Art of Engagement: Practice-Led Research Into Concepts of Urban Aboriginal Art and Heritage

Art of Engagement: Practice-led research into concepts of urban Aboriginal art and heritage.

Garry Charles Jones

Submitted: July 2019

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National University

Word Count: 39,600

Statement of Originality

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the exegesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the exegesis itself.

11 December 2019 ______Date: ______

Garry Charles Jones

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the valuable support and assistance from my supervisors Alex Martinis Roe, Amanda Stuart, and Ian McLean, as well as previous supervisors Wendy Teakel, Paul Hay and Gordon Bull. More generally, I want to acknowledge the ANU School of Art and Design, and the many generous people I have encountered over the years.

Abstract

My practice-led research explores developments that have underpinned contemporary Aboriginal art within an urban Australian context, taking into consideration the social, cultural, and political influences from colonial times through to the present. This inquiry has three primary components: the emergence of an urban-based Aboriginal ontology, the colonial archive and its ambivalent role in Aboriginal cultural healing and contemporary cultural heritage, and an interrogation of the conceptual tension between ontological being and becoming in the context of Aboriginality today.

I ask the question: What does it mean for me, disconnected from traditional material cultural practices, to “authenticate” my life and cultural identity, through reclaiming and replicating archival objects? These objects were created in the context of functional and/or ceremonial practice, under colonisation became objects of ethnographic curiosity and taxonomy, and are increasingly objects of contemporary art and contemporary cultural heritage.

My exploration has been informed by urban-based artists of the 1980s through to the present, including the Sydney-based Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative and individual artists such as Trevor Nickolls, Gordon Bennett, Destiny Deacon, Leah King Smith, Christian Thompson and Brook Andrew. I have also explored the work of the late-nineteenth century New South Wales south coast artist, Mickey of Ulladulla. These artists have been significant for me in the context of the time in which they were practising, the expressions of Aboriginality I perceive demonstrated through their respective art works, and the relationship between identity, place and heritage.

I draw on theorists, historians and philosophers to inform my thesis. These include Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Martin Nakata, who represent important perspectives on contemporary Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Rosi Braidotti, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Nikos Papastergiadis provide valuable insight into contemporary discourses of globalism and cosmopolitanism. I consider these theories with regard to the “diasporic” nature of many urban-based Aboriginal realities, and the increasingly global-local in nature of Indigenous art engagements. I also draw on the work of Ian McLean who has contributed significantly to the critical understanding of contemporary Aboriginal art, historically, and as a manifestation of the ongoing process of transcultural negotiation.

The resultant artworks represent a personal archive of cultural ambivalence – a serious folly – consisting of polystyrene artefacts inspired by early archival investigations, colonial notions of cultural progress, and the problematic concept of cultural authenticity. Materially and culturally problematic, the work struggles with personal experiences of alienation and abjection.

iii

Contents

Statement of Originality ...... i Acknowledgements ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Contents ...... iv Table of Figures ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One – Urban Aboriginal Art and Identity ...... 10 Identity ...... 10 Me ...... 19 Art...... 24 Heritage ...... 34 Thinking Forward ...... 38 Chapter Two – Archival Engagements ...... 41 The Colonial Museum ...... 42 Archival Trauma ...... 49 Contemporary Indigenous Interventions...... 55 Institutional Interventions ...... 60 Re-Thinking Engagement ...... 62 Backwards and Forward ...... 71 Chapter Three – My Practice ...... 74 Early Studio Developments – Concepts and Materials ...... 75 Later Studio Developments – Concepts and Materials ...... 87 Artefacts of Authenticity ...... 92 Documenting the Collection ...... 94 Final Works – A Serious Folly? ...... 101 Final Works – on Display ...... 104 Chapter Four – Cosmopolitanism ...... 107 A Crosscurrent of Essentialism and Cosmopolitanism ...... 108 Cosmopolitan Concerns ...... 112 Aboriginality and Cosmopolitanism ...... 116 Asserting Indigenous Voices ...... 120 Revisiting My Practice ...... 125 Conclusion ...... 128 Bibliography ...... 133

Table of Figures

Figure 1. Raymond Meek, Argoonie Doowie, 1988, lithograph, 58.3 x 48.0 cm ...... 28 Figure 2. Jeffrey Samuels, A Changing Continent, 1986, oil painting, 187.0 x 124.2 cm...... 28 Figure 3. Michael Riley, Portrait of Maria, 1985, photograph, 45.5 x 47.9 cm...... 28 Figure 4. Trevor Nickolls, Contemporary Traditional, 1978, oil painting, 165 x 60 cm...... 30 Figure 5. Gordon Bennett, Outsider, 1988, oil and acrylic painting, 290.5 x 179.5 cm ...... 31 Figure 6. Gordon Bennett, Self portrait (But I always wanted to be one of the good guys), 1990, oil painting, 150.0 x 260.0 cm...... 33 Figure 7. J.M. Crossland, A Portrait of Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer, 1854, oil painting, 99.0 x 78.8 cm...... 52 Figure 8. Destiny Deacon, Eva Johnson, Writer, 1994, photograph, 72.8 x 58.6...... 52 Figure 9. Christian Thompson, Emotional Striptease, 2003, photograph, 107.6 x 95.4 cm. ... 52 Figure 10. Leah King-Smith, Untitled #10, Patterns of Connection series, 1991, photograph, 100.6 × 99.8 cm...... 55 Figure 11. Leah King-Smith, Barak #3, Patterns of Connection series, 1991, photograph, 94.2 × 94.0 cm ...... 55 Figure 12. Brook Andrew, Sexy & Dangerous, 1996, computer-generated colour transparency on transparent synthetic polymer resin, 145.9 × 96.0 cm...... 57 Figure 13. Fiona Foley, Badtjala Woman (two sets of beads), 1994, photograph, 45.5 x 35.5cm...... 58 Figure 14. Fiona Foley, Badtjala Woman (crossed string), 1994, photograph, 45.5 x 35.5cm...... 58 Figure 15. Fiona Foley, Badtjala Woman (with collecting bag), 1994, photograph, 45.5 x 35.5cm ...... 58 Figure 16. Jonathan Jones, mugugalurgarra (conceal), 2015, installation, various dimensions...... 65 Figure 17. Julie Gough, Time Keeper, 2015, installation, various dimensions...... 65 Figure 18. Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors II, 2014, installation, various dimensions. .... 69 Figure 19. Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors II, 2017, installation, various dimensions. .... 70

Figure 20. Mickey of Ulladulla, Fishing: Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna, pencil and water colour, 41 x 49 cm...... 76 Figure 21. Mickey of Ulladulla, Scenes of Aboriginal life, pencil, 55.5 x 74.6 cm (detail)...... 76 Figure 22. Mickey of Ulladulla, Ceremony; Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna, pencil and watercolour, 41 x 49 cm (detail)...... 77 Figure 23. Mickey of Ulladulla, Fishing: Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna, pencil and watercolour, 41 x 49 cm (detail)...... 80 Figure 24. Garry Jones, Cabbage Tree Palm Study, 2009, digital print...... 80 Figure 25. Garry Jones, Settling In, 2009, screen-print, 76 x 56 cm...... 82 Figure 26. Garry Jones, Burning Desires, 2009, screen-print, 76 x 56 cm...... 82 Figure 27. Lin Onus, Fruit Bats, 1991, sculptural installation, mixed dimensions, Art Gallery of New South Wales...... 83 Figure 28. Garry Jones, Outdoor Setting Study, 2009, pvc, mixed dimentions (15 x 15 cm area)...... 84 Figure 29. Garry Jones, Bunny-Go-Round Study, 2009, digital image...... 84 Figure 30. Garry Jones, Urban Dreams, 2009, installation, mixed dimensions...... 85 Figure 31. Mickey of Ulladulla, Figure groups, including man being pulled (?) from horse, 1875, pencil, 23.7 x 13.8 cm...... 86 Figure 32. Garry Jones, 3d Study, 2011, pvc, mixed dimensions...... 86 Figure 33. Bunjilaka display, Melbourne Museum, 2017, material unknown, mixed dimensions. Photograph by the author...... 87 Figure 34. Tommy McRae, Victorian Blacks - Melbourne tribe holding corroboree after seeing ships for the first time, 1890s, pen and ink on paper, 23.8 x 36.0 cm...... 87 Figure 35. Julie Freeman, Dilly bag with Emu eggs, 2009, mixed dimensions...... 88 Figure 36. Phyllis Stewart, Slippers, 2002, mixed dimensions...... 88 Figure 37. Assorted Southeast Aboriginal Clubs. Source: Carol Cooper, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al., Aboriginal Australia (Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981)...... 89

Figure 38. Assorted Southeast Aboriginal Shields. Source: Carol Cooper, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al., Aboriginal Australia (Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981)...... 90 Figure 39. Garry Jones, Shield Print Study, 2012, digital image...... 94 Figure 40. Garry Jones, Club Print Study, 2012, digital image...... 94 Figure 41. Garry Jones, Shield & Club Print Study, 2012, digital image...... 94 Figure 42. Garry Jones, Mixed Objects Print Study, 2012, digital image...... 94 Figure 43. Examples of Australian tourism tea towels ...... 95 Figure 44. Garry Jones, Carving Experiment #1, 2013, polystyrene, mixed dimensions...... 97 Figure 45. Garry Jones, a Work in Progress #1, 2013, polystyrene, digital image...... 97 Figure 46. Garry Jones, a Work in Progress #2, 2013, polystyrene, mixed dimensions...... 98 Figure 47. Garry Jones, Black & White Studies 1-3, 2013, digital prints, 50 x 35 cm...... 98 Figure 48. Garry Jones, Solarised Studies 1-2, 2013, digital print2, 50 x 35 cm...... 99 Figure 49.Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara (skin and bones) 2016, cast plaster, varying dimensions. Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney. Photograph by the author...... 99 Figure 50. Dale Harding, Body of Objects, 2016, silicon and steel nails, mixed dimensions. National Gallery of Australia 2017. Photograph by the author...... 100 Figure 51. Dale Harding, Body of Objects (detail – nulla nulla with nails)...... 100 Figure 52. Garry Jones, Assorted Artefacts, 2017, polystyrene, mixed dimensions...... 102 Figure 53. Garry Jones, Toxic Authenticity 1-6, 2017, digital images, varying dimensions. .. 103 Figure 54. Garry Jones, Pale Imitation 1-3, 2017, digital images, varying dimensions...... 103 Figure 55. Garry Jones, Works in Progress 1 (foreground), Toxic Authenticity 2 (background), 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson...... 104 Figure 56. Garry Jones, Graduating Exhibition floor layout, 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson...... 104 Figure 57. Garry Jones, Works in Progress 2 (foreground), Pale Imitiation 1-3 (background L), Mixed metaphores (after Jonathan Jones) (background R), 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson...... 105

vii

Figure 58. Garry Jones, Works in Progress 2, 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson...... 105 Figure 59. Garry Jones, Drawing a blank/blanc (apologies to Mickey of Ulludulla), 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson...... 106

viii

Introduction

When initially undertaking this research program I was interested in exploring contemporary urban-based Aboriginal art, its relationship with “cultural heritage,” and how it related to the more problematic conditions of colonial history and physical and cultural displacement. I cited as core concepts the terms “Aboriginality,” “identity,” “culture,” “place” and “belonging.” These were terms that resonated powerfully with me at the time, with regard to how I understood myself as an Aboriginal person and the motivations underpinning my evolving art practice. However, my understanding of these terms was not particularly well informed, and my relationship to them was more pragmatic than evaluated from a particular cultural or political standpoint. I have come to realise that while culture, heritage and belonging to place are representative of the unique qualities that define Indigenous peoples the world over, in colonial-settler contexts, they are also profoundly entangled with Western colonial thought, through which Aboriginal people have historically been Othered and marginalised. In the context of my research, I have come to see each of these terms as inherently bound up in concepts of “essence” and “construction,” and of “authenticity” and “inauthenticity.”1

My research has taken me along many parallel and intersecting paths of inquiry. It has drawn upon Western disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and museology, in relation to Aboriginal people and contemporary art practices. I have also sought out the voices of Indigenous people, who mostly work within these disciplinary institutions, but actively challenge the inherent Euro-centric epistemological and ontological dominance. These thinkers achieve this by resisting ongoing intellectual and cultural marginalisation, and by asserting the validity of Indigenous ways of being and knowing. In considering these related but different cultural standpoints, I have attempted throughout my research to privilege Indigenous voices while respecting the diverse positionalities, intellectual and cultural insights and aspirations of all. I use the terms “Indigenous” and “Aboriginal” at times interchangeably, but mostly I refer to people of mainland Australia and

1 See Bronwyn Carlson, The politics of identity: who counts as Aboriginal today? (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016).

the southeast as Aboriginal. Increasingly Aboriginal people have also adopted the term “First Nations” to break from historically imposed categories, as well as to assert a political concept of nationhood beyond the dictates of the colonial-settler state. In acknowledging this, I use the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous here because many of the people and communities that I have worked with, continue to self-identify in this way. I want my writing here to reflect that engagement.

Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson contends that contemporary Western theories say little about the effects, or the positionalities, multiplicities, and specificities, of Indigenous people.2 She argues for a politics of difference in which essentialism and ontology have a place, without being regarded as fixed, but viewed rather as in process. Considering the still deeply unresolved settler-colonial history in Australia, Moreton- Robinson suggests that “post-colonialism” must be theorised to allow for incommensurability, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are situated in relation to colonisation in radically different ways – “ways that cannot be made into sameness.”3 She acknowledges the diverse positionalities of Aboriginal people in Australia and the reality that many individuals and communities find themselves disconnected from culture and Country, being even “seduced” by the West. However, she asserts that this ontological distinctiveness travels within the individual, so that wherever they might find themselves in the world, they still belong, incommensurably, to their Country.

I find Moreton-Robinson’s insights inspiring and reassuring with regard to my own sense of disconnection from culture and Country. Yet I have struggled with the concept of incommensurability, in that it seems premised upon a profound and unbridgeable essentialism, which only cuts one way. I recognise an unyielding resistance in Moreton- Robinson’s standpoint; one that has no doubt facilitated the positive political achievements of the Aboriginal activism leading up to the 1967 constitutional referendum. However, my sense of self is deeply inscribed by the experience of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal

2 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home: indigenous belonging and place in a postcolonizing society,” in White possessive: property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 8. 3 Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home,” 10.

heritage, as well as growing up in suburban Western Sydney through the 1970s to the 1990s, and the years of discrimination I encountered as a response to my Aboriginality. Maybe, consequently, I find incommensurability unfathomable. I wonder if my feelings are bound-up in the profound impact of colonisation and my own assimilation into the Western ontological and epistemological frame that Moreton-Robinson attempts to resist.

Torres Strait Island cultural theorist Martin Nakata calls for a critical intellectual reconfiguration, which might be more broadly productive for understanding how the identities of Indigenous people have been shaped, within both Indigenous and colonial- settler society. This includes recognising and valuing the knowledge and interests of Indigenous people, as well as the complex sets of social and discursive relations that position us as people.4 Nakata suggests that what this requires is a completely different set of assumptions about Indigenous people in theory and in practice, and in particular a rethinking of the space in which Indigenous people interact with others. He argues for “a deeper consideration of the ways in which the specificities of Indigenous experiences are constituted in that space,” which he refers to as a “cultural interface.”5

I find Nakata’s intellectual position a personally more accommodating one, in the sense that, in the cultural interface, Indigeneity represents the diversity of individual and community positionalities, whatever their knowledge, their histories, experiences and aspirations. This framework has the potential to empower Indigenous people to conceive – or reconceive – of themselves positively and meaningfully, with regard to the diverse peoples around them, wherever they might find themselves. Where Moreton-Robinson proposes a fundamentally incommensurable ontology, permitting only a relatively superficial performative sameness, Nakata’s ontological framework is premised on the potential for many different ways of being and becoming, where sameness and difference are contingent on many factors. Nevertheless, I find both theorists to be making important contributions to an ongoing conceptual field of contemporary cultural negotiations.

4 Martin N Nakata, Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 196. 5 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 196.

I cite these examples here because they represent important critical perspectives that attempt to meaningfully locate Indigenous people, knowledges and cultures within the shifting contours of global change. Any attempt to understand the history of developments in urban Aboriginal art and heritage needs to take into consideration the social, cultural and political tensions which have informed Aboriginal peoples’ lives and experiences, within the context of the colonial-settler state. I see this as requiring Aboriginal people to be “forward- backward” looking, whereby future desires and aspirations, as indicated above, become possible through critically engaging with the past. While forward looking is open and fluid, recognising the obstacles and constraints of the present, backward looking is twofold; on the one hand, it addresses the fact and history of colonisation and its devastating impact on connection to Country, culture and heritage, addressing the trauma that has been experienced and inherited inter-generationally. On the other hand, it recognises, reclaims and revitalises cultural identity and tradition in the present. This has been the focus of this exegesis.

Chapter One sets out to provide a truncated history of urban Aboriginal communities in New South Wales, addressing issues of art and identity, while clearly locating me, as an artist and as an Aboriginal person in the narrative. From the early days of colonisation, there has been a constant flow of imposed definitions and classifications as determined by the needs and perspectives of Western institutions.6 Such perspectives cast Aboriginal people in the terms of the prevailing ideologies of the colonial state, in relation to race and nation. The historical attempts to convert, destroy, displace, isolate and eventually assimilate Aboriginal people mark not only the physical body, but also the mind and the spirit. The result is not only the profound fracturing of what are understood to have been relatively stable pre-colonial social and cultural communities, but the emergence of “broken” people and families who inherit this colonial trauma inter-generationally, through to the present.7 According to political theorist Sarah Maddison, contemporary urban Aboriginal identity

6 Michael Dodson, “The end in the beginning: re(de)finding Aboriginality,” in Blacklines: contemporary critical writing by indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossman (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 26-27. 7 Sarah Maddison, “Indigenous Identity, ‘authenticity’ and the structural violence of settler colonialism,” Identities 20, no. 3 (June 2013): “Indigenous identity,” 291.

struggles are underpinned by the legacy of colonial violence inherent in past policies and practices of identity surveillance and control; such as concepts of “blood quantum” which broke populations down to “full-blood,” “half-caste,” “quarter-caste,” and so on. As well, the removal of “mixed-blood” children by “Protection Boards,” on the belief that Aboriginal family environments were unfit for children with “white blood.”8 These beliefs were informed by the rise of pseudo-scientific ideologies such as eugenics and biological absorption, whereby anthropologists and state administrators came to argue for the “breeding out of colour” of “mixed-blood” children, and the “protection” of “full-blood” Aboriginal people.9

While political activism against racist treatment became a feature of Aboriginal engagement with the state from early in the twentieth century, the 1960s and 1970s were very consequential decades for the advancement of Aboriginal rights. They represented a radical new era of Aboriginal politics and cultural activism, which had been building since the late nineteenth century, but found their expression in the language of the international “postcolonial,” civil and political rights movements of the time.10 “Aboriginality” had become a powerful political term of strategic self-representation, appropriating what had been historically a term of oppression, and turning it into one of cultural and political liberation. Aboriginality became widely embraced across urban Australia as representing cultural pride and identity.11 Aboriginal artists in urban centres who had previously been ignored by the mainstream art world, began to be noticed from the early 1980s, from where they began to push the boundaries of institutional perceptions of Aboriginal art.

Pivoting around the Australian bicentennial year, the 1980s and 1990s saw Aboriginal people increasingly assert the right to regain control over image production and self-

8 Maddison, “Indigenous Identity,” 290-292. See also, Peter Read, The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 -1969 (Surry Hills, N.S.W.: New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 2007). 9 Russell McGregor, “‘Breed out the Colour’ or the Importance of Being White,” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (October 2002): 286–302. 10 Sylvia Kleinert and Grace Koch, Urban representations: cultural expression, identity and politics (Canberra A.C.T: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2012), 2. 11 Kleinert and Koch, Urban representations, 2.

representation, via news media, television and film production.12 In this context, I consider the community arts organisation, Garage Graphix, where I began my art practice. I also consider the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative, which was influential in my growing awareness of urban-based Aboriginal art. In particular, I examine artists such as Trevor Nickolls and Gordon Bennett, who had an enormous personal impact upon me.

Chapter Two explores the history of the colonial archive – particularly the modern museum – leading up to the more recent involvement of Aboriginal people, as artists and custodians of the collections of Aboriginal cultural material. Museums are not just about objects; they are about the cultures that produce them. Like their counterparts elsewhere, museums in Australia were seen as institutions of power, instruments of education, enlightenment and social salvation. Informed by postcolonial critique, a “new museology” rejects the understanding of the museum as a static, monolithic institution at the centre of power. Rather, it is seen for what it is – an unstable institution attempting to come to grips with the effects of the colonial encounter, functioning more as a permeable space of transcultural encounter than, as a tightly bound institution disseminating universal truths to its visitors.13

Infuriated by histories of family and community dispossession and trauma, urban-based Aboriginal artists from the 1990s were compelled to seek out, explore and engage with the archive of colonial representations of Aboriginal people and culture. The museum archive, also rich with documentary records and material culture from the colonial period, has proven to be a challenging and often contentious space to engage with. While some artists have considered these archives to represent repositories through which to re-establish cultural heritages and identities considered lost, others have developed broader and more “worldly” and “cosmopolitanism” concerns.14

12 See Helen Molnar and Michael Meadows, Songlines to satellites: indigenous communication in Australia, the South Pacific and Canada (Annandale, N.S.W.: Pluto Press, 2001). 13 Robin Boast, “Neocolonial collaboration: museum as contact zone revisited,” Museum Anthropology 1, no. 1 (2011): 59. 14 Ian McLean, Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 211.

In this regard, urban Aboriginal art of this period manifested an underlying tension between the local and the global. Not bound to the same cultural locations or identity politics of earlier generations of Aboriginal artists, artists of the 1990s were more comfortable negotiating a global inter-connectedness with other Indigenous people, with a desire to reclaim and revitalise an embodied Indigeneity15. The global contemporary art world has enabled Aboriginal artists to actively engage within globally interconnected networks of Indigenous struggle, for cultural recognition and in the pursuit of sovereignty. In this context I compare an early work by Destiny Deacon with a later work by Christian Thompson, to consider their corresponding and progressive assault on the archive. I also consider the work of Leah King-Smith and Brook Andrew, highlighting their respective positions as forerunners in the appropriation of the photographic archive, while demonstrating the fraught and contentious nature of these early engagements.

Chapter Three maps the trajectory of my studio research, identifying cultural, conceptual and material concerns along the way. My initial research proposal spoke of a desire to use my practice as an ongoing act of “engagement,” exploring issues of local community concern. I envisioned my studio research as contributing to an increasing awareness of Aboriginality and its complexities through my own social and cultural standpoint. My studio research would represent a materialisation of the insights gleaned from investigating these concerns, as well as a creative realisation of my own sense of relatedness to place, within this site of diverse cultural intersections.16

Initially focusing on the New South Wales south coast where I have lived and worked for the last quarter century, I considered the historical pencil and watercolour drawings of the late nineteenth-century artist Mickey of Ulladulla. His works struck me by what appeared to be the representation of a profound moment of Aboriginal presence (physically, culturally, and psychically) in the face of what was an equally profound colonial displacement and

15 “Indigeneity” came to increasingly replace “Aboriginality” from the 1990s, reflecting the globalising networks of Indigenous peoples. 16 I have in mind here Mary Louise Pratt’s (and James Clifford’s) “cultural contact zone” as well as Martin Nakata’s more recent “cultural interface.”

dislocation. I saw the works as potentially providing unique insights that might speak to our contemporary urban circumstances, representing important expressions of a situated cultural life in flux. At the same time, they might be read as a powerful assertion of cultural resilience in the face of profound cultural change.

After a series of early creative engagements, the research focus shifted to far north western New South Wales from where my mother’s family descended. It was in this shift that I turned to the colonial archive. When I set out to research the material cultural practices of the Kamilaroi/Ngemba people from far western New South Wales, I quickly discovered that such information was scant, and what remained existed within the context of the museum. Searching online and through accessible databases, I settled on studying a number of museum catalogues of art and artefacts. In many cases, the provenance of objects was unclear, with notes indicating that certain objects were “believed to be from” central, south or northwest New South Wales. Struck by the diversity and the obvious skill and artisanship evident in each object, I felt pride in recognising these objects as connected to my cultural heritage. Yet I also felt ambivalence, what I came to recognise as a combined sense of seriousness and folly. The underpinning intent of the project was as a respectful investigation into aspects of my own cultural heritage; however, I also felt a resistance to it; I had long resisted “acting out” Aboriginality because in my suburban upbringing, that was often expected of me.

Chapter Four represents the critical theoretical inquiry that has informed and influenced the latter stages of my research. I came to be increasingly curious about the observations that urban Aboriginal art demonstrated crosscurrents of essentialism and cosmopolitanism. I found this to be an uncontroversial evaluation but realised that within much of the discourse on contemporary Aboriginal art, such an association seemed under-examined. I was particularly interested in better understanding the concept of cosmopolitanism, because essentialism has had a long history of critique with regard to Aboriginality.17

17 See Michelle Harris, Martin N. Nakata and Bronwyn Carlson, eds., The politics of identity: emerging Indigeneity (Broadway, NSW: ePress UTS Publishing, 2013); Carlson, The politics of identity; Dodson, “The end in the beginning.”

Reading widely on this topic, I came to appreciate its history and its potential significance in our time. I felt strongly that the arguments forwarded by Indigenous scholars such as Moreton-Robinson and Nakata which, different in their ontological orientations, resonated with aspects of the contemporary formulations of cosmopolitanism in the context of a postcolonial world. If urban Aboriginal artists are cosmopolitans, I wondered about the significance of art within this new discourse.

I have come to understand how, all too often, Indigenous theorists and critical thinkers (including artists) are left out of the significant intellectual conversations of our time. In recent debates on the cultural consequences of globalisation, the concept of “cosmopolitanism” has emerged as a means of understanding transnational movements, transcultural interrelationships, and differences in the face of the threat of broad-scale cultural assimilation, homogenisation and ethnocentrism.18 This movement corresponds with dramatic shifts in academic discourses in the Western academy, characterised by challenges to its anthropocentric, post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition.

As a consequence of my research I have come to a greater appreciation of the significance of this broader context for considering the history of urban Aboriginal art and cultural heritage through the twentieth century. I also understand the paradoxical significance of the archive in unravelling the trauma of the past to become anew in the future. Much work needs to continue in addressing and redressing the past. However, it is also more important than ever to begin to engage critically in the future, where essentialism and cosmopolitanism can be productive ways of ensuring that Indigenous artists and activists can facilitate change, drawing on their unique insights and experiences.

18 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 226, Epub.

Chapter One – Urban Aboriginal Art and Identity

As outlined in the Introduction, when commencing my research I was particularly interested in examining concepts of Aboriginality, culture and belonging, in the context of contemporary urban-based Aboriginal art. Recognising that an identity politics has been especially significant in grounding urban Aboriginal artists and providing a sense of cultural coherence, I have wondered if its underlying dichotomous relationship to “non- Aboriginality” may have outlived its purpose. It seems to be a glaring reality that, whatever our historical, epistemological and ontological differences, we are all in this together – this world of social and political upheaval, the profound challenges to the physical world in which we co-exist. However, I feel that this might be overly optimistic just now. While the reality of this co-existence must be qualified by the recognition of the structural differences that were instituted throughout our colonial history (and continue to structure our global condition), we must find appropriate paths forward, respecting our differences as much as our commonalities.1

This chapter reflects this inquiry, which attempts to draw together aspects of the desktop and field research undertaken throughout my program. It embraces both personal and professional experiences, as someone who has practised and worked within the field of Aboriginal arts and cultural development in New South Wales, and within urban and suburban communities in particular.

Identity

The terms “urban Aboriginal” and “Aboriginal art” are far from straightforward and have been bitterly contested in recent times. The difficulties that underlie these recent tensions have a longer history and arise from the point of colonisation, but they have found contemporary expression via a “politics of identity.” This expression has flourished throughout Western liberal democracies post the Second World War and had been influenced by the burgeoning language of rights as they related to the recognition of

1 Rosi Braidotti, “‘Becoming-world’,” in After cosmopolitanism, eds. Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard (New York: Routledge, 2012), 45-46, Epub.

marginalisation. To open up this chapter to an exploration of urban Aboriginal art, it is necessary to examine some historical developments as they pertain to contemporary Aboriginal identity within the southeast of Australia.

When it comes to the discourses that inscribe concepts of Aboriginal art and identity, notions of authenticity continue to be of implicit concern. Where authenticity in Western identity and art relates to notions of “uniqueness,” style and provenance (in the case of art), in relation to Aboriginal identity and art, debates about authenticity revolve around the “culturally authentic.”2 Despite the generally accepted bureaucratic concept of Aboriginality that guides much public discourse on Aboriginal identity today, the ways in which Aboriginal identities are understood in mainstream discourses, draw more on perceived qualities that maximise difference.3 Consequently, in relation to Aboriginal difference, aspects such as phenotypical characteristics (such as skin colour), geographic location (urban, rural, remote), language and spirituality are constituted as signs of Aboriginality. The ability of these attributes to be demonstrated or performed (often on demand), and the degrees to which this can be done, coalesce as signs of authenticity, and are generally accepted as relative positions somewhere between the two extremes of the authentic and the inauthentic.

Critical to an adequate understanding of urban Aboriginal identity is a consideration of the history of urbanised Aboriginal people. The label “Aboriginal” was introduced with colonisation, as were the terms “savage” and “primitive”. As Bidjara scholar Marcia Langton reminded her readers in the early 1990s, before colonial contact “there were Yolngu, Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri, Waka Waka, Guugu Yimidhirr, [and] whatever the ‘Gadigal’ or ‘Eora’ actually called themselves.” 4 Yet the term “Aboriginal,” and the colonial and postcolonial implications of the ideas underpinning it, became concretised in the European imagination

2 Elizabeth Burns Coleman, “Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art revolution,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 1 (December 2009), 7. https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_139154_en.pdf. 3 Christine Hansen and Kathleen Butler, eds. Exploring urban identities and histories (developed from papers at the 2009, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Conference, Exploring urban identities and histories) (Canberra, A.C.T.: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2013), 1. 4 Marcia Langton, “Aboriginal art and film,” in Blacklines: contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossman (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 118.

from colonisation onwards. From 1788, there has been a constant flow of imposed definitions and classifications as determined by the needs and perspectives of non- Aboriginal Australians.5 Such perspectives cast Aboriginal people in the terms of the prevailing ideologies of the colonial state in relation to race and nation. Aboriginal people were long thought to be an inferior race and, according to social evolutionist rhetoric, were on the verge of extinction. In this context, they were either reviled or pitied as pests or paupers, but rarely regarded as human and entitled to an equal humanity.6 By the latter nineteenth century, Indigenous Australians were regarded as remnants of a primitive stage of evolution and in need of being studied, their culture “salvaged” before the remaining population ultimately died away and the culture became lost to white posterity.

On January 1901, the Australian Constitution came into effect, establishing the Commonwealth of Australia. However, the Constitution failed to recognise Aboriginal people except for two exclusionary clauses. Section 51 outlined the law-making powers of the Commonwealth of Australia, including the power to make laws with respect to “people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws.”7 Section 127 provided that, “in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.”8 The plight of Aboriginal people across the country was to remain in the hands of the respective state governments, except in the case of the Northern Territory, which was to be administered by the Commonwealth. Effectively, states were left to their own devices to determine the futures of their Aboriginal populations, where upon, no national census was to be conducted to “reckon” their numbers, their needs or well-being.

