfern and as a couteroint a white wheelie bin painted with the faces of politicians of the previous howard government.

The documentary reportage style of the photographs is a refreshing new take on the overly relied ipon medium of paining to document the reality of the Aboriginal experiece. On first reading the subject matter could be alluding to people of mixed descent being labelled as "rubbish people" within the Aboriginal cummunity (a label on a simular par with "Southerners" in some parts of queensland. Another reading would be that the federal government represented by the (white) trash wheelie bin has negleted the heart of Redfern as depicted in the streetscapes surrounding the artists studio in Redfern.

Adam is a commited social activist, teacher of the yidaki and along with his role as artsit and this combination can produce results that are not easily absorbed into mainstream or the Aboriginal community. The media representation of Redfern and the block in particular is often focused on community disfunction

Darlene Johnson

The film two bob mermaid is a semi autobiagraphical account of issues confronting identity as an Aboriginal Australian in the social space of the local pool. Time spent at the local pool is a right of passage for many Australian teenagers yet there is an underlying social history of the pool that need to be taken into account when viwing the film and this is the segregation and aprthied that existed in NSW prioir to the Freedom rides initiated by acticist Charles Perkins. Aboriginal people in rural towns in NSW were banned from attending swimming pools as the white commiunity did not want to share their pools with and a central point of activism for the Aboriginal rights movement was the bringing to attention of the racist rules banning Aboriginal people using public facilities such as swimming pools

exhibition review - Zulai

2009-01-01T22:21:00.000-08:00

The exhibition 'Zulai 1 - Coming of the Light' incorporates Torres Strait Islander painting, printmaking, ceremonial objects, personal photographs and literature. Exhibition curator Nancy Bamaga has put together an eclectic exhibition. Ceremonial objects used in performance and dance feature prominently as do the representation and sculptural object of the feather Dhari, the motif used on the Torres Strait Islander flag.

The celebration 'Zulai 1 – Coming of the light' is an exhibition and a series of events held at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in July. Acknowledging that July 1 or its Creole equivalent, 'Zulai 1' is no longer restricted to celebrating Christianity. The Lagaw Kodo Mir Torres Strait Islander Resource and Culture Centre NSW, with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts, have organised a week long exhibition of high profile Islander artists and performances.

Traditionally cultural exchange between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders was limited to Coastal North Eastern Australia. Through visual arts many Torres Strait Islander people are finding a context to communicate with Aboriginal people, with Australia and the international community in ways that were not possible before.

The 2007 Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award winner Dennis Nona exemplifies the artistic success stories that are arising from the Torres Strait. Dennis's incredibly intricate printmaking has been gaining popularity in the Sydney market for a few years now. His success has allowed him to work on a scale that would seem to require a steamroller to print considering the size and intricate detail that is included in such works as the six metre long 'Yarwarr' that was exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia last year. The exhibition at Boomalli included works by Dennis as well as his cousin Eddie Nona, and their similar styles create a visual narrative that is unique and informative.

The cultural information in these stories presents the history of the Torres Strait in the words of Torres Strait Islander people. Not surprisingly the sea and the oceanic geography of these islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea provide the visual content of the art of the Torres Strait. The Torres Strait being the remnants of the land bridge that once existed between Papua New Guinea and Australia provides fertile ground for artists seeking to explore the dynamic relationship between contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Another highlight is the first exhibition in Sydney of Aicey Zaro. Aicey's preferred medium is paint on silk, and his bright and bold use of colour depicts the bright sunlit oceans of the Torres Strait. Crossing the divide between fine arts and cultural souvenirs, Aicey's hand painted necklaces cannot be made quickly enough for tourist centres such as the Gub Titui Cultural Centre on Thursday Island.

Aicey and Bernice Zaro have established their business, the Zaro Cultural Gallery in Home Hill south of Townsville thanks to a generous benefactor. After opening in late November 2004, the Centre has grown in strength thanks to Aicey's dedication to producing fine arts and authentic cultural products based on his heritage in the Torres Strait. Many international visitors are intrigued by the diversity of Torres Strait Islander culture and Aicy and Bernice are seeking to increase their exposure in Sydney.

Other artists include David Bosun, textile artist Rosie Barkus, Lisa Sorbie Martin and Alick Tipoti. The celebrations on Friday night included a free performance by one of the Torres Straits most successful musicians Christine Anu, and on Sunday the week-long celebrations concluded with an ecumenical service in Redfern.

