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ARTSongs: The Soul Beneath My Skin

Author Croft, Pamela Joy

Published 2003

Thesis Type Thesis (Professional Doctorate)

School Queensland College of Art

DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/2049

Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/367423

Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au

ARTsong: the soul beneath my skin

Pamela Joy Croft Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Visual Art Queensland College of Art Griffith University Brisbane, Queensland

February, 2003

DEDICATION

Let our voices be heard for our future generations, For the justice of all Aboriginal people. The time has come for family members to be united in unison and heal together.

I cannot heal alone, The time has come for us all to be in harmony, To set our loved one’s spirits free, from places that our family member’s lives had come to an end.

I dedicate [this doctoral project] to the family members in remembrance of all our late loved ones whose lives came to an end in death in custody, and to the families who had suffered the pains of grief and hurt, Of these terrible fatal traumas that we had to accept throughout the years of our lives, Now being together in unison, To heal together.

Daisy Rankine, Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Elder of Meningie.

The visual narratives and this exegesis could not have occurred without the love, support and motivation of my family. They continue to inspire me.

ABSTRACT

This exegesis frames my studio thesis, which explores whether visual art can be a site for reconciliation, a tool for healing, an educational experience and a political act. It details how my art work evolved as a series of cycles and stages, as a systematic engagement with people, involving them in a process of investigating ‘their’ own realities - both the stories of their inner worlds and the community story framework of their outer conditions. It reveals how for my ongoing work as an indigenous artist, I became the learner and the teacher, the subject and the object.

Of central importance for my exploration was the concept and methodology of bothways. As a social process, bothways action-learning methodology was found to incorporate the needs, motivations and cultural values of the learner through negotiated learning. Discussion of bothways methodology and disciplinary context demonstrated the relationships, connections and disjunctions shared by both Aboriginal and Western domains and informed the processes and techniques to position visual art as an educational experience and a tool for healing. From this emerged a range of ARTsongs - installations which reveal possible new alternatives sites for reconciliation, spaces and frames of reference to ‘open our minds, heart and spirit so we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries ’ (hooks, 1994 p.12).

Central to studio production was bricolage as an artistic strategy and my commitment to praxis - to weaving together my art practice with hands-on political action and direct involvement with my communities. I refer to this as the trial and feedback process or SIDEtracks. These were documented acts of personal empowerment, which led to a more activist role in the political struggle of reconciliation. I conclude that, as aboriginal people, we can provide a leadership role, and in so doing, we can demonstrate to the wider community how to move beyond a state of apathy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part ONE A Description of the Research Project Hypothesis project scope overview of artistic practice: conceptual contexts: identity and landscape creating cultural texts as maps of identity and landscape-bothways artistic practice thematic installations spaces dimensions TABLES: 1997/ 2002 Parameters, significance and limitations of the research project parameters why it is of significance limitations Part TWO Bothways methodology or theory and artistic practice Strategies, processes and techniques Disciplinary Context Visual art as an educational experience and as a tool for healing Visual art as an educational experience processes and techniques Visual art as a healing tool

Part THREE Visual art as a site for reconciliation Conceptual Contexts: landscape and identity creating cultural texts as maps of identity and landscape design elements, processes and techniques installation sites -space as narrative landscape significance of objects Artistic processes and techniques

Part FOUR Visual art as a political act a ARTsong 1 reclaiming my responsibility for my life journey 1995-1997) b ARTsong 2 opening my mind and heart 1998-2000) c ARTsong 3 the recovery process (2001-2003) discussion of installations and works

Part FIVE Reflections The outcomes of the Trial and Feedback Process

Bibliography

List of APPENDICES Appendix 1 Council of Aboriginal Reconciliation National Projects. Appendix 2 Jukurrpa Model Appendix 3 A Fundamentalist World View As Remembered Experience. Appendix 4 No more secrets Exhibition Catalogue (ARTsong 2). Appendix 5 Land home place belong Exhibition Catalogue (ARTsong 1). Appendix 6 Cultural Community Development Model. [A circular framework for community work which emphasises the interconnectedness of the various ideas represented, and the importance of

a holistic perspective. (Ife 1995 p.250)].

List of IMAGES All images are on the accompanying CD-ROM in folders 1 – 5. Folder 1 contains images of works cited in Part One. Folder 2 contains images of works cited in Part Two. Folder 3 contains images of the works cited in Part Three and folders for each ARTsong.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to give honour to the Darumbal dreaming ancestors and acknowledge the Darumbal people as the Traditional owners of the Capricorn Coast - Darumbal country; Woppaburra waters: the site which is my home and studio where the majority of the production for this doctoral project occurred. I am a descendant of the Kooma clan, the Uralarai First Nations people, South-west Queensland. I give honour to my ancestral grandmothers who guided my doctoral journey to reclaiming my ancestral identity, dreaming and country: my belonging place. I wrote this exegesis and created the body of visual narratives, as a peaceful warrior, to honour my generations of family now and who are to come.

I would like to acknowledge the gift of love, the honour of trust and pride, and unfading encouragment, from my sons, and my partner. In particular, my partners continued support, patience in listening, understanding and healing gifted to me throughout this postgraduate journey. It is also important to acknowledge the strength and courage shown by my sister-cousin, Cheryl (moodai) Robinson in connecting with family. Her efforts in linking-up with me and others and sharing her research provided the impetous for me and others to continue moving forward our identity search. Her honesty, openness of heart, trust, love, and focused determination often gave me the will and courage to confront that which Iwould normally have left unravelled. The significance of our relationship can be read within the texts of the collaborative visual narratives where we shared our story publicly in No more secrets.

I would like to acknowledge and thank my supervisors, Keith Bradbury, Jay Younger, Anna Haebick and Bronwyn Fredericks. Your guidance, friendship, and listening with open minds and spirits was very much appreciated. I would like to especially mention Keith Bradbury whose enthusiasm carried me over the finishing goalpost and to my cultural supervisor and 'sista,' Bronwyn Fredericks whose friendship, shared dialogue and experiences, helped me unravel my thoughts

along the postgraduate journey. I cherish your poetic articulation of the hidden meanings and connections within my visual narratives, thank you. I would also like to acknowledge and thank the many Australians, extended family members, friends, community members, colleagues, peers, artsworkers, educators, lobbyists and political activists, whose pathways have criss-crossed mine, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes longer. Without their encouraging words, friendhip, and times of sharing, my life's journey would not have been possible, challenging or as exciting an experience. I must also acknowledge and thank my dear friend, Dr. Meredith Murray for her continued committment to supporting my doctoral completion. Without your generosity, encouragement, motivation, and guidance I would not have been able to complete. Thank you, also to my friend Danielle Kelly for her expertise and support with Information Technology. Lastly, I acknowledge my dear friend and brother, Ron Hurley, Gurang Gurang elder and visual artist, for his inspiration, humor and encouragement in completing this doctoral study.

This doctoral project was achieved through the efforts of so many friends. I thank you all for the encouragement and love gifted to me. I have learned the joy of family love, to celebrate and to accept the validity of my heritage:the co-existance of the Indigenous and the colonisor. I am inspired to find solutions to my family's 'placement', where my future generations will be proud to know who they are and to claim their ancestral birthright.

DECLARATION

I, Pamela Croft, declare that this work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the paper contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the paper itself.

...... Pamela Joy Croft

PART ONE Description of the Research Project

Reconciliation: to make friendly again after an estrangement', ‘to make acquiescent or contentedly submissive to', ‘to settle',‘ to harmonise and make compatible', 'to show compatibility of, by

argument or in practice (Oxford 1990 p.1003).

The hypothesis explored in this project is that visual art can be a site for reconciliation, a tool for healing, an educational experience and a political act. The doctoral project spawned a body of visual work that addresses many personal and 1 public issues of reconciliation. The political definition below is adopted and has been used in many publications produced by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) (CAR 1991-1997). In essence, 'reconciliation is about building a new relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the wider community - one that heals the pain of the past and ensures Australians share fairly and equally in our national citizenship’ (CAR 1997 p.3). Under this general rubric, eight key issues have been identified as part of the Council's strategic plan:

1. Understanding Country: The Importance of Land and Sea in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Societies; 2. Improving Relationships: Better Relationships between Indigenous Australians and the Wider Community; 3. Valuing Cultures: Recognising Indigenous Cultures as a Valued Part of the Australian heritage; 4. Sharing Histories: A Sense for all Australians of a Shared Ownership of their History; 5. Addressing Disadvantage: A Greater Awareness of the Causes of Indigenous Australians' Disadvantage; 6. Responding to Custody Levels: A Greater Response to Addressing the Underlying Causes; 7. Agreeing on a Document: Will the Process of Reconciliation be Advanced by a Document or Documents of Reconciliation?

1 National Projects which followed the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation initiative (1991-1997) are listed in Appendix 1.

8. Controlling Destinies: Greater Opportunities for Indigenous Australians to Control their Destinies (CAR 1993 p.iii).

The Australian Government has recognised indigenous art as a unique expression of Australian identity and developed indigenous specific arts 2 funded programs. The State and Territories Governments have followed this lead and in Queensland, where I live, the Beattie Government has released and promoted a health department initiative, Statement of Intent for Reconciliation signed on 2 June 2000. Most recently, the Premier has initiated an Indigenous Arts Export Industry Project that has to date included an 3 exhibition and publication titled Gatherings and a web site, all featuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art from Queensland.

In initiating this project, my Government acknowledges the importance of Queensland’s Indigenous art industry. We acknowledge it also because the contemporary art expression of Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is critical to the maintenance of their rich traditional cultures (Honourable Peter Beattie MP Premier and Minister for Trade cited in Demozay 2001 p.7).

These developments provided a context for this research project. The particular issues of reconciliation in the resulting research and artworks addressed are points one, two, three, four, five and eight of the CAR plan. Author Susan Miller writes: the desire to communicate and to search for explanations and meanings is fundamental for humankind. By sharing our individual and community experiences we establish connections and relationships for forming shared communities. We communicate and exchange knowledges as individuals and as socially organized groups to preserve ideas, to investigate shared events and problems, and to

establish laws and beliefs. This interaction allows us to know ourselves and each other better (Miller 1989 p. xxiii).

These exchanges of experiences are processes of renewal that are an integral part of everyday life. When only part of our individual (private) and community (public)

2 Examples included the Australia Council for the Arts: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board; Indigenous Regional Arts Development Fund; The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commissions (Aboriginal organisations); and Arts Queensland: Major and Minor Grants. 3 Gatherings ‘is a representative sample of the work being produced in remote and isolated communities, provincial cities and regional towns, urban centres and island communities. One of its most compelling aspects is the way it shatters popular mythology about what constitutes indigenous art’ (Honourable Peter Beattie MP Premier and Minister for Trade cited in Demozay 2001 p.7).

histories are known, our identities are open to manipulation and distortion. In the case of aboriginal Australian peoples, we continue to maintain our knowledges through stories, which in part serve to magnify the injustices of the past and provide an opportunity to reflect on how they continue to impact on the Australian psyche.

American academic educator, in Women’s Studies, Chandra Mohant writes ‘uncovering and reclaiming subjugated knowledge is one way to lay claims to alternative histories’ (cited in hooks 1994 p.22). This is offset by the opinion of French theorist Michel Foucault who argues that ‘some kinds of knowledge, because they are not scientific and cannot be verified by science, are considered to be naive, unauthoritative and unimportant. They are placed low in the hierarchies of knowledge in Western Society’ (cited in Brewster 1996 p.81).

My artistic practice involves a bothways philosophy and methodology that will be discussed in detail in part 2. Matjarra explains the concept as ‘we don’t want to lose our culture with too many Balanda4 ways of living. In other words we don’t want to learn more Balanda education and less Yolgnu education, or more Yolgnu education and less Balanda education. We want to learn both, with even understanding’ (cited in Harris 1990 p.05). At an address to the National Press Club in April 1996, Patrick Dodson, Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, provided the contemporary context for bothways learning and understanding.

I alerted this nation to the fact that the reconciliation process was at cross roads. It has now obviously reached some sort of crisis. I suggested that there were five ways that I thought we might go forwards in this country, remembering that reconciliation is about changes to the attitudes, the systems, the structures and the nature of the relationship that we want to see or create for the future shape of Australia. Reconciliation does not need to wait for the future. It has to be experienced in the contemporary times of this nation (cited in Yunupingu 1997 p.139).

Driving my personal exploration of these issues has been the belief that reconciliation begins with the individual. It is imperative for living indigenous

4 Balanda is the language word meaning ‘white’ or ‘whitefella’ for the Yolgnu peoples, Gumatj custodians of Yirrkala community in the top-end of the Northern Territory.

5 Australians who belong to the Stolen Generation to recover and reclaim their history; by bringing to the foreground subjugated knowledges relating to their experiences as indigenous Australians. The continued practice of neglect toward indigenous knowledges in Australian society informs the concepts developed during this project.

The concept of mapping and tracking lived experience and memories, was used to create a series of thematic ARTsong installations and works in a variety of mediums, the studio works presented for examination are cultural texts of otherness. The concepts explore and examine issues of personal identity; the effects of dis/placement (de/colonization, whiteness); history and memories; and the relationships of power through which identities are ‘configured and manipulated’. The studio ARTsong concepts develop spaces of narrative landscapes as sites for reconciliation that ‘mimetically trace’ (hooks 1995 p.10) and document previous and existing narratives, and that become alternative sites and 6 spaces for possible interaction with the wider community .

In part 3 of this exegesis design elements, processes and techniques; the artistic concepts; and the significance of recurring elements (sites of space and incorporating objects) are discussed in further detail.

Spiritual meaning and connectedness to ancestors and country were realized in the hunting and gathering 7process of collecting and using many gifts of nature. From the mixture of found objects or gifts of nature; road kill (bird wings, claws, feathers, bones, and echidna quills), natural found objects (shells, coral, seed

5 The Stolen Generation term was used by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) Report launched by Patrick Dobson at the national Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne in May 1997. It refers to the white assimilation policy that effected the removal of Indigenous children from their birth parents and placed them into the care of white Australian families. 6 See ARTsongs and SIDEtracks TABLES for community participation and outcomes p.15 to 23 7 Italicised terms, bothways, two-way, hunting and gathering, land-centred, visual narratives, SIDEtracks, and Howardian are explained in the text. The author Gloria Watkins uses the publishing name bell hooks which is in lower case as the author’s choice.

pods, barks, cicada shells, insects and ochre) and other salvaged found objects (boxes, bird cages, memorabilia) have become the distinguishing recurring cultural texts in my artistic practice. Taking the familiar, the everyday, the mundane from their original surroundings and transforming these common objects provided the opportunity to share my journey metaphorically and spirituality through a visual narrative of identity, landscape and memory.

Project scope

The project dimensions (1997/2003) are extensive with in excess of sixty pieces produced and installed in four solo exhibitions and twelve invitation group exhibitions across three states, four cities, five regional centres and internationally in Paris, Manila and Amsterdam. One further piece The silent observer was designed and approved for a nominated public art space in Livingstone Shire. It is included within the body of work though the actual installation remains unrealised.

For this exegesis I use the word ARTsong to connect me to the ‘old way’ concepts of ‘singing country’ and ‘songlines’ and the Western notion of visual art. The first ARTsong theme for this study research project titled Land home place belong (1995-1997), began to emerge during the Paris residency at the Cite’ Internationale des Arts. This work was produced as part of the master’s research project, and focused on aspects of bothways such as: identity, personal history, ancestral 8 beliefs of country and the dreaming,9 relationships to land and sovereignty, home

8 Country is a contemporary term used by aboriginal Australians to acknowledge the many nations of Indigenous peoples and their land connections (ownership) of ancestral dreamings. 9 The dreaming incorporates our laws and beliefs, kinships, protocols, responsibilities, and reciprosity. It permeates through our rituals of song, dance, storytelling, painting, artifacts-making and hunting and food gathering activities. It provides our framework for living, gives us a social and spiritual base and links us to our cultural identity and heritage. The dreaming is the songlines of our ancestors. The Pitanjantnathara people use the term Tjukurrpa; the Arrente refer to it as Aldjerinya; the Adnamathanha use the word Nguthuna and Dadirri. This Aboriginal concept described by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr (1993) as refering to a deep contemplative process of listening to one another in reciprocal relationships. It is the way Aboriginal peoples explain life and how their world came into being. See Appendix 2. Anthropologist, Deborah Bird Rose described the Aboriginal dreaming with the following story: The Australian continent is criss-crossed with the tracks of the Dreamings: walking, slithering, crawling, flying, chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, giving birth.

and belonging, dis/placement, land-centred10 and ecology, mapping connections and relationships, investigating the location of culture, beliefs, value systems and languages. ARTsong 2 marks the beginning of my upgrade to the doctoral program. Consequently, ARTsong One provides the context for ARTsong two and three. ARTsong two became the theme, No more secrets (1997-1999), where the focus narrowed to the experience of self, placement and other cultures. In short it explores the complexity of the Stolen Generation experience - effects of colonisation, memory and secrets, femaleness, country and humanity, place and people, grief and loss of relationships to land, family connections, stories and narratives, mapping of country, locations, landforms, sites and property stations. In the third ARTsong, Owning my own skins (2000-02), the theme of healing predominates. There was less studio practice and more critical reflection and

Performing rituals, distributing the plants, making the landforms and water, establishing things in their own places, making the relationships between one place and another. Leaving parts or essences of themselves, looking back in sorrow; and still travelling, changing languages, changing songs, changing skin. ...Where they travelled, where they stopped, where they lived the events of their lives, all these places are sources and sites of Law. These tracks and sites, and the Dreamings associated with them, make up the sacred geography of Australia; they are visible in paintings and engravings; they are sung in songs, depicted in body paintings and engravings; they form the basis of a major dimension of the land tenure system for most Aboriginal people. To know the country is to know the story of how it came into being, and that story also carries the knowledge of how the human owners of that country came into being. Except in cases of succession, the relationship between the people and their country is understood to have existed from time immemorial - to be part of the land itself (Rose 1996 p.35-36).

10 Land-centred is my bothways contemporary term to explain the beliefs and values system which includes the dreaming. It is best explained by the diagram designed by the Institute for Aboriginal Development. See Appendix 2.

writing. An active engagement with community, continued throughout the doctoral project fulfilling my belief in the importance of diverse political action as steps towards reconciliation occasioned many SIDEtracks. These are more fully explored in part 5 Reflections. This exegesis expands on a body of work, which progressively developed into a more sophisticated and refined creative expression of the reconciliation process.