Following Federation, Edmund Barton, the first prime minister, made clear Australia’s position in relation to the Australian population when he declared:

5 Michael Dodson, "The end in the beginning: re(de)finding Aboriginality," in Blacklines: contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossman (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 26-27. 6 See Dodson, "The end in the beginning,” 25-42. 7 “Aboriginal natives shall not be counted,” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Accessed7 November 2019. https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted. 8 “Aboriginal natives shall not be counted,”

I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races—I think no one wants convincing of this fact—unequal and inferior.9

With the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which came later to be commonly referred to as “The White Australia Policy,” Aboriginal lives across the continent were to be managed differently. While it was still believed that Aboriginal people were on the verge of extinction, by the inter-war years there was a growing concern about the emergence of a population of “half-caste” children – referred to as “the half-caste problem.” This problem was one of hybridity and was to be remedied by a regime of managed miscegenation. While it was at once a nationalist project to “keep Australia white,” it was also premised on deeply racist assumptions about “hybrid inferiority.”10 From the late 1920s systematic strategies of absorption were being proposed in which fair- complexioned “mixed-bloods” were to be removed from their families, and their reproductive futures regulated by state governments. While anthropologists such as Norman Tindale advised governments that such absorption was desirable in dealing with the “problem,” it was state administrators such as A.O. Neville, the Commissioner of Native Affairs in Western Australia, who set out to systematise it, proposing the possibility of “whitening” the “half-caste” population within three generations.11

In the decades following Federation, Australia no longer represented the isolated island continent or European colonial outlier that it had previously been. The devastating experiences of world war and dramatic changes in global geo-political relations thereafter brought the world closer together than ever previously imaginable.12 Many Aboriginal people participated in the wars and experienced the sense of equality and camaraderie of fighting as men abroad, only to be reduced to the status of state wards on their return, once

9 Chad Cooper, The immigration debate in Australia: from Federation to World War One. Parliament of Australia, Background Note, July 2012. Accessed 6 October 2019. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/library/prspub/1782447/upload_binary/1782447.pdf;fileType=application/ pdf. 10 Russell McGregor, “‘Breed out the Colour’ or the Importance of Being White.” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (October 2002): 286. 11 McGregor, “‘Breed out the Colour’,” 287-290. 12 Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 2003).

more denied acceptance and segregated from society.13 At the same time, Aboriginal communities at home had been exposed to foreign troops who showed interest in Aboriginal cultural practices and especially arts and crafts. To some degree, this contributed to the development of Aboriginal community-based arts and crafts for a tourist market.14 The deprivation suffered during the Great Depression and the hardships experienced during the war years led Aboriginal people in the southeast to begin moving towards urban centres. It also led to the rise of local socialist and communist movements, as well as an organised labour movement. The movement to the city allowed this urban Aboriginal diaspora to escape from the oppressive constraints of the New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Act. It also provided opportunities for contact with international black visitors and with the political ideologies they carried with them.15 The city offered Aboriginal people an opportunity to be relatively independent and free from government control, exercised across the state. Here they were able to meet and to mobilise, to critically think about and debate politics, history and the social and economic changes they desired for their people. From the outset, this included stopping government revocations of Aboriginal reserve lands in rural locations and the removal of children from their families.16

In the 1920s, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) was established in Sydney. It had six hundred Aboriginal members and regional offices across the state.17 In 1937 the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) emerged, continuing to focus attention on the ongoing abusive practices of the Aborigines Protection Board. The APA was instrumental in coordinating the 1938 Day of Mourning, which was one of the most significant Aboriginal political actions of the early twentieth century. As a response to the frustrations of Aboriginal people in Sydney and Melbourne, who had been petitioning for

13 Robert A. Hall, The Black Diggers: Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the Second World War (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997), 75-77. 14 See Hall, The Black Diggers, 75-77. In addition, the presence of African American servicemen stationed in the Northern Territory and in the capital cities contributed to public debates concerning the segregation of black troops, both American and Australian. 15 John Maynard, “Fred Maynard and Marcus Garvey: storming the urban space,” in Exploring urban identities and histories, eds. Christine Hansen and Kathleen Butler (developed from papers at the 2009, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Conference, Exploring urban identities and histories) (Canberra, A.C.T.: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2013), 153. 16 Maynard, “Fred Maynard and Marcus Garvey,” 157. 17 Maynard, “Fred Maynard and Marcus Garvey,” 158.

changes to the administration of Aboriginal affairs since the late nineteenth century, the Day of Mourning was a counter-commemoration for the sesquicentenary of Australia’s colonial origins.18

We, representing the ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, assembled in Conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on 26th day of 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the Whitemen’s seizure of our country, HEREBY MAKE PROTEST against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, AND WE APPEAL to the Australian Nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITH THE COMMUNITY.19

As with previous protests, the Day of Mourning was informed by a distinctly Aboriginal perspective, which affirmed the APA members’ sense of themselves as a distinct people; a sense rooted in shared historical experiences, collective memory and Aboriginal cultural narratives. Historian Bain Attwood argues that this constituted an urban Aboriginal tradition that came to be transmitted from generation to generation, ensuring a strong element of continuity in urban Aboriginal goals, if not always in the articulated demands.20

Following the War years, state governments stepped up their collective efforts to manage and assimilate Aboriginal people into the broader populace.21 In parallel, organised Aboriginal activism increased across the country, often with the support of non-Aboriginal people and organisations. For example, from the early 1950s, Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory began to protest against Ordinances, which discriminated against them, demanding the right to free movement and association, and the right to be able to “keep themselves” physically and financially.22 Demanding equal wages for equal work, these protests led Aboriginal pastoral workers to take up strike actions in the form of “walk-offs.” Significantly, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights began to be cited, with a threat to take the Northern Territory Government to the United Nations, as having

18 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 54. 19 Quoted in Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 54. 20 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 78. 21 This was coupled with concerns for the assimilation of increasingly multicultural immigrants attracted to Australia through post-war mass immigration programs. See Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale, N.S.W.: Routledge; Pluto Press, 2000). 22 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 131.

committed a “flagrant breach of international human rights.”23 In 1966, the North Australian Workers Union applied to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to vary the Cattle Station Industry Award 1951 to enable Aboriginal pastoral workers to receive equal wages. The Commission found in favour of the Aboriginal workers but delayed the new award until 1968.24 This then led to the now famous Gurindji Wave Hill walk-off, which was foundational to Aboriginal land rights and political history.25 Meanwhile, Yolngu people in the community of Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land petitioned the Commonwealth parliament in 1963 against the excision of the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve for commercial mining. The act, and the unique form of the petition as a bark painting, is considered the case in which the emerging Aboriginal rights movement was most explicitly connected to Aboriginal art, and to the notion of an un-ceded Aboriginal sovereignty.

These developments gave momentum to the emerging Aboriginal rights movement nationally, but especially in urban areas. In 1958, the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA) was established to provide a national and unified Aboriginal lobby for the Commonwealth government to be involved in Aboriginal affairs, and to finally remove discriminatory state legislation.26 It was a movement towards giving Aboriginal people full citizenship, while also acknowledging their unique circumstances as Australia’s first people and the rights and respect that that position should accord them. The outcome was the 1967 Constitutional Referendum in which the Australian constitution was amended by removing the two exclusionary clauses that had prevented Aboriginal people from full participation in the national polity.27

23 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 131-132. 24 This was due to threats from pastoralists to change over to white workers. The Commission wanted to enable the industry to prepare for the changes. 25 Aboriginal pastoral workers on the vast Vesties’ cattle station at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory expressed their unhappiness at the decision by leading an initial walk-off. In 1967 the group moved to Daguragu (Wattie Creek) and erected a sign saying “Gurindji,” identifying themselves culturally and politically as the people of that Country. With Vincent Lingiari as their spokesman, they petitioned the Governor-General to win support for having their land granted to them to establish their own cattle station. While the campaign received lots of media attention, the claim was dismissed by the government at the time. However, in 1975 Daguragu was purchased by the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission and leasehold title was transferred to the Gurindji by then Prime Minster Gough Whitlam. 26 “Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI)” Collaborating for Indigenous Rights, National Museum of Australia, http://indigenousrights.net.au/organisations/pagination/federal_council_for_the_advancement_of_aborigines_and_torre s_strait_islanders_fcaatsi. 27 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 172-180.

The following year, the Yolngu people of Yirrkala took the mining company Nabalco to the Northern Territory Supreme Court, seeking recognition of their unique rights to the Arnhem Peninsula since time immemorial (Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd. 1968).28 While the court determined against the plaintiffs, the case provided the basis of a Commission of Inquiry into Aboriginal Land between 1973-1974, and eventually The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.29

These developments from the 1950s through to the 1970s were very consequential for urban Aboriginal communities. While the case for constitutional change was largely driven by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal organisations in the southeast, the cases made for equal wages in the pastoral industry, and the challenges to federal government excising Aboriginal reserve lands in remote locations, had very significant implications for all Aboriginal people. These movements signalled that the times were changing and that through strategic political engagement; the capacity for Aboriginal social and cultural priorities could now also be more firmly part of the change agenda. The efforts of the Gurindji at Daguragu (Wattie Creek) and the Yolngu struggles at Yirrkala, established Aboriginal cultural identity as undeniably alive and rooted in ways of being and knowing that long predated colonisation. The impact in the southeast came in the early 1980s with the New South Wales government recognising state-based Aboriginal land rights, establishing a community-based land council network through which communities across the state could collectivise and work towards gaining access to land. This extended to pursuing social, cultural and heritage priorities.30

I see this as representing a powerful period of inspiration and hope for cultural re-discovery and re-vitalisation in the southeast. With the early 1990s, pivoting around the Australian bicentennial year, Aboriginal people in an urban context also began to assert the right to the control of the means of image production and self-representation, via news media,

28 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 226-234. 29 Max Griffiths, Aboriginal Affairs: A Short History (Kenthurst, N.S.W.: Kangaroo Press, 1995), 166-176. 30 Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972 (Sydney, N.S.W.: Sydney University Press, 2008).

television and film production.31 Self-representation as a counter to historically imposed representations became increasingly urgent, and, in the southeast, often involved a strident assertion of cultural difference, a mourning of cultural loss, and a desire for a collective cultural reconstruction, or “pan-Aboriginality.”32

The right to self-representation includes our right to draw on all aspects of our sense of our Aboriginality, be that our blood, our descent, our history, our ways of living and relating, or any element of our cultures. Certainly, the practice of fixing us to our blood or our romanticised traditions has been a cornerstone of racist practices. But depriving us of our experienced connections with the past is another racist practice. The relationship we draw with our past is not to be confused with the relationships with the past that have been imposed on us. One is an act of resistance the other is a tool in the politics of domination and oppression.33

Much of the historical discourse of Aboriginality emerged within non-Aboriginal communities, where today it is common to hear non-Aboriginal people perpetuate colonial race-based distinctions between “full-bloods” and “half-castes.”34 In this context questions of identity and authenticity often go hand-in-hand and are actively played out not only between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and between Aboriginal people and the state, but also amongst Aboriginal people themselves.35 Contestations about what constitutes authentic Aboriginality have become “fraught and toxic.”36

The demand to conform to such expectation effectively delimits the possession of Aboriginality to those who can claim to possess it as an uninterrupted cultural practice and self-identification, inherited and propagated through the generations. This presents the potential for many people to fall into the trap of idealising a “traditional” authenticity that is largely mythologised, while failing to recognise the significant impact of centuries of

31 See Helen Molnar and Michael Meadows, Songlines to satellites: Indigenous communication in Australia, the South Pacific and Canada (Anandale, N.S.W.: Pluto Press, 2001). 32 Yin Paradies, “Beyond black and white: essentialism, hybridity and Indigeneity,” Journal of Sociology 42, no. 4 (2006): 355-367. 33 Dodson, "The end in the beginning,” 10. 34 Sarah Maddison, “Indigenous Identity, ‘authenticity’ and the structural violence of settler colonialism,” Identities 20, no. 3 (June 2013): “Indigenous identity,” 292-293. 35 Maddison, “Indigenous identity,” 289. 36 See Anton Enus, “Aboriginal or not,” Insight (Australia: SBS, 7 August 2012), Television Broadcast

colonisation, conquest, and external influence.37 Contemporary Indigenous theorists, such as Michelle Harris, assert that Aboriginal identities are “emergent, occupying complex spaces informed, socially and dialogically, by historical moments, places, social forces, and the everyday of their owners’ lives.”38 Harris suggests that identifying as Aboriginal in a contemporary context is a strategic self-identification as much as anything. She states that:

… to claim indigeneity is to self-consciously recognise that certain cultural “traits” (such as language, religion, ancestry) are important emblems in representing one’s self, and in mobilising these emblems as signifiers of belonging, one is, in part, making a political statement of solidarity with others who also identify as Indigenous.39

However, claiming Indigeneity in this way can still be paradoxical, in the sense that acknowledging complexity on the one hand, while reifying notions of “tradition” and “authenticity” on the other, nevertheless requires the ability to be able to name and define that, which constitutes the authentic in the first place.40

Prior to the 1970s, Aboriginality in my life was about family relations and connection to far western New South Wales. In my suburban community of Green Valley, I was identified as part-Aboriginal or Aboriginal depending on the context, but mostly as “boong,” “abo,” or “coon,” or whatever the particular name-caller could imagine in the moment. From the 1970s on, there was a palpable sense of change. Where earlier I was readily identified – negatively or positively – as Aboriginal, I was increasingly subjected to questioning about the authenticity of my heritage and identity, and whether or not I could legitimately refer to myself as being Aboriginal.41 “Part-Aboriginal” was the term used in my family, not as a conscious pejorative, as it is mostly perceived today, but as an acknowledgment of both my

37 Michelle Harris, “Emergent Indigenous identities: rejecting the need for purity” in The politics of identity: emerging Indigeneity, eds. Michelle Harris, Martin N. Nakata, and Bronwyn Carlson (Broadway NSW: ePress UTS Publishing, 2013) 12- 13. 38 Harris, “Emergent Indigenous identities,” 10. 39 Harris, “Emergent Indigenous identities,” 10-11. 40 Harris, “Emergent Indigenous identities,” 11. 41 This experience is mirrored in much of the Aboriginal life writing which began to emerge from the late 1980s. While Sally Morgan’s 1987 autobiographical novel My Place expresses the experience of self-discovery and the subsequent struggles with self-representation, it brought such experiences to a broad mainstream audience. Marcia Langton (1981, 1993) and Michael Dodson (2003) provided early political critiques in this field.

parents’ heritages. While there were sometimes suggestions that certain personal traits were essentially Aboriginal (like art), there were no overt references to Aboriginal culture or cultural connections, but more to family history and lived experiences. Experiences remembered were of connections to extended family and certain places of origin mostly, but were also of prejudice and discrimination, and an ongoing fear of and aversion to authority with frequent references to “watching out for the welfare.” My Aboriginality was also bound up in my mother’s connection to far-western New South Wales,42 mainly Brewarrina, which was her place of origin and the geographic location of our Kamilaroi/Ngemba heritage. Neighbouring communities such as Bourke, Walgett and Lightning Ridge also featured significantly in the extended family network.

I grew up in suburban south western Sydney from the 1960s through to the early 1990s. These were dramatic decades in Australia and for Aboriginal people in particular. Except for the annual bush forays, my life was strictly suburban, yet there was a persistent “racial” tension in the predominantly white working-class neighbourhood in which I lived.43 In the late 1970s in particular, in high school, I was regularly called upon to answer for myself, defend myself, and wear racial slurs and others’ intolerances. In retrospect, I put it down to the broader national politics of the time, and the racial prejudice that I now recognise as being played out in response to Aboriginal issues that were prominent in the mainstream media, which influenced the dynamic of the schoolyard.44 It certainly was not because I behaved differently, socially or culturally, because of differences in language, religion, or other systems of belief or lifestyles foreign to my neighbours. I realise it now to have been a more profound manifestation of the residual structural violence of colonialism, where, since colonisation, Aboriginal identities were defined by the state, scientific and religious institutions and, through mainstream media, became popularised in public discourse.45 Anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw describes the “complicated, contradictory and

42 Beryl Jones nee Eastwood, best known as “Cheeky.” 43 Greater Green Valley. It has changed dramatically since my years there. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was predominantly Anglo-Australian and migrants from the United Kingdom. From the late 1980s, it increasingly became ethnically diversified with new migrants from around the world. 44 These historical issues are discussed at the outset of this chapter. 45 Maddison, “Indigenous identity,” 288–303.

destabilising relationship with the idea of authenticity” that urban-based Aboriginal people experience, “bubbling away” in the background of their daily lives, but rarely made explicit.46 Aboriginal activist and scholar Michael Dodson asserts, “There would be few Aboriginal people who have not been labelled as culturally bereft, “fake” … and then expected to authenticate their Aboriginality in terms of blood or clichéd “traditional” experiences.”47

Outside of suburban Sydney my experience of my Aboriginality was connected to far western New South Wales and involved annual forays “out bush” to visit family, and to get away from the “rat-race,” as my parents would say. These involved family reunions, funerals and weddings, but were all opportunities to reconnect with extended family such as cousins, uncles and aunties, and the “ring-ins” adopted into the family by marriage or association. On these trips, I actually felt more like a country kid who had been misplaced in the city suburbs. The experiences of being with my mother’s extended family often felt dramatic, but amazing. I could just be, without having to feel singled out, or out of place. There was a great freedom, wandering around town visiting families, making trips down the river, fishing, and spending days on end out and about. I recall going for drives further afield between country towns, out to the old mission, out to “the Ridge,” to the country races, the rodeo, and to “roo” shootings (which I liked least).

In the mid-1980s, just as “urban” Aboriginal art had appeared as a provocation to the metropolitan art scene in Sydney, I joined a community arts organisation in Western Sydney – Garage Graphix – that ran an Aboriginal arts program with an agenda of enhancing community awareness of suburban Aboriginal issues, identities, and community services. I was somewhat aware of the broader political developments that were at play, in that I was an early member of the Gandangarra Local Aboriginal Land Council in Liverpool, where my mother was a founding member. As an aspiring artist I was aware of the “new” Aboriginal art being produced in remote desert communities, where names like Clifford Possum

46 Gillian Cowlishaw, The city’s outback (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 183. 47 Dodson, "The end in the beginning,” 28.

Tjapaltjarri and Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula had a unique resonance. However, I had not any sense of the significance of the art that was being produced by city-based Aboriginal artists.

The practices of “community art” and “community cultural development” emerged in the 1970s and through the 1980s as a persuasive process for engaging marginalised communities in civic activities, which focused on the exploration of notions of cultural and ethnic identity, place and belonging.48 Built on the tradition (in earlier labour movements) of engaging workers in cultural activities, the belief was that through creative engagement individuals and communities could be empowered to have greater agency in their lives, the objective being more cohesive, vibrant, and healthy communities.49 In my work at the time, there was the two-fold objective of extending and expanding the self-representational possibilities for suburban Aboriginal people beyond the limiting stereotypes that affected the scope for self-identification, whilst dramatically shifting the ways in which non- Aboriginal people understood and conceived of “Aboriginality.”50 The “politics of Aboriginal art” was central to this community-based and ethically oriented practice, where thinking through notions of “cultural tradition,” “contemporary heritage,” cultural and social “authority” and “authenticity” underpinned those politics. Personally, this opportunity to work as a community artist provided a space where my life, my memories, experiences, and aspirations felt respected and nurtured with regard to my Aboriginality and my place as a Sydney “Westie.”51 While these were both identities of disaffection at the time, I did feel a sense of empowerment and autonomy, a place where I simply was, which was not bound,

48 Deborah Mills, Paul Brown, and Australia Council, Art and wellbeing: a guide to the connections between community cultural development and health, ecologically sustainable development, public housing and place, rural revitalisation, community strengthening, active citizenship, social inclusion and cultural diversity (Surry Hills, New South Wales: Australia Council, 2004). 49 Gay Hawkins, From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: constructing community arts, Australian Cultural Studies (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993). 50 At the time this was not a particularly theorised position, and was more an assertion of a right to be “who you are” and to be able to present yourself in ways that were “true” to this self-identification, beyond the limited range of “Aboriginalities” that seemed to be on offer. Langton (1993) and Dodson (2003) came later to theorise and more clearly articulate this stance in relation to the multiplicity of Aboriginal historical and cultural standpoints, and the possibilities of self-representation available through access to new media. 51 See Gabrielle Gwyther, “Once were Westies,” Griffith Review, no. 20, (2008): 153-164. Also see Peter Weir’s Whatever happened to Green Valley? Directed by Peter Weir (Film Australia, 1973), DVD.

ultimately, by geography, gender or cultural identity. I feel that this opportunity indeed grounded me socially, politically and culturally.52

As a Western Sydney suburban Aboriginal person engaging in a visual art practice in the 1980s and 1990s, the capacity of art as a political tool in that cultural and political moment, felt as urgent as it felt personally empowering. Working as a community artist – working in community – with other Aboriginal people, I felt able to establish a sense of community and a connection to place in which I felt more enabled than I had previously. I also felt a strong sense of commitment and obligation to this otherwise abstract field of thinking and being. Through this work, I experienced a kind of community connectedness that might have been referred to as an urban kinship.

I recognise in retrospect that this desire for community was fomenting more broadly, particularly in response to rapidly globalising trends. For urban-based Aboriginal communities there was an increasing desire to rediscover and reconnect with Indigenous cultural heritage. In this context, in parallel to non-Aboriginal expectations of a kind of performative authenticity, self-identification became increasingly fraught within urban- based Aboriginal community situations as well. Expressions of mixed heritage could be challenged because there were only two choices – “Aboriginal or not” – and to identify properly as Aboriginal required an appropriate performance of that Aboriginality. I recognise this now as that double bind of the cultural essentialisms I referred to earlier, in which historically imposed essentialisms of Aboriginality were being codified and policed by Aboriginal people themselves. The capacity to perform Aboriginality impacted upon personal relationships and in the broader community, through acceptance/non-acceptance.

52 As a “democratic” collective of artists we met weekly to discuss our individual and joint projects, as well as what was happening more broadly across “the sector” of community-based and Indigenous arts. An ethical and culturally informed stance underpinned our collective identity and it was critical that we were aware of community politics, cultural politics, and the Politics of the state. With the increasing exposure of Aboriginal art came an increasing understanding of its diverse, and in many cases highly specific, political implications for Aboriginal people and communities. Cultural appropriation was a major concern as became clear through Imants Tillers’ appropriation of Michael Jagamara Nelson’s “Five Dreamings” (1982) within “The Nine Shots” (1985). In the first instance, Tiller’s appropriation was offensive in that, at this critical moment in contemporary Aboriginal art, a non-Aboriginal person was taking it and making it his. It felt like an act of neo- colonialism. However, a more nuanced awareness of Aboriginal cultural ownership and authority, of art as an expression of a specific person or family’s cultural sovereignty, demonstrated that the issues were far more complex than simple binary Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal differences.

It was a confusing and stressful time. I became immersed in broader Aboriginal affairs but I resisted performing Aboriginality.

Art

The terms “urban” and “Aboriginal” in the context of art are contested yet have persisted due to their widely perceived convenience. “Aboriginal art” as a category is likewise fraught, but continues to circulate as a superficial descriptor of diverse cultural practices, despite the constant efforts by artists, curators, Aboriginal communities and academics to unpack them and expose their problematic baggage.53 Many artists embrace the category because their cultural identities and their art practices are closely aligned. Some urban-based Aboriginal artists vigorously assert their urban Aboriginality as a strategic counter to binary oppositions of remote/authenticity, urban/inauthenticity.

In a 2006 article published in the Queensland art journal Machine, titled “Black Eye = Black Viewpoint: A Conversation with ProppaNOW,” the following exchange is in part explored by ProppaNow artists Vernon Ah Kee (VAK) and Richard Bell (RB):

VAK: The reason I say that the art that we make is Aboriginal art is because the way we live our lives is an Aboriginal experience. What happens in the deserts and remote communities is that people create art and they try to live their lives in a way that correlates to a romanticised idea. It’s a white construction.

RB: We should stick to Urban Art because that’s the fucking label they gave us, instead of inauthentic art. So let’s fucking stick with it … fuck these half white cunts down here.

VAK: That’s why I say that the only authentic Aboriginal people in this country are the urban Aboriginal people, they’re the only ones that behave autonomously. We’re the only ones whose lives aren’t wholly and solely determined by white construction. I don’t care about Urban Aboriginal Art, whether we’re called that

53 “Urban” has both technical and colloquial definitions. In relation to Aboriginal people and art, it has largely been used to signify proximity to a metropolitan centre, but also came to suggest a particular style or artistic motivation. However, throughout the assimilation process Aboriginal people across the country were forced into mission and reserve environments, which aimed to sedentarise and urbanise them through Western living arrangements and lifestyles. In this context Aboriginal people were being urbanised to varying degrees long before the category was coined. While “urban” was embraced early in the emergence of “urban Aboriginal art,” artists have since this time asserted more specific place- based and/or language groups for self-identification. Another complication can be where people associated with remote communities move fluidly between remote and metropolitan centres, and vice versa with urban-based artists. Many Aboriginal people strongly embrace the category of “Aboriginal art,” because of the association between their cultural identity as the motivation for their art practices.

because, at least we’re here and in the beginning of the definition. And we have a chance to have influence. Other than that my mission is to define Urban Aboriginal Art in terms that Aboriginal people understand, and in terms that we can determine and control.54

The concerns expressed within this exchange can only be fully appreciated within the context of a colonial-settler art history in which contemporary Aboriginal art and culture has been “discovered,” “classified,” “authenticated” and commodified by and for non-Aboriginal people. For most of Australian history post-colonisation, Aboriginal art was not considered worthy of being exhibited, let alone collected, except as ethnographic artefacts of a dying race, where Aboriginal people, in proximity to Western society and in contact with Western culture, were regarded as lost to an authentic cultural past.55 Aboriginal people who were of mixed ancestry and actively engaged with Western society, were considered to be “assimilated.”56

While ethnographic museums in Australia began to systematically collect Aboriginal material culture from the late nineteenth century for scientific study, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that Western disciplinary thinking around the existence and significance of Aboriginal art began to develop.57 From the late 1950s, public galleries began to commission and collect “traditional” Aboriginal art, proclaiming its significance beyond the ethnographic and focusing attention on aesthetic qualities, unique cultural iconography and symbolism, and the endurance of tradition and ritual meaning.58 The coincidence of the Western Desert acrylic painting movement, beginning in the early 1970s, with fundamental changes to the treatment of Aboriginal people through the demise of assimilation and the assertion of self-determination, precipitated the rise of Aboriginal art in urban centres.59

54 Archie Moore, “Black Eye = Black Viewpoint: A Conversation with ProppaNOW,” Machine, vol. 1, no 4 (2006): 3-4. Accessed online at: https://www.academia.edu/30239506/Black_Eye_Black_Viewpoint_A_Conversation_With_ProppaNOW. 55 Howard Morphy, “Seeing Aboriginal art in the gallery,” Humanities Research, no. 1 (2001): 37. 56 See Gillian Cowlishaw, The city’s outback (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009); or Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 2003). 57 Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998). 58 Morphy, “Seeing Aboriginal art,” 37. 59 Ian McLean and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Qld.) ed. How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art: writings on Aboriginal art / edited and introduced by Ian McLean (Brisbane; Sydney: Institute of Modern Art and Power Publications, 2011), 146.

As suggested previously, the 1960s and 1970s also represent a radical new era of Aboriginal politics and cultural activism, which had been building since the late nineteenth century, and found expression in the language of the international “postcolonial” civil and political rights movements of the time.60 Coupled with the creation of the unique red, black and yellow Aboriginal flag in 1971, by Luritja artist Harold Thomas, Aboriginality became widely embraced across urban Australia as representing cultural pride and identity.61 Where urban Aboriginal artists had been ignored up until this point by the mainstream art world (whose initial discovery of Aboriginal art after the Second World War was still dictated by discourses of racial and cultural authenticity), awareness began to shift dramatically from the early 1980s, as artists and their supporters began to push the boundaries of institutional perceptions. This was also significantly assisted by the Australia Council for the Arts in its appointment of prominent urban Aboriginal activists to its Aboriginal Arts Board in the early 1980s. Chicka Dixon was appointed chair between 1982 and 1986, and Gary Foley director between 1983 and 1986, setting the Council on a new course in redirecting its efforts to build Aboriginal art capacity in urban centres.62 I was a direct beneficiary in the shift, being drawn to working in community arts in Western Sydney in 1986.

One of the most consequential early interventions into urban Aboriginal art was when the Aboriginal Arts Board supported the exhibition Koori Art ’84, at Artspace gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney, in September 1984. Of twenty-five artists included in the show, eighteen were Sydney-based, while the others represented established and emerging art communities from Central Australia and Arnhem Land.63 However, the exhibition was particularly significant for the southeast artists. Inserting “Koori” into the title signalled a recognition and legitimisation of Aboriginal people and art from the southeast and as “Koori” was strongly associated with Aboriginal political activism, it gave a greater sense of political

60 Sylvia Kleinert and Grace Koch, eds. Urban representations: cultural expression, identity and politics (Canberra A.C.T: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2012), 2. 61 Kleinert and Koch, Urban representations, 2. In addition, a good history of the Aboriginal flag can be found in Mathieu Gallois, “The Aboriginal flag as art,” Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2 (July 2016): 46–60. A useful overview of current copyright debates can be found in Isabella Alexander, “Explainer: our copyright laws and the Australian Aboriginal flag,” The Conversation (June 13, 2019). 62 Ian McLean, Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 209. 63 McLean insightfully notes that these artists also occupied urbanised forms of environment. McLean, How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art, 146.

significance to Aboriginal art more broadly – a significance that was not readily recognised in remote community art at that time. Just as importantly, it brought young city-based artists together with artists who were at the forefront of a revolution in contemporary art in Australia, connecting art, politics and identity with a broader pan-Aboriginal sense of affiliation.64

The mainstream response to Koori Art ’84 was not as celebratory. Some critics were quick to dismiss the works as “hybrid,” “amateurish” and “inauthentic” as Aboriginal art.65 Despite such negative responses, ongoing interventions were being organised in the lead-up to the bicentennial celebrations of 1988. A show of photographers was brought together in 1986, titled NADOC ’86, providing an opportunity for emerging photographic artists to make a mark, and in 1987 a show titled Art and Aboriginality ’87 was taken to Portsmouth, England, to coincide with the re-enactment of the First Fleet’s departure, headed for Sydney Harbour on Australia Day, 26 January. The scene was set for the creation of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative later in 1987, the first city-based collective of Aboriginal visual artists in the country.66 Cooperative members shared a frustration with the marginalisation of their work, clearly expressed in many of the responses to the Koori Art ’84 exhibition, and still reflected in their difficulties in having their work shown in mainstream galleries.67

It has been argued that Boomalli spearheaded a “militant identity discourse,”68 mostly evident in its members’ desires to promote an exclusively urban-Aboriginal voice. However, the more productive work of the collective was in supporting each other as young, like- minded artists exploring and experimenting with their independent and related ways of being – negotiating and navigating the pressures of a broader society all too ready to pigeonhole them as the new Aboriginal thing.

64 There are now many good texts that have mapped out this history. See Neale (2000), and McLean (2011). 65 Margo Neale, “United in the struggle: Indigenous art from urban areas” in Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, eds. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 267. 66 Neale, “United in the struggle,” 267. 67 Neale, “United in the struggle,” 267. 68 McLean, Rattling spears, 209.

Figure 1. Raymond Meek, Figure 2. Jeffrey Samuels, A Figure 3. Michael Riley, Portrait Argoonie Doowie, 1988, Changing Continent, 1986, of Maria, 1985, photograph, 45.5 lithograph, 58.3 x 48.0 cm. oil painting, 187.0 x 124.2 x 47.9 cm. cm.

Boomalli came to represent the counter-currents of an Indigenous strategic essentialism and a postcolonial cosmopolitanism, which effectively fuelled the subsequent growth and diversification in urban Aboriginal art rather than frustrating it.69 Art historian, Ian McLean proposes that, in addition, what most distinguished the emerging generation of urban artists of this period was the strong historical consciousness underpinned by a deep anger at colonial injustices, compelling them to seek out, explore and engage with the colonial archive.70

When I started working at Garage Graphix I was immediately aware of Koori Art ’84 and the subsequent shows that were being mounted around the inner city. When Boomalli was established I was directly in touch with some of its founding members and had discussions about establishing connections. However, it was the work of Trevor Nickolls, as a prominent participant in the Koori Art ’84 exhibition, which resonated with me most at the time. Nickolls had something of a head start on his younger urban peers and has come to be celebrated as the “father of urban Aboriginal art.” He is also described as “the great

69 McLean, Rattling spears, 210; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the term “strategic essentialism” in the late 1980s. She argues that her intention has largely been misunderstood. However, according to the Oxford Dictionary, strategic essentialism represents the political practice of overlooking the fact that essences (in a philosophical sense) are difficult to sustain both ontologically and epistemologically. Strategic essentialism recognises simultaneously the impossibility of any essentialism and the necessity of some kind of essentialism for the sake of political action. Also See, Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Boundary 2, 20, no. 2 (1993): 24- 50; I explore “cosmopolitanism” more comprehensively in Chapter Four. Otherwise, it represents a worldliness in which individuals and their collectives are increasingly globally networked, especially with other similarly situated communities, maintaining a personal connection to cultural origins, but comfortably “at home” in another’s country. 70 McLean, Rattling spears, 211.

innovator of the 1970s” for showing how urban Aboriginal artists raised in mainstream Australian society could meaningfully explore their Aboriginality.71

Growing up in a disadvantaged part of Adelaide, he was an early beneficiary of the new Aboriginal affairs climate following the 1967 Referendum and was accepted into the South Australian School of Art where he graduated in 1972. He went on to complete a postgraduate diploma at the Victorian College of Arts in 1980.72 While his painting practice reflected his art school training, it manifested qualities beyond institutional learning, demonstrating what has been described as the “manic intensity … of some outsider art.”73 Nickolls was aware of his Aboriginal ancestry growing up, but it was apparently played down by his family. It can be noted that this was at a time when Aboriginal people “passed” where they could, as non-Aboriginal to avoid the oppressive constraints and restrictions of Aboriginal welfare policies; especially child removal and employment and movement restrictions.74 It was only in his twenties while studying art that he started to develop a greater awareness of Aboriginal art and culture.75 In the mid-1970s, as the Western Desert acrylic painting movement began to gain momentum, Nickolls started to explore the incorporation of unique Aboriginal visual signifiers within his own painting practice. During postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of Art, he met the Western Desert Papunya artist Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa, after which, his thinking about art and his practice took a significant turn. After graduating with a postgraduate diploma in painting he was employed as an Education Officer, which enabled him to travel throughout the Northern Territory. Here he met many more remote community artists and experienced their practices directly.76

71 Ian McLean, “Other side art: Trevor Nickolls,” Artlink, no. 2 (2011): 52. 72 McLean, “Other side art,” 52. 73 McLean, “Other side art,” 53. 74 See Maureen Perkins, “False whiteness: ‘passing’ and the stolen generations,” in Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 164-175. (Canberra, A.C.T.: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004). Sally Morgan’s My Place told that very personal story of a family passing as Indian. Also, see St Leon, Mark Valentine. “Celebrated at first, then implied and finally denied: the erosion of Aboriginal identity in circus, 1851–1960,” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 63-81, which considers the passing of Aboriginal performers as Spanish and as Hawaiian, to avoid the constraints of being recognised as Aboriginal. 75 McLean, “Other side art,” 54. 76 “Trevor Nickolls,” Design and art Australia online, database and e-research tool for art and design researchers, accessed 5 December 2018. https://www.daao.org.au/bio/trevor-nickolls/biography/.