The formation of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative

2009-01-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

During the 1980s in Australia things were leading up to the Bicentenary of the British colonisation in 1988 and there had been a real interest in Australia and overseas about the art of Aboriginal people. In the 1980's there had been exhibitions in North America and Europe about Aboriginal art, putting it on the international stage and including it as a post colonial curatorial strategy which redressed in some cases centuries of unethical appropriations of Indigenous cultures around the world. It has only been within the last 30 years that Aboriginal art has been taken out of a sterile ethnographic museum context and recognized as an aestetic and cultural expression as unique as the landscape that it often depicts. Boomalli is a resource centre for Aboriginal artists as well as the wider artistic community and continues to make a mark on art and culture in Australia today.

During this decade many Indigenous organisations were formed in regards to the promotion Aboriginal cultural expression in media (CAAMA, Gadigal, and Indigenous Screen Australia) dance (Bangarra, NAISDA) politics (Aboriginal Provisional government, ATSIC). There was this real grassroots movement in Sydney by Aboriginal artists to have their own Aboriginal owned and operated artists co-operative. Boomalli was formed in 1987, a year before the Bicentenary. It was set up by Aboriginal artists who wanted to exhibit art on their own terms.

From around mid 1970 some of them had been included in shows that were just too general, they were included in shows which centred on Northern Territory artists, or criticised because they didn't make paintings that dealt with a traditional or spiritual subject matter. The urban Aboriginal artist's cooperative was for artists who had their own story to tell. For artists who didn't believe the tourist brochure representations of "genuine" Australian Aboriginal culture. Boomalli was a gallery for Aboriginal Artists and Curators to have the freedom to own the means of representing art which represented the living history of Aboriginal people. There were many aboriginal people who didn't believe the hype of a unified nation celebrating 200 years of 'progress' and achievement. Aboriginal people renamed the Australia day celebrations Invasion day and used the opportunity of world attention on Australia to highlight Australia's secret history of oppression of Aboriginal people. In Australia it was the Bicentenary which galvanised these forces – In South Africa it was the Anti Apartheid movement.

In some ways Boomalli was a political challenge to all the other curators and arts institutions, some non-indigenous curators were actively involved in developing the careers of Aboriginal artists and were quick to see the validity of this type of cultural expression as art. They championed the social realism of documentary photography and the narratives of injustice in many of the representational paintings of many "Urban" artists. These developments were complementary with developments in modern art history in other indigenous arts movement in the early 1980s around the world. However at this time there were not many Aboriginal people outside of politics that were actively involved in shaping the representation of Aboriginal culture. It is the difference between the representation of Aboriginal people, and representation by Aboriginal people.

Harry J Wedge

2009-01-01T21:51:00.001-08:00

Harry J Wedge
Quiet Sunday afternoon
acrylic on canvas 2006

H J Wedge was born in 1958 on Erambie Mission, Cowra, in New South Wales. His Wiradjuri heritage is proudly acknowledged in many of his paintings. The experience of the colonisation of the Wiradjuri was different to other experiences of colonisation in Australia and is expressed in its own aesthetic techniques. Historically, painting was not as dominant in the Wiradjuri culture or as widely used as it was in other regions in Australia [perhaps expand on what visual culture was dominant for Wiradjuri people].

Although currently living on the borderline of poverty on the Erambie Aboriginal Reserve, more commonly referred to as Erambie Mission, where he has lived for around most of his life , H J Wedge's art has been seen by many in the flesh and in his 1996 monograph and stands out for many as an exemplary example of contemporary Indigenous art.

What makes HJ Wedge's work distinct from other contemporary Indigenous artists' work is the graphic use of color and subject matter, dealing with the social and political issues more relevant to Aboriginal people living in an urban context as opposed to the traditional cultural information which defines many other styles of Indigenous art.

Sometimes everyday observations and sometimes shockingly confrontational - H. J. Wedge has developed a body of work of hundreds of images documenting his memories and experiences as an Aboriginal Man. Some Aboriginal people may find his painting and drawing techniques simplistic and his lack of formal art training limiting.

However, having learned and studied art history within the (then) Aboriginal-focussed educational institution Eora College for Aboriginal Studies in Redfern (later relocating to Chippendale, in inner-Sydney) among other Aboriginal students, H. J. Wedge bypassed the cultural baggage associated with many other Australian artists' art education.There is traditional cultural information that informs most Aboriginal art, because for so long Aboriginal people were denied this basic freedom of expression; contemporary art allows them to use to speak to the wider community. Contemporary art does not need to use the English language as a means of explanation and perhaps this is another reason for the huge interest in Aboriginal art internationally.