15 ARTsong One – Land home place belong (1996-1997)

EXHIBITION TITLE WORKS INCLUDED TYPE/LOCATION

Land home place belong ALL Works CD Images: Part 4 Solo Exhibition (Regional) Folder ARTsong 1 Rockhampton Regional Art Gallery, Central Queensland

Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Solo Exhibition (Regional) Folder ARTsong 1 A journey to reconciliation Paint Pot Gallery, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland

Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Touring Group Exhibition (Regional) Folder ARTsong 1 Gold Coast Art Gallery, Queensland Coastcult

Selected Works CD Images: Group Exhibition (Regional) Matters of her heart-installation Noosa Regional Art Gallery, Sunshine Coast, Hand and Eye Queensland

Separation-Reunion-Reconciliation Selected Works CD Images: Group Exhibition (Regional) Matters of her heart Qld Uni of Technology, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Queensland

Sandhills Collection ARTWORK TITLES CD Image No. Description Year Size Reference

84ab Identity. This is me. I’m not who you think I am or what you want me to 17, 18, 19 dry-etch colour print on rice paper, eagle 1998 90x30x be beak, cottons, bird nest, gumnuts, shells, 7cm shadowbox assemblage quills, driftwood, baitbag, feathers, leather, plastic toy, coral, bones, string, heart, plastic rope, seeds, and acrylic paint

86a Spirit with broken wing ARTsong 1 wing on bark and wooden frame 1997 30x30cm shadowbox assemblage

87 Love lies bleeding ARTsong 1 paperbark, gum resin, skulls, bones, 1997 25x19.5x4 shadowbox assemblage cottons, mangrove pod, quills and acrylic cm paint

88 We saw something strange; The British Erriccson; Obsession; 1 cupboard installation 1997 Waterdreaming story; Sister’s of Mercy – shadowbox assemblages

89a British Erriccson-‘We are indeed a civilising race..when we came here, 20, 21 skulls, nails, quills, net, feathers rope, 1996 40x40x the Aborigines covered these wide plains in thousands. Where are they driftwood, pastel, and ‘Erriccson’ telephone 30cm today? We have ‘civilised’ them – they are dead’ Shadowbox box assemblage

90 We saw something strange out there -it’s like a white man! a white 26 feathers, bible, and antique soapbox; 1996 12x15x man!! Shadowbox assemblage 5cm

92 Sister of Mercy- ‘I was taken in for care and protection..abused’ ARTsong 1 gum resin, quills, feathers, box, wings and 1996 10x20x Shadowbox assemblage acrylic paint 6.5cm

93 Water dreaming story - Shadowbox assemblage 25 bones, stones, shells, feathers, gumnuts, 1996 30x20cm coin, and acrylic paint

94 Obsession - Shadowbox assemblage 15, 16 bait bag, shells, antique box 1995 40x12.5x8 cm

95 HomeLand one’s native land - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 bait bags, shells, coral, driftwood, artist 1997 100x30x woven basket, pastel, and wooden box 25cm

96 ‘the first thing is an urge which becomes so strong that eventually you ARTsong 1 quills and cotton in c.1940 brass powder 1995 11x6.5x have to find out who you are.’ - Shadowbox assemblage container 6cm

97a Sorry business - Shadowbox assemblage 20, 21, 22 artist handmade paper, feathers, driftwood, 1996 30x19x ink, claw, barb wire, and box 25cm

98a My treasures - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 quills, cottons on canvas, antique box 1995 15x18x 15cm

100a Pairs, divided by two, double, dual ownership - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 collected objects, gumnuts, and artist woven 1997 17x14x basket 20cm

101 Sacrificial love passion:to the father the son the holy spirit - 7 personal salvaged objects – paint brushes, 1995 15x30x Shadowbox assemblage watercolour pots, blotting paper and box 10cm

102a Monopoly game used to convert the ‘primitive’ - Shadowbox 27, 28 bibles and hymn books, cottons, quills, 1995 26x21x assemblage found objects, and cigar box 10cm

103 Ochre pit ..our spirit, our essence, our life blood - Shadowbox 22, 23,24 ochres, acrylic paint, and antique box 1995 20x20x assemblage 15cm

104 Global beaches - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 bronze fish skeleton, bone, tiles, nails, 1996 30x20cm shells, door nob, acrylic paint, and box

105a Wunndurra ‘warrior’ red dog dreaming - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 bottle cap tops, cottons, acrylic paint, and 1995 23x13x antique box 6.5cm

65 land home place belong – ARTsong 1 entry to installation Rockhmapton Regional 1997 Riverside Art Gallery space

62a 64ab Water helping us see, connecting the knots 30, 31, 32 net assemblage, feathers and ropes 1996 4.5x 3.5mtrs

1997 66 Us 2 travelling in Paris ARTsong 1 acrylic painting on stretched canvas, collage 100x of postcards & artist’s photographs 100cm

67 Fish, fish come into the dish ARTsong 1 dry-etch colour print on rice paper 1993 53x62cm

68 Nourlangie rock ARTsong 1 acrylic on canvas (unstretched) and 1995 2mtrsx driftwood 1mtr

53 The lost city ARTsong 1 pastel on paper 1995 55x76cm

16 We can mount the armour ARTsong 1 lithograph print and mixed media on paper 1987 700x 1000cm

69 Protect the spirit with colour-Adivasi country ARTsong 1 Artist’s photograph, incense, pastel, acrylic 1997 60x60cm paint, and powder dyes on stretched canvas

70 Our creator-white man’s devil – shadowbox 29 seasnake skeleton, bait bag, acrylic paint, 1995 16x15x net, echidna quills, cottons 6cm

71ab Lost identity ARTsong 1 fishing line, net, thongs, driftwood, acrylic 1997 100x paint on canvas 100cm

72 Long beach:Darumbal country, Woppaburra waters ARTsong 1 acrylic on canvas, driftwood 1997 2mtrsx 1mtr

73a Us mob at Joskeleigh hunting and gathering ARTsong 1 acrylic on canvas; 1997 60x60cm

74 Eagle rock and fish traps ARTsong 1 acrylic on canvas 1997 60x60cm

75a Gifts from the oceans – installation - Beach birds; Fish, fish; and ARTsong 1 Driftwood 1997 Eaglehawk

115 Beach birds – assemblage ARTsong 1 driftwood, brass, cottons, and feathers 1997 60x30x 20cm 116 Fish, fish ARTsong 1 ceramic bowl - collaboration with Peter Bray 1991 23x 25cm dia

117 Eaglehawk- assemblage ARTsong 1 bronze, feathers, marble, brass, plaster and 1992 60x13x marble 13 cm

76 Land home place belong installation ARTsong 1 central view 1997

77 lounge room – installation ARTsong 1 television and transparency, plastic crate, 1997 Water helping us see; and Gone fishin’

77a Gone fishin’ – assemblage ARTsong 1 driftwood, bronze, brass, rope 1997 30x30cm

78ab Embossed in the landscape ARTsong 1 artist’s handmade paper and cottons 1997 110x 75cm

79ab The land is our life, it holds our laws and our spirit; it holds their bones 12, 13, 14 bones, cottons, acrylic and powder paints 1997 110x and ours on artist’s handmade paper 75cm

80 Ancestral spirit beings; the strength of heritage passed down through ARTsong 1 dry-etch colour print on artist’s handmade 1997 80x73cm cultural memory paper, feathers, and watercolour paint on paper

81a Rivers flowing thru me ARTsong 1 pastel, ochre, acrylic on (unstretched) 1997 2mtrsx canvas, and driftwood 1mtr

83a Survival:spirit is strong flowing together balanced Ngarrawungi and ARTsong1 dry-etch colour print on artist’s handmade 1997 770x770 me paper cm

SIDEtracks One (publications & experiences contributing to conceptual development during ARTsong One research period)

Croft, P., 1998 (Organiser and Facilitator) Inaugural National Indigenous Postgraduate Symposium,(CAPA), Canberra. URL: http://www.ion.unisa.edu.au/conf/virtualconf/nipa/Vconf/wednesday/Wednesday.html

Croft, P., 1998 (Organiser and Facilatator of set up and incorporation) National Indigenous Postgraduate Aboriginal Association Corp (NIPAAC) Melbourne.

Croft, P., Fredericks B. and Jansen R., 1998 (Project Coordinator, research designer, publication, cover designer, organiser of national launch) Indigenous Postgraduate Education:Barriers which Indigenous Students must overcome in undertaking Postgraduate Studies, Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) Victoria. URL: http://www.capa.edu.au/committees/nipaac/index.html

Croft, P, Fredericks, B. and Robinson, C. Our Agenda: Indigenous Knowledges & Postgraduate Education, Australian Curriculum Studies Assoc Biennial Conference, University of Sydney, NSW

Fredericks, B., Croft, P. Student Support - Everyone’s Business: Sharing the load, National Equity & Access Conference, Yeppoon, Central Queensland. URL: http://www.cqu.edu.au/eaconf98/abstracts.htm.

Croft, P., 1998 (artist-in-residence talk) My Home, My Place, University of Santo Thomas College of Architecture and Fine Arts, Manilla.

Croft, P., 1998 (Interviewer and contributor) An Investigation into the Possible Enhancement and Extension of the RATEP Project, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton.

ARTsong Two – No more secrets (1997-1998)

EXHIBITION TITLE WORKS INCLUDED TYPE/LOCATION

No more secrets – Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Collaborative Exhibition (National) Folder ARTsong 2 with Cheryl (moodai) Robinson, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, NSW

International Women- Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Collaboration Exhibition (International) with Cheryl (moodai) Folder ARTsong 2\ Robinson, Australian Embassy, Manila, Philippine Islands

Identity – Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (National)

Folder ARTsong 2 Gallery 482, Brisbane, Queensland

Transvisual Travelling Schools Selected Works CD Images: 93, Touring Group Exhibition (Regional) Exhibition 105a Regional Galleries of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland

Sandhills CD Collection ARTWORK TITLES Image No. Description Year Size Reference

No More Secrets - Matters of her heart; The Storyteller Waddy; ARTsong 2 1998 The boiler Domestic Servant-Gubermunda; Coongoola; BirthPlace now room known as the ‘Butcher’s block’; Journey to Connection; The Sorry Wall;

49 a-v Matters of her heart ARTsong2 – personal salvaged ocuments- photographs, 1993 5x3.5mtrs Folder 10 letters, wax, string, twigs, plywood, hair, book, bronze, acrylic paint, oxides and mixed media on card

108 a-l The Storyteller Waddy Folder 9 collage, mixed media on canvas, blanket 1998 2x2.5mtrs

109 a-h Domestic Servant-Gubermunda, Coongoola 34, 35, 36 basket, photograph, brooch, lace, wooden pegs, 1998 4x2.5mts and collected objects

110 ab BirthPlace now known as the ‘Butcher’s block’ 37 ochre, oxides, & acrylic paints on canvas 1998 6.5x4mtrs

112, 113, 114 a- The Sorry Wall ARTsong 2 – bird cages, barbed wire, road kill, insects, bones, 1998 6x4mtrs m Folder 8 salvaged & found objects, bric-a-brac, ochres and mixed media

84ab Identity. This is me. I’m not who you think I am or what you want 17, 18, 19 dry-etch colour print on rice paper, eagle beak, 1998 90x30x7cm me to be cottons, bird nest, gumnuts, shells, quills, shadowbox assemblage driftwood, baitbag, feathers, leather, plastic toy, coral, bones, string, heart, plastic rope, seeds, and acrylic paint

87 Love lies bleeding ARTsong 1 paperbark, gum resin, skulls, bones, cottons, 1997 25x19.5x Shadowbox assemblage mangrove pod, quills and acrylic paint 4cm

89a British Erriccson-‘We are indeed a civilising race..when we came 20, 21 skulls, nails, quills, net, feathers rope, driftwood, 1996 40x40x30cm here, the Aborigines covered these wide plains in thousands. pastel, and ‘Erriccson’ telephone box Where are they today? We have ‘civilised’ them - they are dead.’ Shadowbox assemblage

92 Sister of Mercy- ‘I was taken in for care and protection..abused’ ARTsong 1 gum resin, quills, feathers, box, wings and acrylic 1996 10x20x6.5cm Shadowbox assemblage paint

95 HomeLand one’s native land - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 bait bags, shells, coral, driftwood, artist woven 1997 100x30x basket, pastel, and wooden box 25cm

97a Sorry business - Shadowbox assemblage 20, 21, 22 artist handmade paper, feathers, driftwood, ink, 1996 30x19x25cm claw, barb wire, and box

98a My treasures - Shadowbox assemblage ARTsong 1 quills, cottons on canvas, antique box 1995 15x18x15cm

102a Monopoly game used to convert the ‘primitive’ - Shadowbox 27, 28 bibles and hymn books, cottons, quills, found 1995 26x21x10 cm assemblage objects, and cigar box

103 Ochre pit ..our spirit, our essence, our life blood - Shadowbox 22, 23,24 ochres, acrylic paint, and antique box 1995 20x20x15 cm assemblage

62a 64ab Water helping us see, connecting the knots 30, 31, 32 net assemblage, feathers and ropes 1996 4.5x3.5mtrs

16 We can mount the armour ARTsong 1 lithograph print and mixed media on paper 1987 700x1000cm

115 Beach birds - assemblage ARTsong 1 driftwood, brass, cottons, and feathers 1997 60x30x20cm

77a Gone fishin’ - assemblage ARTsong 1 driftwood, bronze, brass, rope 1997 30x30cm

79ab The land is our life, it holds our laws and our spirit; it holds their 12, 13, 14 bones, cottons, acrylic and powder paints on 1997 110x75cm bones and ours artist’s handmade paper

81a Rivers flowing thru me ARTsong 1 Pastel, ochre, acrylic on (unstretched) 1997 2mtrsx1mtr canvas, and driftwood

83a Survival:spirit is strong flowing together balanced Ngarrawungi ARTsong1 dry-etch colour print on artist’s handmade paper 1997 770x770 cm and me

SIDEtracks Two (publications & experiences contributing to conceptual development during ARTsong Two research period)

Croft, P., 1999, (cover image and contributor) land home place belong Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, Griffith University Publication pp. 261/262

Croft, P., 1999, (Address) Talkin up straight, Griffith University International Women’s Day Celebration, Brisbane

Croft P. & Fredericks, B., 1999, (co-writer) A postgraduate's Guide to university Employment, Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA), Melbourne. URL: http://www.nteu.org.au/services/publics/postgrad/posttext.pdf

Croft, P., 1999, (researcher, contributor and reviewer) Evaluation of the Years 1 to 10 The Arts Curriculum Development Project Reports 1 2 & 3:pp. 42-44 Queensland School Curriculum Council & Education Queensland. URL: http://www.qscc.qld.edu.au/evaluation_review/pdf/evaluation_1_10_arts_rep2.pdf

ARTsong Three – Owning my own skins (1999-2002)

EXHIBITION TITLE WORKS INCLUDED TYPE/ LOCATION

Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (National) ARTsong 3 – folder 11 Wesley Private Hospital, Brisbane, Queensland Women's Business

Mum Shirl: the sacred trust of Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (National) memory ARTsong 3 – folder 12- The Storyteller Boomali Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, Sydney, New South Waddy Wales

Gatherings – Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (National) ARTsong 3 –81a, 90, 94, 79a b, 16, Commonwealth Peoples Festival Southbank, Brisbane, 115, 97a Queensland

Peoplescape Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (National)

ARTsong 3 – folder- Parliament House Lawns, Canberra, Australian Capitol Mable Edmund – Darumbal Elder Territory

Art in the Heart Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (Regional) ARTsong 3 – folder Gladstone CBD, Gladstone Art Gallery and Museum, Queensland

Awoonga Immersion 2 - Mud map Selected Works CD Images: Part 4 Group Exhibition (Regional) series ARTsong 3 – 41 Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum, Queensland

Sandhills Collection Artwork Titles CD Image No. Description Year Size Reference

Owning my own skins ARTsong 3 – folder 11 2001 6mx2m

Wisdom ARTsong 3 -folder 2001 2.5mx1m

Heartland 41 2002

Mud map series:watermarks and landlines ARTsong 3 –folder 13 2002- 60x60 2003

Not quite right, not quite white ARTsong 3 - Folder -

SIDEtracks THREE (publications & experiences contributing to conceptual development during ARTsong Three research period)

Croft, P., 2000, (personal history recorded, images) Bringing Them Home oral history project, National Library of Australia (TRC 5000/99)

Croft, P, (extract & two images) in Mellor, D. and Haebich, A. 2002, ‘Reflections on Past Methods, Thoughts for the Future’ in Many Voices: Reflections of experiences of Indigeneous child separation, Nationbal Library of Australia, Canberra p.16, 223-225

Croft, P., 1999, Lecturer/ Artist- The Cathedral College Rockhampton- teaching art practice & methodologies

Croft, P., 1999, Transvisual Travelling Schools Exhibition Website- RGAQ http://www.transvisual.rgaq.org.au

Croft, P., 2000, Course Review of Visual Art & Design- CQ Institute of TAFE Rockhampton

Croft, P., 2000, Training & Professional Development Needs Of Indigenous Students Report, March pp. 1-2 http://www.maq.org.au/profdev/indig/docs/indig.pdf

Croft, P., 2001, Community Aid Abroad One World Series (Be)longing for local and global justice: Arts & Activism

Croft, P., 2001, Course Review of Diploma of Visual Art, CQ Institute of TAFE Bolsover St. Campus, Rockhampton

Croft, P., 2002 cover image Livingstone Shire Council Environmental and Recreation Report

Croft, P., Fredericks, B., and Mundine, J., 2000, Indigenous Postgraduate Education- Barriers which Indigenous Students must overcome in undertaking Postgraduate Studies: A Short History, Council of Australian Postgraduate Association, Melbourne

Croft, P., Owning my own skins, Queensland Women’s Health Network Journal, Vol 1 No 1 pg 17-22

Fredericks, B., Croft, P. and Lamb, N., Talkin’ up Sport and Gender: Three Aboriginal Women Speak Canadian Woman Studies les cashers de la femme Vol 21, No 3, Canada

Fredericks, B., Croft, P., 2001, Too Deadly! :A review of Talkin’ up to the White Women, Idiom 23, CQPress, Rockhampton

ARTsong: The soul beneath my skin –

Selected Works from ARTsongs One, Two and Three (2003)

This final exhibition/installation brings together a selection of works produced throughout the Research Project.

Sandhills Collection ARTWORK TITLES CD Image No. Description/Province/Story* Reference

62a 64ab Rivers flowing thru me Canvas, driftwood, ochre, acrylic, pastel 1996 4.5x ARTsong 1 3.5mtrs

110 ab BirthPlace now known as the ‘Butcher’s block’ Oxides, acrylic, ochre paints on canvas 1998 6.5x4mtrs ARTsong 2

Owning my own skins- not quite white, not quite Kangaroo skins, wooden coat hangers, 2001 6.5x2.5 right oil,acrylic, ochre rocks, cottons

ARTsong 3 Wisdom Bird cage and stand, acrylic,road kill, 2001 2.5x1x1m plate, driftwood, feathers, found objects

Mud map series:landlines and watermarks Clay, ochre, oil, acrylic, oxides, mud 2002

Parameters, significance and limitations of the research project

The decisions I made in producing the body of work for this project arose from my lived experience, guided by my aboriginality, and my training in both Aboriginal and Western traditional art forms.

Parameters of this project were continually re-defined by my artistic experiences relative to my ever-expanding land-centred frame of reference that prohibited the use of certain symbols and found objects because they were linked to the sacred. Artistic expression was also restrained by cultural protocols11 existing in the communities in which I practised. The availability of found objects, archival documents, historic souvenirs and relics such as birth certificates, guided the selection of areas for research.

My project articulates practical reconciliation in the narrative of visual language and adds new knowledge to the wider repository of historical knowledge about 12 Indigenous lives lived in Australia during the Howardian era. The project highlights indigenous stories by acknowledging spirituality and the ecological connections to ancestral spirit beings. Thus, this contemporary record intervenes in the white discourse of history and articulates a personal reflection that may have otherwise remained hidden.

This record provides an opportunity for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians to respond to the harsh realities explored in ARTsong 1 Land home place belong of a life-journey narrated in art. By discovering points of difference ARTsong 2 No more secrets, as well as identifying similarities audiences can

11 RGAQ Cultural Linkages (1994 p.3-5) QCAN Network News:Indigenous Copyright:Cultural and Intellectual Property (1998) and Nava www.visualarts.net.au 12 The researcher assumes two meanings for this term. The first is from the lived experience, as John Howard was an active member of the Liberal Party and establishing his political career when I was ‘taken away from my mother’. He continues to remain in a state of passive ignorance by not saying Sorry to the Stolen Generations. The second is from a community perspective which refers to Howard’s terms in office as Prime Minister of Australia.

witness first-hand how cultural traditions can be preserved through artistic techniques and themes that demonstrate how cultural and spiritual identities can be reclaimed, maintained and strengthened. Using multiple viewpoints, to convey information in a non-linear way, visual metaphors become a bridge to represent a diverse range of realities and to understand, validate and preserve a shared Australian heritage of a Stolen Generation of Indigenous children.

This bothways research project has been an instrument that facilitated my personal healing journey from a seemingly tragic story into a human story of hope. In healing much of the grief and loss associated with any displacement from indigenous relationships to land; the loss of family connections, relationships and ancestral beliefs; my continued search for my place and identity, now fuel rather than diminish my future vision. I claim then, that this project is centred on experiences of the Stolen Generation to effect a greater awareness of the causes of indigenous Australians disadvantage, (point five of the CAR plan), but the connotations of this project go beyond that to become a transformative critique of contemporary social and cultural history. It attempts to address points one, two, three, and four of the CAR plan.

The significance of this project is that it offers a way to ‘connect’ Australians in the shared process of reconciliation. Not only did many of my relatives reconnect because of this art, but also members of the public, Australians and international viewers were drawn into the unfolding story of Australian reconciliation. Janet Fountain, regional artist observed, ‘Pam Croft's work is very much about communication. If a shopping mall were appropriate to her message she would use it.’ (Flying Arts 1996 p.22).

Many limitations were encountered though only five are discussed. They are included here to highlight the value of the wider community supporting indigenous artists involved in reconciliation art. As has been shown in my journey

of ARTsongs, indigenous artists need time and support to allow their artistic work to keep pace with their feelings.

1) The inner healing process itself limited the pace at which I worked and the ‘content’ of my works. I was reluctant to disclose, even to myself, the source of the symbolism deeply embedded within the layers of the visual narratives of my artwork. As reconciliation healing progressed, I needed time and a safe place, to deal with my removal from my birth mother and the oppressive memories of growing up in an adopted community of Christian fundamentalists.13 In this childhood world every thought and action was measured against ‘The Bible’ and my life was governed by fear, shame and punishment. The healing recovery process of remembering and recording, the deconstructing and reconstructing parts of a damaged self, and the re-nurturing of self extended from days, months and into years. The courage to confront the traumas and begin the healing process through visual narrative was to discover a strength in my own voice that enabled me to speak out and own my past in ARTsong 3 Owning my own skins (2001). At the same time, meta-cognitive thinking about my practice continued throughout the duration of the project. At times the work stood still as the reconciliation of self progressed and as inner repressed and suppressed memories were interrogated. I chose not to produce work when I was consciously in a state of depression as my philosophy as a practitioner is to create artwork spontaneously conveying enthusiasm and openness of heart and mind. At times, the restricted access to and release of archival records by governments/ and authorities in the political climate of the Howardian Era slowed the production of works.