Over the following decade he began to intensely explore his own ancestry and the broader social, cultural and political disjuncture between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal life in Australia. Where he initially started to consider ideas of “traditional” versus “contemporary” culture and identity, this resolved itself into a body of works that he referred to as Dreamtime to Machinetime (Figure 4). This series represented a visual exploration of the differences between what was popularly referred to as the Aboriginal “Dreamtime,” representing a fundamental, primordial connectedness with the natural world, and the Western industrial “machine-time,” encompassing what he regarded as the alienating effects of modernity.77 Despite the politics of the time and the capacity to read Nickolls’ practice within the context of these politics, he did not personally regard his practice as being motivated by “politics.” McLean observes that Nickolls’ concern was not with “the perceived binary differences between cultures and ways of being, but in how these are entangled.”78 Nevertheless, such an entanglement is inherently political. While it may not have been Nickolls’ stated objective to employ his art as a form of a social or political discourse, his practice profoundly confronts Australia’s historical psyche with regard to the urban Aboriginal identity, culture and belonging. Through a deeply personal self-inquiry, Trevor Nickolls’ oeuvre articulates an experience of

Figure 4. Trevor Nickolls, the colonial project that had not, up until this point, Contemporary Traditional, 1978, oil painting, 165 x 60 cm. been examined through mainstream histories and

77 Ruth Megaw and Vincent Megaw, “Nickolls” in Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, eds. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 663. 78 McLean, “Other side art,” 54.

ethnographies, and certainly not in art. It represented a body of experience that resonates with many urban-based Aboriginal people.

The sudden and dramatic emergence of Gordon Bennett onto the urban Aboriginal art scene in 1988 represented, for me a significant moment of witnessing the capacity of a contemporary urban-based Aboriginal artist, to explore the relationship between personal trauma and colonial history. The work Outsider (Figure 5) presented a powerful visual shock at the time, in its representation of a form of black on white violence, depicted in a decapitated but nevertheless potent black body “putting to rest” the relatively passive white heads of European classicism.79

It was a revelation of the power of art, to move beyond the inner exploration of the self (as in the case of Nickolls) and the outer expression of urban-identity (as with Boomalli artists), to a more

Figure 5. Gordon Bennett, Outsider, 1988, oil and nuanced critique of the meta- acrylic painting, 290.5 x 179.5 cm.

79 Painted in the same year of his graduation from art school, Outsider (1988) can be read as potentially observing a number of anniversaries. In one respect it represents a homage to the one hundredth anniversary of van Gogh’s historic break with Western artistic traditions, while closer to home, 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary, attracted closer scrutiny of Australia’s brutal colonial history and the practice of beheading Aboriginal people. It was also the tenth anniversary of the release of the local film The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, in which Jimmy Governor, a young Aboriginal man of mixed heritage in New South Wales, goes berserk after years of racial vilification and humiliation. See Walsh, Gerald. P. “Governor, Jimmy (1875–1901).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed 27 July 2019. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/governor-jimmy-6439/text11017, published first in hardcopy 1983.

narratives and language of colonialism, and the impact on those “on the receiving end” of colonialism’s physical and symbolic violence.

In 1986, after two years of night school art classes, Bennett was admitted into the Queensland College of Art Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) degree.80 This was a time when, in the context of the bicentenary, and in the light of the Western Desert art movement, many Australians became interested in exploring notions of Aboriginality and multiculturalism, and Australian identity more broadly. Bennett, who was not aware of his Aboriginal ancestry until his teens, was a relative outsider to the emerging urban Aboriginal art of Boomalli. More significantly, he came to see himself as an outsider to narratives that underpinned popular conceptions of identities more broadly.81

Bennett explained that:

I decided that I was in a very interesting position: My mind and body had been effectively colonised by Western culture, and yet my Aboriginality, which had been historically, socially and personally repressed, was still part of me and I was obtaining the tools and the language to explore it on my own terms. In a conceptual sense I was liberated from the binary prison of self and other; the wall had disintegrated but where was I? In a real sense I was still living in the suburbs, and in a world where there were very real demands to be either one thing or the other. There was no space for me to simply “be.”82

Bennett’s Self portrait (But I always wanted to be one of the good guys) (Figure 6) is now an iconic Australian artwork – a “history painting” as he came to refer to such works. The powerful image/word “I AM,” while central, is accompanied by the statements of opposites – “I am light” “I am dark.” Bennett’s portrait is of himself as a four-year old, dressed in a child’s American cowboy costume, occupying the “I” and flanked by projected schoolbook illustrations of Aboriginal people in a “primitive state.” This is juxtaposed with the “AM” superimposed over another illustration of Indigenous and white people in battle. The “I AM”

80 At this time the College was administered by the Queensland Department of Technical and Further Education. In 1991 the College was incorporated into Griffith University. 81 Olivier Krischer, “Fields of disturbance: Gordon Bennett,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 78 (May 2012): 122. 82 Ian McLean and Gordon Bennett, The art of Gordon Bennett (Roseville East, N.S.W.: Craftsman House, 1996), 32-33.

is appropriated from the well-known work of art “Victory over death 2” (1970), by New Zealand artist Colin McCahon.

Figure 6. Gordon Bennett, Self portrait (But I always wanted to be one of the good guys), 1990, oil painting, 150.0 x 260.0 cm.

While there are interesting cross-references that could be explored, this work spoke directly to Bennett’s attempt to reconcile his own ontological and epistemological entanglement with European Enlightenment notions of human progress, empire and colonialism, and the death and destruction wrought in its name. While this work is, like much of Bennett’s oeuvre, deeply autobiographical, it is an attempt to explore not the “who am I,” as an expression of a set cultural identity, but rather the “how am I,” as an expression of an ambivalent identity, in flux in a world of profound injustices.83

This brings me back to McLean’s observation that what distinguished many of the emerging generation of urban artists of this period was a strong conscious drive to engage with and take to task the founding legacy of the settler-colonial archive. For artists like Trevor Nickolls and Gordon Bennet, this was no easy task as it was an exploration that, in trawling the depths of what was still largely hidden historical material, was fraught with pain and

83 Kelly Gellatly, “Citizen in the making: the art of Gordon Bennett,” in Gordon Bennett (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007), Exhibition catalogue.

despair, exposing the trauma experienced by Aboriginal people throughout colonial history. In Chapter Two I explore in much greater depth the role of the ethnographic museum as a colonial archive and the postcolonial interventions of Aboriginal artists in contemporary times. But before I get there, I will briefly outline another area of concern that was evolving in parallel over this period: the engagement and re-engagement of Aboriginal communities, of which artists were members, with the significance of art to the maintenance of contemporary cultural heritage and identity.

Heritage

Since the late 1980s, Aboriginal people have had a much greater presence in the mainstream art world than they had historically, yet there are aspects of contemporary art discourse that reveal old habits. The emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art from the shadows of colonisation into the bright lights of postmodernity seems to still be largely a story of what “others” did to Aboriginal people and Aboriginal art. Aboriginal art as “art” has followed a unique trajectory in its acceptance into the predominantly “white” Australian art world. From an earlier, almost wilful blindness to its existence, white artists and curators not only found a “space” for Aboriginal art within their institutions, but came to suspect that Indigenous art represented more; maybe what they had been looking for all along: an unadulterated cultural authenticity.84 All the while, these views never fully appreciating the agency, resilience and resourcefulness of Aboriginal people, and the ways in which art has historically functioned within Aboriginal sites of cultural and political engagement.85 With the broad-scale commodification of much Aboriginal art and the emergence of what is critically referred to as the “Aboriginal art industry,” it seems that despite this agency, resilience and resourcefulness, white people have continued to control the discourse regarding what it is that Aboriginal artists do and what it means.86 This seems to have relegated most Aboriginal artists and their communities to the sidelines of “the main game”

84 McLean, Rattling spears. 85 McLean, Rattling spears. 86 I have in mind Richard Bell’s “Bell’s theorem: Aboriginal art – it’s a white thing,” Kooriweb.org. Accessed on 15 January 2018. http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html/.

in the business of contemporary arts, including profiting from the market, determining what is appropriate or not and ultimately defining the discourse.87

As demonstrated earlier in this chapter, Aboriginal activists have long argued for their rights, including that their autonomy and agency be recognised, and not just today, but throughout our colonial-settler history. Contemporary challenges to the entrenched myths of peaceful settlement, supposedly due to a lack of Aboriginal resistance and an acquiescence to colonial power, are not new. For Aboriginal artists at the time (and non-Aboriginal artists and art historians more recently), art is being increasingly recognised as the ground on which cultural difference, as well as cultural “contradiction and incommensurability,” might be recognised, grasped, and accepted for its own inherent values, without the need for cultural domination, assimilation or obliteration.88 In recent years, anthropologists and art historians at the forefront of the contemporary Aboriginal art revolution have contributed to a revisionary process which has begun to recognise that art played a significant role from the beginning, demonstrated in very early Aboriginal attempts to bridge the Aboriginal- colonial settler cultural chasm, in response to which colonists appeared either blind or largely disinterested.89

Throughout our colonial-settler history, wherever Europeans have shown an interest in Aboriginal art and material culture, Aboriginal artists have responded, recognising the cultural and political potential to draw the “European Other” into their own worldviews.90 It is clear that the successive colonial policies and practices of segregation, protection, welfare and assimilation ensured that productive cultural and intellectual engagements between

87 See Julie Gough, “Trading Places – why make Indigenous art and where goes culture?” Machine, Artworkers Alliance Queensland, Brisbane (Dec 2006, Issue 2.3): 7-9. 88 McLean, Rattling spears, 258. 89 Morphy, Aboriginal Art, 21-24. Morphy suggests that Aboriginal art was “invisible” to colonists for three primary reasons: the concept of terra nullius rendered Aboriginal people as without culture, where to have culture would extend to civilisation; Aboriginal people were too primitive, hence since of art must have been produced by other visiting cultures; cultural clash, where Aboriginal art and culture was simply too foreign for colonists to appreciate the existence of a system of Aboriginal art. 90 Howard Morphy, Becoming art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008).

Aboriginal people and the colonial-settler population could not be realised.91 However, post the 1967 referendum and the breakdown of the hard-cultural boundaries of the previous eras, public institutions such as universities, galleries and museums that, for European audiences, have represented important civic places for cultural dialogue, have become logical forums for Aboriginal people to meaningfully engage mainstream society in readdressing the unfinished business of accounting for colonisation.92

Across rural and regional New South Wales, Aboriginal communities have been in the process of recovering and healing, deconstructing the colonially imposed and denigrating myths of Aboriginality, while establishing more precise and more meaningful local histories.93 These movements aim to identify and reconstruct local languages and specific cultural knowledge systems, and to recognise and reclaim what remains of local material cultural heritages. Besides the challenges posed by the absence or fragmentation of traditional knowledge and culture practices, there is the often-traumatic experience of unpicking family memories and accessing colonial records. Many communities in the southeast have to contend with a residual, in many ways internalised, discourse of “cultural loss,” which inhibits expressions of positive contemporary culture identities.94 These situations are being challenged through the emergence of Aboriginal activists at the local

91 On the whole, religious mission and government reserve administrations were historically geared not only to attempt to prohibit Aboriginal cultural maintenance but to prevent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relationships of any kind, outside of strictly controlled working contracts and “adoption.” This history has been well documented in scholarly research as well as via government administrative investigations. The 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody represents the landmark investigation of this type. 92 Bernice Murphy, “Transforming culture: Indigenous art and Australian art museums,” in Understanding museums: Australian museums and museology, National Museum of Australia, published online at nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums, eds. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien, 2011, accessed 4 July 2019. 93 It has been gaining momentum since the early 1980s with the creation of state-based Aboriginal land rights and Aboriginal Land Councils, the development of a broader community-controlled service sector, in, for example, community health, childcare, legal aid, and Community Development and Employment Programs. The latter has involved community- based arts and cultural heritage programs. In addition to these, formal inquiries (e.g. Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991), the Native Title Act (1993), the national inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997)) have assisted many communities in having the impact of colonisation on them recognised and better understood. Remedial programs in language revitalisation, local cultural heritage, and land management, such as the Indigenous Park Ranger program (since about 2007), have played an important role in local cultural revival. 94 Cultural loss is a concept that has been perpetuated throughout colonial history, initially in institutional and governmental discourses that attempted to define, manage and control the Aboriginal Other, but became part of the popular stereotypes informing mainstream notions of Aboriginality. It represented the degree to which Aboriginal people/communities measured up against imposed notions of cultural authenticity.

and regional levels, activists who act as “cultural brokers” and “community-workers,”95 much like my own experience as a community artist in Western Sydney, but in a significantly transformed cultural and political landscape, where Aboriginal art and material heritage have become far more respected.

Anthropologist, Daphne Nash, notes that the current revival of cultural knowledge through contemporary art has been led by a number of prominent cultural workers, who, while principally interested in developing their own art practices, are re-engaging with concepts of traditionally-based art and craft, to assert the integrity and legitimacy of southeast Aboriginal claims to cultural knowledge, place and identity.96 However, Nash advises, while the knowledge base of these cultural workers is not necessarily typical of all Aboriginal peoples’ views across the region, because of their strategic engagement with mainstream cultural institutions — including universities, art galleries and museums — they do effectively represent the broader Aboriginal community through their actions, “which affect the wider (non-Aboriginal/institutional) community’s perception of all Kooris.”97 Critically, it is this, and their sense of “diasporic displacement,” that has motivated many to reinforce, and to guard a sense of a shared identity distinct from those who do not have the same affiliations.

The term “community-workers” defines Aboriginal people, especially artists, who actively work to retrieve and reconfigure local Aboriginal identities, inter- and intra-community politics, and developments in contemporary art. It can be considered a response to a changed environment where Aboriginality has become valued, particularly Aboriginal art. This has encouraged revitalised signs and expressions of Aboriginality and re-engagements with local traditions. These cultural brokers and the communities they represent, have

95 Lorraine Gibson, “‘We don't do dots - ours is lines’ - asserting a Barkindji style,” Oceania, no. 3 (2008); and Daphne Nash, “Transforming knowledge: Indigenous knowledge and culture workers on the South Coast of New South Wales,” (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2009). 96 Nash, “Transforming knowledge,” 21. 97 Nash, “Transforming knowledge,” 22.

become increasingly active in engaging with the public cultural sector, to have their art viewed as contemporary material culture, and to have their work collected and exhibited.98

Thinking Forward

Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to map out something of the history of the emergence of developments in urban Aboriginal arts and their association with notions of identity. In considering the growing self-awareness and politicisation of urban Aboriginal communities throughout the twentieth century, it is clear that the history of Aboriginal assertions of rights, to citizenship and to equality, were tempered by assertions of distinctive cultural identities premised on being the first Australians, while remembering the devastation that colonisation wrought upon Aboriginal lives. In this regard, as urban-based Aboriginal communities became increasingly urbane, cultural distinctiveness became an important quality establishing difference from non-Aboriginal Australians. In this latter era of expanding social, cultural and economic migration, with associated conditions of dislocation, alienation, and the emergence of distinct Aboriginal diasporas, “authentic” culture and traditional relations to Country have taken on extraordinary significance.

Aboriginal health scholar Yin Paradies has argued that one of the problems with the emerging essentialist discourse of recent years is that, despite the assertions that a unique spirituality or relationship with the land epitomises Indigeneity, “the available statistics suggest that many Indigenous Australians fail to conform to the fantasy of cultural alterity.”99 He adds that constructions of (pan) Indigeneity also involve boundary construction and policing which seek to represent Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities as “mutually impermeable and incommensurable,” forcing those who already inhabit Indigeneity into a “prison-house” of identity.100 Paradies suggests that assertions of

98 This can be seen in the diversity of regionally based exhibitions across the south east, where public galleries and museums are increasingly working with local cultural advocates, to facilitate the development of local art and cultural archives. These regional institutions in turn are establishing connections with the more major state and national institutions. An example of this which I refer to in later chapters is the Pallingjang: Salt Water exhibition of south coast Aboriginal artists. From the work developed through four exhibitions over a decade, participating artists have been commissioned to produce new work, and invited to participate in programs in museums and galleries across the country. 99 Paradies, “Beyond black and white,” 358. 100 Paradies, "Beyond black and white,” 356.

incommensurability are based on the argument that “the seduction of assimilation” can and must be resisted, and that a political and cultural space can be created where a unique Aboriginality can be “re-built.”101

The question of Aboriginal authenticity is deeply connected to colonial racism, where the regimes of biological and cultural authenticity have shaped state policies and practices that frame and organise indigenous lives around the world.102 At the immediate level, constructions of Aboriginality are linked to the policies of management and control of Indigenous people. Contemporary Indigenous Identity scholars, such as Michelle Harris, recognise that Identity, rather than being expressive of a definable cultural tradition, is formative: it emerges from particular moments, experiences, relations and positions within the social order, and from both the opportunities and the constraints that govern our realities. This means that identities are formative and constitutive, not merely reflexive.103 As Michael Dodson asserts, the right to self-representation includes “the right to draw on all aspects of our sense of our Aboriginality, be that our blood, our descent, our history, our ways of living and relating, or any element of our cultures”; this is an act of resistance to the politics of domination and oppression.104

Torres Strait Island scholar, Martin Nakata (who I refer to in much greater length in Chapter Four) argues for the development of a critical Indigenous intellectual framework that might be more broadly productive for understanding how Indigenous people have been constituted within the world, one that acknowledges contemporary Indigenous knowledge, as well as the complex sets of social and discursive relations that position them as people, while accepting the possibilities for cultural change.105 According to Nakata, this requires a different set of assumptions about Indigenous people in theory and in practice, and in particular a rethinking of the space in which Indigenous people interact with others. He calls

101 Paradies, "Beyond black and white," 356. 102 Harris, Nakata and Carlson, The politics of identity, 1. 103 Harris, “Emergent Indigenous identities,” 13. 104 Dodson, “The Wentworth lecture,” 10. 105 Martin N. Nakata, Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines (Canberra, A.C.T.: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 196.

for a deeper consideration of the ways in which the particularities of contemporary Indigenous knowledge and experiences are constituted in that space.106

Within this chapter, I referred to the “cross-currents” of “essentialism” and “cosmopolitanism,” that have been observed in the practices of emerging urban-based artists. In Chapter Four, I consider some of the cultural consequences of globalisation, and in particular the concept of “cosmopolitanism,” which I suggest have been elided in relation to contemporary Aboriginal artists. Non-Indigenous, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti contends that cosmopolitanism is a potentially useful framework for thinking about the relationships between people across the globe today, so long as it is “radically relational” and includes the “roots of Indigenous people” as much as the “routes of the postcolonial migrant.”107 Braidotti’s vision rejects the Western universalism of the past, whereby Indigenous people the world over were colonised and subjected to generations of trauma.108 According to Braidotti, within this form of cosmopolitanism, “difference” is an expression of one’s “embodied and embedded locations.” It is an expression not of who we are, but rather of what we are capable of becoming. To achieve this, a new agenda needs to be set, which is no longer that of European or Eurocentric identity (with which urban Aboriginal identity is undeniably entangled), but rather a radical transformation of it.109

106 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 196. 107 Braidotti, “’Becoming-world’,” 30-31. 108 Braidotti, “’Becoming-world’,” 36-37. 109 Braidotti, “’Becoming-world’,” 44-45.

Chapter Two – Archival Engagements

Since the end of the twentieth century, urban-based Aboriginal artists have been drawn to the colonial archive as a means of making sense of history; as a practice of revealing and revising colonial representations of Aboriginal people and culture; and as a process of community healing. Art historian Ian McLean suggests that, fuelled by a deep cultural anger, the archival impulse of urban Aboriginal artists made it a natural fit with the postmodernism of the 1990s, where, in representing the archive through a critical contemporary lens, the ideological work of the archive could be disclosed and challenged.1 The earlier urban artists of the Koori Art ’84 exhibition in Sydney in 1984 were criticised in part as being out of step with contemporary Western artistic trends. This postmodern fit that McLean refers to provided a means for this later generation of urban artists to be “read” by a non-Indigenous audience, and to be able to be understood within the terms of the mainstream cultural discourses of the time.

Tracey Moffatt and Gordon Bennett rose to prominence in the late 1980s while consciously exploring international postmodern/postcolonial strategies in their respective practices. From the outset, Moffatt strongly embraced her identity as a “contemporary Aboriginal artist” concerned with representing urban Aboriginal lifestyles. Her photographic series Some Lads (1996) and her experimental short film Nice Coloured Girls (1987) were unique at the time in analysing colonial representations of Aboriginal people while asserting an urban Aboriginal aesthetic. Nice Coloured Girls and Moffatt’s later film Night Cries: a rural tragedy (1990) each employ experimental filmic strategies that challenge both Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal representations of Aboriginality, while playing with a number of prominent binaries of the time: urban/remote; white culture/black culture; the past/the present; exploiter/exploited. Moffatt, like Bennett, went on to increasingly resist reductive categorisations of her practice as an artist and her cultural identity. It seems that this resistance is sometimes misinterpreted as a rejection of their respective identities as Aboriginal people. Despite rejecting the reductive terms of “Aboriginal artist,” neither

1 Ian McLean, Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 211.

stopped engaging with Aboriginality, personally or more broadly, they simply did it on their own terms and in their own time and place. Hence, their practices as artists are nevertheless critical to the history of contemporary Aboriginal art, urban Aboriginal identity, and the place of Aboriginal art and artists in addressing the ongoing concerns of Indigenous Australia.

Much urban-based Aboriginal art then, as now, derives its power from its capacity to draw on the resources available to the artists to assert their personal insights and concerns for their communities, without conforming to Western cultural and intellectual trends. Engagement with the colonial archive has represented a profound commitment to undertaking the challenging work of unpacking the past with the promise of becoming anew. Urban Aboriginal art, like much of the urban activism of the twentieth century, has been as much informed by local – “grass-roots” – concerns, motivated by the artists’ own time and place, influenced by unfolding relationships to the state, by testing the limits to self-determination, and by the growing assertions of community cultural difference. In this context, the archive has been pivotal in connecting the cultural present with a reactivated sovereign past.

This chapter sets out a selected history of this development, with a focus on the Australian colonial context, and the more recent engagement by contemporary Aboriginal artists. I will consider, specifically, the National Museum of Australia’s (NMA) 2015-2016 landmark exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum, and the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) 2017 Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, as both exemplifying this idea of the museum as contact zone.

The Colonial Museum

My inquiry into Aboriginal artists’ engagements with the archive has involved a deeper investigation into the history of the Western museum and its colonial origins, not only as the cultural representative of European empire in the colonies, but as the collector, cataloguer,

and translator of all things within its physical and conceptual reach. This philosophy of organisation and management established the museum as a cultural curiosity cabinet, initially holding precious botanical specimens, flora and fauna, and later Indigenous cultural objects and human remains. These collections came to underpin the dominant narratives and taxonomies of European social and cultural order, enhancing their symbolic control over the colonies, and justifying the atrocities being committed in the name of colonisation.2

The origin of the Western museum can be traced to the sixteenth century cabinet of curiosities, commonly known in German as the Wunderkammer.3 In its earliest manifestation, the cabinet of curiosities was a private affair consisting of vitrines fitted with multiple compartments, filled with collections of exotic natural objects, including animal, vegetable and mineral specimens; particularly desirable were composite objects and anomalies or “freaks of nature.” Collections would be arranged by their wealthy owners, to inspire a sense of awe and wonder in their visitors, and they often occupied a private and devotional space where nature and art were transcendentally bound together.4 This is no surprise as the cabinet of curiosities had its own roots in the Western medieval church reliquary, containing the holy relics of the bishops, which connected the church, through its sacred objects, to locations out of reach – such as the Holy Land. McLean argues that the reliquary functioned as an indexical sign “of a centre elsewhere,” a proxy for “an Other which was named God.”5 Curiosity cabinets were the personal collections of prominent individuals during the Renaissance, especially princes and ruling families, and acted as symbols of their societal power and privilege.6 While they did represent a significant first attempt to reorder the things of the known world opened up by colonialism, McLean argues that this secularisation of the reliquary effectively usurped the church’s authority, making

2 Jennifer Barrett and Jacqueline Millner, Australian artists in the contemporary museum (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 40. 3 Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002). 4 James Putnam, Art and artifact: the museum as medium (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 10. 5 Ian McLean, “Wunderkammering,” in Curious colony: a twenty first century Wunderkammer, edited by Jennifer Blunden (Newcastle, N.S.W.: Newcastle Region Art Gallery. 2010), Exhibition catalogue. 6 Geoffrey D. Lewis “Museum,” Encyclopeadia Britannica, November 2018, accessed December 2018. https://www.britannica.com/topic/museum-cultural-institution.

the European king the representative of the new centre. In this context, the cabinet of curiosities was a potent emblem of imperial power.7

Curiosity cabinets grew in popularity in the seventeenth century, being adopted more broadly by scholars and wealthy amateurs as expressions of their own unique individual insights, aspirations, and public personae. Consequently, the trend in private collecting expanded dramatically. With the end of the Renaissance and the scientific developments of the Enlightenment era, the world was opened up through the expansion of empire and colonisation, establishing extensive trade routes and enabling merchants and explorers to traffic in rare and exotic objects from far-off lands.8 Cabinets of curiosity increasingly occupied whole rooms, becoming diversified into those of natural history (naturalia), technology (scientifica), and art (artificialia), which were often crowded together.9

By the eighteenth century these categories underwent a dramatic evolution in which systematic organisation became pivotal. The age of “scientific classification” corresponded with the “age of artistic classification,” with both profoundly influencing museums and their respective practices in later centuries.10 Gradually, the large and significant royal collections became institutionalised and turned into modern museums, and increasingly accessible to a wider public. Where the curiosity cabinet was private, personally inspired and subjectively informed, the new museum was public, scientific, and ordered by concepts of truth and rationality. Where the curiosity cabinet was arranged seemingly randomly, the new museum broke collections into thematic categories corresponding with natural history and anthropology, technology and art. The curiosity cabinet came to be seen as anachronistic, kitsch and macabre.

As Australia was being incorporated into a new world mapped by Europeans, antipodean things – animals, plants, minerals, cultural material and bodies – were collected, with the

7 McLean, “Wunderkammering.” 8 Patrick, Cabinets of Curiosities. 9 Louis Cellauro, “Venice and the origins of the art-historical tradition of display of the modern museum,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 81, no. 2 (June 2012): 96-97. 10 Cellauro, "Venice,” 117.

museum becoming the key site in exchanges of knowledge for scientists, connoisseurs and governments. Their capacity to amass material and empirical research assisted not only the economic development of the new settler society, but also the Mother Country. Museums were seen as a vital part of colonial culture, as they could order and make comprehensible the newness of the new world, while mapping the exploits of the empire.11 The colonial museum was also the symbolic flagship of the imperial power abroad, and consequently came to be housed within monumental neo-classical buildings, with imposing entrances and spacious halls, and typically elevated in the landscape. Their content was all neatly classified according to the “scientific” findings of the “benevolent” imperial power.12 Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial museums took their place alongside libraries, churches and schools as cultural institutions for the provision of standard intellectual and moral values to the working classes.13

The first Australian museum was established in Sydney in 1827, officially becoming the Australian Museum in 1836.14 The new museum initially focused on collections of flora and fauna, with Aboriginal material not collected, housed and displayed locally, but instead sent to London. It appears that there was very little local institutional collecting of Aboriginal cultural material until the 1890s.15 The Australian Museum only had nine Aboriginal artefacts in its collection a decade after it was established, and these and anything else it might have collected subsequently were lost in the Great Garden Palace fire in 1882 in the Sydney Botanic Gardens. The Museum instead acquired its most significant collection of Aboriginal artefacts from Edward Pierson Ramsay, who had been its curator between 1874 and 1895, and who had been amassing a personal collection during his appointment.16 In 1899, British biologist Baldwin Spencer was appointed honorary director of the then

11 Barrett and Millner, Australian artists, 42. 12 Joy Hendry, Reclaiming culture: Indigenous people and self-representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 29. 13 Barrett and Millner, Australian artists, 41. 14 Sydney’s “Old Post Office” held the first collection of “curiosities” prior to this. 15 Barrett and Millner, Australian artists, 41. 16 Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby, The makers and making of Indigenous Australian museum collections (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 9.

National Museum of Victoria, where he quickly set out to assess the state of ethnographic collections in Australia.17

Over the turn of the twentieth century, anthropological activity had become intense, and Aboriginal Australians were becoming the most studied Indigenous people in the world. Between 1880 and 1920, a new social evolutionary paradigm took hold within Western science, accompanied by a new museology, and Aboriginal material culture became universally significant and highly sought after, especially through collections on display at international exhibitions around the world. Given the poor state of Australian museum holdings, there was an intense scramble for artefacts from around 1880, with a preference for artefacts made with “the original stone technology.”18 The social evolutionism of the time presumed the imminent extinction of Aboriginal culture, contributing to a sense of urgency in salvaging “authentic” Aboriginal artefacts, not for Aboriginal people themselves, but for white Australian posterity.19

Over the first two decades of the twentieth century, artefact production increased rather than diminished, particularly in the southeast. Institutionally, artefacts were desired as the cultural remnants of a dying race, and their ongoing production and commodification represented evidence of cultural contamination, loss and inauthenticity. Consequently, institutional anxieties grew regarding the authenticity of their collections, and by the late 1920s museum collecting practices locally and abroad came to a sudden standstill.20 It seemed not to have been recognised by these institutional collectors that, from the early days of colonisation, Aboriginal communities had been making artefacts for personal and ceremonial use, as well as for trade or sale to non-Aboriginal collectors. In effect, the institutions ceased collecting at the very time Aboriginal people themselves set out to actively exploit their tentative relationships with the state in meaningful cultural exchange.21

17 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 9. 18 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 10. 19 Howard Morphy, Becoming art (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 263. 20 Morphy, Becoming art, 263. 21 Sylvia Kleinert, “Art and Aboriginality in the south-east,” in Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, eds. Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 245.

Except that the state’s understanding of the situation had Aboriginal people locked within an ideological framework, in which contemporary Aboriginal people could not meaningfully have a place.

The trade in boomerangs, shields, clubs and spears nevertheless continued to grow, and in many instances reserves and mission authorities encouraged the production of artefacts, not because of a desire to support Aboriginal cultural propagation, but because these were considered industrious activities and useful for the mission economy.22 Cultural tourism also began to bring many Aboriginal communities into contact with mainstream Australia, and the production of artefacts which emerged in response to this interaction represented an innovative set of local negotiations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. Sociologist Sylvia Kleinert suggests that these encounters between Aboriginal people and white anthropologists and tourists represent an assertion of Indigenous presence that effectively maintained community social cohesion, generated important cultural and economic benefits, and ultimately contributed to the development of a modern Aboriginal cultural identity in the southeast.23

Meanwhile, museums redirected most of their attention to natural history, geology and technology.24 Because artefacts had lost their institutional significance, collecting became privatised, while anthropologists shifted their attention to Aboriginal social relations.25 This situation remained the norm until fairly recently, and is reflected in museum collections throughout nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The South Australian Museum has long been recognised as having one of the best collections of Australian material, yet its exhibition of Aboriginal material stood unchanged for almost seventy years. Likewise, the original Queensland Museum’s display stood unchanged for seventy-five years, and the Australian Museum’s initial display was maintained for sixty years.26

22 Sylvia Kleinert, “‘Jacky Jacky was a smart young fella’: a study of art and Aboriginality in south east Australia 1900-1980,” (PhD Thesis, Australian Nation University, 1994), 105-139. 23 Sylvia Kleinert, “Aboriginal enterprises negotiating an urban Aboriginality,” Aboriginal History 34 (2010): 2. 24 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 8-9. 25 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 3. 26 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 4.