Curatorial influences and encouragment helped advanced H. J. Wedge's artistic career more than a desire for artistic innovation by the artist – he was simply documenting his life and observations of life around him. The push for inclusion of Aboriginal perspectives into group exhibitions during many visual arts events of Australian culture following the becentennial in 1988, coincided with the rise of Wedge's profile.

H. J. Wedge received a minimal European educatioon and he has used his art to find a voice to communicate his stories and perceptions of being an Aboriginal person in modern Australian society. Too often there is only interest in the traditional and ancestral themes of Aboriginal culture, from the desert or northern regions the continent. Aboriginal people from New South Wales (and the southeast) especially have faced community perceptions that they were assimilated a long time ago and the only traditional culture that survives is in remote areas – remote from the southeast.

After his first exhibition with Ngarrindjerri artist Ian W. Abdulla at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in Sydney in 1991² a new aesthetic of Aboriginal art emerged where subject matter was of primary concern rather than artistic technique. Other south-eastern artists such as Elaine Russell, Leonie Dennis and more recently Roy Kennedy also developed a bold naïve technique to illustrate the memories of life growing up in rural contexts and in many instances focused on the defining factors of poverty, discrimination, and making the most out of what was allowed for them by the authorities at the time.

This artistic style gave to many Aboriginal people access to the art world, whose local histories challenged the one-sided history that had been recorded. This also suited older artists who did not have access to the education that many non-Indigenous people took for granted.

H. J. Wedge has suffered many personal setbacks, which have unsurprisingly shaped a lot of his artistic output: hospitalization for severe illness, imprisonment and deaing with the impact of alcohol. Yet, many many Australian artists who are represented in the National Gallery of Australia and other public galleiries around Australia, have lived lives outside the mainstream and rejected society's dominant values.

For H. J. Wedge this is an issue which has affected his relationship with his family, the community he lives in and sometimes with other Aboriginal artists. H. J. Wedge's art is Outsider art as he is himself is an outsider in his own community and in the Australian art establishment. A lack of education is what hinders but also what makes H. J. Wedge art so compelling. This dichotomy produces another aspect – that sometimes what makes an artwork so 'of the moment' is the fact that certain people reject its existence and reception as fine art. However, all the issues H.J. addresses in his prolific output are issues which many Indigenous people have faced in urban, rural and remote communities- a sad aspect of our shared lives.

Book Review: Dollar Dreaming

2008-12-29T00:30:00.000-08:00

Interview with Author Ben Genocchio

This is one of the best books on Aboriginal art published in recent years. Dollar Dreaming is an intriguing look at a very under reported aspect of the actual mechanics of the Aboriginal art industry in Australia. It presents the unprecedented bloom of Aboriginal art in Australia in both its local and international contexts and shows how these two very different aspects of the business are in some ways tearing each other apart in a race to be the first to live up to the impossible expectations of art and its supposed role as an economic saviour for Indigenous communities negleted by failures of state and federal policies.

That many of the regions in which the artists mentioned in this book live in are currently undergoing a federal goverment intervention brings to the fore the contemporary implications of not making the rights decisions in regards to the regulation of Industries such as visual arts but it seems Aborigional artists are puling more than their fair share of the load when it comes to the national represenatation of Australia as a modern 21st century global citizen however the reality behind this image is that Aboriginl people are still not reaping the benefits of this apparant sucess.

This book reminds us that there are more pressing isues other than the actual production of art that are affecting the industry. This history of Aboriginal people throughout this period (1955 - 2008) is fascinating in itself but Genochio presents a series of events and personal interventions that artists and those who worked with with them used as strategies to use art to engage with the wider communhjity on their own terms. Aboriginal art as we know it today as exploded onto the worlds stage during the early 1980's yet there are many examples of the foundations for this industry being built in seperate locations at different times fore many years before then.

The success of the aboriginal art movement in Australia is primarily gauged by the economic aspects of the industry – not surprisingly this is the main area where government policy making has being so scrutinised in relation to perceptions among some in the community that some of the art that is being sold as "Aboriginal" is in fact inauthentic. Commercial galleries and "Carpet baggers" seem to get all the blame for the negative aspects of the indusrty when in fact they are responsible for the most succesful defining factor of the industry - artwork sales

In light of the federal governments recent senate enquiry and the new commercial code of conduct this book is a timely primer on why careful decision making that takes place on behalf of Aboriginal people in general need to be well planned for.