(2) The Howardian political context impacted on the content of this work which was produced during the time that Bringing Them Home, the Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

13 See Appendix 3 Fundamentalist World View As Remembered And Experienced.

Children and Their Families (1997) 14 was released. The validating of my experience triggered a confrontation within me that led to difficulties in communication and misunderstandings. I was confronted by many unresolved issues and traumas packed and locked away in my Soul cupboard (1997).15 The refusal of the Howard government to say Sorry for the thousands of Aboriginal children like myself who were taken from their families and given to whites to raise was a major stumbling block to the progression of my inner and outer reconciliation. (3) Geographic location greatly influenced my work. The Sandhills Studio16 where I work is on the perimeter of the small coastal village of Keppel Sands. On the

14 This Report is the outcome of the HREOC Inquiry. The Prime Minister, Mr Howard, continues to refuse to acknowledge our trauma and instead issued a limited statement of personal regret. 15 I have a cupboard in my soul. I had jammed it packed with secrets and tightly shut and locked the doors. With the acknowledgement that there was a Stolen Generation, many Australians wrote their apologies and dedicated a day to be Sorry. I was often confronted with a Sorry Book and asked if I would like to write something. I never did write but I did read and I did weep. Occasionally, I would disclose that I too was one of the Stolen Generation. With this disclosure came burdensome but well meaning care, questions and comments. The memories became overwhelming for my spirit and for my ancestors' spirits. When I was thirty I came to the conclusion that there would be no one that I could place blame onto for my loss. We, the people elect politicians into governments and governments make policies. What I know is when people say sorry from the heart, it gives hope to the heart and the healing journey can begin, for future Australian generations, for reconciliation. I know I let my guard down, I thought I might be able to trust again, I turned the key to my soul cupboard, wanting to trust and to share, and the door sprung open. I have been unable to close this door again as the white man's foot is jammed in there holding the door ajar. All my secrets are falling out, sometimes it feels as if people are laughing at my pain, dismissing me as nothing again and crushing my life of memories into dust. I've lost control and the memories are flooding my mind, my heart, my spirit. I am born of the Indigenous and of the coloniser. These two opposites which make up me, need to be allowed to harmonise. I have learned to nurture a safe environment for myself, my partner and my sons and I have learned the huge effort that it takes for all of us to be family - and that this is normal. Encourage diversity for the individual, for groups and for the whole populace. Take the journey to shift from the white dominant centre and understand, then acknowledge the privileges that whiteness brings within this society. Always remember that what makes you all Australians is the fact that you live on this land, with our ancestral spirits, and with our creation stories. Lastly, what makes you Australian, is in fact your interactions with us, the First Nation peoples of this land- in the past, now, and in the future. It is what makes you different from your ancestors whose spirits lie in other lands. We, are what helps to make you, Australian. It is what gives you belonging on and to this land.’(Croft cited in Mellor & Haebich 2002 p.225) Part 1:ARTsong 1 16 The Sandhills Studio is between Keppel Sands and Joskeleigh the most southern beach communities on the Capricorn Coast, 45klms out of Rockhampton, Darumbal country; Woppaburra waters. I chose to settle in Central Queensland in 1995 where The Sandhills Studio was established after completing a six month artist-in-residence at the Cite International des Arts in Paris, France. This is my paradise, a place that I had dreamed about all my life. A place where creativity is inspired by the landscape and its energy. A site where I can achieve peace, joy and

one hand the natural beauty of the coastal landscape influenced the ARTsong themes in my work; and the mangrove salt-water creeks here provided a resource to explore new techniques in the creation of monoprints. On the other hand, the isolation provided few opportunities to dialogue and interact face-to- face with other indigenous or mainstream artists. Access to university resources such as seminars, exhibitions and state-of-the-art computer facilities was also limited.

Because of the distance and associated costs, only one visit was made to my ancestral country at Kooma in South West Queensland17 for the purpose of the collection of research materials. The transportability and durability of artworks produced in the studio were considerations at all stages of the production as were the costs associated with the transportation of the works for exhibitions. Technologically based art forms such as digitalized imagery were not feasible without appropriate facilities. The lack of heavy machinery in my studio, the distance to a foundry, and the height of the ceiling meant that sculptures and assemblages were of limited size.

(4) Protocols also influenced the selection of themes under discussion. For example, respect for living persons/ families had to be considered. Matters of her heart18 discussed my deceased parents, and No more secrets19 included issues that involved aspects of other extended family members’ lived experience. The cultural knowledges that I had learned and experienced in the Northern Territory empowered me to make important cultural protocol choices regarding subject matter for the visual narratives that I create. Related to this is my belief in ecological integrity and the perfection of natural art forms. In practice, this meant that I chose not to kill anything for the production of art but had to wait for the inner fulfillment. The focus was to establish an artist studio/gallery space where I would continue to produce artwork, exhibit internationally, nationally, and regionally, and participate in consultancy and commission work to fund my exhibition program (Quoted from my artist talk delivered at a Rockhampton Business Women’s Breakfast 2000). 17 Images of ancestral country. CD-Part 1: ARTsong 2-image nos. 2,3,4 18 Matters of her heart. CD-Part 4: ARTsong 2

found gifts given by the universe. In this way I worked with nature rather than dominated it.

(5) The pace at which reconciliation was progressing in the wider community, and continued due to the divisions occurring over the ‘apology’ issue slowed reception of the work. This meant that a time lag existed in viewers understanding the themes of my Artsongs. For example, in 1993, Dianna Simmonds wrote for Arts and Review section, The Australian Bulletin,

Among other arresting works is Pamela Croft’s installation matters of her heart is more immediately heart-wrenching to the “Western” eye. Its focus is a weeping, torn and incomplete jigsaw of the artist’s face. Beside it, the neatly framed momentos and letters from her adopted childhood tell a harrowing story, made even more poignant by the final picture of a beaming Croft surrounded by her own smiling young sons (Simmonds 1993 p.82).

The article makes no reference to the Stolen Generation and yet at this time Aboriginal people were lobbying for a government inquiry. Since that time Matters of her heart (1993) has been in numerous exhibitions (1998 No more secrets Casula Powerhouse Sydney; 1997 Separation reunion reconciliation QUT Art Gallery Brisbane, Hand & Eye Noosa Regional Gallery; 1993 Telstra National Aboriginal Art Award Exhibition Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory Darwin and (1993) Mater Boulder Lodge Concepts Gallery, Brisbane). The responses in the gallery visitors’ books were positive. Six years later in 1999 (after the release of Bringing Them Home Report) Matters of her heart was acquired for the public domain by the National Museum of Australia in Canberra as a contemporary expression of reconciliation.

19 No more secrets invitation CD-Part 1:ARTsong 2 image no.6

PART 2 Methodology, theory and art practice

Reconciliation must be reaffirmed. The Australian nation needs to understand and accept the history of colonisation. I am not suggesting that we go on a guilt trip, but a trip of discovery and reparation, and concentrate on the things that unite us, rather than the things

that divide us (Lois O’Donoghue CBE AM Chairperson, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Yankuntjatjara woman cited in Yunupingu 1997 p.32).

The chosen methodology for this research project combines bothways or two- 20 way concept (incorporation of ‘old way’ and ‘new way’) of indigenous knowledges, which has emerged from post-secondary Indigenous education, with theories of a western action learning and research. The following discussion outlines my personal experience with the development and implementation of bothways philosophy and methodology, and describes the philosophical underpinnings of my healing journey through my art practice.

Queensland education in the 1980s included in its rhetoric the terms ‘cross- cultural’ and ‘culturally appropriate’ which involved identifying the need to improve indigenous participation in education levels. The development and implementation of ‘culturally inclusive curricula and culturally appropriate pedagogy was not only essential for maximising participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island students in education, but are essential to building a responsible and responsive country based on social justice, cultural inclusivity, cultural affirmation and equity’ (D’Cruz 1988 p.v). My experience as an Indigenous student, Student Support Officer for TAFE, Lecturer in the School of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies at TAFE, and Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology was that these concepts largely remained words with no pedagogical ‘reality’.

In my roles as indigenous educator and artist, I had to explore the possibility of the dual realities of ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘culturally appropriate’ education. On reflection, previous artistic themes (1980-1992) began to re-emerge and provided

the basis from which I began to investigate aspects of identity and aboriginality through explorations of the body image, marginality, femaleness and landscape using memory, lived experience; sites for spaces and objects to create visual 21 narratives. My works Duality...my story, my place (1989), Protector spirits of my 22 23 life (1990), Fish, fish come into the dish (1991) and The story line (1992), all produced before moving to the Northern Territory, foreshadowed bothways. The artistic investigative journeys where interactions were taking place between educator, learner and artist, formed a body of artwork which explored recurring concepts of ‘duality’. I first encountered the bothways practice in 1993 when I was

20 Bothways is the top end terminology whilst the central desert term is two-way. 21 Duality...my story, my place (1989) Gallerie Brutal, Brisbane. I wanted to portray the ambiguity that emerges within the concept of people and fashion:tribal stature and armour. The human form/mask became the site for decoration:projectors of images. The mannequin, ‘empty vessels’ represented armour:to protect the mind, soul, heart and the physical body; emotional suits of protection, barriers against intimacy; and disguises, allowing the ‘acting out’ of acceptable western behaviour and image. Unfortunately, the suits of armour proved to be more of an emotional prison than a protection. By using the armours, I had learnt to hide me: my identity; my traumas; my pain; and my vulnerability to others. Margo McClintock (1990 p.40) in the Eyeline:review writes ‘the mannequin pieces in the installation encapsulated and integrated opposing elements of fragility and strength, presence and absence, fragmentation and wholeness. Their construction in pieces, their hollowness, and lack of head and appendages was balanced by a solidity of structure and materials. These mute life-size figures were given a voice by small accretions on the metal form, or inclusions of fragments and tiny symbols from nature and culture, which are embedded in resin, like a fleeting gad-fly immortalised in a piece of amber. These works bring together the idea and fragmentation of female life and identity, and a sense of female experience as a creative one which is constantly working to weld the pieces together. Pam Croft’s experience manifests itself in her art as a quietly positive rather critical expression; a gentle force, but one that is not easily resisted.’ For non-Aboriginal peoples images are determined externally- rather than spiritually. For Aboriginal peoples who we are comes from within. The lino print with the same title was acquired and reproduced by the Queensland Government Housing Department for the World Indigenous Housing Conference in 1993. CD- Part 2: folder 1 22 Protector spirits of my life (1990); Fish, fish come into the dish (1991) was an exploration of the past; the effects of colonisation, and the shaping of identity and landscape. The installation designs narrated alternative spaces and sites for many stories about Aboriginal individuals and families for decolonising and reconciling our minds, hearts and spirits. In mapping the land, Aboriginal boundaries are organic and follow the landscape, while this dominating colonising society draws boundaries in straight lines and then builds fences to demonstrate ‘ownership’. Through surveying the landscape, I discovered the importance of the dreaming ancestors; hunting and gathering; ceremonies; beliefs and laws. I learned to understand the connection that Indigenous peoples associate with mother earth. These knowledges ignited a consiousness- raising awareness of the environment and how vital it is to our humanness. CD-Part 2:folder 2 & 3 23 The Story Line a collaborative project with Jill Barker for ARX3 (1992) in Western Australia included an installation produced in the Lawrence Wilson Gallery after site-specific work had been placed at either ends of the 9 bridges crossing the Swan river. CD-Part 2: folder 4

24 lecturing at Batchelor College in the Northern Territory. This philosophy was enacted in pedagogy based on:

a mixed mode of course delivery, that was designed not only to provide students with the opportunity to gain recognised and high quality vocational and academic qualification, but also to do this through programs that supported their respective Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture and language. All courses were designed to bring together diverse knowledge information, practices, values, language systems, from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island traditions as well as those from traditional educational cultures (Batchelor College cited in Dept. of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) 1999 p.22).

This is an evolving model that developed in the Northern Territory in the 1980’s as a response to Aboriginal people wanting ‘a way to insert indigenous values into a western educational framework’ (Baumgart, Halse, Philp, McNamara, Aston, Power 1995 p.19).

McConvell who heard the term used by Pincher Nyurrimiyarra, a Gurindgi elder, 25 at Daguragu, recorded the first documentation of the concept. Pincher and other Gurindji elders described their vision of two-way as a proposal for change:

[The] Australian education system should reflect a spirit of exchange between European Australians and Aborigines involved, in terms of equal power relations. There should be a two-way flow in reciprocity and recognition of equality; a two-way exchange of knowledge (Harris 1990 p.13) .

Harris (1990) who is also a lecturer in Aboriginal Studies, considers two-way Aboriginal schooling as one of the most important concepts in contemporary Aboriginal education. In theory, the concept is well described by Hughs and More as ‘the bothways position that focuses on compatible aspects of each domain

24 Batchelor College Bothways Philosophy:is reflected in all aspects of the college’s research and development profile and is a special feature of Batchelor College that cannot be found to any significant extent in any other TAFE, VET or higher education institution in Australia. Periods in the home community provide access to the experience and knowledge of the people of the community, to be reflected on within the course of studies. Other activities in the community include work experience, practicum, inquiry and research, assignment preparation instruction and conferencing with lecturers (DETYA 1999 p.22). The need to privilege Aboriginal research methodologies is recognised by other Indigenous academics and tertiary institutions who are engaged in an exploration for evolving Indigneous Methodological Approaches. 25 Also known as Wattie Creek.

(Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal [Western]). The bothways position accepts that it is necessary for some aspects of each domain to 'grow separately, but argues that in today’s world there also needs to be a growing together of some aspects of each domain’

(Hughes and More 1997 p.10).

At Batchelor College, in 1993, my role as an arts lecturer was to apply art as a cultural teaching tool within all courses offered and to teach art practices and methodology. The bothways philosophy and methodology were embedded into the curriculum design and the delivery mode of courses and lessons (maths, science, health, arts, media, language) and took place in a variety of teaching/ learning contexts which could facilitate a collaboration with the course teacher/s; in the student’s community or at the college. This process was the catalyst for recognising the connections between concepts of ‘cross cultural’ and ‘culturally appropriate’ as sites to enact the bothways philosophy. I became the teacher and the learner, as many of the students were custodians, the holders of ‘old way’ cultural knowledges and practices relating to the dreaming and ancestral country. I feel privileged to have experienced the exchange of cultural knowledges where I 26 learnt about lores and beliefs, kinships, protocols, responsibility, and 27 reciprocity.

The Going Home Conference held in Darwin during October 1994, preceded the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) Inquiry into the Forced Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their ’ families 28 where individuals and families recounted their painful memories often for the first time. The opportunity and my courage never arose to tell my story to

26 ‘Lore is defined as the body of traditional knowledge, based on the wisdom that comes from experience, and transmitted in practical teachings across generations’ (Atkinson 2001 p.44). Bothways acknowledges the co-existance of two laws/lores. 27 Reciprocity - in right relationship - brings both rights and responsibilities and is the principle that what is received must in some form be returned. Reciprocity is fundamental to the cultural integrity of Aboriginal peoples (Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr 1993 p.37). 28 The terms of reference for the HREOC Inquiry covered a wide range of issues. They were past practices and present effects of separation; the present services available to people affected by separation; current child welfare laws and practices and principles of compensation.

the HREOC but in the experiential context as teacher/learner, I heard other ‘removal of children’ stories and shared my story. All of these self-empowering experiences strengthened my bothways reality. Finally, after six years of artistic deliberation, I found the courage to share my journey through the installation

Matters of her heart (1993) in the public domain. I had found ways to honour self and realised that the bothways system was a site for reconciliation.

My next experiential development with bothways philosophy was in 1994 as the Head of the Department for Higher Education and Cultural Community Development at the Institute for Aboriginal Development (IAD) in Alice Springs. My personal challenge was to adopt a two-way management style that provided a strong but flexible leadership that worked within the context of cultural community development. The variety of competency training courses delivered by the staff of my department included the Associate Diploma of Business (Aboriginal Organisations Management); the Certificate in Vocational Studies (Aboriginal Organisations); Train the Trainer; Cultural Community Development courses which specifically included numeracy and literacy initiatives; and offered university courses in ‘external study mode’.

At that time, IAD was in the process of restructuring to meet the requirements for competency-based training accreditation and identified the need to locate a western methodology that would successfully incorporate a two-ways philosophy. There was also a wide variation of course outcomes, individual students and their cultural groups to be taken into account. The National Aboriginal Education Committee (NAEC) argued in 1985 that ‘emphasis should be placed on action- orientated research relevant to the needs of Aboriginal people as defined by Aboriginal people’, (NAEC 1985 p.35-46; Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody 1991 p.330) My experience at Batchelor College was that action-orientated learning (including art as a teaching tool) was an effective methodology in ‘cross- cultural’ settings and dealt effectively with cultural differences. Action learning and research was the culturally appropriate methodology that TAFE was

promoting nationally for Competency-Based Training Frameworks29 and ‘best practice’. For these reasons IAD chose to implement a two-way action learning and research methodology within its structure and frameworks.

The restructuring process began within my department with the development of a teachers manual based on bothways and professional development training for the Institute staff. Although no artwork was produced during this year, my experience of two-way action learning was an empowering process which reshaped my self-image. As the philosophy became embedded within my everyday life experience the realisation of my identity began to unfold for I was born of both the indigenous and the immigrant coloniser.

The bothways methodology parallels the idea of a particularly action-orientated paradigm espoused by cultural theorist, Frederic Jameson’s (1991) account of the operations of late capitalism. Essentially, Jameson argues that with the demise of the class system, capitalism has evolved in accordance with the values of emergent power groups based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference and disability. As the prolifically published black American academic bell hooks observed, ‘systems are maintained by all of us who internalise and enforce their values’ (hooks 1995 p.6). Thus the bothways system is best described as action learning and research that builds critical thinking and confidence through action- reflection-understanding-action. Therefore it is a politically active paradigm and well suited as a basis for art practice.

29 For further reference see TAFE National Staff Development Committee (1993) A National Action Learning Scheme for CBT Practitioners; Vocational Education, Employment and Training Advisory Committee (VEETC) (1993) Framework for the Implementation of A Competency-Based Vocational Education and Training System; VEETAC Competency Based Training:How to do it for trainers (1993); VEETAC (1994) Competency Standards Assessors; Australian Committee for Training Curriculum (1994) National Framework of Adult English Language, Literacy and Numeracy Competence.

This project demonstrates that bothways methodology contributes a practical methodology for realising the aims of the key issues of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) charter which is ‘about building a new relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the wider community-one that heals the pain of the past and ensures Australians share fairly and equally in our national citizenship' (CAR 1997 p.3).

My claims are that bothways methodology allows the incorporation of the cultural domains of Aboriginal and Western; the lived experience as the other; and, this is well suited to my practice as visual artist and educator/ learner. Further, this project is evidence that bothways philosophy, in partnership with action-oriented learning and research, can fulfil the requirements for a political aesthetic in terms of what Hal Foster claims for bricolage. For Foster (1985 p.201), bricolage is ‘a resistant operation, by which the other might appropriate the forms of the modern capitalist west and fragment them with indigenous ones in a reflexive, critical montage of synthetic contradictions. Similar operations to bricolage are advocated as appropriate methodologies in indigenous scholarship. Bungalung woman, historian, and academic, Dr. Wendy Brady, argues for the recognition of ‘different knowledge bases, and [is] a process for valuing the differences and ’ incorporating them into the dominant cultural groups (1992 p.6). Equally, McTaggart sees bothways as ‘two parallel educational processes, aboriginal and western which are directed towards resolving antagonisms and working out ways in which they can be mutually supportive’ (McTaggart 1991 p.302). The relevance for bricolage in this project is discussed in part three in terms of bothways.

Methodological strategies, processes and techniques

Four strategies were employed: archival documentation, documenting my story, the trial and feedback process, and reflexive approach.

The archival documentation investigation in ARTsong 2 included searching records held with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra); the John Oxley Library (Brisbane); the State Archives of Queensland; the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Queensland); and the Department of Family Services and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Affairs (Brisbane). I had anticipated that relevant information could be retrieved from government archives but this avenue proved ineffective. Retrieving archival information turned into a disappointing, painful and lengthy process that afforded insignificant information. For example, information collected from the Queensland Department of Family Services archival records relating to my ‘removal of children’ story only confirmed that I had been ‘placed into care’. This situation re- oriented the research process away from external sources towards self-reliance on internal memory and personal artefacts. This will be discussed in detail in part 3 to inform the reader of the variety of strategies I found useful in the process of testing my hypothesis that visual art can be a site for reconciliation, an educational experience, a tool for healing and a political act.

Another avenue pursued was to participate in the documenting of my story with the National Library of Australia for the Bringing Them Home: oral history 30 project. This involved six hours of recording with a highly trained recordist. My words were later transcribed into a document. My participation in this process

30 In December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of the Bringing Them Home Report the Commonwealth Government allocated $1.6 million to the National Library to collect and preserve a substantial range of stories from Indigenous people and others involved in the process of child removals. The recording of these oral histories is crucial to documenting a significant period of Australia’s history and making it available as a public record. The process of recording and the oral histories themselves, can play an important part in healing and

raised my self-esteem and enabled me to speak my truth through memory. In this way my own being was affirmed as a legitimate bearer of historical truth for the national archives, and publicly acknowledged by the inclusion of my artworks and quotes in the publication Many Voices: reflections on experiences of Indigenous child separation.