With the changes to Aboriginal affairs from the late-1960s and the abandonment of the policy of Aboriginal assimilation in the early 1970s, governments refocussed on Aboriginal material culture as an integral component of an Australian tourism strategy, as well as a more concerted effort to recognise and value Aboriginal culture. The emergence of the Western Desert art movement at the same time changed everything profoundly. From the early 1980s, a broad range of significant transformations began to take shape, paralleling the transformations in Aboriginal life and Australian society more broadly. From this point, Aboriginal art almost totally dominated the production and collection of Aboriginal material culture, privately and institutionally. Artefacts were still being made for sale at the beginning of this period, but by the twenty-first century, there was a major decline in the number, diversity and quality of artefacts available.27

As with colonised peoples elsewhere, the archive’s store of Australian Indigenous material was spread across the globe, subject to the classification and value hierarchies of the imperial collecting institutions.28 A national material culture advisory committee was established in 1973 to consider options for re-establishing collections of traditional objects, including the purchase of existing private collections and the commissioning of new works. In 1986, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies initiated a survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material in overseas museums, which revealed that collections of “varying importance” existed in at least 177 museums across thirty countries.29 A planned multi-volume publication on the material culture of Aboriginal Australia never eventuated, and the general interest titles on material culture became overwhelmed by the rise of the Aboriginal art movement, especially in the lead-up to the bicentenary.30 Central to the rise in Aboriginal art was the effort of many outside anthropology to wrest art from the anthropologists and the ethnographic museums, and to relocate it in the art galleries.31 Renewed interest in collections of Australian Indigenous material at home and abroad has

27 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 12. 28 Mike Featherstone, “Archive,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 3 (May 2006): 592. 29Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and Carol Cooper, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections in overseas museums (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989). 30 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 6. 31 Peterson, Allen and Hamby, The makers and making, 6.

led to new initiatives not only to determine the holdings in overseas collections, but also to seek repatriation. The most current Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AITSIS) research suggests that there are up to 83 000 items of Australian Indigenous cultural heritage material in overseas collections, of which 266 items across 200 museums are being sought for return.32

Archival Trauma

Early twentieth century European avant-garde artists, from Dadaists to Surrealists, began actively exploring art and natural history museums for their political, technological and psychological significance, in order to challenge the cultural conventions of Western society.33 Following the end of the Second World War and with the creation of the United Nations and the joint proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a process of global decolonisation was set in train over the following decades. For many formerly subjugated peoples, rediscovering pre-colonial history and identity was important to the process of establishing a new nation-state, requiring the unpacking of the colonial infrastructure of control.34 The archive was a crucial site for national memory, and the museums, libraries, public monuments and memorials – the instruments for forging a nation of people into an “imagined community” – had to be interrogated and reinvented, especially as the bulk of Indigenous materials had already been shipped to European imperial centres.35 Artists have since been diversifying their engagement with such institutions beyond political critique, and have worked within the institutions and their collections to complement and extend, as well as to complicate, the role of the museum and the audience experience.36

For Indigenous peoples in colonial-settler states such as Australia, New Zealand, and North America, there was no decolonisation. The colonial archive went largely unchallenged until

32 Hill, Jess and Felicity Ogilvie, “ ‘We want it to come home’: returning Indigenous cultural heritage to Australia,” Radio National Breakfast, aired Tuesday 2 July 2019 (Sydney: ABC Radio National, 2012), Radio broadcast. 33 Hal Foster, “An archival impulse,” October 110 (Autumn, 2004): 3. 34 Featherstone, “Archive,” 592. 35 Featherstone, “Archive,” 592. 36 Barrett and Millner, Australian artists, 3.

Indigenous populations were granted access. In Australia this was from the late-1980s onwards. However, physical access has not been the only challenging obstacle for Aboriginal people. For many artists and their communities, engagement with the archive has proven to be a contentious practice, especially where culturally sensitive material such as human remains and secret/sacred objects has been involved. In other cases, it has been suggested that the colonial trauma Aboriginal people continue to experience presents too strong a potential for pain and suffering to be inflicted and therefore this material should be left alone. In this sense, the colonial archive forms an integral component of the project of colonisation itself.37 Until Aboriginal people have been able to fully interrogate, “unpack” and become reconciled with what the numerous archives hold, these remain bittersweet sites of potential pain and trauma and/or celebration and revalidation.

The concept of “historical trauma” has developed in recent years as a construct to describe and address the intergenerational impact of colonisation, manifested in the cultural suppression and oppression of Aboriginal people today.38 The concept of “trauma testimony” has been proposed as a potentially valuable process whereby, through the act of narrating the experience or sense of past trauma, “the creation of a present and future becomes more possible.”39 People who work in and with communities experiencing intergenerational trauma act as “witnesses” who facilitate the healing process. Jewish holocaust scholar, Thomas Trezise, draws attention to the importance of the relational nature of “witness testimony,” in which the listener of trauma testimony effectively becomes a witness to the witnessing of trauma.40 This listening/witnessing can enable trauma witnesses to listen to themselves, aiding in their own transformation as survivors. Aboriginal artists who engage with the colonial archive effectively bear witness to

37 Kate MacNeill, “Undoing the colonial gaze: ambiguity in the art of Brook Andrew,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 179. 38 Laurence J. Kirmayer., Joseph P. Gone and Joshua Moses, “Rethinking historical trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (June 2014): 299-319. 39 Thomas Trezise, Witnessing witnessing: on the reception of Holocaust survivor testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 8. Also see Jill Bennett’s 2005 Empathic vision: affect, trauma, and contemporary art is an insightful text which address in part the work of Gordon Bennett; Michelle Evans and Amanda Sinclair, “Containing, contesting, creating spaces: leadership and cultural identity work among Australian Indigenous arts leaders” also provides a useful insight into associations of art with Aboriginal identity and trauma specifically. 40 Trezise, Witnessing witnessing, 8.

community trauma, and their artistic narration then has the potential to facilitate the healing of the community and of themselves.

In thinking through Aboriginal colonial trauma, and the act of artists engaging with the archive to facilitate community and self-healing, I found Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “dialectical image” useful.41 The “dialectical image,” according to Benjamin, represents a constellation of disparate fragments of historical images, which, when suspended together, can reveal the underlying tensions in history and provide insight into different conceptions of “temporality and difference.”42 Attempting to address the emergence of fascism in Europe, the objective of Benjamin’s “dialectical image” was to enable different historical narratives to emerge.43 He believed that objects were commodified into “dream images” or “phantasmagoria,” image concepts marked by melancholy that become lodged in the collective consciousness of a culture.44 In order to effectively counter the power of such historical material in determining “historical truth,” it is necessary to “disrupt” the taken- for-granted relationship between past and present that the [colonial] “tradition” assumes, and in ways that “uproot” and “shock” what has been constructed as “the present.”45

In the following, I briefly analyse three critical junctures in our colonial history in which the archive is confronted through the framework of the “dialectical image.” I attempt to demonstrate the role of “visual testimony” in recent Aboriginal art, as well as the dual expressions of deep anger and reclamation of lost identity referred to by McLean. I consider an early colonial work of art, Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer (1854) (Figure 7) painted by newly arrived colonial artist J.M. Crossland on commission for the South Australian Parliament collection. I then address Destiny Deacon’s 1990s response to this

41 I find Walter Benjamin’s analytical framework compelling here. While I do not draw on him largely, he is a relevant source in this context. Alex Martinis Roe brought to my attention that Benjamin’s authority in the canon is fully established, and, given he was writing in a context in which Jews were victims of racism, and his opposition to fascism more broadly, there is a clear if tangential connection to the postcolonial Indigenous rights movement. Also, see Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, Illuminations/Walter Benjamin (London: Collins; Fontana Books, 1973). 42 Uros Cvoro, “Dialectical image today,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (February 2008): 89. 43 Cvoro, “Dialectical image today,” 90. 44 Cvoro, “Dialectical image today,” 91. 45 Max Pensky, "Method and time," in The Cambridge companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41.

work in her photograph, Eva Johnson, Writer (1994) (Figure 8). Finally, I consider Christian Thompson’s later Emotional Striptease (2003) (Figure 9).

Figure 7. J.M. Crossland, A Figure 8. Destiny Deacon, Eva Figure 9. Christian Thompson, Portrait of Nannultera, a young Johnson, Writer, 1994, Emotional Striptease, 2003, Poonindie cricketer, 1854, oil photograph, 72.8 x 58.6. photograph, 107.6 x 95.4 cm. painting, 99.0 x 78.8 cm.

On first glance, Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer (1854) pictures an adolescent Aboriginal boy, neatly attired with hair slicked back, standing determinedly with a raised cricket bat. The painting’s quality is readily associated with an earlier Australian art period. The centre of focus is the boy with the background functioning more as a symbolic prop, representing nothing more than a muted undulating “arid” landscape; the darkened sky with brightened horizon alluding, potentially, to the coming of “a new dawn,” a frequent colonial trope of the times. However, Nannultera’s presence evokes simultaneously a sense of strength and determination — a cricketer sizing up to an impending delivery from the opposite end of the pitch — and a sense of dignity and respectability in posture, and, significantly, in the recognisable attire of an English cricketer, associated, in those days, with “the sport of gentlemen.” Yet the image is strikingly melancholic.

Today, much revisionist work has been undertaken to re-contextualise such images to enable our engagement with them to align more accurately with the broader realities of their origins. For example, Poonindie was established as a Catholic “training” institution for Aboriginal children in South Australia in the 1850s, with the aim of taking teenage children coming through the colony’s Aboriginal boarding school system, and “saving” them from

potentially returning to their “people and tribal ways.”46 In this context we can read “Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer,” in the context of Australian colonial history and the practices of the colonial regime in authoring images, which acted as propaganda for its ideological intent. How do such images represent the contested facts of history? If we consider images such as this as constructed historical allegory, we can read them as uniquely marked by a state of melancholy which, underpinning the dualism of Western historicism, negates the trauma of the past for a phantasmagoria of the future. The collective expression of these images must be represented, and recognised, precisely for what it is, in order to become effectively reversed into a politically shocking force, and it is this representation and recognition that the dialectical image constitutes.47

In Eva Johnson, Writer (1994), Destiny Deacon recognises Nannultera as such an image of colonial allegory in the service of European historicism and sets out to convert the image into a “politically shocking force.” The result is Eva Johnson, Writer. Once again, on first glance, this work of art is photographic, and the figure of an Aboriginal person dominates the picture frame. From the title we understand that the figure is Eva Johnson, who is a “Writer” (not to be mistaken simply with appearances). Eva, like Nannultera, is centrally positioned, standing upright facing her audience, her gaze direct and intense. The work established Deacon’s practice as being grounded in the iterative and appropriative strategies of postmodernism of that moment, clearly quoting Crossling’s work; Eva is mimicking Nannultera’s dress, stance and stare.48 The most significant difference is that Eva is gripping not a cricket bat, but, quite menacingly, an axe. In an important respect the work can be read as an expression of the broad-scale postcolonial revisionary work underway post the 1988 bicentenary. It constitutes a form of Aboriginal self-representation, which

46 “Poonindie,” Saint Mathew’s, Poonindie: restoration appeal. http://www.poonindie.com/poonindie/history.htm, accessed 4 July 2019. 47 Pensky, “Method and time,” 185. 48 Terry Smith, “Generation X: the impacts of the 1980s.” in What Is Appropriation? : An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s and 1990s, edited by Rex Butler, 249-259. Fortitude Valley, Queensland: Institute of Modern Art and IMA, 2004. Smith observes that while artists like Moffatt and Deacon employed the appropriative strategies of postmodernism, it did not speak for them. “Postmodern art” was renowned for its performative practices in which quotation, appropriation and iteration were central to its creative repertoire. See Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Jason L. Mast, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge University Press, 2006, 320- 321.

locates contemporary Aboriginal people as also visual artists, literary artists, and urban artists. At the same time, it attempts to counter what can and has been read into the original image as a passive or docile essence, suggesting Aboriginal acquiescence with the colonial enterprise to assimilate, if not eradicate, Australia’s first peoples. In this regard, Deacon’s work can be read as an act of testimony, bearing witness to Nannultera’s trauma, in which the trauma of colonisation is once again brought to the fore, through a violent strike at the colonial fantasy of Aboriginal compliance, in their own supposed decline.

Christian Thompson’s photography can also be analysed with regard to Euro-American “re- enactment” discourse from the 1980s through to the re-enactment/performance practices of the 2000s.49 Thompson’s 2003 series Emotional Striptease responds specifically to the history of carte de visite in Australia, and in particular the practice of colonial studio photography involving melancholy Aboriginal sitters “acting out” colonial fantasies of the essentialised “primitive.”50 Thompson’s first image in the series is of himself, standing in front of a flimsy photographic backdrop representing an aspect of a prominent Australian cultural institution in Melbourne, Victoria. The work has Thompson dominating the image, standing centrally upright with his gaze firm and directed towards the viewer. His arms are raised, firmly clasping an Indigenous “killing club,” borrowed and reactivated, from the Melbourne Museum’s ethnographic collection. While the figure (the artist) appears to be prepared, in waiting to wield this lethal weapon, his stance is neither docile nor particular threatening; rather, he appears strong, self-possessed and resolute. This image, while not directly quoting Crossling’s Nannultera or Deacon’s Eva Johnson, it is in critical dialogue with both. Thompson, dressed in black except for a white cravat which he wears in a manner that mimics a Victorian dress code (while simultaneously resisting that code in its conscious misapplication), continues the act of bearing witness – to Nannultera, to Eva, and to Deacon. Thompson’s work transcends the originary trauma of colonisation through the shocking revelation of his own capacity to reclaim and re-embody both place and identity. This is achieved via an authenticity that is not necessarily contingent on colonial recognition

49 Cindy Sherman has been a clear source of inspiration for Thompson. Alex Martinis Roe also brought to my attention Marina Abramovic’s re-enactment of VALIE EXPORT’s photographic poster Genital Panic in 2007. 50 The works of John William Lindt and Charles Kerry in particular.

and acceptance; this is an Indigenous person self-composed and comfortable in-his-own- skin, clear and confident of his agency wherever he might find himself, on Country or off.

Contemporary Indigenous Interventions

As early as 1986, Tracey Moffatt was entering into a direct and explicit dialogue with the photography of colonial photographers such as John William Lindt. Her series Some Lads (1986) enabled young “sexy” Indigenous dancers to playfully appropriate, parody, and reflect back the stiff colonial gaze built into Lindt’s studio tableaux.51 However, it is Bigambul artist Leah King-Smith who might be regarded as the first Australian Indigenous photographic artist to have formally engaged with the archive of colonial ethnographic photographic material, in her landmark 1992 exhibition Patterns of Connection (Figure 10 and Figure 11).52 King-Smith was initially invited by the State Library of Victoria to compile a picture book of photographs from its archival collection as a community resource. The library wanted to enable the Victorian Aboriginal community to be aware of its holdings, signifying a new constructive engagement between institution and community. King-Smith

Figure 10. Leah King-Smith, Untitled #10, Figure 11. Leah King-Smith, Barak #3, Patterns of Connection series, 1991, Patterns of Connection series, 1991, photograph, 100.6 × 99.8 cm. photograph, 94.2 × 94.0 cm

51 Martyn Jolly, “Big archives and small collections: remarks on the archival mode in contemporary Australian art and visual culture,” Public History Review Vol. 21 (2014): 60-80, accessed 4 July 2019. https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/3823/4605, 4 July, 2019 52 Leah King-Smith, “Patterns of connection,” Arena Magazine, no.5 (Jun/Jul 1993): 26-29. Both Moffatt and King-Smith reflected broader international efforts towards “decolonial archival practices” that McLean refers to. These were practices that had been emerging in Asia and Africa since the mid-1950s, and in Latin and North America since the mid-1960s.

was apparently so overwhelmed by what she found in the Library’s collection that she was compelled to respond personally through her own practice. She wanted to “deinstitutionalise” the unknown Aboriginal people she found captured in colonial mission settings and sought to let them “flow” back into the land, into the space “reclaimed” for them through her own creative reconstruction.53

Patterns of Connection was widely acclaimed for the beautiful but equally haunting images of representatives of Victoria’s lost Aboriginal generations. It was also regarded as a significant decolonising act by a contemporary Aboriginal artist. Yet, some of King-Smith’s Aboriginal contemporaries criticised the artist for being “too generalist, for not knowing the stories of the people whose photographs she used, and not asking permission of the traditional owners of the land she makes them haunt.”54 This represented a strong rebuke, but, more importantly, it raised questions about the archive, contemporary artistic practice, and the concept of Aboriginal authority and authenticity. Destiny Deacon’s Eva functioned so effectively in its appropriation of Crossling’s Nannultera because it was not Nannultera but Crossling’s colonial “phantasmagoria” that was being appropriated. King-Smith’s subjects were the traumatised descendants of contemporary Victorian Aboriginal communities, who themselves had not had time to bear witness, and process the significance of the archival material in their own lives.55

A few years later, in 1993, Brook Andrew emerged onto the Sydney Aboriginal art scene, almost immediately stepping into the space opened by King-Smith. Andrew “stumbled” into the world of colonial ethnographic photography while undertaking research for an art project at Sydney’s Mitchell Library. Discovering the image of an unknown Aboriginal man that captivated his attention, he, like King-Smith, felt compelled to respond creatively.

53 Martyn Jolly, Writing and Photography, “Photography and an Australian Indigenous spirituality,” (blog), posted 9 October 2013, accessed 4 July 2019. https://martynjolly.com/2013/10/09/photography-and-an-australian-indigenous- spirituality/. 54 Jolly, “Photography and an Australian Indigenous spirituality”. 55 Rachel O’Reilly, “Leah King-Smith: strategies of ambiguity,” RealTime 67 (June-July 2005): 38. http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue67/7905. King-Smith’s subsequent practice continued to explore and develop the photo-composition technique which made “Patterns of Connection” so compelling; however, her subject matter shifted markedly away from the colonial archive and towards greater abstraction and ambiguity.

Where King-Smith aimed to “deinstitutionalise” and “liberate” the subjects of her collection, Andrew aimed to celebrate his unknown subject in terms of what he perceived as the subject’s “masculinity” and “sexual desirability,” and to re-present this anonymous Aboriginal man as powerfully positioned beyond, and unconstrained by, the Western colonial discourse which framed the original photograph.56 This image became the basis of the 1996 work Sexy & Dangerous (Figure 12), which effectively launched Andrew’s career, bringing his art practice to immediate prominence.

Despite this work being widely embraced as a ground-breaking intervention into the Australian colonial archive, it also received a quick and sharp rebuke from other Aboriginal artists. That the person pictured in Sexy & Dangerous was unknown and not locatable culturally or geographically with any great precision made the matter more, not less, complicated. While Andrew regarded this image as representative of the dispossessed (or disappeared) people of Australian colonialism, and therefore available to his decolonising project, his critics regarded this as a fundamental Figure 12. Brook Andrew, Sexy & Dangerous, 1996, computer-generated colour transparency on transparent synthetic polymer resin, 145.9 × 96.0 cm.

56 Christine Nichols, “Brook Andrew: seriously playful,” Realtime 54 (April-May 2003), accessed 4 July 2019. http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue54/7062.

breach of cultural protocols.57 Andrew did not possess a familiar or cultural “connection” to the person pictured, and therefore lacked a perceived cultural right to use the image.

Sexy & Dangerous was created shortly after Badtjala artist, Fiona Foley’s 1994 Badtjala Woman (Figure 13, Figure 14 & Figure 15), a photographic series which drew on ethnographic images of Badtjala people taken in 1899. In three sepia-toned images, Foley replicates the format of the ethnographic photograph in representing an Indigenous female “type.” In directing the shoot and posing for the photographs herself, Foley aimed to overturn the anonymity of the ethnographic subject, asserting herself as a contemporary Badtjala woman – descendent of those previously denied an authentic presence – and “in control of her own identity and image.”58

Figure 13. Fiona Foley, Badtjala Figure 14. Fiona Foley, Badtjala Figure 15. Fiona Foley, Badtjala Woman (two sets of beads), Woman (crossed string), 1994, Woman (with collecting bag), 1994, photograph, 45.5 x photograph, 45.5 x 35.5cm. 1994, photograph, 45.5 x 35.5cm. 35.5cm.

Foley’s photographic practice at this time represents the opposite end of the archival spectrum explored by Leah King Smith in Patterns of Connection; where King Smith’s work is disconnected culturally to the subject matter and appropriative of the imagery, Foley’s is culturally connected to her source material and strategically counter-performative of its

57 Djon Mundine, “Nowhere boy,” Artlink, Vol.30, no.1 (March 2010): 93-95. Although it was not until 2003 that clear sets of institution protocols would be developed and adopted nationally. 58 “Fiona Foley: Badtjala Woman (two sets of beads) 1994, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/1995.101A/.

source’s intent. Andrew would have been aware of Foley’s work at this time, and with the emerging critique of archival engagements. In terms of his desire to activate his photographic subject in Sexy & Dangerous, he may be more politically aligned with Foley’s Badtjala Woman. However, conceptually, and in terms of process and affect, the work resonates more closely with King Smith’s appropriations.

While acknowledging the concerns raised, and agreeing to recalibrate his approach in future work,59 following shortly on from Sexy & Dangerous, works such as I Split your Gaze (1997) and Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr (I see you) (1988) were produced, receiving a slightly more muted reception. Two new images were built up from an ethnographic photographic portrait, but this time of an Aboriginal man who, while having been named by the original photographer Charles Kerry, had been identified by Andrew as “not from but close to” Country with which he was ancestrally associated.60 Nevertheless, Andrew’s works were seen as provocative on a number of levels. Again, they raised significant issues with regard to colonial history, the colonial archive, and the meaning of this archive to contemporary Aboriginal society, and in particular the role of contemporary Aboriginal artists, as re- interpreters of history. In the context of the contemporary collecting institutions, the reproduction and display of the colonial photographic material was at odds with the newly developing protocols, and considered restricted in part because they were seen as potentially offensive to Aboriginal people, due to the distress they might cause if seen in an unrestricted public context.61 It was also suggested that the images were not benign, or lacking in agency, and that instead their existence participated in “the continuing construction of ‘Aboriginality’ through the re-enactment of the colonial gaze.”62

In this regard, rather than “liberating” the Indigenous subject from the colonial frame, these early works of Andrew’s were thought to potentially “recolonise,” the subject. While most

59 Judith Ryan, “Aesthetics/medium/process,” in Brook Andrew: the right to offend is sacred, eds. Judith Ryan, Brook Andrew, Nick Aikens, Anthony Gardner, Marcia Langton and Simon Maidment (Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017), 1-33. 60 MacNeill, “Undoing the colonial gaze,” 180. 61 MacNeill, “Undoing the colonial gaze,” 179. 62 MacNeill, “Undoing the colonial gaze,” 179.

of the critical reception to his photographic interventions celebrated their power and capacity to “speak back to” the originals, to render them impotent through revealing and countering their colonial function, the apparent “recalibration” of Andrew’s practice, and his attempt to achieve greater personal connection to his subjects, was rejected by his Aboriginal critics. The works represented a powerful springboard for Andrew and, despite his opponents, his engagement with the archive has become increasingly sophisticated, and determined, and far more cosmopolitan.63 Where his earliest forays into the colonial archive may have lacked Aboriginal community connection and engagement, Andrew has evolved a multi-faceted practice in which “communities” are central to an ethical field of engagement.64

Institutional Interventions

The 1993 International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples coincided with the federal Native Title Act in the same year, and followed close on the release of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody National Report in 1991, providing the context for a dynamic program of activity with regard to developments in Indigenous culture and heritage. Museums Australia produced a landmark study into institutional practices around collections of Aboriginal material culture. The report, Previous possessions, new obligations, articulated a framework for museums and galleries to address past collection and exhibition

63 Worimi artist Genevieve Grieves, produced the multi-channel digital video work Picturing the Old People in 2005. Akin to Foley’s Badtjala Woman, Grieves’ Picturing the Old People drew on the colonial archive to create a series of five video vignettes, conceived to look like nineteenth-century studio portraits. Recreating the styles of J.W. Lindt, Richard Daintree and Carl Walter, Grieves employs Victorian Koori people to re-enact the once static scenarios, giving the settings greater context and the subjects undisputable agency. The works are most significant in the challenge they represent to reductionist readings of the original photographs: the assumed victimhood of the sitters, the invisibility of the photographer, and the denial of Indigenous readings and interpretations. The works overtly appropriate the tools and techniques of the colonial archive, while repopulating the scenes with contemporary Aboriginal people who take control and exploit the medium to tell their own stories. See, Susan Lowish, “Genevieve Grieves,” un Magazine Issue 7 (Autumn 2006): 28-30. 64 As Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney 2020, Andrew states: “As Artistic Director, I am interested in shining a light on the active, stable and rich preexisting collaborations and connectivity of Indigenous and Edge cultures. I aim to work together with artists, collectives and communities, from Australia and around the globe, to reconfigure the world as we see it and reveal rich local and global rhizomes and unique individual cultural expressions in one place.” “Brook Andrew Appointed Artistic Director of 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020)” Biennale of Sydney. Accessed 10 December 2019. https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/media/media-releases/brook-andrew-appointed-artistic-director-of-22nd-biennale-of- sydney/.

practices, and a way forward in “creating a new future of respect for and co-operation with Indigenous Australians.”65

A significant focus of the report was to guide the development of relationships between museums and Indigenous communities by identifying protocols, policies and procedures for collecting institutions to implement nationally. At this point, the main focus was on dealing sensitively with Indigenous human remains and secret/sacred materials. The collection of objects of cultural material was next in order of priority.66 In this context, cultural material was considered to consist of objects, both physical and documentary, that represented either tangible or intangible elements of Aboriginal cultures, including artistic works such as visual, performing and literary works, and archival records such as photography, film, and sound recordings.67

In 2002 a new study, Continuous cultures, ongoing responsibilities represented a revision of Previous possessions, new obligations, with the aim of ensuring its ongoing relevance to the museum sector. However, it was also designed to clarify across the sector that the phrase “previous possessions” should not have implied a diminution in Aboriginal cultural ownership despite the “custodianship” acquired by the collecting institution. The new report acknowledged that museums and galleries, having modified their approach to Indigenous cultural material and collections, were to incorporate concepts of:

Custodianship and care taking rather than ownership; recognition of stories and other intangibles associated with objects; acknowledgment and recognition within museums of contemporary Indigenous cultural practices; and the creation of genuine relationships of recognition and reciprocity between traditional custodians and museums and galleries.68

65 Museums Australia, Previous possessions, new obligations: policies for museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Canberra: Museums Australia, 1993). 66 Tim Sullivan, Lynda Kelly and Phil Gordon, “Museums and Indigenous people in Australia: a review of Previous possessions, new obligations: policies for museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” Curator: The Museum Journal 46, no. 2 (April 2003): 209. 67 Museums Australia and Museums Australia Inc., Continuous cultures, ongoing responsibilities: principles and guidelines for Australian museums working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage (Canberra: Museums Australia, 2005), 10. 68 Museums Australia and Museums Australia Inc., Continuous cultures, 7.

Consequently, while Aboriginal participation in the institutional settings might be low, Aboriginal communities are increasingly engaging with the materials held in such collections, to reconstitute and reconstruct meaningful connections with their otherwise broken cultural heritage.69 McLean suggests that many artists who have engaged with the archive have drawn on it as a repository, through which to “regain a lost identity that the archive had supposedly preserved.”70 A significant shift in perspective regarding the purpose and use of ethnographic collections has been the move from a preoccupation with “preservation” to a concern with “cultural maintenance,” and revitalisation.71 Anthropologist, John Stanton, observes that the relationships between Aboriginal cultural material, the museum and the Aboriginal communities have become more, not less entangled. Whereby collections can develop an “energy and a primacy” of their own, in which objects within museum collections can begin to accumulate other meanings, new interpretations and new applications “imposed” by curators, or by members of the communities of origin.72 Museums, in collaboration with Aboriginal communities and advisors’ groups, have to, as a matter of necessity, become responsible for both accommodating and facilitating these changing social, cultural and political meanings.

Re-Thinking Engagement

In 2015, the National Museum of Australia (NMA) hosted the landmark exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum. This was a follow-up show to an initial exhibition earlier in 2015 at the British Museum (BM) titled Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation. These shows were the culmination of a four-year research project between the NMA, the BM and the ANU (Australian National University) titled Engaging Objects: Indigenous Communities, Museum Collections and the Representation of Indigenous Histories. The goal of the research project was to reconnect the BM’s collection of Australian material with contemporary Indigenous

69 John E. Stanton, “Ethnographic museums and collections: from the past into the future,” in Understanding museums: Australian museums and museology, National Museum of Australia, eds. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien, 2011, 4. 70 McLean, Rattling spears, 211. 71 Stanton, “Ethnographic museums and collections,” 4. 72 Stanton, “Ethnographic museums and collections,” 4-5.

communities, and to understand more about what the collections might mean for Indigenous people today. 73

Encounters brought to Australia, for the first time, 149 objects from the BM’s collection of 6000 Australian Indigenous objects.74 The program involved engaging directly with communities across Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, informing people about the objects in the collection and seeking their perspectives on the objects and on museums more generally.75 Twenty-seven communities were identified, and the objects selected were done so on the basis that their individual provenance was very clear, that it was known where they were collected, where they originated from, and the cultural group responsible for their creation. Importantly, the communities of provenance had the final say on both object inclusion and how they were included.76

From the outset, the curators and the project managers between the NMA and the BM set out to ensure that as many as possible of the recognisable Indigenous stakeholders’ voices could be expressed. It was also acknowledged, however, that the array of voices engaged with “are not – and cannot be – exclusively or essentially Indigenous,” and that the objects themselves are caught up in an ongoing process of meaning production, “refashioning the materials comprising the heritage field to yield a range of new hybridised identities and national pasts.”77 The result was a recognition by the major institutions, at least, that this exhibition represented as clearly and honestly as conceivable, the contact zone of Australian settler and Aboriginal material exchange and entanglement.

73 Gaye Sculthorpe, Lissant Bolton and Ian Coates, “Introduction,” in Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation, Gaye Sculthorpe, John Carty, Howard Morphy, Maria Nugent, Coates, Ian, et al. (Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015), 14. 74 Lissant Bolton, “Moving objects: Indigenous Australia in the British Museum,” in Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, eds. Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin (Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015), 28. 75 Sculthorpe, Bolton, and Coates, “Introduction,” 14. 76 Jay Arthur and Lily Withycombe, “Talking about objects and ancestors in the first person,” in Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, eds. Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin (Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015), 36. 77 Tony Bennett, “Re-collecting ourselves: Indigenous time, culture, community and the museum.” In Museums, power, knowledge: selected essays (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 269.

Curators wanted to connect oral tradition and cultural memory with the objects in an attempt to “reanimate” them, recognising their identities as vital community cultural artefacts, and to engage with them in ways that the ethnographic records had not been able to achieve.78 To do this, the project selected five leading Indigenous artists to produce new works in response to the exhibitions. The alternative exhibition was titled Unsettled: Stories Within, and included Julie Gough, Jonathan Jones, Judy Watson, Elma Kris and Wukun Wanambi. Unsettled enabled each artist to produce unique works that provided a creative examination of objects on display in Encounters. Through their artworks, they interrogated the circumstances in which these objects were originally collected. The artists interpreted the material and attempted to re-establish links between the objects and their cultural context, enabling them to be more fully embraced, honoured and understood. According to the NMA, Unsettled was a visual repatriation that “inspirits, reanimates and encourages new contemplations of these precious objects.”79

For Julie Gough, the experience was particularly challenging:

Our lives are kind of bound up in what happened in the past – where those objects come from – really troubled times, you know, near annihilation. We grew up with this knowledge of what went wrong, and you can’t really rub that out, or fix it. You can’t fix it, we just have to try and work with it, but not replace it with something happy and contemporary, because that’s not the truth.80

The contemporary artists’ responses were varied, and some engaged critically with museum practices, questioning the underlying assumptions of Encounters itself. Jonathan Jones’s work, mugugalurgarra (conceal) (Figure 16), re-presents a selection of objects from the National Museum of Australia’s collection of south eastern Australian Aboriginal material culture. Wanting to highlight the elision of ideological motives in anthropology, Jones aims to deconstruct the contextual frame that defines the collection. He does this by bringing together various throwing sticks, boomerangs, ceremonial and fighting clubs and shields, wrapped in Robert Brough Smyth’s 1878 anthropological text, The Aborigines of Victoria:

78 Arthur and Withycombe, Encounters, 37. 79 Kelli Cole, “About the exhibition,” Unsettled: stories within, National Museums of Australia, accessed 8 July 2019, http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/about_the_exhibition. 80 Arthur and Withycombe, Encounters, 37 (quoting exhibition Artist Julie Gough).

with notes relating to the habits of the natives of other parts of Australia and Tasmania. Exhibited lying flat on the shelves of a vitrine originally from the Institute of Anatomy, the objects are “at one and the same time … fully open and yet hidden from view,” their presence and their meaning mediated by the layers of anthropological interpretation in which they are wrapped.81

Figure 16. Jonathan Jones, mugugalurgarra Figure 17. Julie Gough, Time Keeper, 2015, (conceal), 2015, installation, various installation, various dimensions. dimensions.

Through mugugalurgarra (conceal) 2015, Jones confronts the ways in which Indigenous cultural objects have been “bound within a Western anthropological construct” – ways that blind audiences to what is actually before them. Southeast Aboriginal people and culture, he suggests, have been narrated by a handful of historical anthropological texts that have filtered how material culture has been understood and interpreted, obscuring the ability of Aboriginal people to reclaim and embrace them.82

81 Bennett, “Re-collecting ourselves,” 286. 82 “Jonathan Jones,” Unsettled: stories within, National Museums of Australia, accessed 9 July 2019. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/jonathan_jones.