The success of some aboriginal artists would be on a par for global award ceremonies if they were in the more sound bite friendly fields of music or acting. Many Aboriginal artists who are held in esteem by the industry and have exhibited in prestigeous institutions or in significant art collections are themselves still fringedwellers of the arts community in Australia through lack of business and financial management experience.

Intrernational interest and engagement with Australia is increasingly through the acedemic and tourism industries. Interest in Aboriginal culture rathern than contemporary post colonial culture is what creates the grey zone that undermines Aboriginal peoples direct involvement in the legitimization of what is an uthentic Aboriginal art.

Not to mention the networking between representatives of international first nations that has been initaited by Aboriginal Australians.

What this book shows though is that there is a real discrepancy in the attitudes of the participants that shows that there is no level playing field among the distant regions and the urban centres in regards to Aboriginal people becoming empowered by the success of Aboriginal art

Aboriginal artists like all artists are prone to the eccentricities that are associated with the emotional baggage of being recognized as a genius on one side of the street and an economic liability on the other.

The way that government funded community art centers have been gate keepers in regards to the most sacred of all aboriginal arts - the "authentic" visually artistic representation of the dream time creationist stories that are community owned and are a privilege bestowed upon the artist by the community they live in. There is no Aboriginal artist living outside their community that dares speak on behalf of that community and expect it to be presented as an authorized artistic expression. This is the art that sells for big dollars straight away and skews the preception of many Aboriginal artists new to the feld that this is the only type of art that people are interested in.

Australians don't seem to take to well to community figures who dare to move on from their communities that sustained them. In the sporting area rugby league stars who take on lucrative contracts in Europe are branded traitors in the headlines of the main steam press (just ask sonny bill Williams or Anthony Mundine). The obligations of your community's perceptions versus public obligations was very familiar to Albert Namatjiri and a sad ending in the personal life of a remarkable Australian.

A point in case is the artist Tommy Watson whoose career is now being reassed after having left his original community arts centre and As an Australian citizen in the year 2008 Tommy Watson has the right to do what ever he wants with his art and his money, tribal obligations are none of the outside coimmunities business and the artists who boycotted the exhibition should have found a more direct interpersoanl way of communicating their message to him rather than of one of our few national Aboriginal art prizes to air their grievance.

Some representatives of commercial galleries are not liking what they are hearing regarding the soon to be introduced commercial code of conduct and fear thei entire industry is being maligned on behalf of a few rouge operators.

"However, as to art museums opting out of the code, the assurance ... that there is to be a meeting in February of the Cultural Ministers Council in which this matter is to be discussed is frankly not good enough. On this absolute foundation point I retract none of my earlier statements and assertions. Holding a meeting between Ministers at some date hence is delayed action far, far in away removed from the reality of participating in a relevant draft code of conduct.

A significant number of the working committee- blithely ignored on this issue- firmly believe that art museums should have been held accountable in the fourth draft of the code- as they were in its early incarnations. After all that was the assigned role, of the good half dozen or so public gallery working party attendees, who actively participated the working party sessions. One can only assume that in order to balance out procedure transparency that there will be a number of commercial art gallery representatives observing and participating in the conference of art Ministers and the ensuing discussions as to the ethical participation of art museums in the commercial world. I would be available to address the Ministers on this point."

Dollar dreaming shows the raw face of this division among the pillars of the industry - commercial versus community. The unfortunate boycott of the recent 25th anniversary Telstra art awards is another recent example of how commercial industry practices are at loggerheads with an existing industry of artwold weary Aboriginal people who just want to know how to get on with the business of being artists but also being members of their community or any community at all for that matter - as is their right as Australian citizens.

The message in the mainstream press was that seven artists choose not to submit their work to the art prize in protest to the inclusion of another art centres inclusion. The reason being that the Irritjir community had lured Tommy Watson away from his community against his best interests.

This case is unique in many respects most notably the work of Watson himself one of the six living artists chosen to be included in the Mussee de quay branley. Watson also being the first Aboriginal artists to sell one of his own privately owned works at auction for $240 000.00 (way before Damien Hurst sent shivers down the commercial galleries spines by directly auctioning his own work) an irony all the more apparent given that Damian Hurt is Brittish and lauded in sections of the financial and arts press as a visionary whereas Watson taking direct control over the sale of his work and not automaticly putting the money from the sale of the work back into the art centre has caused such a furure among established sections of the Australian commercial galleries.

Its almost like the government funded art centres are like an ATSIC era sedan loaded with a caravan of baggage on the high way to international glory, infuriating the commercial galleries in their luxury vehicles in the single lane behind them.