In the beginning stages of this research I began to realise that due to the confusion and frustration that I was experiencing, it would be important to establish survival strategies. As Maori academic Dr. Smith asserts ‘engagement of culturally diverse minority group members in a foreign/ alien education system often necessitates the use of cultural adaptations and survival mechanisms' (cited in Andrews & Hughes 1988 p.32).

The trial and feedback process – SIDEtracks (Table pgs.15-23) became an essential strategy throughout the project for implementing cultural reciprocity through community cultural development principles which, in turn, provided opportunities for:

• examining specific lines of study relating to both the artistic and theoretical processes and concepts;

• promoting the implementation of bothways action-orientated method;

• contemplating theory further, to develop creative practice and processes;

• evolving new alternative visions, by using indigenous spiritual values and traditions as ways for ‘alternative approaches to social problems and human services, such as health, alcohol, housing and justice issues' (Ife 1995 p.61); and

reconciliation, and in helping Australians to understand their history (Bringing Them Home 1999).

• acknowledging aboriginal cultural beliefs of reciprocity informing the bothways worldview.

A final strategy was to incorporate a reflexive approach into bothways methodology, making theoretical enquiry essential for critical practice. ‘Reflexivity is thinking about thinking and the agent, context, doing the thinking. It involves questioning critically the assumptions and implications of your ideas and theories’ (Ramos-Poqui and Rodway 1995 p.5).

On reflective practice, Schon (1983) proposes storytelling as an effective genre for the translation of research back into practice. Storytelling discloses relevant themes, rather than theories. Storytelling both facilitates and actively promotes a transformation of the ARTsong themes into a specific situational context. It is in this sense that stories themselves represent design knowledge. ‘The value of design inquiry is as a contextual and situated engagement with practice. It is a means for grounding research in practice’ (Taylor 1992 p.9).

Bothways perspective is that both understanding and action (or theory and practice) belong together. Bothways worldview is that

theory, practice, knowledge, science, and actions are conceptualised. The essence of praxis is that one is involved in a constant cycle of doing, learning and critical reflection, so that each informs the others and so that the three effectively become one. It is from such a process that both theory and practice are built, at the same time (Ife 1995 p.161). bell hooks describes this notion as ‘teaching to transgress’ which suggests ‘a movement against and beyond boundaries, one which is reciprocal and continual' (hooks 1994 p.12). Praxis is more than simply action. It is critical reflection and analysis to derive understanding, learning and theory building. The more conventional approach assumes that from understanding we derive action.

To integrate theory and visual narratives, the following research actioning processes were undertaken: - the gathering of materials and personal artefacts (photographs, letters, archival records, family documents, and salvaged objects);

locating and collecting oral and written material from personal and community sources (history stories, language, and maps illustrating landforms, boundaries, sites, property stations, and towns); and collating and sequencing events of written and oral information (memories, experiences, stories, personal and archival documentation, found objects).

I travelled to locations around Australia where significant personal events occurred; my grandmother’s ancestral country, Kooma in South West Queensland in search of cultural stories and family connections; for gathering and collecting materials and information unavailable in my region. The many plane journeys presented the opportunity for mapping landscape from the air, visually and mentally. It is at these moments when I reflect on my eagle totem and note how ‘eagle’ my thinking and actions are sometimes. Travel played a part in the self-definition process, to experience cultures and discover their points of difference as well as shared similarities in culture and traditions of peoples. My worldview adjusted as opportunities arose to experience diverse cultures from many countries within Australia and throughout the world.

Bothways included a variety of combinations of both Aboriginal and Western communication cultural tools (art and storytelling), processes, techniques and strategies which were actioned throughout the project demonstrating how ‘to show compatibility of, by argument or in practice’ (Oxford 1990 p.1003). This included a complexity of ideas, matter, form and theory which is central to my practice. Woven within the visual narrative constructs is interpretations of the multilayered context of life. All of the ARTsongs were created from memories and lived experiences. They revealed layers of cultural texts within socio-cultural heritage, and described language and ideology embedded within landscapes and environments-spaces and sites of stories, tracks, and memories.

The process for creating the visual narrative can be best described as action (production of artworks)-reflection and understanding (SIDEtracks: exhibitions and projects)-action (production of artworks).

Visual art as a positive alternative educational experience and tool for healing

My body of work falls within the general practice of intermedia, installation, and more generally, political activism. The artworks are a multiple of viewpoints. Some are, as Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, (Ryan 1997 p.10) Ngukurr community elder and painter, stated about his work, ‘same story different way’, narratives which have created a diary of memories, a province of all my cultural experience. In a similar way, the specific object of the research is to make sense and document my everyday world, my spiritual healing journey and confronting and it in its complexity. The contexts for the ARTsongs are communication sites, environments in which to convey bothways meaning and reconciliation. The installation sites are spaces for mapping out explicit or implicit, overt or covert aspects of bothways cultural identity and placement in a visual language.

Central to bothways philosophy is the spiritual dimension, a space where the sacred and spiritual transcend all of life, providing a framework for understanding connectedness for human interaction and community experiences. The central framework for understanding indigenous spirituality is connecting to the dreaming as expressed in one’s connection to the land. Spirituality is an essential part of Aboriginal community development.

The western framework of Community Cultural Development is compatible with a bothways philosophy and methodology, as it facilitates and promotes spirituality and cultural diversity. This model is taken up in SIDEtracks and discussed in part 5 as the trial and feedback process.

In a bothways context, ‘communication and culture are not separate entities or areas, but are produced through a dynamic relationship with each other' (Schirato & Yell 1996 p.2). The dreaming ceremonies described a primarily oral world of storytelling and art, which continue to be an inseparable part of our everyday life. The communication tools for expressing and experiencing our spirituality included the use of intermedia and mixed media for performance, dance, visual arts and body painting, song and music, through de/contextualised praxis, communicating directly and passing on knowledges from the narrator to listener in ways that often seem indirect and difficult to the western domain. Now, included in our habits of thinking and ways of taking action is reading and writing, a part of colonial domination (Mudrooroo 1997; Miller 1989; Bal 1997).

Incorporated into a land-centred philosophy and bothways methodology is the notion of art as a source of knowledges and insights about the world. This is a similar notion to the hermeneutic and semiotic ideas used in western art. The hermeneutic tradition of critical philosophy recognises

that all perception, reasoning, selection and judgement in art, ethics, politics, and science, is a circular process or construction. We bring what we see. In other words, how we interpret information, visual data, the world; depends on the beliefs or theories, assumptions, interests, values, education, culture, informing our world view (Ramos-Poqui & Rodway 1995 p.4).

Feminist authors Alexander (1993) and Mohanty (1987) believe that, decolonisation involves individuals thinking out of the spaces of domination, but always within the context of a collective or communal process. This thinking “out of” colonisation happens only through action and reflection, through praxis as social transformation cannot remain at the level of ideas, it must engage practice. Munslow (1997 p.67) also suggests ‘the impact of the deconstructive consciousness means questioning historical interpretation as an objective avenue to the past exploring the explanatory or story-telling power of narrative'.

The visual narrative approach was used to facilitate the artist’s memory of lived experience; to promote an understanding of the present context of aboriginal

lives in relationship to non-aboriginal lives; and to share concepts for moving forward toward reconciliation. It included the documentation of an aboriginal perspective exploring possibilities of developing new alternative sites for personal and community reconciliation, telling remembered stories of the lived experience. ‘The term ‘experiences’ incorporates the notion of interplay between feelings and circumstance,’ (Woods & Hammersley 1977 p.188) and a relationship between memory and history where past, present and future are interconnected. The central concept of aboriginal life is the notion of spiritual continuity of the ancestral past, the present and the future (Stanner 1979 p.24-27; Reynolds 1987 p.225/236; Berndt & Berndt 1988 p.227-300). As Cheryl Robinson, Kooma woman and visual artist argued ‘I cannot look forward to the future without connecting it to the present and the past. I travel back to the past to know the present and to visualise what the future may be’ (Robinson 1997 p.25). Furthermore, memory or reflecting connects us to the relationship between time and space.

The ARTsong themes, installations and artworks were exposition ‘sites’ to publicly reveal insights into the ‘secret’ colonial history experienced and known by indigenous Australian individuals and their families, by exposing a ‘reality’ of how colonising policies, specifically the ‘removal of children under the 31 assimilation policy’ have impacted on aboriginal people who continue to suffer as a result of past and current policies implemented within Australia. As Andrew Lattas suggests, reclaiming memories and recreating the past history is a way of ‘formulating an uncolonised space to inhabit an ‘alternative’ space from which to reflect

31 The policy of assimilation (1950s-1960’s) means that ‘Aboriginies and part Aborigines will attain the same manner of living as other Australians and live as members of a single Australian community enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other Australians’ (Commonwealth Parlimentary Papers 1963). As Bird states (1998 p.11-14) ‘the objective of all this activity was to absorb the Indigenous children into white society, to force them to forget and deny their Aboriginal heritage and blood, and to bring about, within a few generations, a form of breeding-out of all Indigenous characteristics.’ Anna Haebich author of Broken Circles (2000) writes ‘the children would be assimilated in non-Aboriginal family homes through holiday, fostering or adoption’. Assimilation as a policy was offensive and divisive.

upon terms of present existence’ (Brewster 1996 p.254) and points to the ‘need to create new mythic narratives for regaining and healing the lost side of one’s being’ (Brewster 1996 p.257).

My memory of lived experience evoked ‘a past where I was dislodged from my space by colonisers who [dominantly] occupied it, a past in which they did not yield’ (Bal 1997 p.137). The historian, Munslow (1997 p.43) suggests that ‘memory is our written history, ‘an act of vision’ of the past but, as an act, situated in the present of the memory which serves as the social function of keeping a truthful social, political and economic memory'. The visual narratives were constructs for rethinking representations of past experience and unavoidably meant rethinking history.

Furthermore, the American historian J.H. Hexter (1968 p.623) believes that ‘history is a narrative reconstruction of the past that can objectively reveal what actually happened’ where on the other hand, Foucault (1950-1980) and Hayden White’s (1978) view of history was not about factual discovery but about the literary and textual creation of knowledge for the purpose of the exercise of power, or to counter such exercise as a form of literary dissent. Whilst exploring the relationship between the past and narrative form, Foucault (1980 p.122) stated ‘there cannot be one history but there must be any number of histories of exclusion (the marginalized or other), inclusion (the accepted as normal) and transgression (normal becoming abnormal)’ and he describes the social construction of reality as the power/ knowledge equation. French cultural critic Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) and Foucault both agreed that narrative is about the exercise of power. In summary, these philosophical views recognised the importance of a narrative explanation in our lives. In documenting a narrative reconstruction of the past the reality of everyday life positions history as a ‘literary artefact’. There are many different stories to be told about the same events, the same past. Therefore, continually exploring and redefining the relationship between ourselves and the past, helps us to understand and accept more fully that we are not detached observers of the past, but participants in its creation from our unique perspectives.

At the beginning of this new millennium, the personal and communal 32 reconciliation ‘unfinished business’, for the eight key issues identified in the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation strategic plan outlined in the introduction of this exegesis remain incomplete. The sets of relationships and connections 33 surrounding ‘treaty’ and ‘sorry’ remain unfulfilled in the Howardian era.

In August 1996 the Governor-General, Sir William Deane, speaking at the inaugural Lingari Lecture at the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in Canberra stated: True reconciliation between the Australian nation and its Indigenous peoples is not achievable in the absence of acknowledgement by the nation of the wrongfulness of the past dispossession, oppression and degradation of the Aboriginal peoples. That is not to say that individual Australians who had no part in what was done in the past should feel or acknowledge personal guilt. It is simply to assert our identity as a nation and the basic fact that national shame, as well as national pride, can and should exist in relation to past acts and omissions, at least when done or made in the name of the community or with the authority of government (Bird 1998 p.3).

This visual art project continually focused on those aspects of the domains (Aboriginal and Western) which are compatible, endeavouring to develop a new alternative visual language to ‘open our mind, heart and spirit so we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions' (hooks 1994 p.12). The theory of narratology is when ‘narratives,

32 The end of the millennium was quickly approaching marking the end of the Australian governments Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation initiative. In 2001, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission (ATSIC) released a document Treaty lets get it right (2001 p.13) which identified ‘unfinished business’ relating to the 8 key issues of the Council’s strategic plan. Aden Ridgeway, Executive Director, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council states ‘A treaty between indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of a country typically involves an agreement, usually concerning the sharing of land and other resources between the groups and recognising a range of indigenous rights. For there to be a treaty between indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of a country there needs to be recognition of the rights of the indigenous peoples. There is no treaty between any of the Aboriginal peoples and the European invaders of Australia and there never has been one.’ (cited in Yunupingu 1997 p.63) 33 The Editor of the stolen children:their stories writes:‘We saw, to our shame, the Prime Minister, John Howard, refuse to apologise on our behalf to Indigenous people for their tragedy and sorrow, and we saw and registered, in fact felt, the shock that this refusal caused to Indigenous people. Some of the state premiers, local councils and churches have apologised, expressing a profound regret and great sorrow, but the statement of apology from the Federal Government remains unsaid,’ (Bird 1998 p.5) for the occurance of the Stolen Generation.

narrative texts, images, spectacles, events, and cultural artefacts ‘tell a story’ (Bal 1997 p.3). This notion is compatible with both domains which inform the bothways worldview. The visual narratives selected for this research positioned stories within social and cultural paradigms demonstrating the interactions between the two domains. Included was an examination of cultural issues, ideologies, and historical contexts which informed the creation of new alternative constructions of binaries, or pairs of terms as ideologies which could circulate in Australian culture to create a reconciled notion of community (Miller 1989).

In summary, this section has mapped out the individual and community relationships and connections to promote possible new alternative ways where visual art can be an educational experience and a tool for healing. The next section explores the notion that visual art can be an educational experience.

Visual Art as an Educational Experience - processes and techniques The mapping of visual art as an educational experience, occurred in ARTsong 1- Land home place belong.34 This work was completed as part of my Masters project and formed the basis of an upgrade to the doctoral program. I want to briefly explain how an understanding of storytelling, reciprosity, praxis and community, gleaned from teaching activities, forms the basis for ARTsong two and ARTsong three.

As Bronwyn Fredericks commented in the exhibition catalogue for land home place belong: ‘Story is one of the unique ways of Aboriginal education in both teaching and learning. It is in the story that there is made a place for honouring of self, family, community, place, nature and spirituality’ (Fredericks 1997 p.3).

Aboriginal people use storytelling as a vehicle for cultural maintenance, for transmitting knowledges and memories; and for passing on cultural beliefs and values. Sharing is ‘a two-way process, with each learning from, and valuing, the other’s

34 See Appendix 5 Land home place belong exhibition catalogue.

experience, expertise and wisdom’ (Ife 1995 p.160). Dr Ife states, ‘the critical relationship of Aboriginal people to the land and Aboriginal understandings of spirituality and the sacred are fundamentally different from those of non-Aboriginal people, and pervade all aspects of Aboriginal society and community’ (1995 p.161). Maintaining our land-centred culture continues to be a critical issue for indigenous community development.

The social action of communication is to exchange knowledge and to inform and educate. Liberalist communication theorists argue that to communicate is ‘to empower members of communities to shape the discourse of their groups rather than to be passively shaped by the discourses of those controlling the production and distribution of knowledge’ (Roundy Blyler & Thralls 1993 p.15) The ‘old way’ for aboriginal learning was primarily to benefit the group, clan or community not necessarily the individual. Now, in contemporary society we share stories in the public domain to reconcile and unite communities. ‘The distinction between theory and practice has been a core component of the mechanistic, Western Cartesian world view’ (Capra 1982; Rifkin 1985 p.230), but the bothways paradigm seeks to emphasise their compatibility of theory and practice rather than their difference as an alternative.

Praxis is an integral strategy in art practice and life generally. This project endeavours to explain the positive personal and communal shifts towards inclusive processes and practices for progressing towards reconciliation. It involves praxis that sits ‘outside the parameters’ of ‘normal’ Western educational thinking and ‘teaches about shifting paradigms’. On reflection, Batchelor College and the Institute for Aboriginal Development mirrored bell hooks (1994 p.21) description of empowering educational environments: ‘places where teachers grew and were empowered by the process’. Ife (1995 p.98) notes that ‘Indigenous peoples make an important contribution not only in terms of alternative values and world views, but also in terms of the experience of struggle and change’. My lived experience as an aboriginal student and lecturer, prior to living in the Northern Territory, accorded with bell hooks’ description of ‘teaching to trangress’, crossing the boundaries of

narrow Western styles which often reflect the notion of a single reality of thought and experience, often theorising practice without ever knowing or possessing the terms (hooks 1994). This negative personal experience of academia was a catalyst for locating and demonstrating through my practice, other choices and options for communicating and exchanging knowledges available to me as an educator.

Freire (1972) and Ife (1995) promote consciousness-raising as an effective strategy to support community growth and development. As Dr. Ife argues:

Community development must incorporate strategies of consciousness-raising and of ensuring that the voices of the oppressed are heard, acknowledged and valued. The wisdom of indigenous peoples, have shown how it is possible to live in harmony with the natural environment. Aboriginal people have provided their meeting of basic human needs through essentially community-based social, economic and political structures. Incorporated into values, social structures and cultural traditions are the major components of community development (Ife 1995 p.96) .

Two community contexts exist in contemporary aboriginal society, as Ife identified when writing about Australia, ‘one is the case of indigenous communities, where the community members are all or predominately indigenous people and the community itself is thus identified, and the other is the case of indigenous people belonging to a community along with people of other cultural backgrounds' (Ife 1995 p.156). The visual concepts and narratives of my lived and working experience include stories from both of these community contexts.

35 Ife (1995 p.131-178) positions four components within the community development context; ….preserving and valuing local culture, preserving and valuing indigenous culture, multi- culturalism and participatory culture (Ife 1995 p.158).

This involves a complex process that include:

Integrated community development or social development; economic development; political development; cultural development; environmental development and personal/ spiritual development. Underlying the approach are twenty-two principles which include integrated development; confronting structural disadvantage; human rights; sustainability; empowerment; the personal and the political; community ownership; self-reliance; independence for the ‘state’; immediate goals and ultimate visions; organic development;

35 See Appendix 6 Cultural Community Development model.

the pace of development; external expertise; community building; process and outcome; the integrity of process; non-violence; inclusiveness; consensus; co-operation; participation; and defining need. In this contemporary society rebuilding community structures is one of the highest priorities for the future (Ife 1995 p.15).

My professional affiliation and commitment to personal and community cultural development began in the late 1980’s as a founding member of Goolwar Aboriginal Arts Organisation in Brisbane which was administered under the umbrella of Queensland Community Arts Network (QCAN). My experience of bothways methodology was positive in enabling participants, in developing more holistic and organic systems which presented community with alternatives to the existing order. ‘The primary aim of the western community cultural development strategy was to legitimate and strengthen indigenous cultures, through an effective empowerment strategy which enables indigenous peoples to have genuine control over their own community and their own destiny’ (Ife 1995 p.61). Currently, I hold the elected regional representative position on the QCAN management committee which continues to enrichen my understanding of community development.

QCAN defines community cultural development as:

…an ongoing cultural practice engaging with principles of social justice. It opens creative spaces for communities to build new knowledges about themselves and involves opportunities to collectively shape the future. The process of defining and developing one’s own understanding of community cultural development actually mirrors the practice: it is an ongoing process constantly informed by conversation, analysis and reflection, by reaching out beyond the familiar and comfortable and above all, by a commitment to engage with people and communities. Community cultural development share practices common to other sectors: practices which sustain, refresh and enliven one’s work such as keeping the self informed through attending conferences, undertaking internet and library research and networking with other practitioners (QCAN 2001 p.4).

Community Cultural Development is a vital process for developing networks and embracing new alternative ideas, and appropriate as a methodology for reconciliation.

Visual art as a healing tool - processes and techniques

Whenever illness is associated with loss of soul, the arts emerge spontaneously as remedies soul medicine. The medicine of the artist, like that of the shaman, arises from his or her relationships to ‘families’ -the themes, methods and materials that interact with the artist through the creative process (McNiff 1992 p.1).

The following discussion maps the connectedness of visual narrative and healing. The power of narrative art as a healing tool only became apparent to the artist during the discovery of self-identity which continued to occur for the duration of the research journey. The visual narratives concentrated on understanding my own subjectivity, location and community and provided spaces and ‘sites’ for the artist to reveal, map and reconstruct creatively, a more coherent image of self. The self-discovery journey is similar to seeing myself through a viewfinder, focusing and refocusing, trying to reconcile my split dual image. The research uncovered stories of self, while at the same time, through the release of the Bringing Them Home Report, the national community was acknowledging and validating my stories.