Jones states that:

Throughout the process of colonisation, southeast communities have faced a number of obstacles in connecting to our ancestral objects housed within museums, including those within the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia. Anthropology has played a complex role, often impeding and disenfranchising southeast communities and causing untold harm.83

McLean notes the irony of mugugalurgarra (conceal), as a work of contemporary art with its heritage in 1960s and 1970s post-formalist conceptualism, which at the same time recognises Smyth’s book as the first anthropological text to claim that Aboriginal art was fine art, inspiring European critics to advocate for Indigenous art’s fine art qualities.84

Julie Gough’s Time Keeper (2015) (Figure 17) repurposes the longest-surviving Tasmanian kelp water carrier, held in the BM’s collection. While the specific community from which the object originally came is not known, this water carrier is recorded to have been on display at the international Great Exhibition in London in 1851.85 Gough has taken the object, which has a hole in its base through which water might have once passed, and suspended it filled with sand, which now trickles through to form a conical mound below. Rather than having the water carrier re-enact its traditional function, Gough’s reconfiguration has it referencing the passing of colonial time “between the carrier, its homeland, its people, and its intended purpose.”86

The work is accompanied by a video projection, which Gough employs to “unite” the object and its place of origin virtually – given that it was to be imminently returned to London and unlikely to be returned to Tasmania. The video presents two separate locations – the Tasmanian beach where Gough sourced kelp for a carrier that she had made herself, and her visit to the British Museum archives to initially view the water carrier on exhibition – capturing audio visual material from both locations. It was Gough’s hope that this virtual

83 “Jonathan Jones,” Unsettled: stories within. 84 Ian McLean, “Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation and unsettled encounters,” Museums Australia Magazine 24, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 17. 85 “Julie Gough,” Unsettled: stories within. National Museums of Australia, accessed 9 July 2019, https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/julie-gough. 86 “Julie Gough,” Unsettled: stories within.

“re-union” might give the carrier some comfort in its experience in the exhibition. Wall text next to the video projection provides an insight into the artist’s motivation, where Gough states: “There was a sense of urgency to communicate with the objects before our time was up. I had to let them know we are still out here, waiting for them, remembering them, that they weren’t forgotten.”87

From the outset, it was found that the stories that Aboriginal communities contributed to the exhibition expressed painful and traumatic memories, memories people associated with the objects and with times of profound cultural loss, dispossession and displacement from people and country.88 The full range of emotions were expressed: anger, grief, frustration, gratitude, joy, excitement, amazement, curiosity and sorrow. There was a profound longing for the cultural knowledge “embedded” in the objects to be accessible and, for many, for the objects to be returned to their communities. Wider-ranging debate was aroused about the history that brought the collection into being and the desire for repatriation from England.89 Exhibition co-coordinator Peter Yu added that while these issues needed to be addressed, repatriation of the objects in Encounters was a process for another day. Adding that while a dialogue was necessary to move forward on issues of repatriation, and to advance the interests of Indigenous communities, the demand for urgent repatriation was unreasonable as a means of addressing historic injustice. He also called for a focus on developing a consensus, which incorporated “our museums, Indigenous communities and our governments.”90

The 2017 National Gallery of Australia’s Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial provides an important perspective on contemporary urban artists’ engagements within an art museum context. Defying Empire presented 139 works of art nationally, spanning weaving, sculpture, textiles, painting on bark and canvas, photo-media, glasswork and

87 “Julie Gough,” Unsettled: stories within. 88 Arthur and Withycombe, Encounters, 37. 89 Peter Yu, “Plotting the future by learning from the past,” in Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, edited by Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin. 32 (Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015). 90 Yu, “Plotting the future,” 32.

metalwork, making it the biggest survey show of contemporary Indigenous art ever held at the gallery. While combining artists and works from all art-making regions across the country, the National Indigenous Triennial has been known for its significant inclusion of urban-based Aboriginal artists.91 This interaction marked both the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Constitutional Referendum that allowed Aboriginal people to be included in the national census, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mabo High Court decision that effectively overturned the colonial concept of terra nullius. The official opening was also timed to coincide with the nineteenth National Sorry Day, commemorating the release of the federal report into the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. This was an overtly politically engaged and activist exhibition, where many of the artists “bear witness” to the trauma of colonisation, and engage the nation in an exercise in “truth telling about our history” via contemporary art.92 Tina Baum, the National Gallery of Australia Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, notes the significance of the theme of “defiance,” stating that:

In the archives, Aboriginal people have been documented as being in “defiance of the Empire” due to cultural misunderstandings and their perceived behaviour and unwillingness to adapt to the new colonies. As a consequence, many policies of integration and assimilation were developed and enforced.93

The exhibition was curated according to eight interconnected themes: Asserting Presence, Bearing Witness, Defying Empire, Disrupting Invisibility, Forever Memory, Recounting and Revival, Resistance and Refusal, and Rising Passion. Each category had its own rationale and artists were grouped within specific themes; however, artists were free to explore the past as well as the future as well as their own being in the present.94 I was particularly interested in Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens’s installation, Assimilated Warriors II, as the work resonated

91 Sasha Grishin, “Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 June 2017, accessed 14 July 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/defying-empire-3rd-national-indigenous- art-triennial-20170606-gwlkgb.html/. 92 Sarah Scott, “Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial,” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art 17, no. 2 (December 2017): 251. 93 Baum, “Defying Empire,” 22–31. [Need full publication details] 94 Marina Tyquiengco, “Defying Empire: The Third National Indigenous Art Triennial,” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 6, no.1 “Boundless” (2017), 118, accessed 4 July 2019, http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/.

physically and conceptually with many of the issues that I have been exploring throughout my research.

Figure 18. Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors II, 2014, installation, various dimensions.

Dickens’s Assimilated Warriors II was first exhibited in 2014 for the We Hereby Protest exhibition at Carriageworks, Sydney, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian Aboriginal Progress Association (AAPA) and the Aboriginal Progressive Association (APA). As discussed in Chapter One, these organisations were pivotal in the 1920s and 1930s, campaigning for Aboriginal civil and cultural rights, which culminated in the 1967 Constitutional Referendum – which Defying Empire in turn celebrates. Assimilated Warriors II (Figure 18) consists of two works suggesting a looking forward and a looking backward. The first to the left is a series of thirteen masks, appearing distinctly “tribal” and arranged in a manner that alludes to an ethnographic museum display. Using fencing masks as the base structure, Dickens adorns them with varying combinations of found materials including sun visors, coloured wool, raffia and teeth, feathers and possum skin. Each has a sense of individuality while clearly of a kind.

The second work (Figure 19) has three suit jackets hanging from rusted meat hooks, which are in turn hanging from a rustic makeshift beam projecting from the wall. The jackets, which appear dated, possibly from the last century, have their pant-less bottoms adorned with similar material to the masks – twined and hanging raffia, coloured wool, feathers and fur – in a manner that alludes to a kind of ceremonial dress. Also suspended is a rusted pulley on one hook and a bunch of leather dog muzzles on another, each decorated to some

degree with the same materials as jackets and masks. Dickens says that the work pays tribute to her forefathers and mothers, who worked towards a fair deal, and that: “It takes great courage to scratch at the shadows of silence within a dominant discourse of denial, betrayal and abuse.”95

Figure 19. Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors II, 2017, installation, various dimensions.

Materially, the works are raw with a sense of dignified impoverishment. Woven from refuse, they draw together otherwise disparate materials to create something new, something hybrid. The title Assimilated Warriors establishes the work as highly ambiguous. The “warriors” we might take as a reference to the numerous and in some cases highly notable Aboriginal people who, from early in the twentieth century, agitated relentlessly for change in the oppressive conditions under which all Aboriginal people lived. These people were fighters, and, in contemporary terms of their Aboriginality, they were cultural warriors. While Aboriginal assimilation into white society was the expectation of the day, “assimilation” was more like code for “dispersal,” which was in turn code for eradication. Despite the highly creative and determined ways in which Aboriginal people attempted to negotiate a coexistence in which they gladly adapted to and adopted Western traits; the

95 Carmen Cita, “We hereby make protest,” City Hub, 22 June 2014, accessed 22 November 2019, http://cityhubsydney.com.au/2014/06/we-hereby-make-protest/94792/.

system was profoundly against them. Yet they persisted. The suits are a bittersweet tribute to these leaders’ past, who engaged white Australia with confidence and dignity despite their hardship; and despite their trauma, their Aboriginality was core to their being.

The masks can be seen to be looking forward, as a reference to the warriors to come. For these future activists assimilation may not be a one-way street, where a dominant power absorbs another, less powerful Other rather there is a sense of a multifaceted world of interconnections where assimilations go in multiple directions and to varying degrees. Emergent on the traumatic legacy of their ancestors, these new warriors are ever vigilant to external attempts to strike them at the heart. They are the tribal fighters who take us forward, with a deft capacity to remake and refashion themselves from the debris and detritus of our colonial ruins.96

Backwards and Forward

The American anthropology historian James Clifford conceived of contemporary museums (natural history and art) as “contact zones,” seeking to decentre themselves and accepting that the materials they “temporarily” host are entangled in “unfinished historical processes of travel.”97 As contact zones, museums represent the collections of different worlds, histories and cosmologies, which need to be engaged with, rather than having singular and colonial curatorial visions imposed upon them. The contemporary museum, within this framework, needs to be seen for what it is, an unstable institution attempting to come to grips with the effects of colonialism, functioning more as a permeable space of transcultural entanglements than as a tightly bound institution that disseminates “knowledge” to its visitors.98

96 Dale Harding’s Body of Objects, 2017 also included in this show, caught my attention at the time because of its replication of artefacts in black silicone rubber. I discuss these further in the next chapter. 97 Bennett, “Re-collecting ourselves,” 283. 98 Robin Boast, “Neocolonial collaboration: museum as contact zone revisited,” Museum Anthropology 1, no. 1 (2011): 59. Clifford builds his conceptualisation of the museum on the work of American scholar of linguistics and comparative literatures, Mary Louise Pratt. Pratt’s 1991 article “Arts of the contact zone”, proposed the idea of “contact zones” as a term to refer to social spaces where different cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.

These ideas are reflected in the “new museology” that has been emerging across colonial- settler societies since the early 1990s, in which Australian museology, with its emphatic turn towards Indigenous community engagement, has been recognised as a leader in the field.99 The issue of authority to speak on items held in such collections is nevertheless a highly contested one, with many museums today recognising that their work as collectors, archivers and exhibitors is being conducted in very different and evolving socio-political and cultural contexts.

Preferring to be identified as interdisciplinary sites of postmodernism, where subjectivity is presented as contextual and contingent rather than static, new museums also appear to challenge the continued relevance and role of the nation- state and its boundaries in a globalising world. In promoting ideas of local specificity and in paying attention to an alternately configured politics of representation, new museums generally attempt to challenge the authority associated with more pedagogically traditional or conservative state museums.100

The widespread embrace of Aboriginal art and material culture by public cultural institutions has been facilitated by galleries and museums fundamentally readdressing and reconfiguring their physical spaces, as well as their methodologies and practices of collection, organisation, and display. However, as much as they attempt to critically address their own colonial origins, their physical and conceptual spaces are nevertheless underpinned by the logic of the Western epistemology. Museums research scholar Kylie Message suggests that, “despite looking and sounding new, these new museums maintain their ability to contribute to hegemonic systems of control and coercion, even while they appear to offer new ways to address the cultural predicaments of the contemporary world.”101

Questions have long been raised about what it actually means to collect and display Aboriginal art and cultural material in such institutions. After decades of striving to have Aboriginal art and cultural material recognised and valued by white Australia as something

99 Kylie Message, “Reflecting on the new museum through an Antipodean lens: the Museum of Sydney and ‘the imaginary museum’,” Third Text 22, no. 6 (2008): 755. 100 Message, “Reflecting on the new museum,” 764. 101 Message, “Reflecting on the new museum,” 762.

equal but different, and worthy of being collected as contemporary, what equal but different means is yet to be determined.102 By incorporating Aboriginal cultural objects into the mix of mainstream and other contemporary art, does it then function in the same cultural way – as a cultural commodity? Anthropologist Lorraine Gibson goes so far as to suggest that the act of selling art objects to museums should not necessarily cancel out an Aboriginal artist’s ongoing rights and relationship with the object, which artists often do regard as extending beyond the point and fact of exchange.103 Drawing on the ideas of Clifford, Gibson suggests that such objects, whether contemporary or historical, are inherently entangled within “spheres and webs of exchange,” where different social, cultural and economic values operate and are understood.104

For many artists and their communities, public gallery and museum collections in particular have generated a great sense of cultural pride and of belonging – not only to their ancestors and to kin past and present, but to the venues themselves, which have come to function as “portals of access to an emotional space, the effects of which can work beyond the physical walls of the museum.”105 In this regard, the presence of contemporary Aboriginal art and material culture is not just a recognition of artists’ talents by the institutions, but is also representative of an inventive Aboriginal assimilation of public space – physically, emotionally and politically.106

102 Morphy, Becoming art, 203-219. 103 Gibson, “Colonizing bricks and mortar," 205. 104 Gibson, “Colonizing bricks and mortar,” 205. 105 Gibson, “Colonizing bricks and mortar,” 205. 106 Gibson, “Colonizing bricks and mortar,” 215.

Chapter Three – My Practice

From the outset of my research, I felt strongly inclined to regard my studio practice as an extension of my earlier community art and cultural development experience. I had proposed a research dissertation that examined contemporary Aboriginal visual arts development within my broader community setting, and anticipated that my own practice would evolve from that; not as “community art” in the sense of working in and collaborating with a specific social and cultural community, but as a personal exploration of my sense of place- based relatedness and belonging, in this place.1 In particular I was interested in the role and practice of artists within communities as “agents of change,” where my initial research proposal spoke of a desire to use my practice as an ongoing act of engagement, exploring issues of community concern.2 I envisioned my studio research as contributing to an increasing awareness of Aboriginality and its complexities, through my own social and cultural standpoint. I imagined my studio research representing a materialisation of the insights gleaned from investigating these concerns, and as a creative realisation of my own sense of relatedness to this place within this site of diverse cultural intersections.

My starting point was informed by previous practices and visual research interests, including an earlier honours program, which focused on experience of place and displacement in Western Sydney, and community-based exhibitions addressing Aboriginal identity and belonging on the south coast. To understand contemporary identification with, and sense of belonging to, place and community, I wanted to explore something of the Aboriginal history of the region as a grounding to my awareness. Through my previous activities with other southeast Aboriginal artists, I was aware of a growing movement to re-establish connections with locally specific art and cultural heritage practices, practices understood to be traditional, pre-dating colonial history, and practices unique to Aboriginal communities, post-colonisation. On the south coast this was principally in the form of weaving, object

1 This place being the Illawarra on the New South Wales south coast, where I have lived for over two decades. 2 Drawing on my earlier experience as a community arts worker, I was interested in the roles and impact of people who facilitated social and cultural change through engagements with art. See Howard Morphy, “Acting in a community: art and social cohesion in Indigenous Australia,” Humanities Research, no. 2 (2009): 115-131; also, Daphne Nash, “Transforming knowledge: Indigenous knowledge and culture workers on the South Coast of New South Wales” (PhD thesis. Australian National University, 2009).

manufacturing and decorative shell-work, motivated by recognised Aboriginal cultural knowledge holders – people who asserted continuous descent and connection to place – to revalidate that knowledge. In so doing, they aimed to reinvigorate the cultural significance of these practices, especially for younger generations, and to begin to establish a vibrant regionally based contemporary Indigeneity, expressed through visual art.3

Early Studio Developments – Concepts and Materials

I felt very clearly that the cultural history of the south coast, while fascinating and significant for these contemporary descendants, was not something that I could meaningfully engage with in my own studio research. Having no immediate cultural connection to this regional heritage, under broadly understood contemporary cultural protocols, I was and could only ever be a cultural outsider. However, I had become aware of the work of the nineteenth century Aboriginal artist from the Ulladulla region, a South Coast Dhurga man, referred to as Mickey of Ulladulla, Ulladulla Mickey, Mickey the cripple and Mickey Flynn.4 While there had been growing scholarly interest in this artist and his contemporaries elsewhere across the country, his life and work were not widely known. I was curious about Mickey and his works as potentially something of a forerunner to contemporary urban Aboriginal arts in the southeast.

Art historian Carol Cooper observes that Mickey’s drawings reveal a keen knowledge of and love for country, capturing a spirit of everyday survival and continuity in a rapidly changing world.5 His drawings are full of animated yet precise details documenting the ways in which local Aboriginal people engaged with the new expanding economy of timber milling, a fishing industry, cropping and pastoral work (Figure 20 and Figure 21). Andrew Sayers, Australian art curator, notes that Mickey often paired sets of drawings with the principal subjects being

3 Daphne Nash, “Transforming knowledge: Indigenous knowledge and culture workers on the South Coast of New South Wales” (PhD thesis. Australian National University, 2009). 4 “Mickey of Ulladulla,” Dictionary of Australian art online, accessed 10 July 2019, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/mickey-of- ulladulla/biography. 5 Carol Cooper, “Mickey of Ulladulla: a love of country,” In Likan'mirri - connections: the AIATSIS collection of art: an exhibition at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery 20 February - 28th March 2004. Australian National University, Institute for Indigenous Australia (Canberra: Australian National University Institute for Indigenous Australia, 2004): 20.

corroboree and fishing. He suggests, “this polarity remains constant, and the subjects represent, surely, the two most important elements in the artist’s world.”6

Figure 20. Mickey of Ulladulla, Fishing: Figure 21. Mickey of Ulladulla, Scenes of Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna, Aboriginal life, pencil, 55.5 x 74.6 cm (detail). pencil and water colour, 41 x 49 cm.

Mickey is believed to have been born around 1820 and died at the age of seventy-one in October 1891. Living in and around the Aboriginal town reserve at Ulladulla, Mickey would have witnessed his traditional youth dramatically uprooted and transformed by the influx of European settlers and their industry. By the time he was twenty, Aboriginal men at Ulladulla were being employed by settlers in reaping, tree felling and trading in native fauna. As the south coast industries developed, Aboriginal people were employed in farming, sawmilling and the fishing industry.7

Mickey’s pencil and watercolour wash drawings document a unique and idiosyncratic perspective of the dramatically changing physical and cultural landscape of the south coast towards the end of the nineteenth century. His artworks represent social and environmental relationships, highlighting the dominance of local flora and fauna, and a continuing Aboriginal presence amidst the overwhelming emergence of European settlement. It is believed that he was likely an initiated Elder and ceremonial dance leader, who would have

6 Andrew Sayers, Carol Cooper and National Gallery of Australia, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, 1994), 52. 7 Andrew Sayers, “Mickey of Ulladulla (1820–1891),” Australian dictionary of biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed 11 July 2019. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mickey-of-ulladulla- 13098/text23697.

participated in prominent rituals and cultural ceremonies, some of which were recorded on the coast by European ethnographers late in the century.8 This may be supported by the artist picturing himself in his works (Figure 21 and Figure 22), as one of the dance leaders in his corroboree scenes, where he is easily identified as the figure wearing a hat and coat and leaning on two sticks.

Figure 22. Mickey of Ulladulla, Ceremony; Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna, pencil and watercolour, 41 x 49 cm (detail).

There is a strong sense of autobiographical narrative in Mickey’s drawings, and this is also supported by brief notes associated with some of the works. Otherwise, there is little contemporaneous documentation about him or his life. There are some associated historical documents from local press reporting such as the Ulladulla and Milton Times. His obituary, which was reported in the local paper, recognised that Mickey was well known to be “[g]ifted with some of the qualities of an artist,” and that “[h]e produced some very fine pencil sketches, and indeed showed ability in that direction.”9 In 1893, the Board for the Protection of Aborigines included five of Mickey's drawings in the ethnographic section of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, United States of America. The works were awarded a bronze medal and described as “unique and valuable as a specimen of primitive

8 Cooper, “Mickey of Ulladulla: a love of country,” 20. 9 Ulladulla and Milton Times, 17 October 1891, 2. Source: Sayers, “Mickey of Ulladulla (1820–1891).”

art, being uninfluenced by the white man.”10 While Mickey may have been “untaught,” Sayers argues he was hardly “uninfluenced”:

More so than any of his contemporaries, Mickey’s work represented a blending of traditional forms and subjects, with an interest in the changes, particularly technology changes, which Europeans introduced into the world of his people through the nineteenth century.11

It was not until the 1980s that the works of Mickey of Ulladulla, as well as those of contemporaneous southeast artists such as Tommy McRae and William Barak, began to receive critical attention in Australian art history. Sayers observes that, prior to this point, concepts of authenticity and cultural purity denied such artists “the adaptability fundamental to cultural continuity,” and that such a denial was little different from the way colonialist treated Indigenous cultures across the world.12 However, Sayers adds, awareness will continue to grow that these “precursors of twentieth century Aboriginal artists – many of whom have faced the same struggles to assert independence and identity – are very significant figures in the history of Australian visual culture.”13

Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas took issue with these optimistic remarks, stating that “it would seem inappropriate to fashion a new history in which artists such as [Mickey of Ulladulla] stand as precursors to the contemporary urban artists,” artists who are more self- consciously aware and engaged in appropriating the Western canon and asserting their individual creative practices and arguments.14 Thomas argued that the “narratives of identity” underpinning contemporary Aboriginal society, simply did not motivate these nineteenth-century artists. While they might have been concerned with the power of ceremony and daily life, concepts of “history” and “identity” were not part of their aesthetic experience.15

10 Sayers, “Mickey of Ulladulla”. 11 Sayers, Cooper and National Gallery of Australia, Aboriginal artists, 59. 12 Sayers, Cooper and National Gallery of Australia, Aboriginal artists, 87. 13 Sayers, Cooper and National Gallery of Australia, Aboriginal artists, 89. 14 Nicholas Thomas, “Aboriginal artists of the nineteenth century,” Oceania 66, no. 4 (1996): 331. 15 Thomas, “Aboriginal artists,” 332.

I felt challenged by Thomas’s argument, in particular, this assertion that concepts of history and identity could not have been influencing factors in Mickey’s work. It suggests that “history” and “identity” are uniquely modern ways of thinking, and that people of a different cultural domain could not possess comparative concepts. Clearly Thomas’s position, while deeply informed by his disciplinary training and experience, is nevertheless speculative and perhaps as much so as Sayers’. Did Mickey have no sense of himself as an historical person – without a sense of past, present or future? Did he not consider himself in ways that located him within his society, informing his beliefs and motivations, and who or what he might become? Considering the production of such culturally informed works of art in the context of settler-colonial dispossession, it is hard to imagine that a sense of critical engagement did not motivate him.

At once beautiful in their aesthetic achievement, I saw the works as providing unique narratives that could speak to our contemporary urban circumstances. Mickey’s drawings represent important documents of a situated Aboriginal cultural life in flux, and a resilient navigation of profound environmental change. At the same time, they can be read as expressing a powerful assertion of cultural maintenance in the face of such change. The relatively recent inclusion of Mickey’s drawings in the discursive category of contemporary Aboriginal art, after years of having been dismissed as emblematic of cultural loss and assimilation, can be regarded as an example of how contemporary conditions might be reconceived to accommodate a multiplicity of Aboriginalities. Reflecting on this opened a point of entry into thinking through my own concerns with connection and disconnection to place. I began to wonder about Mickey’s drawings and the stories that they tell about the time of their production and the location of the artist.

I imagined attempting to experience his drawings as places. While it is understood that these represent locations in and around the village of Ulladulla at the time of their production, it is not clear if they represent exact locations. Even if the opportunity to visit a drawing site existed, it is difficult to imagine that they would exist unchanged, or that there would be any

residual sense of the artist or the stories seemingly unfolding in his art. A number of features in his work fascinated me, namely the way that he represented the flora and fauna.

Figure 23. Mickey of Ulladulla, Fishing: Scenes of Figure 24. Garry Jones, Cabbage Tree Palm Study, daily life; Native flora and fauna, pencil and 2009, digital print. watercolour, 41 x 49 cm (detail).

I was particularly taken by his idiosyncratic representation of what are understood to be cabbage tree palms (Figure 23).16 It was significant because of the historical predominance of cabbage palms along the south coast and in the Illawarra. In Mickey’s art, this motif represented to me a unique visual expression of this place, yet even more a unique expression of Mickey’s Aboriginality. I wanted to understand the cultural space that I perceived in the artist’s drawings and think on it in terms of their otherwise unacknowledged contemporary significance as historical representations of place, as expressions of physical and cultural change, as documents of adaptation, and as art.

These early visual inquiries coincided with an invitation to participate in a regional exhibition of south coast Aboriginal artists through the local regional gallery.17 The artists represented communities from the Illawarra and along the New South Wales far south coast. The process was to be “collaborative,” “connective,” bringing otherwise dispersed practitioners together to workshop and critically explore notions of place and belonging, as a means of developing new works that were representative of the diverse contemporary cultural identities of the

16 Livistona australis. In the Illawarra, the Aboriginal word for the cabbage palm is Dharawal, which is also the name for the people traditionally from the region along the coast and further inland – the Dharawal are the people of the cabbage palm. 17 Pallingjang IV at Wollongong City Gallery now referred to as Wollongong Art Gallery.

region. I felt that this was a good opportunity to engage this artistic community with my creative concerns, and to sound out their responses. Conscious of sensitivities regarding Aboriginal cultural appropriation, I spoke with Aboriginal Elders on the south coast, who identified as descendants of Ulladulla Mickey.18 In this context, I was eager to develop my interest in Mickey’s life and work, ideas about what I regarded as historical ambiguity and fluidity. I was interested in drawing attention to the historical contingencies of concepts of cultural authenticity, and the capacity of art to reflect such contingencies. At the same time, I wanted to acknowledge and respect contemporary Aboriginal history, culture and heritage.

What developed was a body of work consisting of silk-screen prints and an installation, which combined freestanding elements with a painted wall relief. The screen-prints most directly referenced Mickey’s practice, with the cabbage palm the most prominent element drawn upon. In thinking through ideas of place and connection to place, this motif became an important signifier for this body of work. It aimed to reference a unique Indigenous presence on the south coast that was nevertheless entangled with colonisation, while alluding to my own sense of cultural ambiguity and a desire to make meaning amidst the confusion of it all.

The first work, titled Settling In (Figure 25), addresses Mickey’s world looking back from my time. Most noticeable is the floral patterning which dominates the image surface, acting as a screen or filter through which the drama of the past is read and interpreted. Mickey’s drawings are overtly referenced by including not only numerous manipulated motifs, but also a spectral silhouette of the artist himself – holding his much-needed walking sticks in one hand, as he holds aloft a signature hand-made straw broom in the other – apparently gesturing to somebody or something. Less spectral but equally embedded within this composition is a silhouette of a rabbit, the quintessential symbol of invasion, unflinching and impervious to the artist with this rudimentary technology of resistance. Diagonally opposite in the top left corner is an appropriated image of one of Mickey’s many representations of sailing boats, embedded but not fully integrated. At the bottom right is a red Adirondack

18 Iris White and Cheryl Davidson in conversation with Garry Jones (Moruya, 2009).

chair, an artefact of the present, seemingly hovering above and almost out of the frame.19 Empty, yet offering a place to recline and to contemplate – to “settle in” and to bear witness from afar.

Figure 25. Garry Jones, Settling In, 2009, Figure 26. Garry Jones, Burning Desires, 2009, screen-print, 76 x 56 cm. screen-print, 76 x 56 cm.

The second work, titled Burning Desires (Figure 26), is present-focused, where I wanted to reflect what I sensed as traces of the cultural past in my life, where my desire to know the world more fully also reflected my desire to be more fully in it. Mickey’s cabbage palms provide a backdrop to a more contemporary setting, which was my backyard at the time. While this work is darker with some sense of foreboding, I wanted to allude to a liminal space that is at once both more and less graspable. The centrally placed Hills Hoist in silhouette, bearing no “weight,” attempts to capture a sense of unsettled business.20 I felt successful in connecting with what was for me a visceral experience of the seemingly paradoxical presence-absence / lightness-heaviness of Aboriginal history in my physical

19 Thanks to Amanda Stuart in observing the parallel North American colonial reference in the Adirondack. 20 The Hills Hoist is a height-adjustable rotary clothesline that was almost ubiquitous in Australian suburban backyards in the 1950s and 1960s. See Peter A. Howell, “The genesis of an Australian icon: the Hills Hoist,” Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 35 (2007): 98-110.

suburban location. However, while my aim was never to be overtly “political,” I was well aware that Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus had previously reconceived the Hills Hoist as a significant symbol of settler-colonialism with his iconic 1991 work Fruit Bats (Figure 27). In presenting a Hills Hoist bearing a load of 100 hanging native fruit bats, Onus alludes to the potential “re-colonising” or “re-claiming” of the Australian suburban backyard in the wake of the pending 1992 Mabo High Court case; which overturned the legal myth of terra nullius

Figure 27. Lin Onus, Fruit Bats, 1991, sculptural installation, mixed dimensions, Art Gallery of New South Wales. and led to the establishment of the Native Title Act 1993.21 Native title was frequently in the mainstream media at the time, and not just because of its historic significance. Public panic was whipped up daily by forces opposed to the recognition of Indigenous land and water title rights under Australian common law, and “regular” Australians were cautioned to worry that their backyards were potentially at risk of native title claims.

My objective was not to re-prosecute this history but to attempt to manifest something of the liminal – the ambivalence of cultural and historical entanglement that was my suburban experience. The floral lace screen, a pervasive and binding presence throughout the body of work, is less consistent in Burning Desires, and a bit tattered and broken in patches. Almost

21 Waanyi artists Gordon Hookey subsequently employed the Hills Hoist as a motif of colonisation in his confrontational works such as Xanthorrhoea takes over the suburban backyard (1995).

indiscernible is the same rabbit, now completely integrated into the substructure of the print. Two of Mickey’s kangaroos are present, as if spectres from the past, while the Adirondack deckchair locates this witness more firmly within the current drama at play.

In developing a floor installation for the exhibition (Figure 28. and Figure 30), I wanted to explore aspects of these otherwise two-dimensional explorations three-dimensionally. I realised that I was drawing on a practice that I have utilised in previous projects, working with flat intersecting planes, possibly originating in my screen-printing and the practice of working with flat layers to create a sense of spatial depth. What emerged was a combination of “flat-pack-like” objects, including domestic furniture, rabbits, and a further interpretation

Figure 28. Garry Jones, Bunny-Go- Figure 29. Garry Jones, Outdoor Setting Study, Round Study, 2009, digital image. 2009, pvc, mixed dimentions (15 x 15 cm area). of Mickey’s cabbage palm. The cabbage palm became stylised as though ornamental. The chair, drawn more literally from those represented in the prints, is also functional, as though presenting the audience an invitation to actually sit and be part of the installation. The rabbit multiplied and came to most starkly represent the ambivalent status of the work. I have been interested in rabbits as ambiguous sign since the early 1990s when I worked for a brief period in the Central and Western Deserts. I became aware of the ways in which desert communities had incorporated feral animals such as rabbits and cats into Dreaming

cycles and adopted them as totemic beings.22 I felt deeply impressed by the capacity of these Aboriginal cultures to embrace all things within their experience meaningfully and positively into their greater cosmology. Aware that I possessed a Chinese star sign of the rabbit, I found this simultaneously “alien” and “indigenous” creature as a sign of personal folly, whilst disrupting essentialist notions of cultural identity.

Figure 30. Garry Jones, Urban Dreams, 2009, installation, mixed dimensions.

Here also, began my exploration of polystyrene as a sculptural material, more for convenience than for conceptual integrity and meaning. However, the polystyrene seemed to extend from earlier explorations in PVC, where the flatness and the do-it-yourself cheapness of click-together objects alluded to a sense of mass-culture and relative material impoverishment. While these were important personal concerns underpinned by a lingering sense of personal abjection, they might also be considered to extend to broader societal experiences of social and cultural superficiality.

22 Adrian Franklin, Animal nation: the true story of animals and Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 173. Franklin addresses the integration of feral animals into Aboriginal societies, and refers to “Pussy Cat Dreaming.” I recall talking to Dick Kimber in Alice Springs in the early 1990s about a Pintupi-Luritja “bunny rabbit” Dreaming. During my research I came to appreciate that since the first introduction of rabbits in the early days of colonisation, cross-breeding and hybridisation has resulted in breeds of rabbits unique to Australia.

An alternative work that I wanted to develop was based on a drawing of Mickey’s that had intrigued me, titled Figure groups, including man being pulled (?) from horse (Figure 31). This was of a collection of figures in graphite on a foolscap page, seemingly random and unfinished, but possessing a strong sense of interconnections and parallel events playing out in a moment in the life of a community. I had been studying the work attempting to understand the dynamics at play, the connections between characters and sequences of events. There were families sitting, people milling around, some cooking at campfires, others travelling carrying goods on their shoulders, sacks, kangaroos, and other uncertain loads. There is a prominent presence of a horse rearing up and an apparently thrown rider prostate and akimbo being assisted up by another person. The cause of this drama appears to be two dogs nipping at the horse’s hind legs, one dog drawn as if it might be lying on the ground. There are also other figures in the foreground and in the background that appear to be involved, one attempting to calm the horse while the other waves a long stick at the dogs. Another person appears to be reaching down to pick up the rider’s hat.

Figure 31. Mickey of Ulladulla, Figure 32. Garry Jones, 3d Study, Figure groups, including man being 2011, pvc, mixed dimensions. pulled (?) from horse, 1875, pencil, 23.7 x 13.8 cm.