Looking back, I remember the many instances when I have been very ill. I believe that subconsciously I manifested my physical collapse again, to force myself to stop, and to think about what I was achieving and for whom. This is my pattern when my instincts overpower me, when the struggle to survive becomes so great. The more I gave, the more out of balance my body and life had become. This time my mental illness and healing journey enabled me to sever the emotional ties which bound and encased me. I found a different perspective during that time and have been able to move forward. Slowly, over the next two years I identified issues and continued on a painful yet releasing journey to redefine who I was and who I am. This healing journey is represented in ARTsong 3 Owning my own skins.

Another self-discovery was the aspect of art during my life. Childhood memories came flooding back. The bedroom that I had been allocated as a ‘child in care’ 36 was my adopted father’s art studio. I would live with his materials and their smells and watch him for hours in this room where he would meditate on the Bible or draw and paint with watercolours. These memories are the ones that fill me with love. The only times my adopted father and I was trusting and close, was when we worked artistically together. As an only child, my imaginary game was to ‘play galleries’ with his artwork. In my teens, we practised understanding issues of colour, light/ shade, perspective and balance, through the use of the camera. I was allowed to share the shelved, ceiling to floor cupboard which included his artworks. My cupboard installation was similar in concept to the Queensland Museum and Art Gallery at Petrie Terrace in Brisbane that I was often allowed to visit during school holidays. Later, when I began my art degree, we would sit for hours and he would share his art knowledge of colour by demonstrating with the colour wheel chart or while mixing colours.

This study journey while sorting and collating personal salvaged artefacts, connected me to memories, reflections of childhood, where I recognised that I had been creating visual text since my childhood. I began to recognise that what my adopted father had ‘gifted’ me was the relationship with an art making passion for seeking to understand and develop through the creative experience. I had never realised these experiences shared with my adopted father had greatly influenced my own artistic practice. He discussed colour, design elements, perspective, some of Australia’s art history, understanding of construction and I learned how to use tools and machinery; to paint small and large areas for commercial design, for interior design, and the flotilla displays for the Warana festival. He shared his artistic techniques and mixed media ‘recipes’ for achieving different techniques.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years I was too fearful to speak and reveal the pain that I held in my heart so I began to create memories as visual narratives to console myself, and to separate from the pain, the hatred, the abuse, and loneliness that seemed to continually engulf me. The narrative process continues to provide a ‘freedom of speech’, a way to step outside my boundaries, to talk about feelings, and to disclose secrets. Since beginning my professional practice, my artist statements have always referred to visual stories. For as far back as my memories take me, the production of visual narratives has been personally cathartic and therefore, a useful therapeutic tool for healing.

Professor Ian Anderson, Director of the Victorian Koori Health Community Development Unit states:

The era of assimilation colonialism has had tragic consequences for significant numbers of Aboriginal people. In responding to this, we must not only meet our therapeutic and rehabilitative needs, we also need to develop strategies which undermine those forms of representations which deny our ability to develop identities which are both coherent and sustaining (Anderson 1994 p.121-122).

Knowledge is power and so is keeping secrets or revealing them. Imparting or sharing knowledge is an educational experience, an act of power. The visual narratives reclaimed individual and communal stories by retelling history using subjugated knowledge. ‘The personal need for members of the Stolen generation to remain anonymous is yet another tragic element in this deep, vast tale of pain and sorrow that is a central part of the story of our country' (Bird 1998 p.8). As a researcher, connections were made to the relationships between art, education and healing. The narrative ‘sites’ were organised around different issues and themes to provide explanations, multiple meanings, understanding and acceptance. On reflection, memories and retelling through creating visual narrative became an important process of ‘truth’ through memory that leads to empowerment and self-esteem and to personal healing and reconciliation. As a result, the communication of knowledges can reconcile and empower aspects of self and community identity.

36 My adopted father in his studio. CD-PART2: folder 5

In writing about autobiography, Rainer (1998 p.14), argues that ‘for although, therapy is seen as a healing science and autobiography as a literary form, there have always been intimate links between psychotherapy and the restorative powers of personal narrative'. Many members of the stolen generation ‘were telling their stories for the first time, unleashing a torrent of emotional pain. For those people it was vitally important that their stories, once told, would be “out there” and part of history' (Schnierer & Fisher 1995). The recording of my personal history and the visual narrative constructs were strategies for overcoming my intense fear of public exposure. The journey for this art reconciliation study has developed clear sight and vision to continue to seek alternatives for change with ‘a peaceful warrior’s heart’ (Hazelhurst 1994 p.128). This is now my challenge for the future.

It is now on public record, that the effects of Australian government policies throughout the history of colonisation, has meant that grief and loss are a constant presence in aboriginal people’s lives, and stems from the long history of dispossession and genocide, the forced removal of children, deaths in custody, ill health and suicide. Narrative construction ‘is used in cultural studies, where cultural memory, documented in mostly narrative and text forms, generates empowerment by renewing the actual world of experiences’ (Bal 1997 p.xiv and Rainer 1998 p.14). New understandings lead me to creating alternative spaces and sites for reconciliation which could provide solutions for both personal and community healing and reconciliation. I continued to find hope and renewal for my spirit and thus continued my journey of healing.

The researcher does not intend to explore ‘art therapy’ through quantitative analysis but rather, focused on a personal case study toward the human experience of trauma with an approach to ‘seek a deeper understanding of the trauma through stories or narrative accounts of life experiences’ (Root 1992 p.229).

Similarly to bothways, ‘feminist theory, positions personal testimony and personal experience, as a fertile ground for the production of libertory theory because it usually

forms the base for theory making’ (bell hooks 1994 p.70). Lyotard (1984) in ‘The Postmodern Condition’ describes narrative as a kind of self-legitimisation whereby constructing storytelling according to a certain set of socially accepted rules and practices establishes the speaker’s or writer’s authority within their society, and acts as a mutual reinforcement of that society’s self-identity.

This bothways research investigation continued to map a visual narrative approach for this study as it enables and assists people to develop exceptions to the dominant western story into an alternative which provided the context to explore meaning and contemporary ways for living and thinking.

Aboriginal people in a variety of contexts have identified the ‘narrative’ approach as offering the possibility for culturally sensitive and appropriate counselling practices. This approach uses ‘external conversations’ which make it possible for people to experience an identity that is distinct or separate from the problem (Dunwich Centre Newsletter 1995 p.18).

‘Traumatic events often disrupt the capacity to comprehend and experience them at the time of their occurrence. As a result the traumatized person cannot remember them; instead, they recur in bits and pieces, in nightmares, and can not be ‘worked through. The incapacity that paralyses the traumatized person can be situated on both story and texts levels. The events can be so incongruous that no elements can be ‘recognised’ as ‘logical’ enough to make sense, at the moment of occurrence’ (Bal 1997 p.137).

The visual narratives allow the viewer to gain access to the conceptual and contextual world, sharing experiences, allowing both to construct a world of meaning from their own separate realities (Crolty 1996).

In aboriginal culture when someone is talking, we listen to hear his or her thoughts and feelings. It is in this way that our stories continue to live day by day. Storytelling has always been an important part of our culture and so is listening. The uncovering of repressed or forgotten memory into visual narratives are productions of history as a cultural text. As bell hooks (1995 p.19) states ‘declaring the existence of subjugated knowledges, recognising the ways in which ‘western’ dominant culture can impose stories on people that negates them of their history and preferred ways of being'. As members of the Stolen Generations we are demonstrating how ‘memory has healing power’ (hooks 1995 p.94) which can

help to identify ways in which we can reclaim and strengthen our capacity to heal the effects of injustice, pain and loss.

This project is the evidence that theory and practice can become a location for healing. The visual narrative text (art stories) becomes a tool for remembering, reclaiming and healing, empowerment as a process of renewal for wellbeing and wisdom. Visual texts are about the importance of making links and connections; about relationships between the personal and the political; between aboriginal ecological beliefs and social justice stories, and between alternative visions for local and global perspectives, and not thinking about structures or processes in isolation. My experience is that it is essential that we live out what we affirm in our daily lives.

Part 3 Visual art as a political act

In the telling we assert the validity of our own experiences and we call the silence of two hundred years a lie. And it is important for you, the listener, because like it or not, we are part of you. We have to find a way of living together in this country, and that will only come when our hearts, minds and wills are set towards reconciliation. It will only come when thousands of stories have been spoken and listened to with understanding (Morgan cited in Edwards and Read 1989 p.vii).

In the previous section I discussed bothways methodology and mapped visual art as an educational experience and as a tool for healing. Cultural issues and practice, which mapped bothways methodology, explored relationships and interconnectedness of communication, storytelling, culture, memory, Australian history, education, healing processes, and positioned my personal experience as a reflection of community experience. In the discussion, co-existance of a collaborative interchange of different and same, were discussed through multiple layers of stories which were appropriated into artistic expressions as cultural texts. My ‘work’ emerged from intersections of multiple, simultaneous processes as a methodological proposal for an alternative model for imagining, interpreting and analysing visual culture.

In this section, I explore visual art as a political act, by mapping conceptual contexts of the ARTsongs and their connectedness to the eight key issues cited in the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (1993), and by arguing the political significance of bricolage and design elements, processes and techniques for this enquiry. The discussion maps out what Fredericks (1997 p.3) describes as ‘the connections between the relationships and the tracks of the process’ by applying a source of knowledge using visual narrative to generate alternative ways of seeing and being. Included in the discussion are the recurring and repetitive design concepts and elements, the experimentation and developments of the artistic and curatorial processes and techniques implemented throughout the project. The

body of work could be categorised as conceptual art where ‘meaning lies not in the physical beauty of the work itself, but in the ideas underlying its creation’ (Smolucha 1996 p.101).

The ARTsong themes were structured around lived experience and discourses of identity and aboriginality. Over the last ten years, indigenous artists such as Banduk Marika, Lin Onus, Gordon Bennett, Ron Hurley, Judy Watson, Fiona Foley, Shirley MacNamara and Cheryl Moodai-Robinson have reclaimed indigenous history and experience through visual narratives and thus have worked towards realising the eight key issues outlined in The Reconciliation Council Report (1993). Identifying reconciliation themes involved deconstructing and reconstructing stories and memories as cultural texts embodied within the landscape attempting to understand my own historical and current identity and belonging as a member of the stolen generation. My work constitutes ‘as a form of resistence’ to the continued domination of white Australia’s colonial history; a diary of cultural and spiritual connections which mapped my personal journey of healing and reconciliation. I identify with the words by bell hooks and West, ‘I am inspired by the knowledge that I can take this pain, work with it, recycle it so it becomes the source of my power’ (hooks and West 1992 p.78).

Within each new installation site a land-centred space opens up a way to ‘old way’ ceremonial sites in which a temporary ceremonial site is created where cultural knowledges are renewed or maintained. The three ARTsongs form the body of work under examination and map storytelling which embodies the repetitive rhythm of the unfamiliar and the everyday. The installations and individual works investigate the process of reconciling identity and belonging, by exploring the tension between the relationships and connectedness of aboriginal identity to spirituality and the landscape, and the duality of memories embodied within the public/private dichotomy of Australian history.

I conceptualise installation as an art ‘cross-mapping’ space with the contents of individual associations, especially memory. It is a site for revealing secrets and ‘repeated confrontations’, to generate alternative or oppositional stories. Thus it has the potential, as a space, for ‘mythological sites constructed of comparisions and multiple locations; the concept of sameness to a consideration of difference, means travelling backward and forward in the space in between difference, and understanding’ (Friedman 1998 p.76).

The artistic constructs are ‘non-conformist works where the importance is the subject matter rather than the formal elements of design such as line, shape, colour' (Smolucha 1996 p.26). The ARTsongs describe political, religious and philosophic issues, by interregating ‘the linear rational upheld by the dominating white western structures. These works participated in broad social discourses on the natural world, and on the political implications of its domination’ (Moore 1994 p.231) by exploring sameness and difference through recurring design elements (found objects, symbols, colours, materials, mixed media, binding, weaving, layering, concealment, containment, revelation), and techniques and praxis (collecting, sorting, grouping, gathering). Many appear particularly evident in a variety of combinations within the shadow boxes in ARTsong 1 and the cages in ARTsong 2. Mirzoeff maintains that the purpose of repetition in art displays is to ‘encourage visitors physically to double back as well as move forward among the individual exhibits rather than to ‘progress’ sequentially through them’ (Mirzoeff 1999 p.137). Repetition in my practice dominates my formal considerations of design and works not to aesthetics but to stress constituent elements.

Creating cultural texts as maps of identity and landscape

The artistic and curatorial conceptual contexts evolved both technically and symbolicly through the incorporation of a bothways approach. In a design context, bothways is conceptualised as a space between two places; exploring aspects of culture and identity by comparing sameness and difference between the Aboriginal and Western domains. In this space alternatives for moving beyond the exclusive focus of difference are developed. As the author Bal (1997 p.137) states ‘looking back to the time in which the place was a different kind of space is a way of countering the effects of colonising acts that can be called mapping'. The body of work critically reflects on the portrayal of the white collective history of

Australia and the dominant oppressive structural effects of the ‘history of the colonial experience of Aboriginal peoples, that the role of ‘the state’ in the construction of Aboriginal identity has been and remains most influencial and cannot be understated’ (Taylor 2001 p.137). The work represents a terrain of common concerns and rhetoric that ‘criss-cross boundaries’ between the Aboriginal domain and the Western domain.

The visual narrative constructs are textual sites of contradiction were difference versus sameness. In discussions about indigenous Australian ‘identity’, identity is often taken to be sameness, as in ‘identical’ where the word identity often has ‘a double and contradictory resonance. The geographics of identity moves between boundaries of difference and borderlands of liminality. Identity is constructed relationally through difference from the other; the notion of identity as the site of multiple subject positions shifting fluidly from setting to setting as site for the interplay of different axes of power and powerless’ (Friedman 1998 p.21). The visual narratives embedded within the cultural texts were developed as sites for alternative stories that ‘attempt to explore, explain or define a personal identity in relation to place’ (Friedman 1998 p.77). The cultural texts are landscapes of place revealing insights into aboriginal

peoples’ identity and our relationship to land ‘which informs our sense of belonging, or of displacement’ (Bennett 1998 p.75). The artistic focus of my work was to move into an exploration of my identity journey by constructing images and narratives of memory and landscape. In so doing I contribute new insights into an ongoing discussion on the development of aboriginal identity.

The artistic expression conceptualised cultures in the likeness of maps of place. Mirzoeff recognised this when he wrote ‘as something constantly in flux and whose borders are always in dispute. Culture is a discourse, a language and as such it has no beginning or end, and it is always in tranformation since it is always looking to signify everyday life’ (Mirzoeff 1999 p.284). In this way the concepts reflect visual language as a place. The visual narratives mapped ancestral stories and country identifing routes, tracks, pathways, borders and bordercrossings, similarly, to the topological positioning of landscape sites on Western maps which indicate world countries, cities, towns, rivers, roads, bridges, borders, etc. In mapping the land, aboriginal boundaries are organic and follow the landscape like rivers, rock formations and mountains etc., whereas, mostly, the western concept dominates the landscape by drawing boundaries and borders in straight lines and defining

‘ownership’ with fences.

Thus far I have argued that through the recovery of subjugated knowledges, (visually mapping stories about ourselves and others), enables viewers to learn and understand who we are. When non-indigenous Australians read aboriginal texts, they learn alternative stories about their own history. The cultural texts encoded and encrypted into visual stories to inform the norms, values and ideologies of the social order, what Frederick Jameson (cited in Friedman 1998 p.9) calls ‘the political unconsciousness’ embedded within ‘narrative as a socially symbolic act’. It is intended as border-crossing work to position aboriginality as a multi-dimensional construction. The artworks reveal connections made between

my political beliefs and lived experience.

Communicating the multiple layers of stories within my journey has helped me to discover my own identity and heritage. In this way ‘living history’ is being recovered and shared with the wider community. ‘The visual is simply one point of entry, and a very strategic one at this historical moment, into a multidimensional world of intertextual dialogism’ (Mirzoeff 1999 p.45). The inclusion of salvaged objects and materials provided the textures of cultural memory to be woven throughout the ARTsongs to represent a contemporary aboriginal reality of ancestral dreaming. The aim is to achieve a cultural and artistic dynamic sufficient to evoke and challenge, that will ‘decolonise minds and hearts’. The conceptual contexts developed as a form of cultural criticism that does not privilege a white domanant source. When reading and analysing the visual texts the use of different visual mediums including different materials constitute a bothways cultural context:ochre and weaving grasses, as ‘old way’ (Aboriginal) or printmaking and acrylic as ‘new way’ (Western).

Design elements, processes and techniques

When we look at a work of art we are observing more than just lines, shapes, values, and colours; we are also seeing, though sometimes quite unconsciously, important principles of organisation. The way these principles of composition are applied in any given work can also tell us something about the attitudes of the artist and the cultural period in which they lived. An artist may sometimes deliberately violate one or more of these organizational principles in order to “make a statement” (Smolucha 1996 p.99).

The design inquiry was a form of engagement which both proposes and configures concepts of identity through visual narratives of memory and landscape with a desire to transfer the personal memories into a collective experience by creating and publishing cultural texts. The visual narratives were produced through the choices of medium and media made within the context of a bothways system of multiplicitious forms for meaning-making. The ARTsong

installations and the significance of space and objects within the design elements of my artistic approach selected for discussion ‘set different elements into play- images, texts, objects, constructions, natural elements the participation of the human presence’ (Moore 1994 p.242). As Belenky, Clinky, Goldberger and Tarule (1997 p.18) maintain, ‘seeing like speaking and listening suggests dialogue and interaction.

ARTsong 1 maps the alternative knowledges of my lived experience in the Northern Territory which provided intense exposure to aboriginal praxis leading me to a deeper understanding of personal and communal ancestral dreaming connections and relationships to land and identity and to the concept of my own aboriginal identity. This experience provided personal empowerment which enabled my search for identity to journey forward, to track and reclaim my lost family connections. This journey is mapped in ARTsong 2 after understanding new alternative knowledges and processes for reading country to travel me to my ancestral dreaming. ARTsong 3 mapped personal healing stories after reclaiming my own ‘stolen generation’ story and reconciling my heartache and pain. As an artist I began to trangress and develop textual alternatives for mapping identity through landscapes using visual autobiographic narratives which explored memories and storytelling through the technique of bricolage, and the recurring design elements of installation sites, space and objects.

The bothways methodology could be likened to bricolage as bothways uses existing elements in an old way/new way context transformsing ‘the elements of thought which it uses as signs’. As Levi-Strauss (cited in Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.168) states, bricolage ‘lies halfway between perception and conception'. It is something which represents a concept, or an idea, but is not in itself a concept or an idea'. For this body of work bricolage is derived from perceptions of bothways meaning-making, a land-centred space to maintain spiritual connectedness to

ancestors and our relationships to country.

Levi-Strauss (cited in Badcock 1975 p.46) describes the ‘Bricoleur’, as someone who ‘uses a set of existing means for the service of new ends, that is, the instruments one finds around them,’ ‘those which are already there, which had not been especially concerned with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by ritual and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary' (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.168). The Webster’s Dictionary definition of bricolage is ‘the process of making or assembling something from various materials at hand; something so made’ (Webster 1994 p.174).

My adoption of bricolage as a lived practice began as an emerging artist in the 1980’s. It is a ‘flexible, adaptive and economic’ technique ‘a celebration of adaptive practices’ and is present in all cultures. This technique is conceptualised as an alternative and subversive practice of the western dominant culture. Levi Strauss’ concept ‘sees historical knowledge reconstituted rather as the bricoleur reconstitutes new structures of old as a political revolutionary act' (Badcock 1975 p.81).

Recurring design concepts and elements: installation spaces of possible freedom

For ‘the general readers’ there is a pleasure in the text of bricolage, a pleasure in seeing the edifice of language tremble a little. If the text presents some difficulty for ‘the general reader’ all the better. Bricolage in any form, sets up a double vision, it forces a juxtaposition of forms, and new meanings must emerge. The one reader who is not disadvantaged is the Aboriginal reader, who is more familiar with the conventions and forms, can easily reconstruct a fuller narrative from the text (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe (1996 p.171).

The installation sites include multiple spaces for documenting history, as a form of history-making with evolving and repetitive concepts and references or representations to expose layers of spaces (environments, peoples), journeys (tracks, narratives), and encounters (the realms of personal and cultural memory). As Friedman (1998 p.82) writes it is ‘a limbo space where peace and

understanding are possible without erasing differences,’ For Ron Hurley of the Goorang Goorang-Munuunjala people of coastal southern Queensland, ‘limboism’ – being neither black nor white - is the issue of many of his works (Demozay 2001 p.102). These spaces are conceptualised as story places to thread understanding through narrating experiences of everyday life. Friedman (1998 p.138) states that ‘space in narrative does not exist seperate from time any more than history can be removed from location'.

The installation sites of cultural landscape maps reveal ‘silenced’ memories and hidden stories as contemporary social and historical texts. ‘Each individual piece of artwork has its own story which is connected and intertwined within an art installation which becomes the larger story’ (Fredericks 1997 p.3). Thus the installations became monuments and memorials as ‘a contested form of rememberance’ for aboriginal losses and knowledges; guided their construction similarly to bell hooks understanding of ‘these processes of rememberance are organised and produced with practices of commemoration which initiate and structure the relation between a representation of past events and that constellation of affect and information which define a standpoint from which various people engage such representations’ (hooks 1995 p.68). They are contemplations and reflections, the politics of an aboriginal private and public memory and history, reclaimed from strands of cultural memory and they work to disrupt the white dominant history.

The installation sites are ‘in between’ spaces of mutual influence and cultural intermingling; the space of self, of identity and landscape, a mutually supportive space for resolving antaganisms. ‘A place of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives; a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other’ (Soja 1996 p.5). Exploring the structures of consciousness beyond the realm of ‘the states’ ‘socially imposed identity’ (hooks

1995 p.96) furthered my own struggle against the colonising process and mind- set.

The site space becomes a communication tool for exchanging knowledges of social and historical processes revealing alternative historical and social stories. The installation space becomes the organising dimension of lived experience, of travel and change. Sharing stories (Aboriginal and Western) in the same space is a coming together through connecting and relating to one another. It is a space of empowerment as many aboriginal people today are increasingly interested both in being empowered in terms of the western world and in retaining or rebuilding aboriginal identity as a primary identity - 'an intellectual space made through the essentially nomadic practice of moving from one set of ideas or images towards another set progressively picked up on the way' (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.27). I became aware of the connections that further developed a technique of bricolage within my own artistic practice after reading the book, Reading the Country where Paddy Roes' words and his ways of seeing and being, took my memories back to my Northern Territory experience. It was exciting to understand the significant influences that became my way of being.

The cultural narratives then became a means for reflecting on the political aesthetic and 'also tell the strategic plots of interaction and resistance as groups and individuals negotiate with and against hegemonic scripts and histories' (Friedman 1998 p.9). As an artist I have created and envisioned experimental spaces for communicating across boundaries- an imaginary space for the interaction of bothways that honours both aboriginal and white Australian narratives. My sites invite the viewer to work with ‘a particular image and place themselves in relationship to the image' (hooks 1995 p.74). I enjoy challenging people to choose to be involved in the work in perceptual and conceptual ways, rather than just looking at something. I create spaces/sites/stories that allow people to pass through them,

to have these spaces live in our memory and to explore how our memory affects the way we look at something. The action of publicly exhibiting the ARTsongs is to create healing and reconciliation texts for interacting with the wider community as ‘sites of possible freedom’ (Friedman 1998 p.96).

The significance of using objects

I began collecting objects in my childhood. They became my closest treasures; my ‘family and friends’ for talking to and playing with. Many objects were cherished gifts from my birth mother, and remained tangible reminders of our love and connection, symbols as evidence of the existence of my first identity. It is these salvaged objects that appear within the imagery of the cultural texts. These ‘precious gifts’37 and my collection of rocks, pressed flowers, insects, moths and butterflies were a continual exhibit in the ceiling to floor cupboard which my adopted father had built in his studio, to store his artwork. His studio had become my bedroom. When I was chased upstairs by my adopted father for ‘getting under his feet’, I would play art galleries by displaying and pretending to sell his paintings in the lounge and dining rooms.

I collected objects and displayed them as museums of that time would modelling my display on the type of exhibition I observed at the original Queensland Museum and the Queensland Art Gallery in Petrie Terrace. I connected memory, desire and identity with these sacred and very cherished objects. These cultural visits were my few ‘allowed’ entries into the ‘world of sinfulness’. At other times when my heartache would overcome me, and I felt like I would die, this cupboard became a shrine; a monument of remembrance. I would open the large doors and my mind and heart would instantly locate and reconnect me to my birth mother and my panic of abandonment would subside and I would not feel so alone.

Objects have continued to be an integral part of my sense of belonging. As an emerging artist in the 1980’s and a sole parent with two sons to support, the need to minimise my costs as an artist was very important to our survival. This is when bricolage and the use of natural and everyday objects, became a major technique for creating my artworks. ‘It is functional rather than ideolistic; it uses the wrong object for a useful purpose, and can change according to necessity’ (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.171). Bricolage is flexible, economical and can be likened to the surfacing of residual material, unstable, and often ephemeral. The choice to continue this technique has become a symbolic political action. In as much as the ‘strategic redemption of the marginal also has echoes in the realms of high theory and cultural studies’ (Mirzoeff 1999 p.41).

The objects used in my visual narratives have assisted me in the ‘process of distancing’. The memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object, thus becoming less threatening and traumatic, allowing my memories and stories for which I previously ‘lacked’ words to unravel and be reclaimed. The objects are momentos of particular spaces and locations, while others, are symbolic of indigenous identity and spirituality – our connections and relationships to land has been noted by Lyotard: ‘The ‘personal artifacts’ within the imagery reflect ‘the personal’ connections to memories of childhood, love stories of hope, and now often included with the imagery as ‘personal story signifiers,’ and identified within a collective relationship to the story’ (Lyotard 1992 p.133).

In this context, the filling in of the space is determined by the spaciality of the objects, the arrangement and configuration of objects can influence the perception of that space. ‘A transformative impulse takes an object considered worthless and turns it into something of value’ (Mirzeoff 1999 p.42). ‘By looking at art objects as texts, we gain not only an understanding of the object’s nature and purpose, but we also learn something about the culture that produced it as well’ (Smolucha 1996 p.72). At the ARTsong installation sites, objects are ‘transformed from personal to cultural artefacts, as items bearing witness to pain suffered, and are intended to be

37 My childhood collections CD-Part 3: folder 2

shared as cultural memory,’ (Mirzoeff 1999 p.173) retaining some of the original meaning although altering it within the weaving of the alternative bothways story. ‘Bricolage becomes visible when we can trace the origins of the different pieces making up the whole. By tracing back these parts to their ‘sources’ we can begin to understand the significance of the object’ (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.169).

In aboriginal dreaming stories like that which Badcock (1975 p.46) claims of our way of seeing and being in our world is ‘pre-existing objects to serve new intellectual purposes'. I draw inspiration from the dreaming and totemic symbols incorporate into my artworks - ‘natural land’ objects to communicate aboriginal connections and relationships to land. As the authors of Reading the Country state, ‘bricolage could be called the activity of roaming in the ruins of a culture, picking up useful bits and pieces to keep things going or even make them function better’ (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.168).

The installations sites are visual narratives symbolic of meeting places and the connectedness and relationships to others; of ceremonial rites which maintain and renew connections and relationships to life and the natural world. Aboriginal ‘old way’ practices and objects continue to have particular meanings within our sacred and kinship systems. Spiritual meaning and connectedness to ancestors and country was also realized in my practice through the hunting and gathering process. Our land-centred connectedness and relationships to the animal world ‘totemism’-is ‘a means of classification’, ‘to effect the connection with the dreaming past through symbolisation’, (Mudrooroo 1997 p.157) the inclusion of fragments (bird wings, bones, echidna quills and ochre) represents our spiritual connections and relationships to land. As Badcock (1975 p.47) explains ‘a plant or animal species, a means to an ordering of nature, now becomes in totemism an end in itself. The signifier, the species itself, changes its meaning – it’s signified – and comes to stand for something quite different in a quite different system of orderings'.

Within the context of bothways meaning-making, the Western domain classification for the natural land objects is ‘for their own sake’ while the

Aboriginal domain draws dual meanings where they are no longer simply themselves but also represent something else and can be interpreted on many levels depending on the understanding by the viewer, of the ancestral dreaming connections which is represented through the inclusion of woods, gum resins, shells, string and ochre. The found objects-road kill: feathers, wings, claws, bones, skeletons and quills etc., represent totems which are symbolically linked to identity, to family groups and clan, and reconnects back to ancestral dreaming. Art is one of the ways through which aboriginal people communicate with and maintain a oneness with the dreaming ancestors. Badcock (1995 p45-46) also states that ‘totemism is a system of thought, and one of the most important examples of cerebral bricolage’.

The duality of bothways is complimented by the practice of bricolage as ‘one set of meanings is never completely exchanged for another' (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1996 p.171). In the colonial context, bricolage is not seperate from assimilation as these ‘old way’ objects are transformed into art objects as an aboriginal contemporary artform. The notion of art objects as purely aesthetic, non- functional and separate from everyday experience is different to our beliefs and value system. The events of the dreaming and the domination of colonialism are brought together providing me with the reconcilatory conceptual themes for the ARTsongs. The option bricolage becomes disruptive of continuities, of what is expected and perceived as ‘normal’ within the dominant Western domain. The combination of bothways and bricolage creates a state of tension and confusion where we encounter structured oppositions of black/white; old/new; desire and taboo, giving the artworks a sense of the surreal.

The use of objects is to yield insights into a bothways thinking context, to see beyond their cultural and political location. The inclusion of bothways materials and objects, sets up the relationships of sameness and difference contrasting objects from everyday life. Bricolage offers a rediscovery of history based on disjunctive scraps and fragments as natural objects when incorporated into an

artistic system still depend on a representational system. ‘Through my images subjugated knowledge speaks – remakes history’ (hooks 1995 p.96).

The installation sites are created to bring to the viewer’s attention objects that are often discarded or ignored in everyday experience and to the destruction or significance of objects to this country and to the people who live on this land. ‘They are everyday artefacts, left behind, that trace the dead back to the living, yet this memory is juxtaposed with a second narrative that records a different reality. In trying to gather the evidence to name accurately that which has been distorted, erased, altered to suit the needs of other’ (hooks 1995 p.96). Taking the familiar, the everyday, the mundane and removing these common objects from their surroundings provided the opportunity for me to share my bothways journey and aboriginal spirituality and to promote the beauty that can exist within bothways and reconciliation through the visual narratives of landscape and memory.

My creative endeavour is for my ARTsongs to be a ‘celebration of] fusion, cultural borrowing and intermixing that bears witness to a poetics of the soul’ (hooks 1995 p.10). Signs of decontexturalized history of seemingly random but connected events, ‘the insistence that elegance and ecstasy are to be found in the daily life, in our habits of being, the familiar, the everyday, the mundane, and removing them from the veiled and hidden realm of domesticity…This art returns us to experience, to memory’ (hooks 1995 p.49).

Creating thematic ARTsongs of visual narratives is similar in style to structuring written narratives. As Zuber explains:

Action research is a process of researcher and researched being in discourse, and in turn constructing its own discourse. It has its own particular narrative or story with its own rules and metaphors. Its narrative is underpinned by certain political and ideological assumptions (Zuber 1996 p.172).

Artistic approach processes and techniques

Narrative is not to be regarded as an aesthetic invention used by artists to control, manipulate and order experience, but as a primary act of mind transferred to art from life.... ‘for we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative (literary critic Louis Mink cited in Bal 1997 p.161).

Since my early childhood, I made art, as ‘gifts of love’38 to my birth mother and to my adopted parents. I was introduced to the adult world of the artist when I first modelled for drawing classes, this soon came to an end when my adopted father became an elder in his fundamentalist group where such behaviour was seen as promoting vanity. My bedroom (and his studio) was filled with smells of mixed media which became familiar and comforted me in times of acute loneliness. The producation of art continues be a cathartic and useful therapeutic tool to deal with my inner world.

In hindsight my artwork developed initially as a solace, and a refuge. As a teenager, I became the surrogate ‘son’ helping my adopted father with painting and erecting the celebration floats for use in the Warana procession and, the government displays for the Brisbane Exhibition where we painted large exterior walls in preparation for signwriting. I often reflect back to the many hours spent creating in my adopted father’s studio and workshed where I was encouraged to make sculptures with hammers and nails and to paint them. I was also allowed to draw and paint on his large selection of papers, card and on the workshop walls with watercolours, chalks, and crayons. [Sacrificial love passion (1997)]39

I realise now that my adopted father, in his profession as a commercial artist and signwriter, was also a bricoleur and would use objects for an alternative purpose

38 Childhood paintings. CD-Part 2: folder 2 39 Sacrificial love passion (1997) CD-Part 2: image no.7

to ‘the normal’. As with others of his generation he had of necessity developed very economical solutions and practices due to habits of war-time austerity. He would recycle and take great care of his equipment, paints and brushes. I was taught his ways and these influences have remained with me in my own artistic practice.

During my growing up years I was taught to attribute information and meaning- making through visual images and colour. My adopted father, as the church elder, would spend a great deal of time painting murals for the ‘bible study’ sessions where he would preach and explain the ‘teachings of the old and new testaments’. These sessions would last for many hours as the men would argue and position their doctrinal teachings according to their interpretation of biblical text. He would only allow himself to be a painter again ‘for the Lord’s sake’. At all other times ‘art’ was connected to ‘sin and wickedness’. In respect of my adopted father and because of my mixed feelings about art practice it was not until the age of 30, that I decided to study visual art formally so that I could support my sons and myself. This became my first act of transgression. I had to overcome the fear of my adopted father’s wroth, as he positioned anything beyond function and biblical themes as the devil’s work, sadly, in spite of his enormous talent his career as a visual artist ended, ignoring his artistic gift, he dedicated himself to research and study of the Bible.

Through the series of ARTsongs I have created a diary of cultural and spiritual memories, which engage the ordinary, showing beauty in everyday life experience. Through this process I was able to understand my journey and story. This exegesis provides a further opportunity to explain the signs and meanings that are hidden within the imagery of the visual narratives to others who may understand that visual art can be a site for reconciliation, a tool for healing and a political act.

An analogy is also found in visual design when a single element is repeated over and over; it gains a kind of authority, a degree of visual interest that the same element alone does not possess’ (Smolucha 1996 p.99-100). As those whose history has been destroyed and

misrepresented, as those whose very history has been dispersed and diasporized rather than lovingly memorialized, and as those whose history has often been told, danced, and sung rather than written, oppressed people have been obliged to recreate history out of scraps and remnants and debris. In aesthetics terms, these hand-me-down aesthetics and history-making embody an art of discontinuity - the heterogenous scraps making up a quilt, for example, incorporate diverse styles, time periods and materials - whence their alignment with artistic modernism as an art of jazzy ‘breaking’ and discontinuity, and with postmodern as an art of recycling and pastiche (Mirzoeff 1999 p.42).

I use innumerable projections of memory and history combining the ‘old way’ processes and praxis used for ceremony, storytelling and dance with ‘new way’ meaning-making to create an alternative semiotic system. It is this tension and uncertainty which I hope provokes the rigorous rethinking of ‘the norms’. My desire is to reinscribe the ‘taboo’ history and to search for meaning through storytelling of aboriginal everyday experience since colonisation and to reinforce the effects of two distinct orders of being which have been brought together. I have found relief and emotional well-being in voicing a history that has been taboo within the dominant Australian history.

My own system of aesthetics combines the influences of various concepts, mediums and mixed media. Bricolage ‘destroys the mystique of the designer’ and leaves representations incomplete. ‘The restoration of the buried worth of a cast-off object analogises the process of revealing the hidden worth of the despised, devalued artist himself [sic]’ (Mirzeoff 1999 p.42). I create in spontaneous bursts of activity which are followed by long periods of contemplation. My hands are confused when my mental thoughts are confused. In my artistic endeavour I don’t necessarily privilege craftsmanship, resolve and finish, but when I do place my work in a public arena it seems accessible. This is evidenced by the Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin and Capricorn Mirror featuring my artwork and art activities regularly, continued requests to work with art organisations (Flying Arts), universities, schools and community groups.

As I reflect upon the design interests in my work, I realise that I have consistantly experimented with bothways processes and techniques which involve the use of intermedia processes and techniques including combinations of oil and water

based mediums which are seemingly resistant to each other. The bringing together of these opposing mediums creates a harmonious dynamic within the work. As hooks described, ‘art and mixed media is a realm where every imposed boundary could be transgressed’ (hooks 1995 p xi). At the beginning of a new thematic series, my creative process begins with printmaking as my drawing process which is then followed by assemblage and sculptural processes, combining found objects with hand crafted ones. As the conceptual context changed and developed, so to did the experiments with water and oil combinations and intermedia processes and techniques, realised chance effects that mediated deliberate mark-making.

Before I begin working in my studio I ‘sing’ my ancestors (learnt from my experiences in the Northern Territory), and I call the custodial ancestors of the country that I call home. I spend time in the imaginative space of ancestral memory. ‘To move into worlds we have not experienced yet have come to understand, is a way of knowing reality that is no longer valued in our culture’ (bell hooks 1995 p.22). This process assists my visual consciousness and acknowledges connections and rites of passage to dreaming stories. It is the continuation of a much older practice but in a different form.

The map paintings, prints and assemblages draw together threads and the criss- cross tracks which travel throughout this land now called Australia. ‘Painting a landscape is not to ‘pin down’ its essence, to make it still, but to trace a path which the eye can follow into the space of tomorrow’s painting’ (Benterrak, Muecke, and Roe 1996 p.214). My creative spirit sings when I am able to work with feeling-to paint and print using ochre on canvas, skins and paper, working my ideas through matter to create textures with mixed media-charcoal, pastels, dyes, powders, clay, acrylic, and oil. Other techniques include the application of colour pigments with my fingers, a feather, or a variety of brushes, and stencilling. Beeswax, carving ochre rocks, sinew, resins, and crystals were also used in the production of assemblages. New experiences opened up at each step of the process of design

have informed the style of presentation in the written and visual work. I don’t always have the image in mind; sometimes ‘the material makes this demand on you’ (bell hooks 1995 p.24).

PART FOUR ARTsongs: art as a site for reconciliation

‘Story ‘themes’ ensure that no matter how unique the personal ‘experience’, or how unfamiliar or familiar the story, its essence will find resonance in others’ (Rainer 1998 p.221).

The following section maps the discussion around aspects of meaning-making and design within the ARTsongs which are themed bodies of work. Some individual works from previous themes provided the starting point for other ARTsongs. For example, Matters of Her Heart (1993) traced my personal journey as a stolen generation person. The installation comprised photographs, personal artefacts, adoption and birth certificates juxtaposed with a self-portrait painting and bronze scultpures. These narratives were important material for No More Secrets (1997–1998) and so the whole installation was included in the later work. Because of the foundational significance of ARTsong One to the entire project I will begin by discussing these works in some detail.

ARTsong One: mapping Land home place belong (1996- 1997)

No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, as warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the Aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘heart’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’, and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets…The Aboriginal would speak of ‘earth’ and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his [sic] ‘shoulder’ or his [sic] ‘side’. I have seen an Aboriginal embrace the earth he [sic] walked on. To put our words ‘home’ and ‘land’ together in ‘homeland’ is a little better but not much. A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance. When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and focus of life, and everlasting of spirit (Stanner cited in Yunupingu 1997 p.42).

Professor Stanner writes from an Anglo-Australian view and describes the links between aboriginal people and their heartland which is vastly different from the dominant western paradigm of homeland. Stanner’s words articulate the essence of the portrayal of home in the visual narrative for

the installation land home place belong. To convey the aboriginal meaning for land requires the inclusion of these four english words which provide a closer interpretation for the indigenous concept of a land-centred identity. By contrast, in the western domain ‘a person’s house is especially connected to their (identity) charater, their way of life and its possibilities’ (Bal 1997 p.138), while for aboriginal people the dreaming is the present and the past where land connections and relationships are indigenous birthright.

In ARTsong one these two domains were attempted to be reconciled. The interior space of the Rockhampton Regional Art Gallery was conceptualised as a contemporary domestic space. The reconstruction of a lounge room was to reveal the coming together of the indigenous and the coloniser. The lounge room is a meeting place within the context of the western domestic home space. The four walls mapped stories which related to the environment of a home place. The landscape paintings were home maps of my lived experience and symbolized the physical manifestation of the spiritual world incorporating dreaming stories. It was a constructed place for viewers to experience a contemporary aboriginal sense of belonging by journeying through an alternative bothways space. Stories relating to the domination and destruction of aboriginal beliefs and values since colonisation were included to provide insights into aboriginal lived experience - an alternative but significant aspect of contemporary Australia that is silenced in official history. An important design element was to strike at comfortable readings of Australian history by confronting and acknowledging the secrets of colonisation which have caused great division between the Aboriginal domain and the Western domain. At the same time there is beauty in the works.

The evidence seems to me to show that the Aboriginals have a more cogent feeling of obligation to the land than of ownership of it. It is dangerous to attempt to express a matter so subtle and difficult by a mere aphorism, but it seems easier, on the evidence, to say that the clan belongs to the land rather than that the land belongs to the clan. Extract from Milirrpun v Nabalco Pty Ltd and the Commonwealth of Australia, Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, 1971 (cited in Yunupingu 1997 p.212-213).

When entering the lounge room space the left wall of the gallery was hung with landscape maps featuring various sites where I gained intense understanding of the connections and relationships to the dreaming beliefs and values which constitute indigenous identity. The repetitive symbol of a meeting place can be interpreted as home but also subtley represent the identity of indigneous peoples and their country and the tracks and events of their ancestral spirits. They are the environments where I was given rites of passage to the land and positioned into the community as an extended family member. It was an important choice within the design context to respect aboriginal protocols and not appropriate someone elses dreaming and symbolism.