I imagined the work being animated, becoming three-dimensional. I also imagined myself being in the work, bearing witness to its originating drama. I was not imaging the potential of being transported back in time and space, but instead, of penetrating the drawing itself, witnessing the drama through Mickey’s creative expression. I started out attempting to translate the drawings as a collection of three-dimensional figures, extending the two- dimensional drawing plane forwards and backwards, while trying to maintain the inherent quality of the two-dimensional surface (Figure 32).

Coincidently, in late 2017 on a visit to Melbourne Museum’s Bunjilaka Gallery, I discovered a beautiful three-dimensional interpretation of Kwatkwat artist Tommy McRae’s Victorian Blacks - Melbourne tribe holding corroboree after seeing ships for the first time (1890). The silhouette nature of the original pen and ink drawing was converted into a larger scale cut- out which in turn projected larger shadows onto the wall behind, functioning like a form of shadow puppetry (Figure 33 and Figure 34).

Figure 33. Bunjilaka display, Melbourne Museum, Figure 34. Tommy McRae, Victorian Blacks - 2017, material unknown, mixed dimensions. Melbourne tribe holding corroboree after seeing Photograph by the author. ships for the first time, 1890s, pen and ink on paper, 23.8 x 36.0 cm.

Later Studio Developments – Concepts and Materials

At the opening of the Pallingjang show, I was surprised by the work of the other participating artists, by what I regarded as the impressive quality of culturally inspired weavings, unique contemporary shell-works, and diverse prints representing authentic

narratives of important Aboriginal sites along the coast (Figure 35 and Figure 36). I felt deeply moved by the works of these local artists, by their potency as objects of contemporary Aboriginality. At once beautifully crafted, some works were viscerally stunning in their ability to renew the past into the present. The artists’ narratives spoke of family traditions and oral histories, which, while disrupted due to the common fact of colonial imposition and the ravages of history, were still accessible from individual and collective memories, alongside records in the colonial archive.

Figure 36. Phyllis Stewart, Slippers, 2002, mixed dimensions.

Figure 35. Julie Freeman, Dilly bag with Emu eggs, 2009, mixed dimensions.

Following the exhibition, I became interested in concepts of cultural heritage, as well as historical notions of cultural authenticity and how contemporary Aboriginal artists engage with their ancestral pasts in the development and production of contemporary art. At this point, I made the decision to shift my research orientation to focus on the relationship between Aboriginal material cultures, the cultural archive, and contemporary Aboriginal artists exploring and exploiting this cross-cultural field of engagement – or transcultural contact zone as I have come to understand it.

I began undertaking research into the history and cultural practices of Aboriginal communities in far western New South Wales, particularly the Kamilaroi/Ngemba region of Brewarrina where my mother came from; the region of my own Aboriginal heritage. I quickly

discovered that information about material culture from the far west of the state was scant, and what existed had been collected categorised and curated within the context of anthropological study – as scientific specimens. I located the 1981 publication Aboriginal Australia, which brought together Aboriginal cultural material from museums across Australia and, possibly for the first time in this case, attempted to discuss such material in the context of the emerging Aboriginal art of the moment (Figure 37 and Figure 38).23 The catalogue contained images of a diverse range of material from a broad stretch of western NSW, from the Queensland border down to Victoria. In many cases, the provenance was unclear with notes indicating that certain objects were “believed to be from” central-, south- or north-west New South Wales.

I was drawn immediately to the diversity and the obvious skill and artistry evident in each object. While I felt a degree of pride recognising these objects as potentially connected to my own cultural heritage, I also felt a degree of ambivalence about my objectives; being familiar with the experiences of previous Aboriginal artists engaging with the museum, and debates around motivations, cultural rights and the potential meanings of artistic outcomes,

Figure 37. Assorted Southeast Aboriginal Clubs. Source: Carol Cooper, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al., Aboriginal Australia (Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981).

23 Carol Cooper, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al., Aboriginal Australia (Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981).

I had some apprehension. Fundamentally, my motivation was a commitment to engaging critically in the contemporary discourse of southeast Aboriginal art and heritage. However, I also recognised my research objectives towards a higher degree and my creative desires as an artist to make new art.

Affectively, I wanted to experience what it might feel like to produce such objects with my own hands; intellectually I wanted to develop a clearer sense of what it might mean to engage in this practice of communicating with and translating the past into the present. I recalled that, decades earlier as a kid, when I travelled out west with my family to visit and stay with relatives, some uncles were actively engaged in making artefacts in their backyards. At the time, it was not something I paid much attention to, except recalling my mother expressing how talented my uncles were. Having not had contact with family in the far west for some years, I imagined making a trip west, to rediscover what practices people might still be engaged in. I was imagining that I might reconnect with family who could provide instruction and impart skills. In the meantime, I arranged a visit to the Australian Museum in Sydney, to look through that institution’s archive of objects from far north western New South Wales. Having really only studied the museum catalogues, I wanted more than anything at this stage to feel the objects, feel their tactility and textual qualities,

their heaviness or lightness. I wanted to hold them and elicit some sense of what they felt like when held the way they were meant to be held.

On entering the collection room, I was immediately surprised to find the large open room filled with row upon row of wide industrial shelving, up to five tiers high, accessible by narrow aisles. Each tier seemed narrow and dark with objects laid out without any particular system or need for order. However, shelves were allocated to specific cultural collections and specific geographical locations. I was directed by the accompanying museum staff member to the Aboriginal collection, and then on to the collection of material from western New South Wales. As I entered the aisle and could see more clearly into the contents of each shelf, I felt a sense of familiarity. I could recognise the generic shape of clubs, shields, and boomerangs. There was something comforting in this recognition, but there was also something deeply saddening about this arrangement. I could not quite put my finger on it until afterwards, after I became familiar with the collection. It was that the objects seemed to have no “life” to them; that they were anonymous; forgotten.

Moving slowly and thoughtfully from shelf to shelf, mindful of the museum attendant patiently supervising my visit, I began searching for specific objects that resembled those I had been examining in the catalogues. One by one, I carefully lifted boomerangs, clubs, and shields from their otherwise nondescript placement. Hand sheathed with blue latex glove, I held them aloft, imagining myself handling them in a fashion consistent with their intended function. Christian Thompson’s “Emotional Striptease”, Destiny Deacon’s “Eva Johnson, Writer,” and Crossland’s “Portrait of Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer,” all came to mind. Turning each artefact repeatedly, studying its shape and surface decoration, I felt an impulse to make an aesthetic judgment about the quality of production and possible cultural significance, but found that I was not equipped to make such distinctions. Beyond my desire at this stage to experience the presence of such objects, I had no knowledge of their history except what I had read in the catalogue. I knew nothing of the tradition of these objects, how they were manufactured or their relative significance within the communities from which they originated.

I felt self-conscious and once again some ambivalence about my intentions; what “right” did I have here to imagine drawing inspiration from them for my own creative ends? Was I engaging in cultural appropriation? What does it mean for an Aboriginal person like me, disconnected from such cultural practices, wanting to understand their own lives and identities through reclaiming and possibly replicating such objects? These objects were once functional technologies of material culture, subsequently objects of ethnographic curiosity, taxonomy, and increasing, objects of contemporary art?

Artefacts of Authenticity

As elsewhere in Australia, Aboriginal art across the southeast has been traditionally highly significant as an expression of cultural identity, and, in effect, integral to the communicative systems in place for engaging within and beyond local community, kinship and Country.24 Analysis of the artefacts of the southeast (including boomerangs, shields, clubs and spears), show the south east region to possess one of the most highly diverse and complex arrays of geometric and figurative designs from across Indigenous Australia.25

While Aboriginal people resisted European colonisation from the outset, object and artefact production emerged as a means of bridging the colonial divide, enabling cultural and economic trade, while generating some degree of independence from institutional control. Despite the efforts of government administrations to assimilate Aboriginal people, such trade with the colonials enabled the continuation of creative production along culturally determined lines, while facilitating the emerging expression of a resistant contemporary Aboriginal identity.26 Early on, artefacts such as weaponry and hunting objects were collected as souvenirs, and as sources of information about the “primitive” people of Australia. Anthropologist Philip Jones notes that boomerangs and other weaponry first appeared in European homes as part of “trophy” displays, a feature of the European frontier

24 Carol Cooper, “Art of temperate southeast Australia,” in Aboriginal Australia, Carol Cooper, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al (Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981). 25 Cooper, “Art of temperate southeast Australia”. 26 Kleinert, Sylvia. “‘Jacky Jacky was a smart young fella’: a study of art and Aboriginality in South East Australia 1900-1980” (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1994).

of nineteenth-century Empires.27 As discussed in Chapter Two, by the end of the century anthropologists and missionaries had made major collections of objects that were bought, traded, or stolen from Aboriginal communities.

While artefacts were still being made for personal use, overall, they were made for sale or trade to non-Aboriginal collectors. The trade in boomerangs, shields, clubs and spears rapidly developed and in turn influenced the form and decoration of some of the objects themselves (which may have become more figurative while incorporating motifs from European genres). For Aboriginal people in the southeast, this participation in an exchange relationship with mainstream Australians can be regarded as representing an expression of continuing attachment to culture.28 The distinctive artefacts that emerged in response to this interaction represent a creative set of local negotiations that can be attributed to the agency and determination of the Aboriginal object makers and traders. In this regard, such objects remain testimony to the innovative ability of Aboriginal communities to exploit the dominant society, which was rapidly encapsulating them.29

As with my earlier research into the work of Mickey of Ulladulla, and the significance of his work as a reflection of his experience of a rapidly transforming world around him, I felt inspired by this history of Aboriginal material engagements in the southeast. These included forms of accommodation, collaboration and resistance in response to the profound transformations experienced by people whose lives were not that distant from a pre-colonial “traditional” reality. That artefacts functioned as a form of cultural exchange (including economic, diplomatic, and a kind of reverse cultural assimilation), was fascinating but not surprising. The sense of cultural malleability, even “plasticity,” felt compelling.

27 Philip Jones, “The boomerang’s erratic flight: the mutability of ethnographic objects,” Journal of Australian Studies 16, no. 35 (December 1992): 70. 28 Kleinert, “Art and Aboriginality”. 29 Sylvia Kleinert, “Aboriginal enterprises negotiating an urban Aboriginality,” Aboriginal History, no. 34 (2010): 1.

Documenting the Collection

I started out by drawing objects from the museum catalogues; manipulating the shapes and then converting them into graphic motifs (see Figure 39 - 42). I could repeat these to generate more varied patterns and arrangements; this is a practice that is familiar and comfortable, a process through which I felt better able to grasp the characteristics of surface and form on the two-dimensional plane. I selected a variety of shields, clubs, boomerangs and spears and traced their profiles, which I then imported into a digital drawing program

Figure 39. Garry Jones, Shield Print Figure 40. Garry Jones, Club Print Study, 2012, digital image. Study, 2012, digital image.

Figure 41. Garry Jones, Mixed Figure 42. Garry Jones, Shield & Objects Print Study, 2012, digital Club Print Study, 2012, digital image. image.

and started compiling layers, much as I would prepare a silk-screen print. The colour palette was an almost unconscious choice – black red yellow, as well as ochre browns and yellows. It was a simple attempt to play with geometry and recognisable shapes, however, after wondering about their appeal to me I realised their visual resonance with early to mid- twentieth-century kitsch paraphernalia, such as tourist tea towels, also referred to as “Aboriginalia” (Figure 43). The work of Destiny Deacon and Tony Albert came immediately to mind. I imagined that there might be something to be productively explored here, however,

Figure 43. Examples of Australian tourism tea towels https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/465922218/ and https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/666324144/ while the history of cultural appropriation and tourist engagment fits within the broader focus of my inquiry, objects of Aboriginalia, defined as “decorative objects depicting Aboriginal peoples and/or culture and motifs,” were predominantly designed for, sold to and produced by non-Aboriginal people.30 They can be considered to represent a white Australian ideal of what was authentically Australian at the time – without having to attend to actual Aboriginal people and their existential plight. Ironically, in finding their way into most Australian homes from the 1920s to the 1970s, objects of Aboriginalia may have effectively functioned as “repositories of recognition of what was often entirely absent,

30 Adrian Franklin, “Aboriginalia: Souvenir Wares and the ‘Aboriginalization’ of Australian Identity,” Tourist Studies 10, no. 3 (2010): 103.

denied or undermined in the everyday political and policy sphere.”31 Adrian Franklin adds that:

… because these objects speak of things that are typically denied, hidden or ignored in civil society, they possess a powerful emotional honesty that can be recoded into a new life as political and protest objects, often with the help of Aboriginal artists and other cultural commentators and educators.32

In this way, such kitsch objects functioned in ways similar to the actual artefacts made by Aboriginal people for sale to non-Aboriginal collectors, in that they enabled an abstract Aboriginal presence in the minds of “regular” Australians, which Aboriginal people have been able to subsequently tap into to assert contemporary concerns. Where Aboriginalia was an often-distorted appropriation of Aboriginality, the objects I have been concerned with are those authored and created by Aboriginal people.

After initial inquiries regarding contemporary artefact makers and the possibility of getting some hands-on experience manufacturing something myself, I realised that it was not going to happen quickly. I felt particularly fascinated by the form of a western NSW parrying shield pictured in one of the catalogues, and I wanted to understand how the shape might be achieved in the carving process. Working with polystyrene, which I could easily and quickly carve, I began working from the flat surface of the photograph to produce a three- dimensional replica. Without too much attention to detail, I was able to estimate from catalogue photographs the height of the shield relative to its width and depth.

This first object (Figure 44)enabled me to realise quickly the basic form of the parrying shield I had been studying, providing a tangible sense of the conceptual steps, if not the actual material sense, of manufacturing such an object. However, something else also occurred. I felt an unexpected degree of surprise and affection for this plastic object I had just handcrafted. There was something about this miniature form — toy-like in its size and its

31 Franklin, “Aboriginalia,” 207. 32 Franklin, “Aboriginalia,” 207.

plasticity, the colour — or lack of — a stark white, its surface soft and slightly furry, and its material fragility and lightness gave it a sense of vulnerability.

Figure 44. Garry Jones, Carving Experiment #1, 2013, polystyrene, mixed dimensions.

The purpose of this initial step was only to create something in the spur of the moment, something that represented a preliminary replication and resemblance of something more substantial to come — materially, functionally and culturally. I had however, become unexpectedly curious about the material and its affective significance in the context of my investigation. Attempting to manufacture artefacts out of natural materials and in a manner that satisfied contemporary expectations of authenticity, no longer felt so important. Having come to this exercise with some sense of trepidation, the process took on a life of its own and I now felt compelled to replicate plastic objects. This struck me as an exercise in both seriousness and folly: there was a seriousness in the intent of the project as a respectful investigation into contemporary Aboriginal cultural heritage, and my own family heritage in particular, but where I had arrived seemed more whimsical, and fraught. I felt that any cultural or political seriousness of the intended project was suddenly negated by the irreverence of these objects, and their pointlessness.

Figure 45. Garry Jones, a Work in Progress #1, 2013, polystyrene, digital image.

Figure 46. Garry Jones, a Work in Progress #2, 2013, polystyrene, mixed dimensions.

Where I began drawing and tracing objects from the museum catalogues, digitising these images and then manipulating them to explore a variety of visual configurations, I started to photograph my carved objects and, converting them to digital files, began to once again play with different combinations of object arrangements (Figure 47 and Figure 48).

Figure 47. Garry Jones, Black & White Studies 1-3, 2013, digital prints, 50 x 35 cm.

Figure 48. Garry Jones, Solarised Studies 1-2, 2013, digital print2, 50 x 35 cm.

A few years later, in 2016 and 2017, I encountered works by Wiradjuri artist Jonathan Jones and Bidjara/Ghungalu/Garingbal artist Dale Harding respectively, which surprised me by their individual engagements with manufactured artefacts as contemporary art objects, and their immediate resonances with my own investigations. In 2016, Jones produced the work barrangal dyara (skin and bones) at the Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney (Figure 49).

Jones’ work was a response to the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens Garden Palace fire of 1882.33 In the fire, a significant collection of New South Wales Aboriginal cultural objects, on loan from the Australian Museum, was destroyed. This effectively created a hugely consequential loss in both the historical knowledge of south east Aboriginal material cultural practices, and the

Figure 49.Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara (skin and bones) 2016, cast plaster, varying dimensions. Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney. Photograph by the author.

33 The Garden Palace was built in 1879 to house the Sydney International Exhibition. See, “The Garden Palace: Building an Early Sydney Icon,” by Sarah Morley in M/C Journal, Vol. 20, Issue 2 (April 2017).

potential opportunity for descendants of those old people to learn from them. barrangal dyara (skin and bones) represented “an effort to commence a healing process and a celebration of the survival of the world’s oldest living culture despite this traumatic event.”34 As part of a broader creative project, Jones created thousands of bleached white shields made from cast plaster, massed along the outline of the Garden Palace’s historic footprint, representing the remnant rubble of the building after the fire, raising the layered history and “bones of the Garden Palace across the site.”35

Dale Harding’s Body or Objects 2016, included in the 2017 National Gallery of Australia’s Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial, consisted of a small mixed collection of male artefacts – spears, nulla nullas and boomerangs – made from cast black silicone rubber, some with protruding horseshoe nails (Figure 50). Exhibited on white shelving protruding from the white gallery wall, Harding’s black rubber objects are ambiguous in their presence. Flaccid in their drooping postures, they allude to a sense of both cultural emasculation and sexual fetishisation. Subtly relating to the historical circumstances of the artist’s Bidjara/Ghungalu/Garingbal ancestors, and their perceived cultural disempowerment throughout the course of pastoral development in nineteenth-century central Queensland, these objects also engage with historical acts of anthropological collecting, displaying and interpreting Indigenous material culture; robbed of their originating cultural contexts they become the impotent fantasy possessions of their European collectors.36

Figure 50. Dale Harding, Body of Objects, 2016, silicon and steel nails, mixed dimensions. National Gallery of Australia 2017. Photograph by the author. Figure 51. Dale Harding, Body of Objects (detail – nulla nulla with nails).

34 barrangal dyara (skin and bones). 17 September – 3 October 2016. Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney. Accessed 14 November 2019. https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/planting-dreams-audio-guides/jonathan-jones-richardsons-garden-palace. 35 barrangal dyara (skin and bones). 36 Angela Goddard, “Dale Harding: Material Traces,” in Dale Harding: Body of objects (Brisbane: Griffith University Art Museum, 2017): 5-8.

100

Final Works – A Serious Folly?

In my project, I came to experience an ambivalent relationship with both the material I had been working with and the objects I had been carving. While I developed a strong sense of affection for these fraught plastic replicas – in their material vulnerability and their conceptual ambiguity – I also came to feel uncomfortable with the sense that the work as a whole, despite the seriousness underpinning its development, had become far less purposeful – something of a folly. The process, in and of itself, had been uncomfortable (the piles of statically charged shavings sticking to everything, the virtual mist of fine airborne particles, and the ever-present whiff of pentane gas – which was apparently burnt off in the manufacturing process but persisted as a residual odour). Materially, plastic is so enmeshed in our lives and is largely taken for granted, despite the increasing awareness of its overwhelming position as a global waste product. Once considered a revolutionary material, the term “plastic” has come to refer to things cheap, unoriginal and mass-produced, where expressions such as “plastic people” and “plastic culture” imply superficiality and inauthenticity. Increasingly, polystyrene in particular has come to be regarded as a virtual “demonic substance;”37 a violation of nature and a defining feature of our “anthropocentric” era.38

Conceptually, I was initially motivated to develop works that celebrated “community diversity” and “cultural identity,” and in that process continue to explore my own cultural identification to the places in which I find myself. From the outset, I had felt challenged by what I perceived as the significant responsibility of producing something meaningful within the context of contemporary Aboriginal arts discourse. I see the works of Jones, Harding and Dickens, and the earlier works of Nicholls and Bennett as unambiguous in their respective artistic objectives and conceptual significances. I came to sympathise with the photographic practices of Leah King Smith and Brook Andrew in their early forays into the archive, particularly their stated desires to “liberate” the subjects of their respective discoveries. I felt

37 Shouhei J. Tanaka, “The plastic in the garden: material ecopoetics of Evelyn Reilly’s styrofoam” (Master’s thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2015): 130. 38 The current geological epoch in which the most dominant influence on the earth’s climate and environment is overwhelmingly the influence of human occupation. Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Material doubts: the consequences of plastic,” Environmental History 2, no. 3, (July 1997): 1-3.

101

particularly inspired by artists such as Destiny Deacon and Christian Thompson, in their determined and declarative reclamations of the archive, not to assert essence but to demonstrate ontological independence in the present. I also felt persuaded by the ethical concerns of the early Aboriginal critics who “called-out” their contemporaries, expressing concerns for cultural authority and integrity, and respect for communities of origin, whose colonial traumas were yet to be appropriately addressed and remediated.

My engagement in thinking about the archive historically, and in the present, and the ways in which Aboriginal cultural material had been collected, categorised and displayed was tentative and incremental. I discovered a field of contemporary art, which interrogates and speaks back to the power of the archive, and then realised that I had inadvertently entered this field in my own studio research. However, what had started out as an attempt to engage outwardly, with “community,” turned inward and tapped into an ambivalence towards the objects – and objectives – of my research. Through the course of this investigation, I came to feel much less assured of my studio achievements and a degree of discomfort with what I started to read into my own works as a kind of parody, not of the archive, but of myself.

Figure 52. Garry Jones, Assorted Artefacts, 2017, polystyrene, mixed dimensions.

102

#1 #2 #3

#4 #5 #6 Figure 53. Garry Jones, Toxic Authenticity 1-6, 2017, digital images, varying dimensions.

Figure 54. Garry Jones, Pale Imitation 1-3, 2017, digital images, varying dimensions.

103

Final Works – on Display

Figure 55. Garry Jones, Works in Progress 1 (foreground), Toxic Authenticity 2 (background), 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, D avid Paterson.

Figure 56. Garry Jones, Graduating Exhibition floor layout, 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson.

104

Figure 57. Garry Jones, Works in Progress 2 (foreground), Pale Imitiation 1-3 (background L), Mixed metaphores (after Jonathan Jones) (background R), 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson.

Figure 58. Garry Jones, Works in Progress 2, 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, David Paterson.

105

Figure 59. Garry Jones, Drawing a blank/blanc (apologies to Mickey of Ulludulla) , 2019, polystyrene installation, ANU School of Art and Design Gallery. Photograph, D avid Paterson.

106

Chapter Four – Cosmopolitanism

The lives of Aboriginal people continue to be commonly understood as existing at the intersection between two different cultures – “Aboriginal” and “non-Aboriginal.” This binary positioning is often represented as a simple intersection of two different and contesting forces producing a “clash of culture,” where the Western dominates the Other.1 However, not only does this positioning refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity of the categories it employs, it also is far from being simply an “intersection.” Martin Nakata conceives of it as a much broader “cultural interface,” constituting points of intersecting trajectories that are multi-layered and multi-dimensional.2 For Nakata, this is a space of “dynamic relations of thought, competing and contesting discourses within and between different knowledge systems, and different systems of social, economic and political organisation.”3 It is a cultural contact zone in which Indigenous academics, activists and artists are increasingly engaging and asserting the necessity of their own cultural standpoints, to be heard and engaged with in relation to the local and global concerns of our time.

In recent debates on the cultural consequences of globalisation, the concept of “cosmopolitanism” has emerged as a means of understanding transnational movements, transcultural interrelationships, and “difference” in the face of the threat of broad-scale cultural assimilation, homogenisation and ethnocentrism.4 This movement corresponds with the conceptual field of “new materialism” which has emerged across diverse disciplines, and shares the basic conviction that “matter has agency.”5 In contesting the strict division of subject and object, culture and nature, human and non-human, “new materialism” makes the promise of engaging in dialogue with and across a diverse array of agents, and imagines

1 Martin N Nakata, Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 198. 2 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 198-199. 3 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 199. 4 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 226, Epub. 5 Jessica L. Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the mirror: Indigenous ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in contemporary art,” Third Text 27, no. 1 (2013): 17. Building on the work of French post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, the radicality of this position is in its break with the “linguistic turn” and its re-thinking of “material.”

107

a world, which is profoundly “relational.”6 This chapter attempts to summarise the recent conceptual developments in “cosmopolitanism” in particular, and considers their potential relevance to contemporary Aboriginal concerns. I conclude the chapter with a more critical reflection on my thesis and its contribution to the field of contemporary urban Aboriginal arts.

A Crosscurrent of Essentialism and Cosmopolitanism

In thinking through the impact of globalisation and its apparent indifference to national and ethnic boundaries, Art historian Rex Butler, highlights the paradox of an Australian national identity where, he asserts, “no national identity actually exists.”7 The irony he insists, is that “the actual art and culture produced” in critiquing this paradox “remains distinctively, indeed obsessively, local.”8 Butler’s concern here is with what he sees as a ceaseless “meditating on [Australian art’s] distance from metropolitan centres, endlessly ironising its own insignificance.”9

Writing in response, art historian Ian McLean adds that:

While we Australians might think Australia is an actual place, it remains a utopian concept (i.e. a no place), categorically bound to the dystopia it protests. … Australia, a nation established primarily around the idea of a white bastion in a hostile black empire, now sports Aboriginal art as its national emblem. These paradoxes are what make Australian art history both richly ambivalent and self- deconstructive. While other national art histories are equally ambivalent, “Australia” provides no cover.10

Whereas McLean sees productive work to be done in the self-deconstruction of an ambivalent national art history, Butler’s position is that “Australian artists” should be striving for an UnAustralian art, an art that attempts to the best of its abilities to belong to a global culture precisely because it would then be an Australian art that was no longer

6 Horton and Berlo, “Beyond the mirror,” 17-18. 7 Rex Butler, “A short introduction to unAustralian art” Broadsheet 32, no. 4 (2003): 17, accessed 1 July 2019, http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:131214. 8 Butler, “A short introduction,” 17. 9 Butler, “A short introduction,” 17. 10 Ian McLean, “The necessity of (un)Australian art history: writing for the new world,” Artlink 26, no. 1, (2006): 54.

108

Australian.11 The point of interest for the purposes of my own inquiry, is Butler’s assertion that, if anything, “Aboriginal art” is “the greatest of all UnAustralian art;” he refers here specifically to art from “small isolated settlements in the middle of the desert.”12 Butler remarks that:

The enigma it poses for us … is how something so culturally specific, coming from a particular time and place, is able to communicate so widely? But this is always the enigma of authentic culture. That is, the true greatness of Aboriginal art is that it refuses either a national (Australian) or an international (Biennale Art Fair) art. It instead takes the risk – and I am sure this is deliberate: the Elders who make it insist again and again that they want it to speak to everybody – of becoming a universal art.13

That Aboriginal art can resonate beyond colonially imposed national borders and speak to a broader field of universal human concerns, is, for Butler, what UnAustralian artists might be able to learn from Aboriginal artists. However much this notion of an Indigenous art that transcends colonial reality may be appealing, Butler’s self-confessed “utopian vein” appears to risk perpetuating the sins of an earlier era in Western imperial history. The notion of Aboriginal art taking “the risk … of becoming a universal art” fails to acknowledge the more problematic principles of the universalism that, until fairly recently, firmly underpinned Western domination of the globe, and the Australian colonial-settler project as a particular case in point.14 Universalism has also an equally problematic history in the story of Western art, which inherited the ideology of colonialism and regarded art as structured hierarchically from the “civilised” to the “uncivilised” – or “primitive”. Modernism’s conceptual Other was “Primitivism,” and “primitive art” had to do largely with the perceived enigma of the

11 Butler, “A short introduction,” 17. 12 Butler was writing at a time when the term “unAustralian,” which was politicised during the inter-war years, was re- introduced into popular discourse by the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Howard’s use of the term was broad, but particularly used with regard to challenges to his government’s treatment of Aboriginal people and refugees. See, “Australia’s un-doing,” Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 2005, accessed 22 November 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/national/australias-un-doing-20050315-gdkxf3.html. 13 Butler, “A short introduction,” 17. 14 From the seventeenth century, “universalism” formed the foundation of the European Enlightenment with its developments in political and moral philosophy, and its articulations of social justice, natural law, and the equality of humankind. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tension between the dominant liberal thought and the reality of colonial practice became particularly acute. One way of reconciling the “equality” of the West and the simultaneous subjugation of the colonial Other was to assert the notion of the “civilising mission,” in which social and political dependence was necessary in order for “uncivilised” societies to advance to the point where they could be “naturally” absorbed into “civilised” society – this became the “white man’s burden.” See Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy, "Colonialism,"The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), accessed 28 July 2019 https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/colonialism/.

109

“unadulterated” “authenticity” of the art, regardless of the social, cultural, or political contexts of the makers of such art.15

However, to better understand Butler’s assertion, it is helpful to consider that in recent decades international art world discourses have been undergoing a significant shift away from a teleological Euro-American modernist canon towards a more encompassing conception of art, enabling very different artistic traditions to be included within the frame – referred to broadly as “contemporary art,” a conception that includes multiple “modernisms” and “post-modernisms”16 Nevertheless, what gets to be determined as “contemporary” in the contemporary art market, is that accepted by the dominant Euro- American art world and its institutions.17 Terry Smith argues that the main goal of Aboriginal artists – those that Butler identifies from remote communities – has,

… never been to deposit their output into an imagined, universal, art-historical canon—to line up for assessment as contributors to phases labelled with terms like “traditional,” “modern,” “postmodern,” or “contemporary.” Rather, their art is first and foremost the product of existential necessity, as it is for most artists anywhere, but in this case, it is one of the few available strategies for surviving the conditions of colonization and for finding a sustainable mode of reconciliation with the colonizing other.18

In contrast to Butler’s universalism, much contemporary Aboriginal art holds a unique status as being kind of equal-but-different in relation to Western contemporary art: embraced by the mainstream art world aesthetically, but held apart as ontologically different, and in many regards incommensurably so.19 This position was once, more commonly articulated in the context of ethnographic or natural history museum collections, but since the relatively recent incorporation of Aboriginal art within the contemporary art discourse, it has gained

15 Elizabeth Burns Coleman, “Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art revolution,” Journal of Art Historiography no. 1 (December 2009): 3. Also see Fred Myers, “‘Primitivism’, anthropology, and the category of ‘primitive art,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley (London, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006). 16 Terry Smith definitions contemporary art as, “... art driven by multiple energies of contemporaneity, the art that figures forth those energies so that we can glimpse them in operation, the art that works to transform those energies in ways that keep our futures open, an art that draws us into commitment to what is to come.” Terry Smith, Art to come: histories of contemporary art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019): 73-74. Epub. 17 Smith, Art to come, 213. 18 Smith, Art to come, 213-214. 19 See Howard Morphy, Becoming art (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), and Ian McLean, Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).

110

popular traction. In this context, it is a relatively new phenomenon, but one that has nevertheless been deeply circumscribed by the European institutions of anthropology and Western art history, with their origins in Western Enlightenment thinking and their historical perspectives on “primitive” peoples and cultures.20

Taking into consideration Smith’s observations cited above, it is important to also recognise the fact that contemporary Aboriginal art has emerged from histories of intersecting social, cultural and political upheavals, which effectively render it as a category, as potently significant of a broader colonial history, as much as a sign of Aboriginal difference. McLean suggests that the ongoing difficulties in addressing the social, cultural and political meaning of much contemporary Aboriginal art, is due to the “presumed incommensurability or dissimilar ways of knowing” so frequently attributed to it.21 In this sense, Aboriginal art is understood to be so culturally bound and absolute, ontologically and epistemologically, that it is not possible for dissimilar cultures to achieve any meaningful exchange.

What seems to be at stake with the concept of incommensurability is not simply the idea of meaningful communication between peoples, but the possibility of mutual recognition and respect among cultures.22

Corresponding to some extent with Butler’s identification of the universalism of much Aboriginal art, McLean contends that all art is a space where human differences are allowed to meet.23 Even in traditional cultural contexts, this is the everyday practice of ceremonial art and the coming together of clans to deal with internal difference; however, McLean assumes that by the time Western art had become commodified (following the Industrial revolution), this capacity for cultural convergence was largely lost.24 He argues that:

Because art is the currency of transculturation there is no exclusive Western or Aboriginal aesthetic principle. Rather, the poetry of feeling that produces art is an innate human faculty not bound by cultural mores, and artists, whatever their traditions, are adept at interacting with other ways and thinking about art. Thus,

20 Morphy, Becoming art, 2. 21 Ian McLean, Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 247. 22 Paul Healy, “Overcoming incommensurability through intercultural dialogue,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 9, no. 1 (January 2013): 268. 23 McLean, Rattling spears, 247-248. 24 Ian McLean, Email correspondence (24 January 2019).

111

artists are alert to the new and the different; like the canary in the mine, art is an early warning system of the new or other.25

The positions that both Butler and McLean take are not strictly new and resonate with Howard Morphy’s argument for the capacity of Aboriginal art to be read aesthetically, across cultural boundaries.26 However, McLean’s position takes a more nuanced turn in asserting not only a capacity for a universal appreciation, but a parallel capacity for cross- cultural knowing and understanding; an active form of communication – a new language – which enables relations among differences. The radicality and controversy of this position is that it forwarded at a time when prominent Indigenous scholars around the globe have increasingly asserted the idea of an ontological incommensurability in which differences may not be bridged.27 The challenge in McLean’s position is essentially a cosmopolitan one.28

Cosmopolitan Concerns

Urban-based Aboriginal artists have consistently challenged the discourse of authenticity where their ontological and epistemological locations have been externally determined to be not equal to, and less than, those of “remote community” artists. This has manifested in multiple and often intersecting strategies resisting imposed categorisations. While many artists may be considered to have capitalised on the cultural cachet attached to signs of authenticity, locating themselves and their artistic practices in the local, and the recognisable as “Aboriginal” artists, others have pursued alternative strategies, resisting categorisation and exploring open-ended practices of visual inquiry. I am thinking here of the “new generation” of Aboriginal artists, engaged in practices that purposefully “speak across racial and social divides” and speak of “wider cultural concerns.”29 While the artists of the remote desert centres Butler makes reference to might well fit into this new category, I am interested specifically in the urban-based artists that McLean identifies, whose long

25 McLean, Rattling spears, 247-248. 26 Howard Morphy, Becoming art (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008). 27 See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home: indigenous belonging and place in a postcolonizing society,” in White possessive: property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty, Aileen Moreton- Robinson, 3-18 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Also, Glen Sean Coulthard, Red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 28 McLean cites the cosmopolitanism articulated by cultural theorists such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Nikos Papastergiadis. 29 Marianne Riphagen, “Contested categories: Brook Andrew, Christian Thompson and the framing of contemporary Australian art,” Australian Humanities Review no. 55 (November 2013): 111.

112

history of cross-cultural encounter and engagement with colonisation has manifested counter currents of “essentialism” and “postcolonial cosmopolitanism.”30 McLean argues that, while the art of the 1980s and 1990s was defined by its “political edge,” with its often direct assault on the national/colonial institutions that underpin the contemporary Australian political economy, it was this underlying tension between urban Aboriginal cultural essentialism and an international cosmopolitanism that fuelled its ongoing development and reach, while being continually unpredictable and shape-shifting.31

Cosmopolitanism refers to a belief or attitude of the “cosmopolitan” person – the “citizen of the world” – that people, regardless of political, religious or ethnic affiliations, can be citizens of a single human society. “Cosmopolitanism” has been theorised across many disciplines and many cultures, and, in Western moral and political philosophy, can be traced in its earliest texts. The Greek philosopher Socrates spoke of it and the Greek Stoics were the first to set out a cosmopolitan moral and aesthetic code.32 The European Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant is credited with envisioning cosmopolitanism as a universal legalistic framework of state rights and responsibilities, as a means to advance the moral nature of humanity. For Kant, cosmopolitanism was not a virtue to be pursued for its own qualities, as it has come to be increasingly considered, but a moral process that could control the “more destructive drives” of human nature.33 This was clearly not the case in Europe’s colonial endeavours, in which Kant’s universalism was articulated to mean a hierarchical human order, whereby the “civilised men” of the West realised their “God- given” mission to civilise the colonial Other while employing all of the destructive capacity available to them.34

In recent debates on the cultural consequences of globalisation, the concept of cosmopolitanism has re-emerged as a potential means for understanding transnational

30 McLean, Rattling spears, 210. 31 McLean, Rattling spears, 211. 32 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and culture, 142. 33 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and culture, 139-140. 34 Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Glimpses of cosmopolitanism in the hospitality of art,” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (February 2007): 141-142.

113

movements, transcultural interrelationships, and difference faced through broad-scale cultural assimilation, homogenisation and ethnocentrism. In this context, cosmopolitanism includes both a way of being in the world that entails a Universalist aspiration for moral connectedness, and a social order that extends political rights beyond ethnic and national boundaries.35 African American philosopher Anthony Appiah argues that this form of cosmopolitanism is a necessary response to the emerging challenges to the modern nation- state framework, which is being impacted by global events that no state alone can address. These threats include the increased movement of people, the formation of transnational political and legal structures, and the emergence of global-scale risks, such as climate change.36

A significant concern for its critics is that cosmopolitanism is nevertheless still associated with an elite mobile class that enjoys the profits of global capitalism. During the Enlightenment, the qualities of “worldliness” and mobility were associated with the socially and economically elite classes of Europe, whose capacity to travel and to invest an interest in other places and other cultures was a direct consequence of their access to wealth, education, and leisure time. While this “class” can now be considered transcultural, including Asian, Arab, African as well as Western elites, cosmopolitanism today, according to Australian philosopher Nikos Papastergiadis, is more readily associated with the other end of the economic and education spectrum: the “multitude;” those “who travel; the jagged roads of exile, or the ones who must confront the turbulence of globalisation without leaving their homes.”37 In this sense, there is no escape from it, and the Indigenous and the marginalised across the globe are bound within degrees of “cosmopolitanism,” whether they realise it or not.

Cosmopolitanism is an argument for the recognition of the essential humanity we all share – not so much despite our differences but by virtue of our differences. It is

35 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and culture, 226. 36 Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2007) 11. Epub. 37 Papastergiadis, “Glimpses of cosmopolitanism,”143.

114

through the act of looking through the eyes of the Other, through a flourishing Otherness, that we are able to see the nature of humanity.38

Critics argue that this kind of use of cosmopolitanism, as the basis for a universal ethic, is mere rhetoric that actually masks the exploitative logic, inequality and divisive reality of global capitalism.39 In addition, they consider that the universalism that underpins it is exclusivist, and a camouflage behind which particular ethnocentric interests are presented, as if they are the universal interest of humanity.40

Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues that, while cosmopolitanism comes with inherent flaws, with some reconceptualisation, it may have potential utility in working through contemporary global concerns. Braidotti argues that when we consider the “multiple, complex and contradictory” notions of global interrelations today, cosmopolitanism is relevant. However, this relevance is dependent on a radical reorientation, “starting with a shift of perspective by abandoning its historical and conceptual attachment to the idea of liberal individualism as a unitary vision of the subject.”41 In this regard, an effective cosmopolitanism must instead embrace diversity, including the many beliefs, and pan- human perspectives that exist today. Braidotti calls for an “ethics of accountability,” with “life” as its main referent, eschewing both biological essentialism and unreflexive anthropocentrism, and taking account of the atrocities and structural injustices experienced historically around the world.42

Within this framework, cosmopolitanism must develop an increased respect for social and cultural complexity, where the “roots of Indigenous people” are included as much as the “routes of the postcolonial migrant.”43 The universalism of the past, which attempted to cast everyone and everything within a singular Western ideological frame, is to be rejected, and instead, “difference” is to be celebrated as an expression not simply of who we are, but of

38 Robert Fine and Vivienne Boon, “Cosmopolitanism: between past and future,” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (February 2007): 6. 39 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism, 145. 40 Fine and Boon, “Cosmopolitanism,” 8. 41 Rosi Braidotti, “‘Becoming-world’,” in After cosmopolitanism, eds. Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard (New York: Routledge, 2012) 29. Epub. 42 Braidotti, “‘Becoming-world’,” 29. 43 Braidotti, “‘Becoming-world’,” 30-31.

115

what we are capable of becoming. Cosmopolitanism in this context entails an ontological philosophical practice predicated on doing away with binary differences and the dualisms that strictly demarcate culture and environment, and mind and body.44 This is an aspiration towards an ethics of engagement in which different ways of being (human and non-human) are recognised and respected, and new entities can come into being out of injury and pain, of their colonial experiences.45

Aboriginality and Cosmopolitanism

Marcia Langton cautioned decades ago against the impulse to assert that there is a “right” way to be Aboriginal, and the belief that there can be “true” representations of Aboriginality.46 Recently Langton responded to criticisms of Brook Andrew’s international art practice and his rejection of ethnic or cultural labels for his work. In particular she suggested that there was a “messy,” “racial stereotyping and over-determined “native” politics” at play, observing that cosmopolitanism in contemporary Aboriginal art was being denied.47 Andrew is not the first artist to reject the category of Aboriginal art in relation to his personal practice, and, like Moffatt, his practice has nevertheless continued to prioritise concerns with indigeneity, (post)coloniality; instead, his practice has expanded to address the conditions of marginalised peoples more broadly.

Langton’s observation of the denial of cosmopolitanism in relation to Aboriginal art – evidenced by the noticeable absence of “Aboriginality” coupled with “cosmopolitanism” within much contemporary art discourse, suggests that cosmopolitanism in this context may be regarded as a problematic concept.

As discussed in Chapters One and Two, the creative concerns of many urban Aboriginal artists since the 1990s have not been bound to the same cultural locations or identity

44 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New materialism: interviews & cartographies. New Metaphysics. (Open Humanities Press, 2012), 115. 45 Braidotti, “‘Becoming-world’,” 41. 46 Kate MacNeill, “Undoing the colonial gaze: ambiguity in the art of Brook Andrew,” Australian And New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no. 1 (1 January 2006): 182. 47 Marcia Langton, “Text/life/meaning,” in Brook Andrew: the right to offend is sacred, eds. Judith Ryan, Brook Andrew, Nick Aikens, Anthony Gardner, Marcia Langton, Simon Maidment (Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017), 59-70.

116

politics as those of earlier generations of Aboriginal identifying artists, whose identities, forged within the domestic political foment of the 1960s through to the late 1980s, were central to their self-representation as artists. On the one hand, the rejection of the category of Aboriginal artist in this new generation might be regarded as a positive sign of the hard- won successes of Aboriginal people participating in the arts. This represents the efforts and investments of governments and Aboriginal communities since the 1970s and 1980s, where skills development and opportunity have coincided to enable such emerging artists to rise above the hardship and historical constraints of cultural dispossession. On the other hand, especially where descriptors such as “international” or “cosmopolitan” have been employed, it may be regarded as a sign of the potential success of the colonial enterprise. Where Aboriginal people, acquiescent to the contemporary Western-dominated art world, are seen to have potentially abandoned or altogether lost their cultural identities, their connections to place, and any allegiance to the “unfinished” business of Australian colonial history.

It is largely appreciated today that prior to colonisation there were no “Aboriginal people” as such, but rather hundreds of sovereign clans that had names for themselves, and their Others. As Langton and McLean allude to above, there was no collective Aboriginal or Indigenous identity, but certainly many varied and fluid alliances. In many respects the relationships that were historically maintained across language boundaries and between cultural identities, the practices of resolving difference by meaningful incorporation of all known things within culturally situated kinship systems and cosmological frameworks, could be considered cosmopolitan. As such, this was a capacity for a “cosmopolitanism,” which was profoundly and devastatingly curtailed, throughout the course of colonisation.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Aboriginal people across the country have re-engaged beyond strict geographic and cultural boundaries. Since the 1970s, they have become increasingly involved in global cultural and political networks. In this context, Aboriginal Australians have more strategically, become “Indigenous” or “First Nations” Australians. Besides attending to ongoing local concerns and unresolved colonial-nation-state relations,

117

they are connecting with other Indigenous nations, through transnational cultural, political and economic dynamics.

While colonisation dramatically affected the connectedness of Aboriginal people with regard to kinship relations and connections to Country, people have generated new experiences and aspirations through the experiences of travelling – physically, virtually, nationally and internationally. In many respects, the narrower conceptions of Aboriginality have been challenged, where authenticity tied to immutable connections to specific places and traditions has become less meaningful.48 The participation of Indigenous people in the global flows of travelling, circulating ideologies, material culture and aesthetic expression facilitates more nuanced perspectives on cultural identity and self-representation, where both are capable of and prone to transformations.49 As famously argued by Langton, Aboriginality is “a field of inter-subjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create “Aboriginalities” …”50

This view of Aboriginality was proffered at a time when both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians were becoming more actively engaged in the representation of Aboriginal people and culture in film and visual media, and was an attempt to establish protocols for countering the colonial history of racist and derogatory representations, that have long been in circulation; in most instances representations up until the latter half of the twentieth century, had been based on little more than the myths that non-Aboriginal people had constructed and circulated amongst themselves.

Since colonisation, Aboriginal people have been defined as much by their relations with the state as by any intrinsic “racial” or cultural characteristics. They have been marked as much by terra nullius and the history of dispossession, the impact of colonial-settler society, and

48 Robin Maria Delugan, “Indigeneity across borders: hemispheric migrations and cosmopolitan encounters,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (Feb, 2010): 83. 49 Delugan, “Indigeneity across borders,” 83-84. 50 Marcia Langton, “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television …,” (North Sydney, NSW: Australian Film Commission, 1993), 33-34.

118

the failed colonial projects of “protection” and of “assimilation.”51 However, in the growing diversity of populations and their mobilisation through global interconnections, “Indigenousness,” and the term “Indigeneity,” have also come to be increasingly associated with assertions of “belonging” and “originariness;” powerful essences which, in colonial- settler states, distinguish Indigenous people from what they are not: the non-Indigenous.52 This ontological differentiation is then premised on an incommensurability that seems more and more difficult to bridge.

The meaning of Indigeneity became globalised in the aftermath of the World Wars, culminating in the creation of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous People (UNWGIP) in 1982.53 When the International Labour Organisation took up the concerns of Indigenous workers on remote pastoral properties in the Northern Territory in the 1950s, it had enormous consequences for Aboriginal recognition and rights in Australia. However, the initial intervention was not associated with cultural identity or Indigeneity as such, but was assimilationist in intent.54 Compared with the equal rights activism of the earlier twentieth century, the 1960s saw a shift in the moral weighting of the difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.55 The entry of the Commonwealth into Aboriginal affairs following the 1967 Australian Constitutional Referendum precipitated the dismantling of assimilation and the infrastructure in place to enable it. It flagged the return of people to homelands, as well as to metropolitan centres, and the steady shift towards recognising Indigenous rights as accruing to Indigenous people within the nation-state.

Urban-based Aboriginal people adopted African American civil rights political strategies and became centrally involved in establishing new community infrastructure, including legal and medical services. With the creation of new governmental Aboriginal affairs administrations, Aboriginal people became increasingly represented across state and federal government bureaucracies. Meanwhile, an idealised, pre-colonial tradition came to be increasingly

51 Francesca Merlan, “Indigeneity: global and local,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 3 (2009): 305. 52 Merlan, “Indigeneity,” 304. 53 Merlan, “Indigeneity,” 307. 54 Merlan, “Indigeneity,” 307. 55 Merlan, “Indigeneity,” 309.

119

articulated, drawing initially on the model of remote-area Aboriginal people. Cultural activists combined powerful discourses of injustice and the recuperation of rights and equality with that of the new Aboriginality, the dignifying and idealising of a previously stigmatised identity.56

The “counter currents” of essentialism and cosmopolitanism that McLean identifies in contemporary urban Aboriginal art practice can be seen to underpin large parts of Aboriginal society more broadly. In addition, as alluded to above, it does not seem to be too big a stretch to suggest that Aboriginal peoples have always been “cosmopolitan.” However, cosmopolitanism, associated as it has been with Western thought, and with its more worldly orientation, can be perceived as a threat to the unique qualities that an idealised cultural essentialism might provide many Aboriginal people and their moral claims against the settler-state. Contemporary ideologies of Indigeneity accept that the political claims of territorial sovereignty, aspirations to self-governance, and demands on the state for recognition of distinct cultural orientations, can be maintained despite the conditions and experiences of Aboriginality being varied, nuanced, and historical; as well as contested and continually in flux.57

Asserting Indigenous Voices

Martin Nakata observes that the way many Indigenous people understand and define themselves today, with regard to difference to others, and the descriptions and characteristics of this difference, have been firmly developed within Western knowledge.58 In addition, while many Indigenous people have maintained continuity with traditional knowledge, Nakata argues, it needs to be recognised that much of the content of these traditions has been transformed, and continues to be transformed in their interactions with Western knowledge institutions, technologies and practices.59 Nakata states:

56 Merlan, “Indigeneity,” 312-313. 57 Delugan, “Indigeneity across borders,” 84. 58 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 197. 59 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 197-198.

120

We exist, live and are positioned in a particular relation to other knowledge, interests and people as we pursue the dual goals of equality with other Australians while maintaining and preserving cultural distinctiveness.60

Nakata’s idea of the “cultural interface” acknowledges the inherent complexity of relationships between Indigenous people, non-Indigenous people, and the world around them. Rather than the cross-cultural context simply representing an intersection of two cultures, Nakata conceives it as constituting many points of intersecting cultural trajectories, where different knowledge systems and different systems of social, economic and political organisation encounter one another.61 I consider this position as resonant with a contemporary cosmopolitan desire for a “transversally new intellectual orientation,” which aims to cut across and through old ways of conceptualising the “who” we are, towards a shared future of celebrated difference.62

Goenpul cultural theorist Aileen Morten-Robinson, however, argues against much contemporary Western theory, in which she suggests that the concepts of hybridity and diaspora have been simply refashioned to underpin new theories of “migrancy,” displacement, replacement and new ways of belonging. Asserting that, despite the profound transformations wrought upon Aboriginal lives and subjectivities, Aboriginal people are nevertheless constituted by a unique pre-colonial ontology of belonging, where such an ontology cannot be undermined in the face of the new cultural politics of belonging narrated via “the latest” intellectual framework.63 For Morton-Robinson, contemporary Aboriginal people, wherever they might find themselves, maintain a unique relation to place, establishing the ongoing cultural and political sovereignty of all Aboriginal people. This is despite the diverse positionalities, multiplicities and specificities of their lives.64 While recognising that Aboriginal people have been incorporated into (“and seduced by”) the cultural forms of the West, Morton-Robinson suggests that this has produced a form of mimesis – “a doubleness whereby Indigenous subjects can “perform” whiteness while being

60 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 198. 61 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 198-199 62 Braidotti, “‘Becoming-world’.” 63 Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home”. 64 Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home,” 8.

121

Indigenous.”65 Calling for a politics of difference, whereby essentialism and ontology have a place without being understood as fixed, but rather as a process, Moreton-Robinson nevertheless asserts that Aboriginal ontological relation to land is radically incommensurable and cannot be shared with the postcolonial migrant subject.66

We are not migrants in the sense that we have moved from one nation-state to another, but the politics of removal transferred different Indigenous peoples from their specific country to another’s. This dislocation in effect means that Indigenous people can be out of place in another’s country, but through cultural protocols and the commonality of our ontological relationship to country we can be in place but away from our home country … Indigenous subjectivity represents a dialectical unity between humans and the earth consisting of subject positions whose integration requires a degree of mimetic performativity.67

Morton-Robinson’s shape-shifting ontological standpoint clearly reflects the profound suspicion that many Indigenous people have developed with regard to Western institutional assertions of “postmodern” and even “postcolonial” theories, which have never sufficiently addressed the unsettled conditions of Indigenous people, culture and sovereignties within colonial-settler states. However, I feel that implicit within her account of contemporary Aboriginal ontology is an inherent contemporary cosmopolitanism, one which recognises the cultural integrity of Aboriginal people wherever they may reside, and however they might manifest their “mimetic” imperative. The challenge within Moreton-Robinson’s stance is how to establish trust in the possibility of open-ended dialogue, and a relationality grounded in respect and accountability.

An Indigenous suspicion of the promises of cosmopolitanism is reflected in the position of Canadian First Nations scholar Glen Coulthard, who argues against “the politics of recognition” in colonial-settler states like Canada and Australia. Coulthard draws on the insight of Frantz Fanon to argue that Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment towards the colonial-settler state can generate forms of decolonised subjectivity and anti-colonial practice, “that we ought to critically affirm rather than denigrate in our premature efforts to

65 Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home,” 8. 66 Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home,” 11. 67 Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home,” 13-14.

122

promote forgiveness and reconciliation on terms still largely dictated by the colonial state.”68

Coulthard argues that in strategically holding on to anger and resentment, Aboriginal people can maintain an important emotional reminder that settler-colonialism is still very much alive and well, despite the state’s repeated assertions otherwise.69 While acknowledging Fanon’s scepticism that an Indigenous subjectivity constructed out of anger and resentment should inform efforts towards decolonisation, Coulthard’s motivation is to problematise what he regards as the commonplace assumption that colonial relationships can be reconciled via state-sanctioned programs. He maintains that, at the end of the day, while this Western system of governance might be accommodating Indigenous peoples’ sovereign claims over land, economic development and self-government, it is still colonial, in that, it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.70 For Coulthard, anger and resentment are a necessary precursor to “the affirmation and resurgence of Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices.” Following this, “the substantive foundation required to reconstruct relationships of reciprocity and peaceful co-existence” might then be able to be pursued. Ultimately, Coulthard’s critical standpoint appears to represent a position, which is not a denial of the possibility of transcultural engagement. “Relationships of reciprocity and peaceful co-existence” suggests the capacity for mutual understanding and appreciation, implicit in a contemporary cosmopolitanism framework.

Considering the collective Indigenous voices addressed above, I find that Nakata offers what I read as the most “hospitable” position in terms of a present openness to navigating a worldliness, confident in the capacity to maintain an engaged and self-determined ontological awareness. I do not think of incommensurability as necessarily exclusionary, however, I do read these texts with an eye to how the might potentially include or exclude me, or the degrees to which I might feel as such. Objectively, I regard Moreton-Robinson

68 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 128. 69 Coulthard, Red skin, 128. 70 Coulthard, Red skin, 151.

123

and Nakata as not oppositional, but as wise people drawing from their own histories, social and cultural experiences, and informed by their unique experiences of the world. Ultimately, I feel better informed and more engaged by them.

Yet, Nakata’s argument for a critical Indigenous intellectual framework that might be more broadly productive for understanding how Indigenous people have been constituted within the world, provides an intellectual opening in which I feel I might more comfortably dwell. This configuration acknowledges contemporary Indigenous knowledge and interests, as well as the complex sets of social and discursive relations that position us as people, while accepting the possibilities for cultural change that may emerge from such increased understanding.71 This, according to Nakata, requires a different set of assumptions about Indigenous people in theory and in practice, and in particular a rethinking of the space in which Indigenous people interact with others. He calls for a deeper consideration of the ways in which the particularities of contemporary Indigenous knowledge and experiences are constituted in that space.72 He defines this space as one of:

... shifting and complex intersections between different people with different histories, experiences, language, agendas, aspirations and responses. As much as it is currently overlaid by various theories, narratives and arguments that work to produce cohesive, consensual and co-operative social practices, it is also a space that abounds with contradictions, ambiguities, conflict and contestation of meanings that emerge from these various shifting intersections.73

Assumptions underpinning such a theoretical framework need to take more account of Indigenous experience of the terrain. They should include beliefs, desires and aspirations, from which more meaningful and more accurate knowledge and understandings might be generated. Nakata argues that this framework should aim to expand the assumptions underpinning theory, based on a re-reading of how Indigenous people have been inscribed in Western systems of thought, and to draw into new theory, principles that give primacy to the Indigenous life worlds and life experiences.74 In this framework, while privileging

71 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 196. 72 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 196. 73 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 198-199. 74 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 197.

124

Indigenous life experiences as opposed to the theories through which they have been historically inscribed, new Indigeneities might have the opportunity to come into being, out of the injury and pain of intergenerational colonial trauma.

Revisiting My Practice

I recognise my identity as multifaceted and constantly in flux, where my Aboriginality had long been a dominant defining quality but has been shaped by the negativity of stereotypes and discrimination throughout my life. Awareness of our colonial history and the traumatic experiences of generations of Aboriginal communities has contributed to a sense of abjection, which I have long struggled with. My interest in belonging was motivated by a perpetual sense of not belonging in the places that I have found myself. While interested in art in aid of community cultural growth and healing, my work has always been driven by a personal yearning to reconcile my own ambivalent association with cultural essence and the desire to belong somewhere.

Having read widely and critically, I am encouraged by the great deal of complementarity I see between the various critical Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives. Sceptical of what I have perceived as Western theoretical fashions, I have become much more open to the serious intellectual and cultural work that is being produced in the field of Indigenous ontologies and cosmopolitanism. I am impressed by what I read as the generosity of theorists like Langton, Nakata, Braidotti and Papastergiadis, but I am also inspired by the critical determination of Morton-Robinson and Coulthard. My sense (hope) is that contemporary Indigenous cultural and political concerns can be engaged with collaboratively, and on an equal footing, in the urgent academic, artistic and activist forums, contending with the urgent questions of our time.

I was initially motivated to better understand the self-identification and cultural location of Aboriginal people in the southeast, and I envisioned my studio research as contributing to an increasing awareness of Aboriginality and its complexities, through my own social and cultural location. I wanted to understand more deeply the cultural concerns of urban

125

Aboriginal communities and artists, and how people grappled with concepts of identity and belonging, particularly in the context of cultural and physical displacements, of being “urban” within an overwhelmingly non-Aboriginal cultural domain.

My research shifted dramatically mid-course, from looking outwards to my contemporary environment and the Aboriginal communities around me, including their local histories, cultures, and art practices, to the interiority of the colonial archive and its relationship to my own Aboriginality. This was motivated by a sudden sense of uncertainty with the community context in which I had set out to engage. I came to feel that, despite my interests being driven by a personal commitment to the cultural space in which I resided, it was not my place to undertake the kind of research I was proposing. Turning to the archive was both a turn to my own Aboriginality within the history of the colonial-settler state, and a turn to an important field of critical cultural engagement through artistic practice.

The issue of authority to speak on items held in ethnographic collections is still highly contested. Archival “research” of the sort that I have been pursuing exists within a system of power, and what this means for artists in this domain is that we cannot underestimate that power. At this point in time there do not appear to be any neutral spaces for this kind of engagement, the ultimate objective being that the archive remains connected intimately to Aboriginal people as a way of thinking, knowing and being.

This review of contemporary theories of Indigenous ontologies and cosmopolitanisms has inspired me and given me hope that, through both local and global cultural and intellectual connectivity, bridges can be built whereby Indigenous people can not only be heard, respected and accepted on an equal footing, but can also be valued for the knowledge and insights that they can bring to addressing the significant concerns of our age. While artists and activists still have much to do with regard to “speaking up to power,” the cultural and political promises of these contemporary theoretical positions, suggest that space may become increasingly available for communities to engage in cultural production towards becoming whole. Here I am thinking of the forms of cultural production that are driven by

126

community priorities and concerns, whatever these might be, unfettered by the trauma of colonisation, and the disabling complexities of “authenticity” as a concept inherently entangled with colonialism.

127

Conclusion

While we generally accept the category of “urban Aboriginal art” as a thing, it is a concept that came into usage in the mid-1980s with the emergence of a metropolitan Aboriginal art scene in Sydney, initially identified as “Koori Art.” The term “Koori” was adopted as a political moniker through the later twentieth century as it became associated with Aboriginal activism and an urban Aboriginality in the southeast. However, it was an appropriation of the self-identifying term used historically by southeast Aboriginal people. As not all urban-based Aboriginal people were Koori by descent, “urban” became the catch- all adjective for city-based Aboriginal people expressing a political identity. Emerging in concert with the activism of the 1970s and 1980s, younger urban Aboriginal artists were inspired by international political and civil rights movements, as well as the traditional cultural and land rights movements of remote Aboriginal communities. Very conscious of the seemingly spontaneous flourishing of Western Desert art from the 1970s on, young city- based artists came together to explore positive connections amongst themselves, as well as with remote community artists, connecting art, politics and identity with a broader pan- Aboriginal sense of affiliation.

The urban Aboriginal art scene expanded dramatically over the subsequent decades, with artists coming through art schools in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. These artists developing more diverse artistic approaches, drawing on international art developments, while maintaining active and activist connections to their cultural communities. More recently, these diverse influences of the local and global with the cultural and political have been described as “crosscurrents” of essentialism and cosmopolitanism. Underpinning their respective practices is a more acute awareness of, and deep anger at colonial injustices; compelling artists to seek out explore and re-engage with the colonial past.1

Since the late twentieth century, many artists have been drawn to historical material relating to colonisation, and the treatment and representation of Aboriginal people. This archive

1 Ian McLean, Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 210-211.

128

exists across national and international institutions such as libraries, museums and galleries, and represents the West’s imperial practices of cultural domination through colonisation. The archive represents the colonial “storehouse” in which Indigenous people, and their tangible and intangible cultural material became collected, categorised, interpreted and displayed; by the West and for the West. The museum, as the archetype of Western science and rationality, facilitated the expansion of empire and the sustainability of colonisation through its capacity to “map,” and make comprehensible, the otherwise unknowable world. Aboriginal artists have since been accessing the contents of the archive to unpack and reveal its colonial origins, to “liberate,” “reinvigorate” and repatriate the collections of Aboriginal human remains, social and cultural records, and objects such as art and artefacts.

This has not been a simple or straightforward endeavour, as the archive, with its origins in imperial domination and its role in supporting the dispossession and near eradication of Aboriginal people, implicitly represents that colonial past in the present. In this regard, the archive is deeply bound to the psychological trauma that Aboriginal communities have endured inter-generationally since colonisation. While new museological practices have evolved over the turn of the twenty-first century, with museums and galleries becoming self- critiquing of their own histories, methodologies and ideologies, there is still no escaping their implicitly Western epistemological orientation.

Two recent landmark national exhibitions, Encounters at the National Museum of Australia and Defying Empire: 3rd Indigenous Art Triennial at the Australian National Gallery, demonstrate the currency of Aboriginal concerns with the still very unsettled business of colonisation, and its ongoing legacy for contemporary Aboriginal communities. While both exhibitions involved Indigenous art and cultural heritage from across the country, the relationship between colonisation and southeast Aboriginal communities was significant to both. In terms of impact, the southeast represents something of a “ground zero” as it was here that the first significant colonial encounters took place, and it was from here that

129

Aboriginal defiance of empire had immediate and enduring expression.2 Southeast Aboriginal artists who participated in these exhibitions, such as Julie Gough, Jonathan Jones, and Karla Dickens, each deeply attuned to the concerns of their communities, contributed works that spoke to the trauma of colonisation, the mourning of cultural loss, the determination to maintain community cultural identity and reclaim heritage from institutional control. Their works speak first and foremost to Aboriginal audiences, as witnesses to the trauma of colonisation, narrating the struggles of Aboriginal communities in the present, and imagining futures of embodied cultural being as opposed to performative resistance.

These engagements with “the past” did not simply reflect artistic trends or creative fashions developed internationally; they represented a sense of urgency in revealing and unpacking the still hidden histories of Aboriginal people while addressing the seemingly inexplicable nature of contemporary Aboriginal pain and trauma. It has been a project of the utmost importance for many Indigenous communities, but especially in the southeast, where the past, present and future cannot easily separate out. In the context of colonial-settler society and the catastrophe that colonisation represents for Aboriginal peoples in Australia, the past is far from reconciled. To move forward, there is an ongoing need to look backwards and to address the unsettled business of colonisation, to expose and unravel its practices of control and domination, and to allow contemporary populations to mourn their loss in order to more fully heal.

The lives of Aboriginal people continue to be commonly conceived of as existing at the intersection of two different worlds: “Aboriginal” and “non-Aboriginal.” This binary is in itself an artefact of Western thinking, as is the binary of “authenticity” and “inauthenticity.” It represents a simplistic configuration in which two different cultures collide, and where the “powerful” West dominates its “weaker and subordinate” Other.3 While it is undeniable that colonisation has indeed wreaked havoc on Aboriginal society (physically, culturally, and

2 The term “ground zero” is mostly associated with the point of impact of a nuclear bomb. It also refers to the starting point at which new activities begin. 3 Martin N Nakata, Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines (Canberra, A.C.T.: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 198.

130

psychically), the issue is that this way of thinking denies Aboriginal people different ways of conceptualising themselves (their ontologies), and different ways of knowing the world (their epistemologies).

Contemporary Indigenous cultural theorists, such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Martin Nakata, have been attempting to develop new intellectual frameworks for thinking through history, the present, and ways of imagining the future, in which Indigenous ways of being and knowing are prioritised. Moreton-Robinson has argued for ways of reformulating postcolonial theory to make it relevant to Aboriginal society, calling for a politics of difference, while recognising the fluidity of Aboriginal ontologies.4 Nakata calls for a more productive theoretical framework for conceiving Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, which take into account the inherent entanglement of contemporary Indigenous and Western knowledges.5 Contemporary urban-based Aboriginal artists are actively engaged in practices which positively manifest the critical ambitions of such theorists, establishing dialogues with their Aboriginal and non-Indigenous audiences in ways that privilege Indigenous ways of being and knowing, all the while cognisant of the cultural entanglements of our time. Their aims being to facilitate cultural growth and healing, while broadening the scope of possibilities for contemporary Aboriginal communities to engage in meaningful cultural production.

In thinking about the practices of contemporary urban Aboriginal artists and their crosscurrents of essentialism and cosmopolitanism, and then considering how we understand traditional Aboriginal processes of cultural engagement and exchange, the proposition arises that, in the broadest sense of that concept, Aboriginal people have always been “cosmopolitan.” New discourses of cosmopolitanism have emerged as a means of understanding transnational movements, transcultural interrelationships, and ontological difference across the globe. Theorists such as Rosi Braidotti argue that, for cosmopolitanism to be relevant to our times, it needs to abandon ideas of liberal individualism and the

4 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a postcolonizing society,” in White possessive: property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 13-14. 5 Nakata, Disciplining the savages, 196.