The land is the land. But it was the lore that held people together. The lore is what is educated here (head) and here (heart). Each family was responsibile for the family education of children as they grew up, the mothers, the fathers, the grandmothers and the grandfathers, the aunties and the uncles. The lore is always there. The breakdown was when the families were broken down when the white men brought their law (Alice Kelly - taped interview by Atkinson 2001 p.45).

The right wall mirriored the left wall with landscape works including canvas paintings and works on paper which mapped the journey of my connections to locate my identity and my ancestral belonging place. For example, the work titled The land is our life, it holds our laws and our spirit; it holds their bones and ours (1997)40 represents a bothways context. It is a recognition of the coming together of the indigenous layers and the colonising settlers who also have their own layers of stories, of history, of culture, of art, of language, of secrets, beliefs and values and memories held by this land. We have honoured and respected this inclusion to our land although honour and respect is not always reciprocated by white society. The challenge is for all Australians to probe the heart, and to move our eyes beyond the colonizing gaze. The challenge is while we consider the world of the everyday and the familiar to remember that the land now holds many layers of memories and bones of the dead. Gordon Bennett’s images of white settlers ploughing the landscape graphically states this as well.

The front wall was a celebration of my identity and belonging. The rear wall depicts a collection of stories which retell an alternative to the dominant white history. The box assemblages brought together my personal associations with ‘shadowboxes’41, lifting the lid on ‘pandoras’ box and to ‘treasure chests’ as they reveal secrets and lies, and convey containment and domination. The box represents compartmentalisation, ‘fitting into the box’ which is an infrastructure within the Western domain denegrating notions of wholeness which recognises the mind, body, and spirit. For example Obsession (1997)42 remind us that broken objects become whole again in another space. Boundaries and borders protect but they also confine and enforce silence. As bell hooks states:

We take home and language for granted; they become nature and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The excile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity (hooks 1995 p.65).

The freestanding shadowboxes were grouped together and positioned in front of the celebratory wall. Each work was placed on a pedestal to convey the concept of memorials, a form of remembrance embodying grief, loss and tribute in the Western domain. For the Aboriginal domain the associations are to totem poles and rituals of healing. Thus creating surreal and surprising juxtapositions as alternatives for portraying a sense of preciousness and connectedness to spirituality, to sacredness and to external and internal identity. The titles of the works provide the viewer with a significant entry point to understanding and meaning making.

40 The land is our life, it holds our laws and our spirit; it holds their bones and ours CD-Part 4:ARTsong 1:image nos. 13,14,15 41 I had treasured my shadowbox as it was one of the few gifts from my adopted father. Shadow boxes were popular in the 1960’s and produced for the domestic interior space. They hung on the wall to display cherished objects. During this period the indigenous artists of Cherbourg Aboriginal Community of Queensland, were renown for the beautifully decorated shadowbox works which included a mixture of their dreaming symbols and western style artwork. 42 Obsession CD-Part 4: ARTsong 1 and 2 mage nos.16,17

The shadowboxes were questioning borders and their transgression [Love lies bleeding (1997), and Sorry business (1997)43]. Each shadowbox has its own story which intertwines to form a larger story. Designed to deconstruct the closed and rigid structures which dominate white society. It is an invitation to enter a world of shadows – an ‘in-between’ space. Some objects suggest experiences of silent complicity, and of voices that spoke against silence and lies. For example in the work titled The British Erricson-we are indeed a civilising race…when we came here, the Aborigines covered these wide plains in thousands. Where are they today? We have “civilised” them – they are dead (1997)44, the cotton binding of the beaks suggests silence or constriction to prevent speech, but also serves as an ambivalent metaphor for privacy. The shadowboxes Ochre pit…our spirit, our essence, our life blood (1997)45, and Water dreaming story (1997)46 brings to the viewers attention ways of seeing and understanding the often invisible concepts of aboriginal beliefs and values. As a designer my concepts ‘moved to a concern with location-the geopolitics of identity within differing communal spaces of being and becoming' (Friedman 1998 p.3).

We saw something strange out there. It’s a whiteman, a white man (1997)47. The soapbox container represents the cult of domesticity, the new imperialism, and the commodity representing social values for becoming white; washes away the stains of primitivism and ‘the pruification of the domestic body'. Thus symbolising christianity, commerce and civilisation - the privilege of whiteness. The bar of soap was replaced by a tiny white bible. As Mirzoeff suggests:

..cleaning rituals were God-given signs of superiority, captured the hidden affinity between domesticity and empire and embodied a triangulated crisis in value: the undervaluation of women’s work in the domestic realm, the overvaluation of the commodity in the industrial market and the disavowal of colonised economies in the arena of empire (Mirzoeff 1999 p.305).

43Sorry business CD-Part 4:image nos 18,19,20. 44 The British Erricson-we are indeed a civilising race…when we came here, the Aborigines covered these wide plains in thousands. Where are they today? We have “civilised” them – they are dead CD-image nos. 21,22 45 Ochre pit…our spirit, our essence, our life blood CD-image nos.23,24,25 46 Water dreaming story CD-image no.25 47 We saw something strange out there. It’s a whiteman, a white man CD-Part 4:image no.27

Other boxes Monoply game used to win the primitive (1997), Obsession (1996), The British Erricson-we are indeed a civiising race…when we came here, the Aborigines covered these wide plains in thousands. Where are they today? We have “civilised” them – they are dead (1997), are also representative of the western empire and domesticity.

Our creator, whiteman’s devil (1997)48 is a clear example of the juxtoposed differences between the Western domain and the Aboriginal domain that often emphasise the chasm of misunderstanding while at the same time suggesting parallels of sameness. Water dreaming story (1997) brings together ‘old ways’ and ‘new ways’ to present a contemporary dialgue. The box chosen for this story is around forty years old and was used by my adopted father to store his painting media and implements. The box is painted with yellow oxide acrylic inside and outside. This colour gives the box an earthy feeling. Each compartment within the box holds found objects from the beaches where I live. The painted gumnut with indigenous markings is representative of my lived experience in Central Australia. The guinea fowls feathers are often included in my work because of the associations drawn from the white dots on a black background. The beautiful colour and texture of Peacock feathers also convery notions of pride, love and family. Both of these birds have been introduced to this country. This box has a hidden compartment which is revealed by removing the smaller box which again has the rows of Karrie shells. When you look at the Karrie shells closely the viewer realises that they are different colours, sizes, with slightly different shapes. When you first look you think that they are all the same. For me they represent people-Australians but unfortunately at the moment many are locked into boxes, in rows, stuck, needing to set themselves free from the confines of the boxes. Under this compartment box is an aboriginal story. It talks of the river and ocean systems and travelling tracks. The meeting place symbol is represntative of ceremonies to give honour to our mother earth, the rainbow serpent and all things that give us life. The aboriginal story is hidden to connect the viewer to

48 Our creator, whiteman’s devil image no.27

understaning that aboriginal stories and sacred places are often unnoticed by those that pass by but for aboriginal custodians they are known and obvious.

The central space of the installation resembled the ‘lounge room’ with seating, a TV and a floor rug Water helping us see, connecting the knots (1997); which was reconstructed from the gathering of collections of discarded pieces of fishing net debris over a three month period from a 20 klm beach line to form a very large fishing net. The community in my small village brought ‘offerings of gifts’ to include in the reconstruction of the net. Collected ropes and feathers were woven threw the net and found objects were placed into net pockets. What may have been an eyesore is transformed into an emblem of beauty which hooks describes as ‘a life force, affirming the presence of intense intimacy, closeness, our capacity to know love, face death and live with ongoing yet unreconciled grief’ (hooks 1995 p.49). The garbage metaphor goes beyond concepts of aesthetic design and is reflective of social prestige and captures ‘the sense of marginality’. The repetitions, variations and arrangement of objects suggest a rite of passage in which one is identified with the many.

Viewers were uncertain about sitting on the seats as they had to walk on the floor rug which is not the accepted idea for artwork displayed in a gallery setting. Destruction has come with the western domination of water and waterways and is likened to the domination and colonisation of this country. Just as there was and is pain held and experienced by aboriginal people during this process - How is the ocean experiencing and holding pain? In all things being related how does this relate to us? The fishing net image reinforced the notion of fragmentation, slipping threw the net and caught in the net. The interwoven strands or fragments become emblematic of the fragmentary interwovenness of black life.

Over the past two hundred years the changes to this country have been dramatic and traumatic for both land and peoples. When the coloniseres first came they saw Australia as the wilderness, as an obstacle to overcome through the settling of land and utilisation of the resources. For many, the indigenous resources could be terminated, cleared away, exploited physically, sociologically and sexually, ‘taught’ by religion-’civilised’ (Croft and Fredericks 1996).

A symbolic smoking ceremony49 was re-enacted for the opening night. The ritual of a smoking is connected to sorry business, for healing, and as a process for cleansing and purification. The gallery patrons were forced to walk between two small ground fires which were placed either side of the narrow pathway which lead to the gallery entrance. Viewers were invited to place a few leaves onto the earth mound thus participating in the smoking ritual before entering the gallery site that I had prepared for their arrival. I again challenged the viewer by confronting them with a closed door and an entrance sign which invited them to enter, listen, listen with your ears, listen with your eyes, listen with your body, listen with your spirit....listen, listen. The viewer was challenged with the decision to chose to continue participating by opening the gallery door and entering the space.

My conceptualisation of alternative spaces is likened to Henry Lefebvre’s,

Thirdspace, which is a ‘dual way for thinking about space’ (Soja 1996 p.10) and ‘social spatiality’ (Soja 1996 p.2). Thirdspace was initially conceptualised by this French ‘metaphilosopher’ and others have continued to develop this concept further. As hooks (cited in Soja 1996 p.12) suggests, ‘our lived spaces of representation are potentially nurturing places of resistance’,-a thirdspace for political choice. Foucault (1986) called these ‘geohistory of otherness spaces “heterotopias”’ and described them as ‘the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs'. Soja describes thirdspace as ‘thirding-as-othering’, a contemporary consciousness of spatiality- our critical geographical imagination- creatively open to redefinition and expansion ‘in alternative directions’ (Soja 1996 p.2). Said’s term ‘imaginative geographics’ and Homi Bhabba’s terms ‘going beyond’ are all concepts of ‘a growing awareness of the simultaneity and interwoven complexity of the social, the historical, and the spatial, their inseperability and interdependence’ (Soja 1996 p.3). Soja continues:

49 Smoking ceremony CD-Part 4: ARTsong 1-image no.29

Exploring Thirdspace therefore requires a strategic and flexible way of thinking that is guided by a particular motivating project, a set of clear practical objectives and preferred pathways that will help to keep each individual journey on track while still allowing for lateral excursions to other spaces, times, and social situations (Soja 1996 p.22).

Thirdspace is guided by praxis, the translation of action into a consciously spacial communication ‘to improve the world in some significant way’ (Soja 1996 p.22). It is a space of representation which is directly lived-a space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’; a space for struggle, liberation, and emancipation. As hooks (1995) suggests, it is a site for resistance, or the allocation of radical openness and possibility. Space is thus ‘thematised’, ‘becoming an object of presentation itself, for its own sake. Space thus becomes an ‘acting place’ (Bal 1997 p.135).

ARTsong 2: No more secrets (1996-98)

Issues of Aboriginal dispossession and claim, and of colonisation are still unresolved in Australia. Hence academic writings and representations about the nature of pre-colonial Aboriginal society, the violence of the frontier, the mode of incorporation of Aboriginal people into colonial and contemporary society, their communities and the nature of Aboriginality, are not simply ‘academic’. Rather they play a part in the politics of language and contest - about Aboriginal status and rights now, about whose country it is, and who should have rights within it (Pettman 1992 p.22).

The exhibition titled No more secrets (1998)50 at Casula Powerhouse in Sydney, New South Wales was a collaboration with my sister-cousin, visual artist Cheryl (Moodai) Robinson. It presented both artists’ seperate journeys in searching for their identity and belonging prior to our connecting with each other. No more secrets culminated in collaborative pieces, The sorry wall (1998), Domestic servant-Gubberamunda, Coongoola (1998), Birthplace now known as the butcher’s block (1998) and The storyteller waddy (1998). As a themed body of work and, along with Matters of her heart (1993), highlighted the similarities in the artist’s genetic cultural memory. We approached the subject of ‘bodily memory’, various forms of sensory and emotional memory including post-traumatic

50 See Appendix 4 No more secrets exhibition catalogue ARTsong 2

memory. The rejection of our black identity had brought too much pain for us to tolerate.

In 1997, Cheryl was mapping her family tree and through this process connected with my mother who informed her of my existance and so a journey of learning about eachother and our extended families began. As kin we were amazed to discover the many connections and similarities that paralelled our individual lives. This realisation began a collaborative journey of connecting with other extended family members. Our major surprise was that we were both visual artists working with similar concepts, media and mediums. As dialogue between us grew stronger and we became more comfortable and familiar with each other, our desire to collaborate in producing a collaborative exhibition evolved.

The sorry wall (1998)51 rneasured approximately 10 metres in length by 2 metres in height and consisted of 4 rows of barbwire where 95 bird cages hung from the ceiling to the floor, representing the fences that the colonising settlers used to surround aboriginal ancestral lands and to claim ownership. The wall told the story of colonisation, of extermination, of domination, of assimilation, and integration. Each cage was a narrative story which formed a larger story.

The cages were an extention of the box concepts developed in ARTsong One. Objects for installation ranged from an array of salvaged and found objects, road kill such as bird wings, claws, feathers, kangaroo bones, shells, coral, seed pods, bark, and cicada shells, to icons and memorabilia of Australia and aboriginal people. Icons were placed into the cages recreating historical stories of colonisation that impact upon aboriginal people’s everyday lives. Images such as black people displayed on a piece of china typified the view of white Australians towards aboriginal people as the exotic and lost “Natives” of Australia.

The road kill became, not just another death by a vehicle but a way of impressing

51 The Sorry wall CD-Part 4:ARTsong 2 folder 8

upon the viewer what is happening to our environment and what happened to aboriginal people in the process of colonising this country. The use of road kill also illustrates aboriginal peoples religious beliefs, our connection to totems, and land. Each road kill totem symbolises identity and allows the viewer to understand this spiritual connection and the journey of dispossession for aboriginal peoples.

The cages represented lived experiences of our family, the dispossession of our land, and the secreting away of our history, cultural knowledges, stories and memories. The wall of cages communicate public and private narratives and memories, creating a complex screen of rememberance. The icons possess a subculture of underpinning emotion and paralells with a ‘wailing wall’ in Jeruselum, ‘the great wall of China’, the Eastern wall of Germany to name a few.

The exhibition was deliberately confrontational as we challenged viewers to choose whether to engage with the works or not, as the entrance was constructed to be a narrow passage way. This extended on previous strategies of engagement evident in the installation Matters of her heart (1993) where it was necessary for the viewer to fully comprehend the documents, to walk on the ochred floor which was positioned in front of the documented works. With the cages all hanging together the story of colonisation and environmental challenges became a powerful entity. This entity had to be seen and dealt with by the viewer before and upon entering the space where the stories and secrets of our family unfolded.

The sorry wall (1998) also represented decay and destruction of the Australian landscape and became a teaching wall as many school children who visited the exhibition expressed that they had never seen christmas beetles and many were shocked by the wildlife being decemated by vehicles. Their responses of astonishment when realising that our beaches become receptacles for garbage and that marine animals and birds die because of the abondonment of discarded

rubbish. All of these aspects were subliminal references to the history of aboriginal Australia.

Domestic Servant - Gubberamunda, Coongoola (1998)52 spoke of our maternal grandmothers, mothers and aunties who were all placed into service on sheep or cattle stations in outback South West Queensland. This artwork told of how having to be servants to white people brought about immense change to our ancestors and their descendants, because they were not able to speak up, not able to speak their language, not able to continue their cultural beliefs and values. In the colonising process they lost their skills of parenting, lost all their connections to their own identity and belonging. Our grandmothers had to learn the customs of another culture and live to the way of the colonisers.

Birth Place Now Known As The Butcher's Block (1998)53 The unstretched canvas (3m x 6m) was created with ochres, oxides and acrylic and hung freely on the wall. This collaborative painting depicts the place where our grandmothers were born, between the junction of the Narran and Balonne Rivers in S.W. Queensland near Dirranbandi. Our journey of knowledge gathering encompassed travelling to this site. We needed to fulfill our spiritual connections by visiting the birthplace of our ancestral mothers. However, we were unable to access the land because the owner of the butcher’s block assumed we wanted to make a land claim. The painting depicts the birthplace of our grandmothers and the resulting movements that our ancestors due to enforced dispossession. Most of our family moved up further into Queensland and some members down into New South Wales. Important sites relating to Uralarai country have been highlighted on the canvas: the women's birthing site, the ochre pits, and stone working sites. The visual narrative recounts the history of my ancestors and their movements due to the colonising settlers.

52 Domestic servant, Gubberamunda, Coongoola CD-Part 4:ARTsong 2:image nos. 30,31,32 53 Birthplace now known as the butcher’s block CD-Part 4:ARTsong 2:images no. 33

The storyteller waddy (1998)54 developed from our discovery of ourselves and our ancestral country and family, our similarities. The production story for this quilt was that we produced five canvases in the privacy of our own studios - Keppel Sands and Wentworthville - whilst two squares were produced seperately in our shared studio space at Parramatta. When we brought our squares together the story was about belonging. Our grandmothers made quilts or ‘waddys’ from hession bags to keep their children warm. We produced mutiple images in multi- media.

ARTsong 3: Owning my own skins

We saw, to our shame, the Prime Minister, John Howard, refuse to apologise on our behalf to Indigenous people for their tragedy and sorrow, and we saw and registered, in fact felt, the shock that this refusal caused to Indigenous people. ...Some of the state premiers, local councils and churches have apologised, expressing a profound regret and great sorrow, but the statement of apology from the Federal Goverment remains unsaid (Bird 1998 p.5).

This body of work became my healing process. The National Sorry Day, 26 May 1998 brought to the surface my personal suffering from the processes of seperation. I had opened my heart and exposed my innermost secrets. In 2000, after recording my story with the national ‘Bringing Them Home:oral history project’ and recovering from the brutal murder of my birth father shortly after our reconciliation, I became aware of my personal need to heal the raw pain that I had been carrying for all of my life. I was trapped in my traumatic past. Talking about healing ways is one path to reclaiming. I did less studio practice and more critical reflection and dialogue.

My healing recovery was a process of grieving the losses of my childhood, to achieve self-esteem. Darumbal country is my ‘home’ environment and my backyard includes the muddy banks of the upper regions of Pumpkin Creek at Keppel Sands, on the Capricorn Coast. I was drawn to this saltwater mangrove creek directly out the back of my property. I would wander through the

54 The storyteller waddy CD-Part 4:ARTsong 2: folder 9

mangroves along its banks often sitting and watching the ebb and flow of the tide for hours. This was my healing place and I wanted to share it with others. I began to produce monoprints from the ebb and flow of the tides. After I produced a number of prints, I hung them in my studio and realised the visual narrative was a story of healing and hope.

It is a commonplace notion that severe loss in any form has to be confronted, examined, acknowledged, discussed, exposed before a process of emotional and even physical healing can begin (Bird 1998 p.9).

At the same time that I was creating the creek monoprints, I began to work on white kangaroo skins in my studio. I allowed the traumatized child within me to bare her pain, and to show the deep level of betrayal, mistrust, sadness and anger that I held. I learnt that recovery is the process of adopting myself as a child, and not to reject or abondon myself anymore. I am learning to become my own new adoptive parent. This installation was titled Owning my own skins (2001)55.

As the work evolved I began to realise the obsessive longing that I held for my birth mother as a child and teenager. I was constantly watching and waiting at the front door for her return. The text on the skins was a cathartic release, as I had never allowed myself to disclose my feelings of abandonment. ‘One of the main effects of white colonisation has been to separate Aboriginal people from a sense of, and a belief in their own strengths’ (Ife 1995 p.11). Each of the skins were attached to a coat hanger to convey the notion of armour and revealing numerous layers of skin, as I learned that character flaws are more easily forgiven if your skin is white. Not quite white....not quite right (2001)56 90x60cm is one of the white kangaroo skins with has my original birth certificate on rice paper, with acrylic, ink and oil, and coat hanger. This is my ‘reality’.

55 Owning my own skins CD-Part 4:ARTsong 3: folder 11 56 Nor quite white…not quite right CD-ARTsong 3:image nos. 34,35

The previous work then lead me to assembling Wisdom (2001)57. The structure of the bird stand and cage represents the human form. The white cage represents the western domain which dominates my lived experience and continues to further develop the concepts of boxes and cages. The cage bars are slowly changing colour as the rust spreads. This slow change is my perception of the Aboriginal Reconciliation process.

The shattered heart on the federation style plate represents the slow healing of a shattered, broken heart. The owl wings talk of wisdom as the metaphore for the Western domain is often referred to the wise owl, and for aboriginal people the owl symbolises totems connecting the dreaming and belonging, to the identity of different clans and peoples. My totem is the eagle so bird wings also connect to the personal. The Peacock feathers are again a metaphore for being ‘as proud as a peacock’ whilst mocking the myth that ‘peacock feathers bring bad luck’.

The floor of the cage is absent to show my continuous struggle in the Western domain for acceptance not dominance: to transgress. The feathers are outstretched through the cage bars and floor to bring a sense of the struggles that I have encountered and my joy of the progress to gaining wisdom as I reclaim my identity and belonging.

My creative focus returned to producing the mangrove creek monoprints . Mud Map Series: Watermarks and landlines (2002)58 and an exploratory study of how I could extend the techniques in the studio. The mixed-media monoprint continued the theme of investigating concepts of identity and belonging by exploring and mapping the colonial, botanical and indigenous layers of memories within landscape sites. I began to use different colour clays as my printing block and included a variety of mixed media (clay, ochre, pigment and oil paints). In the

57 Wisdom CD-ARTsong 3: folder 12 58 Mud map series:Watermarks and landlines CD-Part 4:ARTsong 3-folder 13

creation of the mud map monoprints, my body rediscovered its lost unity, its energies and impulses, its rhythms and its flux.

Each mud map is likened to cultural text, as a fluid interactive process which records past and present journeys imprinted within the Australian landscape. The maps trace the tracks of animals and peoples, connections and relationships to spaces and places, symbols, patterns and colours. ‘The crabs imprint their presence as they forage for food, as do the Ibis and seagulls. She [Pamela] knows the way the moon and the sun impact on the tidal flows and how the time of year affects the temperature of the water…She has watched, observed, hunted and gathered in the ways of Aboriginal women, past, present and future' (Fredericks 2002 inside cover). They describe the environments of reefs, mangrove creeks, saltpans, claypans, and the nomadic nature of the tides, which results in delicate patterns left on the mud that change with each ebb and flow of the water as spiritual waterways. I am tied to water and land, just as all Australians are tied to water and land. These connections and others extend along the time lines of past, present and future and back again. As diverse as we are, we are all connected within the greater web of life. As Fredericks writes, ‘She knows the region well and moves from one set of images and ideas to the next in a progressive practice of moving to a greater understanding of this land. This evidence of water and animals become stories, recorded in the mud like texts which have been imprinted within the artwork' (Fredericks 2002 p inside cover).

Healing comes from the attempts to harmonise with these naturally but unpredictable effects. Significantly, the works are produced in a context removed from the urban environment and are more contemplative than angry and confrontational. The monoprint The soul beneath my skin (2002)59 has been chosen for the title of this exegesis to describe the concepts existing within the three ARTsongs.

59 The soul beneath my skin CD-ARTsong 3:image no.

The installation Heartland (2002)60 is a narrative for reconciliation. I explore the possiblity of new alternative sites, spaces, and texts for creating new forms of cohersion, incorporating concepts of Indigenous heritage; a sense of place; respect for cultures, our past, what has been, and our present, what is, and the future. The investigation of heartfelt issues relating to self and community identity and belonging. The essence of the installation highlights the everyday, using objects as memory to map connections between sets of relationships making the invisible, visible including the physical, psychological, social, spiritual and metaphysical. It depicts our interconnected and intertwined stories, histories, and memories that now lay within our heartland - mother earth.

Wisdom is getting to the heart of things, understanding what nourishes the heart, and knowing what is one’s heartland, heartplace. The heart is an organ that is the innermost central core to keeping flaura, fauna and humankind alive, moment to moment. Heart is a word frequently used in our everyday dialogue. The heart can bring sustenance to the body as we travel our life journey to develop wisdom.

Artsong:The soul beneath my skin (2003) is an installation site presented for examination with this exegesis as a possible site for reconciliation. A culmination of previous works which explored cultural placement, identity and belonging. Depicting stories and memories of the personal, the indigenous, and the human condition as layers within the landscape, as archeological digs. Journeying through time to unravel connecting threads is ever-present in my work, allowing the viewer to participate seeing their own image reflected disparate meanings producing cultural identities. The installation Heartland (2002) includes the individual works of Not quite right…not quite white, Wisdom, Birthplace now known as the butcher’s block.

The act of exhibiting the ARTsongs (my visual narratives) in the public domain is to share understanding of social organisation which assumed a variety of forms

60 Heartland CD-Part 4:ARTsong 3-image no.36

which were shaped by historical contexts. Many aboriginal narratives engage in an act of ritual remembering, where telling an alternative history is an intervention in the white discourse of history – Bennett, Hurley, Watson, Marika. The body of work is about informing, revealing and piecing together fragmentations of personal and cultural experience outlining the shape of past, present, and future possiblilities. There is a deliberate intent to provide subtle information, always leaving something unavailable which allows for a multitude of projections of memories and individual interpretation.

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PART FIVE Reflections

This thesis set out to explore whether visual art can be a site for reconciliation, a tool for healing, an educational experience and a political act. As this exegesis has revealed, my art work has evolved as a series of cycles and stages, as a systematic engagement with people, involving them in a process of investigating ‘their’ own realities - both the stories of their inner worlds and the community story framework of their outer conditions. In my ongoing work as an indigenous artist, I am became the learner and the teacher, the subject and the object.

As an indigenous woman in recovery from the specific traumas inflicted on the stolen generation I had to constantly ‘thicken my skin’ to go forward and produce works knowing that my practice and artworks were likely to remain misunderstood, misinterpreted or even dismissed to a future time; when the wider community, including my colleagues and contemporaries at the university, would have more understanding of the issues of reconciliation.

The ARTsong installations have revealed possible new alternatives sites for reconciliation, spaces and frames of reference to ‘open our minds, heart and spirit so we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries’ (hooks 1994 p.12). Central to their creation was bricolage as an artistic strategy.

Also central was the concept and methodology of bothways. For the purposes of this exegesis an attempt was made to break down and map out bothways principles and functions into their inter-related parts. As a social process, bothways action-learning methodology incorporates the needs, motivations and cultural values of the learner through negotiated learning. My experience is that other methodologies can confine indigenous students within ‘their’ parameters whereas the action-orientated research method is widely accepted as a proven

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strategy in adult learning and is particularly relevant to aboriginal learners, as it allows participants to integrate their cultural experiences into the learning process; ‘Aboriginal learning is an informal learning approach through observation and imitation, interaction and interpretation, with less emphasis on verbal and written instruction’ (Harris 1980; Hughes 1992).

Bothways is contributing to evolving indigenous research methodological approaches as it is informed by aboriginal learning practices. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody National (RCIADC) Report provides a context and justification for bothways methodology as an ethical research approach. ‘Research into patterns, causes and consequences of Aboriginal [problems], should not be conducted for its own sake. Such research is only justified if it is accepted by Aboriginal people as necessary and as being implemented appropriately. Action research of the type that produces solutions to problems is likely to be seen by Aboriginal people as being most appropriate’ (RCIADC 1991 p.330). The bothways research approach for this study proved important in its privileging of an aboriginal methodological framework or world-view, and its ‘liberation epistemological approach’ (Rigby 1997 p.11).

Discussion of bothways methodology and disciplinary context discussion demonstrated the relationships, connections and disjunctions shared by both Aboriginal and Western domains and informed the processes and techniques to position visual art as an educational experience and a tool for healing. From this emerged a range of challenging artworks including the ARTsongs.

There is one final outcome of the ARTsong project that requires discussion. This emerged from my commitment to praxis - to weaving together my art practice with hands-on political action and direct involvement with my communities. I refer to this as the trial and feedback process or SIDEtracks61. These were documented acts of personal empowerment, which led to a more activist role in

61 The term SIDEtrack is used to infer an alternative journey, towards an excursion from the central focus.

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the political struggle. I believe that, as aboriginal people, we can provide a leadership role, and in so doing, we can demonstrate to the wider community how to move beyond a state of apathy. The SIDEtracks implemented cultural protocols and ethics, which revolved around consultation, community involvement and ownership issues, thereby actioning acknowledgement, legitimacy and promotion of aboriginal ‘ways of being’. Indeed, what such experiences make more evident is ‘the bond between practice and critical reflection, that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other’ (Ife 1995 p.210-230). The SIDEtracks research served as a valuable basis for both policy and program innovation and brought further clarity to this doctoral research project investigation and conceptual development of bothways as a philosophy and methodology.

As Freire (1972) has so clearly pointed out, ‘consciousness-raising is at its most powerful and effective when it is located in the context of the ordinary realities of day to day life; rather than being seen as something special or removed’ (Ife 1995 p.210). The SIDEtracks became educational experiences, where the artist/ researcher actioned ‘acts of transgression’ for constructing alternative visions; interactions involving ‘consciousness-raising by confronting and informing; by exposing the possibility for such visions and helping [individuals and the community] to develop their own visions’ (Ife 1995 p.210). The SIDEtracks became self-empowering actions which created the purpose and motivation for further developing the research and sharing concepts of bothways philosophy and methodology.

The first SIDEtrack occurred during ARTsong One in December of 1996 when I was invited to attend a national conference in Adelaide organised by the Council 62 of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) which included their Annual

62 CAPA is the national representive student body which lobbys governments and tertiary institutions on behalf of postgraduate students.

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General Meeting (AGM). At this meeting, I was unexpectedly elected to the 1997 executive board as the National Indigenous Peoples Officer (NIPO). Indigenous conference participants identified the major outcome for 1997 to be the co- ordination to complete the research project report, Indigenous Postgraduate Education: A Project into the Barriers which Indigenous Students must Overcome 63 in Undertaking Postgraduate Studies. My motivation and commitment to this portfolio reflected my own difficulties and intense frustrations as a postgraduate student. This experience identified the need for representational voices for indigenous Australian postgraduates within universities’ infrastructure. The NIPO position provided me with the opportunities for linking the political, the personal and community to visual production and theory.

As a consciousness-raising opportunity CAPA launched the completed report nationally, on the first national Sorry Day (26 May 1997), marking the acknowledgement of the Stolen Generation. The launch was held in Canberra on 64 the grounds of old parliament house and outside the ‘tent embassy’, and on many university sites throughout the nation. My welcoming statement challenged the educational sector to implement the recommendations as ‘an action of reconciliation’. The report was immediately accepted by the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee who encouraged the national implementation of the recommendations made within the report. My artwork Bothways education 65 (1997) was selected for the cover of the report and was acquired by CAPA.

63 CAPA (1997) Indigenous Postgraduate Education: A Project into the Barriers which Indigenous Students must Overcome in Undertaking Postgraduate Studies Victoria. http://www.capa.edu.au/committees/nipaac/index.html 64 The Tent Embassy on behalf of indigenous Australians have been lobbying for a ‘treaty’ since the 1970s. 65 This acrylic painting on stretched canvas is an interpretation symbolising bothways education which was painted during the theme series Aboriginal education through Aboriginal eyes (1993). It represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples cultural knowledges, beliefs and languages and their inclusion of the Western education curriculum. This inclusion of ‘dual’ knowledges could be a reconciliatory step within the education system for all Australians. The concept behind this imagery is ‘bridging the gap’. These words are continually referred to by people when trying to seek acknowledgement and acceptance for cultural differences. The design represents our worldview where all aspects of life are interlinked with each other, as reciprocol

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This action was accepted by the artist/ researcher as positive community feedback acknowledging the reception of the visual narrative concepts.

Over a two-year period I met and consulted with indigenous postgraduate students all around Australia. From that came a national aboriginal incorporated postgraduate student body to provide a representational voice which would politically lobby for changes within the postgraduate sector. Also established was an annual national symposium for Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers. This provides an opportunity for dialogue relating to research theory and praxis, for networking and support to empower Indigenous students and ‘ways of being’.

The CAPA journey unfolded diverse opportunities for me to implement the trial and feedback process, through the exchange of dialogue, and by observing and listening to theories and research issues with other postgraduate students. The self-actualising of my voice throughout the CAPA experience promoted a sense of self-confidence. My lived experience of how to move beyond passive acceptance, to one of political activism for change was being realised.

During ARTsong 2, the SIDEtracks included visual art projects; the personal public exposure as a Stolen Generation member; the collaboration with my sister- 66 cousin Cheryl (Moodai) Robinson for the Sydney exhibition, No more secrets; the link-up with my birth father, his subsequent murder, and my participation in the trial and imprisonment of my half-brother. All were occurring simultaneously. A ‘dual’ self-image emerged. One was an empowered public image while the private personal image was fragmented, torn to shreds, grieving, lost, always too fearful of the pain to remember and recall lost memories. I felt ashamed of my and continuous, not seperate and alone. The two waving lines of rivers, that flow either side of the centre circle design (a meeting place) incorporate recursive dual circles, the concept of bothways education. Previous theme works were commissioned by The Northern Territories Aboriginal Teachers Association (1993) to use as a conference banner, and later as a Tshirt design for the World Indigenous Peoples 1993 Conference:Education held at Wollongong. CD-Part 5: folder 14

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double image that mirrored the ‘reality of self’, a ‘reality’ that all but one of my parents were gone from this universe, brought the raw pain of the past flooding back, so much pain and sadness that I felt I would burst. I had remained too fearful and caring of other peoples’ pain to ask for their stories about my identity and story. This ‘reality’ confrontation caused an unexpected physical, emotional, and spiritual breakdown which threatened my future health and well being. During the following months, the reality of my ‘loss of identity’, the rejection by ‘authority’ to say sorry, and the public rejection to aspects within the Stolen Generation stories, sent me spiralling, further into a deep depression. Personal healing began through counselling sessions, recording my story for the historical records; and the continued creation of visual narrative constructs.

During Jan/Feb of 1998, another SIDEtrack opportunity occurred when I was awarded an artist-in-residence in Manila by the Queensland College of Art. This led in turn to invitations and opportunities to implement the trial and feedback process within a cultural community development strategy. The highlights included being a guest speaker, participating in a national arts festival;67 and an 68 international women's exhibition and attending indigenous community events.

During this residency discussions centred on environmental issues, the dominance of colonial religious beliefs and values and the political struggle for self-determination. It became very apparent through my experience that female artists were still struggling for their voice to be heard in a society where ‘maleness and whiteness’ are positioned as superior. For example, it was extremely difficult to purchase products that did not include whitener, that promised to bleach away dark skin colour considered unattractive for women.

The installation Our rivers of this world who are our life source, deliver us into conscious respect of our environment, give us this day the will to repair our

66 Kooma kinship term 67 Painting on a paraw sail for an arts festival CD-Part 5:folder 15-image no.37

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Mother Earth who is our Saviour, let us not forget, awomen, amen (1998) created in Manila was another collaborative work with Cheryl (Moodai) Robinson. The visual narrative described our reaction to the dominance of colonising within these islands, and was a critical reflection on our own lived experience in Australia. It presented the wisdom of indigenous peoples and women as an essential contribution within the wider society and to the welfare of humanity.69

During ARTsong 2, research development further progressed due to another SIDEtrack opportunity which occurred whilst attending the Unmasking Whiteness Conference held in Brisbane in 1998. The conference directed discussion and critical reflection to whiteness theory and praxis. The inclusion of a chapter of text, and visual narrative on the publication cover was again accepted by the artist as positive feedback from the academic community towards visual narrative concepts.

Throughout the research project the SIDEtracks continued to emerge various ways. These included conference papers, presentations, publication reviews, judging of community art competitions and awards, design of community banner

68 Kalinga (mountain ) people CD-Part 5:folder 15- image no.38 69 Croft & Robinson, collaborative installation Our rivers of this world who are our life source. Deliver us into conscious respect of our environment, give us this day the will to repair our Mother Earth who is our Saviour, let us not forget, awomen, amen (1998) 9mx3mx4m Australian Embassy collection, Manilla. The visual narrative mimicked a cultural landscape. The flowing red traditional Abica fabric represented rivers which symbolised the power of landscape:earth as our mother and the flow of water/ blood as our life source. The rivers of fabric flow down to symbolic sites representing changes within the environment and society. The construction on the right side of the river was a representation of how the dominant western structures continue to overpower indigenous cultures of the Philippines and the world. The construction on the left side of the river was a memorial which represented the old cultural ways, a reminder to reflect on the domination and destruction of the natural environment. The construction of hat and brooms represented the strength and courage of women and workers, a reversal of the present power constructs. The angel religious icon wore a newspaper garment where the text reflected the corruption, domination, abuse and neglect within the society. The cross made of feather dusters reminded us of women and toil and the inadequacy of the Church to seek and make change for the lifeblood of the rivers and culture for social justice. The circle of candles (religious icons) and sea urchin shells (indigenous food source) surrounding the angel created an altar of the contradictions the Philippine people face in contemporary society. The altar was a representation of the Catholic religion’s dominance, and Mother earth, a site for connecting individuals and community. The statement is that we, as differing peoples with differing beliefs, should come together for the sustainability of our mother earth. CD-Part 5: folder 15.

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projects, a Public Art Policy development consultancy for Rockhampton Shire Council, and numerous Art and Cultural community workshops. An unexpected outcome of the professional affiliations and SIDEtracks was the diminishing feeling of ‘isolation’.

My critical understanding of bothways methodology was enhanced by my involvement in two SIDEtracks relating to education. In 1998 I was invited to participate as a researcher/interviewer for An Investigation into the Possible Enhancement and Extension of the Remote Aboriginal Teachers Education Program (RATEP). This provided the opportunity to further develop personal interviewing and research skills. I was then commissioned to write The Evaluation of the Years 1 to 10 The Arts Curriculum Development Project Reports1, 2, & 3 by the Queensland School Curriculum and Education Queensland. In my view both research projects had the potential to envision new alternatives within the western education system. My evaluation of the arts curriculum was that it had the capacity to explore ‘the notion to transgress’, an opportunity for teachers to take action for change, ‘to teach to transgress so learning can be a place where paradise can be created’ (bell hooks 1994 p.207). A section discussing bothways methodology was included in the conclusion of the third evaluation report thus consolidating much of my own critical thinking. As bell hooks argues ‘the classroom with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility' (hooks 1994 p.207). My review assessment was that the arts curriculum had the possibility for teaching as ‘the practice of freedom’.

‘In the field of possibility teachers have the opportunity to labor for freedom, by demanding of ourselves and our comrades, to facilitate a diversity of knowledges and praxis and to teach in ways that transform consciousness, and allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. Therefore,creating a climate of free expression that is the essence of a truly liberatory liberal arts education’ (hooks 1994 p.44).

Another SIDEtrack opportunity arose in 1999, during attendance at the 2nd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Visual Art and Craft Conference held in Cairns, to participate in recording my story with the Bringing Them Home oral

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history project. I had learnt to feel ‘safe’ during counselling sessions where, for the first time, I was unravelling and reclaiming memories which were linked to traumatic experiences in my past. These actions became the catalysts for beginning a journey toward personal healing and reconciliation.

Much of the SIDEtrack research activity was in terms of affirmation action both personally and publicly. I chose not to simply stay in my studio, instead I chose to deliver workshops and presentations in the public arena. These included presentations to the Rockhampton Business Women’s Network, the Rockhampton Indigenous Interagency and Griffith University’s International Women’s Day Celebration. Particularly significant was the interaction with the Rockhampton Indigenous Interagency which brings all aboriginal organisations together to participate in a formal communication process governed by indigenous protocols to inform Rockhampton’s Aboriginal and Islander peoples of issues, thus creating dialogue for working towards outcomes and change. For the past two years, I have participated as an external industry reviewer for the assessment review of the Visual Art and Design Course for Central Queensland Institute of TAFE. All of these activities formed part of the validation process of the bothways action-orientated research paradigm that underpins my practice.

In the space of my own studio, the Sandhills Studio (gallery and home) I continue to maintain a community cultural development practice. I have established the studio to develop a community collective for creative collaboration, to obtain art resources, to advocate, network and share knowledges and experiences, to promote public relations, collaborative and consultancy needs, research, assessment and evaluation and mentoring for emerging artists. Through my 70 representational roles on various committees I interact with external bodies for 71 the benefits of my local community.

70 Queensland Community Arts Network, The Premier’s Indigenous Export Art Project, and Queensland Artworkers Alliance 71 The Sandhills Studio Collective has collaborated in public art, reports, consultations, and

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SIDEtracks was found to be an invaluable strategy as a process for self- discovery, for locating my voice, and for empowering subjugated knowledges through the existence of lived experience. Hooks describes this self-affirming process:

When our lived experience of theorising is fundamentally linked to processes of self- recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experiences makes more evident is the bond between the two-that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other (hooks 1994 p.61).

SIDEtracks offered specific insights into and extended both the academic and cultural contributions of the research project. They were integral to the creation of the projects powerful visual narratives, which presented alternative spaces where the artist/ researcher was defining and determining both self and community. These spaces incorporated the relationships and interconnectedness of visual art as cultural text (storytelling, history); as a communication tool for sharing, as a form of cultural exchange for teaching and learning; to provide an educational experience for the listener/ viewer; and as a tool for healing and reconciliation.

In these bothways intersections of Aboriginal and Western domains similarities are acknowledged and differences are celebrated. These spaces are sites of freedom which open up possibilities for reflecting on how these relationships make us Australians. Bothways becomes a journey of reconciliation for all Australians.

performances.

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