131

universal subject, while respecting social and cultural complexity. Braidotti asserts that “difference” is to be celebrated as an expression not simply of who we are, but of what we are capable of becoming.6

I now see my art practice more clearly as an expression of my own complex and layered identity, not simply the who I am, but the more ambivalent person constantly in a process of becoming. It was through my early engagement in community arts that I came to art as a means of exploring and representing a sense of becoming in community, of becoming aware of the multiple influences in my life that inform the scope and quality of my self- identification. It was through art making that I was able to narrate my stories to a diverse community of family, friends, colleagues and collaborators, all effectively witnesses to my being. While my initial research intention was to extend this practice to my current geographical and cultural community, the turn to the archive was sudden and unexpected; however, it has been very productive materially and conceptually. After finding myself drawn to replicating archival objects in polystyrene, I struggled to make sense of the significance of this compulsion. It felt problematic on a number of levels. Materially, it has not been pleasant to work with and has been both physically irritating and unpleasurable. Conceptually, it has been confounding, thinking through the many ways of reading the materiality of the objects with what they essentially signify. Concepts of contested essentialism and a cosmopolitan universalism resonate strongly, and these “concerns” or “doubts” have certainly been present in both my research and my studio deliberations. Ideas of “toxicity,” culturally and materially are equally relevant. However, throughout the process of labouring of each object, enduring the moment of discomfort and worrying about what it meant, I have felt a sense of deep fondness, like a parental fawning over a newborn child. This fondness, I later began to realise, was permeated by an almost ungraspable sense of loss and longing. This realisation caused me to feel shame, embarrassment – to see my work as a folly at best, and a failure at worst.

6 Rosi Braidotti, “’Becoming-world’,” in After cosmopolitanism, eds. Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard (New York: Routledge, 2012) 29. Epub.

132

Bibliography

Alexander, Isabella. “Explainer: our copyright laws and the Australian Aboriginal flag.” The Conversation (June 13, 2019). http://theconversation.com/explainer-our-copyright- laws-and-the-australian-aboriginal-flag-118687.

Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen and Jason L. Mast. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Altman, Rebecca. “American petro-topia.” Utne Reader: The Best of the Alternative Press, no. 193 (Winter): 55-61. Accessed 10 July 2019, https://www.utne.com/environment/american-petro-topia-zm0z16wzsel.

Andrew, Brook. Sexy & Dangerous 1996. Computer-generated colour transparency on transparent synthetic polymer resin, National Gallery of Victoria. Accessed 5 July 2019, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/77516/.

Ansher, Nilofar Shanin. “Understanding museums and art galleries.” Arts Management Internship, Chennai, India: Madras Craft Foundation and DakshinaChitra, 2007-08.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers. UK: Penguin Books 2007. Epub.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 617-639.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Identity, authenticity and survival: multicultural societies and social reproduction.” In Multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 149-163. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Araeen, Rasheed. “The Art of benevolent racism.” Third Text no. 51 (Summer 2000): 57-64.

Arthur, Jay and Lily Withycombe. “Talking about objects and ancestors in the first person.” In Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, edited by Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin, 36-38. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015.

Attwood, Bain. Rights for Aborigines. Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 2003.

Australia Council for the Arts. Building audiences: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts. Australian Government. August 2015. Accessed 4 July 2019.

133

https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/building-audiences- australia-c-55d50950f340d.pdf.

“Aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Accessed7 November 2019. https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted

Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and Cooper, Carol. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections in overseas museums. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989.

“Australia’s un-doing.” Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 2005. Accessed 22 November 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/national/australias-un-doing-20050315- gdkxf3.html.

Bader, Veit. “Culture and identity: contesting constructivism.” Ethnicities 1, no. 2 (2001): 251-285. barrangal dyara (skin and bones). 17 September – 3 October 2016. Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney. Accessed 14 November 2019. https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/planting- dreams-audio-guides/jonathan-jones-richardsons-garden-palace.

Barrett, Jennifer and Jacqueline Millner. Australian artists in the contemporary museum. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014.

Baum, Tina. “Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial.” Artonview, no. 90 (Winter 2017): 22–31. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://search-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=vth&AN=126274884&site=eds- live.

“Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal art – it’s a white thing.” Kooriweb.org. Accessed 15 January 2018. http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html/.

Benjamin, Walter and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations/Walter Benjamin. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, n.p. London: Collins; Fontana Books, 1973.

Bennett, Gordon. Outsider. 1988. Painting. National Gallery of Victoria. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/gordonbennett/education/03.html.

Bennett, Gordon. Self portrait (But I always wanted to be one of the good guys). 1990. Painting. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/gordonbennett/education/02.html/.

134

Bennett, Jill. Empathic vision: affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Bennett, Tony. “Re-collecting ourselves: Indigenous time, culture, community and the museum.” In Museums, power, knowledge: selected essays. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

Bensaude Vincent, Bernadette. “Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization.” In Accumulation: the material politics of plastic, edited by Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael, 17-29. Oxon: Routledge, 2013.

Boast, Robin. 2011. “Neocolonial collaboration: museum as contact zone revisited.” Museum Anthropology 1, 1 (2011): 56–70.

Bolt, Barbara. “Introduction.” In Carnal knowledge: towards a “New Materialism” through the arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 1-13. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Bolton, Lissant. “Moving objects: Indigenous Australia in the British Museum.” in Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, edited by Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin, 28-31. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015.

Braidotti, Rosi, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard. After cosmopolitanism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Epub.

Braidotti, Rosi.“ ‘Becoming-world’.” In After cosmopolitanism, edited by Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin and Bolette Blaagaard. New York: Routledge, 2012. Epub.

“Brook Andrew Appointed Artistic Director of 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020)” Biennale of Sydney. Accessed 10 December 2019. https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/media/media-releases/brook-andrew-appointed- artistic-director-of-22nd-biennale-of-sydney/

“Brook Andrew, space & time.” Roslyn Oxley9. Accessed 8 July 2019. https://www.artsy.net/show/roslyn-oxley9-gallery-brook-andrew-space-and-time.

Burke, John Francis. “Reconciling cultural diversity with a democratic community: Mestizaje as opposed to the usual suspects.” Citizenship Studies 3, no. 1 (February 1999): 119- 140.

Burns Coleman, Elizabeth. “Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art revolution.” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 1 (December 2009): 1-22. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_139154_en.pdf.

135

Butler, Rex. “A short introduction to unAustralian art.” Broadsheet 32, no. 4 (2003): 17. Accessed 1 July 2019. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:131214.

Carlson, Bronwyn. The politics of identity: who counts as Aboriginal today? Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016.

Cellauro, Louis. “Venice and the origins of the art-historical tradition of display of the modern museum.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 81, no. 2 (June 2012): 94-122.

Cita, Carmen. “We hereby make protest.” City Hub. 22 June 2014. Accessed 22 November 2019. http://cityhubsydney.com.au/2014/06/we-hereby-make-protest/94792/.

Coates, Ian. “Introduction.” In Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, edited by Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin, 16-21. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015.

Cole, Kelli. “About the exhibition.” Unsettled: stories within. National Museums of Australia, 2015. Accessed 4 July 2019. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/about_the_exhibition.

Cooper, Carol, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al. Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981.

Cooper, Carol. “Art of temperate southeast Australia.” In Aboriginal Australia, edited by Carol Cooper, Australian Gallery Directors Council, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Museum, Queensland Art Gallery et al. Sydney: Australian Gallery Directors Council, 1981.

Cooper, Carol. “Mickey of Ulladulla: a love of country.” In Likan'mirri - connections: the AIATSIS collection of art: an exhibition at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery 20 February - 28th March 2004. Canberra: Australian National University Institute for Indigenous Australia, 2004.

Cooper, Chad. The immigration debate in Australia: from Federation to World War One. Parliament of Australia, Background Note, July 2012. Accessed 6 October 2019. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/library/prspub/1782447/upload_bin ary/1782447.pdf;fileType=application/pdf

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Cowlishaw, Gillian. The city’s outback. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.

136

Crossland. J.M. A Portrait of Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer. 1854. Painting. National Gallery of Australia. Accessed 5 July 2019. https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/detail.cfm?irn=62236.

Cvoro, Uros. “Dialectical image today.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (February 2008): 89–98.

Danius, Sara., Stefan Jonsson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Boundary 2, 20, no. 2 (1993): 24-50.

Deacon, Destiny. Eva Johnson, Writer. 1994. Print, National Gallery of Australia. Accessed 5 July 2019. https://nga.gov.au/retake/retake_art2/0000000f.htm/.

Delugan, Robin Maria. “Indigeneity across borders: hemispheric migrations and cosmopolitan encounters.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (February 2010): 83-97.

Dickens, Karla. Assimilated Warriors. 2014. Sculptural installation. Australian National Gallery. Accessed 9 July 2019. https://nga.gov.au/defyingempire/artists.cfm?artistirn=18896/.

Dickens, Karla. Associated Warriors II. 2017. Sculptural installation. karladickens.com.au. Accessed 9 July 2019. http://www.karladickens.com.au/artwork/1968/.

Dodson, Michael. “The end in the beginning: re(de)finding Aboriginality.” In Blacklines: contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians, edited by Michele Grossman, 25-42. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, [1993] 2003.

Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. New materialism: interviews & cartographies. New Metaphysics. (Open Humanities Press, 2012).

Echo, Umberto. “Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics.” Daedalus 114, no. 4, The Moving Image (Fall, 1985): 161-184.

Enus, Anton. “Aboriginal or not." Insight (Australia: SBS, 7 August 2012). Television Broadcast.

Evans, Michelle and Amanda Sinclair. “Containing, contesting, creating spaces: leadership and cultural identity work among Australian Indigenous arts leaders.” Leadership (17427150) 12, no. 3 (July 2016): 270-293.

Featherstone, Mike. “Archive.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 3 (May 2006): 591-596.

137

“Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI).” Collaborating for Indigenous Rights, National Museum of Australia. Accessed 4 July 2019. http://indigenousrights.net.au/organisations/pagination/federal_council_for_the_ad vancement_of_aborigines_and_torres_strait_islanders_fcaatsi.

Fine, Robert, and Vivienne Boon. “Cosmopolitanism: between past and future.” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (February 2007): 5–16.

“Fiona Foley: Badtjala Woman (two sets of beads) 1994,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.mca.com.au/artists- works/works/1995.101A/.

Foley, Fiona, Badtjala Woman (two sets of beads) 1994. Photograph. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/1995.101A/.

Foley, Fiona, Badtjala Woman (crossed string) 1994. Photograph. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/1995.101B/.

Foley, Fiona, Badtjala Woman (with collecting bag) 1994. Photograph. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/1995.101C/.

Foley, Fiona. “When the circus came to town.” Art Monthly Australia, no. 245 (2011): 5-7.

Foster, Hal. “An archival impulse.” October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004): 3-22.

Franklin, Adrian. “Aboriginalia: Souvenir Wares and the ‘Aboriginalization’ of Australian Identity.” Tourist Studies 10, no. 3 (2010): 195–208.

Franklin, Adrian. Animal nation: the true story of animals and Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006.

Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael, eds., Accumulation: the material politics of plastic. Oxon: Routledge, 2013.

Gallois, Mathieu. “The Aboriginal flag as art.” Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2 (July 2016): 46–60.

Gellatly, Kelly. “Citizen in the making: the art of Gordon Bennett.” In Gordon Bennett. National Gallery of Victoria, 2007. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/gordon-bennett/.

138

Gibson, Lorraine. “Colonizing bricks and mortar: Indigenous place-making through art objects and artifacts.” Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2012): 203-219.

Gibson, Lorraine. “‘We don't do dots - ours is lines’ - asserting a Barkindji style.” Oceania, no. 3 (2008): 280-298.

Goddard, Angela. “Dale Harding: Material Traces.” in Dale Harding: Body of objects. Brisbane: Griffith University Art Museum, 2017: 5-8.

Goodall, Heather. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972. Sydney, N.S.W.: Sydney University Press, 2008.

Gough, Julie. Time Keeper. 2015. Sculptural installation. National Museum of Australia. Accessed 8 July 2019. https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/julie-gough.

Gough, Julie. “Trading Places – why make Indigenous art and where goes culture?” Machine, Artworkers Alliance Queensland, Brisbane (Dec 2006, issue 2.3): 7-9.

Gough, Julie, Jonathan Jones and Kelli Cole. “Reflections from a panel of Indigenous speakers at the New Encounters conference.” Museum Worlds 4, no. 1 (2016): 196- 203.

Griffiths, Max. Aboriginal Affairs : A Short History. Kenthurst, N.S.W.: Kangaroo Press, 1995.

Grishin, Sasha. “Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 June 2017. Accessed 14 July 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/defying-empire-3rd- national-indigenous-art-triennial-20170606-gwlkgb.html/.

Gwyther, Gabrielle. “Once were Westies [Aspirationals as a demographic and examining their preferred residential haunt of the master-planned estate. Paper in: Cities on the edge. Schultz, Julianne ed.].” Griffith Review no. 20 (2008): 153-164.

Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale, N.S.W.: Routledge; Pluto Press, 2000.

Hall, Robert A. The black Diggers: Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the Second World War. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997.

Hansen, Christine and Kathleen Butler, eds., Exploring urban identities and histories. (developed from papers at the 2009, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Conference, Exploring urban identities and histories).

139

Canberra, A.C.T.: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2013.

Harris, Michelle. “Emergent Indigenous identities: rejecting the need for purity.” In The politics of identity: emerging Indigeneity, edited by Michelle Harris, Martin N. Nakata and Bronwyn Carlson, 10-25. Broadway, NSW: ePress UTS Publishing, 2013.

Harris, Michelle., Martin N. Nakata and Bronwyn Carlson, eds., The politics of identity: emerging Indigeneity. Broadway, NSW: ePress UTS Publishing, 2013.

Hawkins, Gay. From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: constructing community arts. Australian Cultural Studies. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993.

Healy, Paul. “Overcoming incommensurability through intercultural dialogue.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 9, no. 1 (January 2013): 265–81.

Hendry, Joy. Reclaiming culture: Indigenous people and self-representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Hill, Jess and Felicity Ogilvie, “ ‘We want it to come home’: returning Indigenous cultural heritage to Australia.” Radio National Breakfast, aired Tuesday 2 July 2019. Sydney: ABC Radio National, 2012. Radio broadcast.

Horton, Jessica L. and Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the mirror: Indigenous ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in contemporary art.” Third Text 27, no. 1 (2013):17-28.

Howell, Peter A. “The genesis of an Australian icon: the Hills Hoist,” Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 35 (2007)

Jolly, Martyn. “Big archives and small collections: remarks on the archival mode in contemporary Australian art and visual culture.” Public History Review Vol.21 (2014): 60-80. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj/article/view/3823/4605.

Jolly, Martyn. Writing and photography. “Photography and an Australian Indigenous spirituality.” Blog, posted 9 October 2013. Accessed 9 July 2019. https://martynjolly.com/2013/10/09/photography-and-an-australian-indigenous- spirituality/.

“Jonathan Jones.” Unsettled: stories within. National Museums of Australia, 2015. Accessed December 2018. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/jonathan_jones.

140

Jones, Jonathan. barrangal dyara (skin and bones) 2016, cast plaster, varying dimensions. Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney. Kaldor Public Art Projects. Accessed 14 November 2019. https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/planting-dreams-audio-guides/jonathan- jones-richardsons-garden-palace.

Jones, Jonathan. mugugalurgarra (concealed). 2015. Sculptural installation. National Museum of Australia. Accessed 8 July 2019. https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/jonathan-jones.

Jones, Philip. “Perceptions of Aboriginal art: a history.” In Dreamings: the art of Aboriginal Australia, edited by Peter Sutton, 143-179. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking, 1989.

Jones, Philip. “The boomerang’s erratic flight: the mutability of ethnographic objects.” Journal of Australian Studies 16, no. 35 (December 1992): 59-71.

“Julie Gough.” Unsettled: stories within. National Museums of Australia, 2015. Accessed December 2018. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/julie_gough.

King-Smith, Leah. Barak #3. In Patterns of Connection series, 1991. Photograph. National Gallery of Victoria. Accessed 5 July 2019. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/69832/.

King-Smith, Leah. Untitled #10. In Patterns of Connection series, 1991. Photograph. Source: National Gallery of Victoria. Accessed 5 July 2019. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/13392/.

King-Smith, Leah. “Patterns of connection.” Arena Magazine, no. 5 (Jun/Jul 1993): 26-29.

Kirmayer, Laurence J., Joseph P. Gone and Joshua Moses. “Rethinking historical trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (June 2014): 299–319.

Kleinert, Sylvia. “Aboriginal enterprises negotiating an urban Aboriginality.” Aboriginal History, no. 34 (2010): 171-196.

Kleinert, Sylvia. “Art and Aboriginality in the south-east.” In Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, 240-247. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kleinert, Sylvia and Grace Koch. Urban representations: cultural expression, identity and politics. Canberra A.C.T: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2012.

141

Kleinert, Sylvia. “‘Jacky Jacky was a smart young fella’: a study of art and Aboriginality in South East Australia 1900-1980.” PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1994.

Kleingeld, Pauline and Eric brown, “Cosmopolitanism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 edition). Accessed 9 July 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/.

Kohn, Margaret and Reddy, Kavita. “Colonialism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition) edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed 28 July 2019. .

Krischer, Olivier. “Fields of disturbance: Gordon Bennett.” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 78 (May 2012): 120-131.

Langton, Marcia. “Aboriginal art and film.” In Blacklines: contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians, edited by Michele Grossman, 109-124. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003.

Langton, Marcia. “Text/life/meaning.” In Brook Andrew: the right to offend is sacred, edited by Judith Ryan, Brook Andrew, Nick Aikens, Anthony Gardner, Marcia Langton, Simon Maidment, 59-70. Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017.

Langton, Marcia. “Urbanizing Aborigines.” Social Alternatives 2, no. 2 (August 1981): 16–22.

Langton, Marcia. “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television … .” North Sydney, N.S.W.: Australian Film Commission, 1993.

Lee, Richard Borshay. “Twenty-first century Indigenism.” Anthropological Theory 6, no. 4 (December 2006): 455–79.

Lewis, Geoffrey D. “Museum.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 2018. Accessed December 2018. https://www.britannica.com/topic/museum-cultural-institution.

“Living culture: First Nations arts participation and wellbeing.” Australia Council for the Arts. Accessed 6 July 2019. https://australiacouncil.gov.au/research/living-culture/.

Lowish, Susan. “Genevieve Grieves.” un Magazine Issue 7 (Autumn 2006): 28-30. Accessed 8 October 2019. https://www.academia.edu/10345196/Genevieve_Grieves_Picturing_the_Old_Peopl e

MacNeill, Kate. "Undoing the colonial gaze: ambiguity in the art of Brook Andrew." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no. 1 (January 2006): 179-194.

142

Maddison, Sarah. “Indigenous identity, ‘authenticity’ and the structural violence of settler colonialism.” Identities 20, no. 3 (June 2013): 288–303.

Mauriès, Patrick. Cabinets of Curiosities. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Maynard, John. “Fred Maynard and Marcus Garvey: storming the urban space.” In Exploring urban identities and histories, edited by Christine Hansen and Kathleen Butler (developed from papers at the 2009, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Conference, Exploring urban identities and histories), 153-159. Canberra, A.C.T.: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2013.

McGregor, Russell. “‘Breed out the Colour’ or the Importance of Being White.” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (October 2002): 286–302.

McRae, Tommy. Victorian Blacks - Melbourne tribe holding corroboree after seeing ships for the first time, 1890s. Drawing. Source: National Gallery of Australia. Accessed on 24 October 2019. https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/detail.cfm?IRN=2490.

McLean, Ian. Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian art. London: Reaktion Books, 2016.

McLean, Ian. "Wunderkammering." In Curious colony: a 20 first century Wunderkammer, edited by Jennifer Blunden, 70-75. Newcastle, N.S.W.: Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 2010. Exhibition catalogue.

McLean, Ian. “Other side art: Trevor Nickolls.” Artlink, no. 2 (2011): 54-57.

McLean, Ian. “Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation and unsettled encounters.” Museums Australia Magazine 24, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 10-17.

McLean, Ian. “The necessity of (un)Australian art history: writing for the new world.” Artlink 26, no. 1, (2006): 51.

McLean, Ian and Gordon Bennett. The art of Gordon Bennett. Roseville East, N.S.W.: Craftsman House, 1996.

McLean, Ian and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Qld.) ed., How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art: writings on Aboriginal art / edited and introduced by Ian McLean. Brisbane; Sydney: Institute of Modern Art and Power Publications, 2011.

Meeks, Raymond. Argoonie Doowie. 1988. Etching. National Gallery of Australia. Accessed on 4 July 2019. https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/detail.cfm?irn=89214/.

143

Megaw, Ruth and Vincent Megaw. “Nickolls.” In Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, 663. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Meikle, Jeffrey L. American plastic: a cultural history. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Meikle, Jeffrey L. “Material doubts: the consequences of plastic.” Environmental History 2, no. 3 (July 1997): 278–300.

Merlan, Francesca. “Indigeneity: global and local.” Current Anthropology 50, no. 3 (2009): 303-333

Message, Kylie. “Reflecting on the new museum through an antipodean lens: the Museum of Sydney and ‘the imaginary museum’.” Third Text 22, no. 6 (2008): 755–68.

“Mickey of Ulladulla.” Dictionary of Australian art online. Accessed 10 July 2019. https://www.daao.org.au/bio/mickey-of-ulladulla/biography.

Mickey of Ulladulla, Ceremony; Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna. Sourced from Artists of the nineteenth century. Andrew Sayers, Carol Cooper and National Gallery of Australia Aboriginal. Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, 1994, 56.

Mickey of Ulladulla, Figure groups, including man being pulled (?) from horse, 1875. Sourced from Artists of the nineteenth century. Andrew Sayers, Carol Cooper and National Gallery of Australia Aboriginal. Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, 1994, 53.

Mickey of Ulladulla, Fishing: Scenes of daily life; Native flora and fauna. Sourced from Artists of the nineteenth century. Andrew Sayers, Carol Cooper and National Gallery of Australia Aboriginal. Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, 1994, 57.

Mickey of Ulladulla. Scenes of Aboriginal life (detail), pencil drawing. Aboriginal Studies Press. Accessed 10 July 2019. http://lryb.aiatsis.gov.au/PDFs/cruse_livelihood.pdf.

Mills, Deborah, Paul Brown and Australia Council. Art and wellbeing: a guide to the connections between community cultural development and health, ecologically sustainable development, public housing and place, rural revitalisation, community strengthening, active citizenship, social inclusion and cultural diversity. Surry Hills, New South Wales: Australia Council, 2004.

144

Molnar, Helen and Michael Meadows. Songlines to satellites: Indigenous communication in Australia, the South Pacific and Canada. Pluto Press, 2001.

Moore, Archie. “Black Eye = Black Viewpoint: A Conversation with ProppaNOW.” Machine, vol. 1, no 4 (2006): 2-4. Accessed 6 October 2019. https://www.academia.edu/30239506/Black_Eye_Black_Viewpoint_A_Conversation _With_ProppaNOW

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a postcolonizing society.” In White possessive: property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 3-18. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Whiteness, epistemology and Indigenous representation.” In Whitening race: essays in social and cultural criticism, edited by Aileen Moreton- Robinson, 75-88. Canberra, ACT: Australian Studies Press, 2004.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004.

Morgan, George. “Autochthonous Australian syncretism.” Current Sociology 51, no. 3/4 (May 2003): 433–451.

Morley, Sarah. “The Garden Palace: Building an Early Sydney Icon.” M/C Journal, Vol. 20, Issue 2 (April 2017). Accessed 14 November 2019. https://eds-b-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/eds/detail/detail?vid=7&sid=76866053-e12c-40b0-996b- 608e697375a0%40pdc-v- sessmgr03&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#db=ufh&AN=122940418.

Morphy, Howard. “Acting in a community: art and social cohesion in Indigenous Australia.” Humanities Research, no. 2 (2009): 115-131.

Morphy, Howard. “Seeing Aboriginal art in the gallery.” Humanities Research, no. 1 (2001): 37.

Morphy, Howard. Becoming art: exploring cross-cultural categories. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008.

Morphy, Howard. Aboriginal Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1998.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

145

Mundine, Djon. “Nowhere boy.” Artlink, Vol 30, no. 1 (March 2010): 93-95.

Murphy, Bernice. “Transforming culture: Indigenous art and Australian art museums.” In Understanding museums: Australian museums and museology, National Museum of Australia, edited by Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien, 2011. Accessed 4 July 2019. nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums.

Museums Australia and Museums Australia Inc. Continuous cultures, ongoing responsibilities: principles and guidelines for Australian museums working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage. Canberra: Museums Australia, 2005.

Museums Australia, Previous possessions, new obligations: policies for museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Canberra: Museums Australia, 1993. See: https://www.amaga.org.au/sites/default/files/uploaded- content/website- content/SubmissionsPolicies/previous_possessions_policy_2000.pdf.

Myers, Fred. “‘Primitivism’, anthropology, and the category of ‘primitive art’,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, 267-284. London, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006.

Nakata, Martin. “The cultural interface.” The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, Vol. 36, Supplement (2007).

Nakata, Martin. Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007.

Nash, Daphne. “Transforming knowledge: Indigenous knowledge and culture workers on the South Coast of New South Wales.” PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2009.

National Standards Taskforce (Australia) and Collections Australia Network. National standards for Australian museums and galleries (Version 1.4). Melbourne: National Standards Taskforce, Museums Australia (Victoria), 2008.

Neale, Margo. “United in the struggle: Indigenous art from urban areas.” In Oxford companion to Aboriginal art and culture, edited by Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, 267-277. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Nicholls, Christine. “Brook Andrew: seriously playful.” RealTime, Issue 54 (April-May 2003). Accessed 1 July 2019. http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue54/7062.

146

Nickolls, Trevor. Contemporary Traditional. 1978. Painting. National Exhibition Touring Support Victoria, 1978. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://netsvictoria.org.au/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/EDKITNICKOLLS131109fin2.pdf.

Onus, Lin. Fruit Bats. 1991. Sculptural installation. Source: Art Gallery of New South Wales. Accessed 6 October 2019. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/395.1993.a-c/.

O’Reilly, Rachel. “Leah King-Smith: strategies of ambiguity.” Realtime, Issue 67 (June-July, 2005): 38. http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue67/7905.

Oxford English dictionary. Accessed 1 July 2019. http://www.oed.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/view/Entry/42259?redirectedFrom=cosmop olitan#eid.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Glimpses of cosmopolitanism in the hospitality of art.” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (February 2007): 139–52.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. Cosmopolitanism and culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Epub.

Paradies, Yin. “Beyond black and white: essentialism, hybridity and Indigeneity.” Journal of Sociology, The Australian Sociological Association 42, no. 4 (2006): 355-367.

Perkins, Maureen. “False whiteness: ‘passing’ and the stolen generations.” In Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 164-175. Canberra, A.C.T.: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004.

Read, Peter. The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 -1969. Surry Hills, N.S.W.: New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 2007.

Pensky, Max. “Method and time.” In The Cambridge companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris, 177-98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Peters-Little, Frances. The community game: Aboriginal self-definition at the local level. Research Discussion Paper, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies No. 10. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000.

Peterson, Nicolas., Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby. The makers and making of indigenous Australian museum collections. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2008.

“Plastics - history, types & processing.” Adapted from An insight into plastics. Melbourne: Nylex Corporation Ltd, 1974. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://s3-ap-southeast-

147

2.amazonaws.com/aws-s3.plasticsaust.com.au/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/19235509/an_Insight_Into_Plastics.pdf.

Pollock, Sheldon. “Cosmopolitan and vernacular in history.” Public Culture 12, no. 3 [32] (2000): 591–625.

“Poonindie.” Saint Mathew’s, Poonindie: restoration appeal. Accessed 4 July 2019. http://www.poonindie.com/poonindie/history.htm.

Putnam, James. Art and artifact: the museum as medium. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.

Riley, Michael. Portrait of Maria. 1985. Photograph. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Accessed 4 July 2019. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/12.1999/.

Riley, Michael. Boomalli - Five Koori Artists. Film Australia, 1988. Online video, 28 minutes. Source: Boomalli - Five Koorie Artists. Kanopy Streaming, 2015. Accessed 26 October 2019. https://search-ebscohost- com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat03332a&AN=uow.b234427 5&site=eds-live.

Riphagen, Marianne and Gretchen M. Stolte. “The functioning of Indigenous cultural protocols in Australia’s contemporary art world.” International Journal of Cultural Property, Issue 3 (2016): 295-320.

Riphagen, Marianne. “Contested categories: Brook Andrew, Christian Thompson and the framing of contemporary Australian art.” Australian Humanities Review, no. 55 (November 2013): 93-118.

Rizzuto, Nicole. Insurgent testimonies. Fordham University Press, 2016. Accessed 9 July 2019. http://www.jstor.org.virtual.anu.edu.au/stable/j.ctt18kr6gb.

Ryan, Judith. “Aesthetics/medium/process.” In Brook Andrew: the right to offend is sacred, edited by Judith Ryan, Brook Andrew, Nick Aikens, Anthony Gardner, Marcia Langton, and Simon Maidment, 1-33. Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017.

Samuels, Jeffrey. A changing continent. 1986. Painting. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Accessed 4 July 2019. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/241.1986/.

Satterthwait, Leonn. “Collections as artefacts: the making and thinking of anthropological museum collections.” In The makers and making of Indigenous Australian museum

148

collections, edited by Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby, 29-54. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=988677808488720;res=IELIN D.

Sayers, Andrew, Carol Cooper and National Gallery of Australia Aboriginal. Artists of the nineteenth century. Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, 1994.

Sayers, Andrew. “Mickey of Ulladulla (1820–1891).” Australian dictionary of biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Accessed 11 July 2019. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mickey-of-ulladulla-13098/text23697.

Scott, Sarah. “Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art 17, no. 2 (December 2017): 251–55.

Sculthorpe, Gaye., John Carty, Howard Morphy, Maria Nugent, and Ian Coates. Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015.

Sculthorpe, Gaye., Lissant Bolton and Ian Coates. “Introduction.” In Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation, Gaye Sculthorpe, John Carty, Howard Morphy, Maria Nugent, and Ian Coates, 12-19. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015.

Seltzer Goldstein, Ilana. “Visible art, invisible artists? the incorporation of Aboriginal objects and knowledge in Australian museums.” Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology. [online]., Vol. 10, no. 1 (2013): 469-493.

Smith, Terry. Art to come: histories of contemporary art. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2019. Epub.

Terry Smith, “Generation X: the impacts of the 1980s.” in What Is Appropriation? : An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s and 1990s, edited by Rex Butler, 249-259. Fortitude Valley, Queensland: Institute of Modern Art and IMA, 2004.

Stanton, John E. “Ethnographic museums and collections: from the past into the future.” In Understanding museums: Australian museums and museology, National Museum of Australia, edited by Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien. 2011. Accessed 1 July 2019. nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums.

St Leon, Mark Valentine. “Celebrated at first, then implied and finally denied: the erosion of Aboriginal identity in circus, 1851–1960.” Aboriginal History, Vol. 32 (2008): 63-81.

149

Sullivan, Tim., Lynda Kelly and Phil Gordon, “Museums and Indigenous people in Australia: a review of Previous possessions, new obligations: policies for museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Curator: The Museum Journal 46, no. 2 (April 2003): 208-227.

Sznaider, Natan. “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish cosmopolitanism: between the universal and the particular.” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (February 2007): 112–22.

Tanaka, Shouhei J. “The plastic in the garden: material ecopoetics of Evelyn Reilly’s styrofoam.” Master’s thesis. California State University, Long Beach, 2015.

Taylor, Charles. “The politics of recognition.” In Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25-75. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Thomas, Nicholas. “Aboriginal artists of the nineteenth century.” Oceania 66, no. 4 (1996): 330-332.

Thompson, Christian. Emotional Striptease. 2003. Photograph. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Accessed 5 July 2019. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/5.2008.10/.

Trees, Katheryn and Mudrooroo Nyoongah. “Postcolonialism: yet another colonial strategy?” Span: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36 (1993): 1-6.

“Trevor Nickolls.” Design and art Australia online, database and e-research tool for art and design researchers. Accessed 5 December 2018. https://www.daao.org.au/bio/trevor-nickolls/biography/.

Trezise, Thomas. Witnessing witnessing: on the reception of Holocaust survivor testimony. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

Tyquiengco, Marina. “Defying Empire: The Third National Indigenous Art Triennial.” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence.” Visual Culture 6, no. 1 “Boundless” (2017), 113-119. Accessed 4 July 2019. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/.

Waldron, Jeremy. "Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative." University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25, no. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1992): 751-794.

Walsh, Gerald. P. “Governor, Jimmy (1875–1901).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Accessed 27 July 2019. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/governor-jimmy-6439/text11017.

150

Weir, Peter. Whatever happened to Green Valley? Directed by Peter Weir (Film Australia, 1973). DVD.

Wollongong City Gallery Pallingjang Saltwater 2009. Wollongong East, N.S.W.: Wollongong City Gallery, 1999. Exhibition catalogue.

Yu, Peter. “Plotting the future by learning from the past.” In Encounters: revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum, edited by Thérèsa Osborne and Julie Simpkin, 32-34. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Museum of Australia Press, 2015.

151