Fluent Essays

Anthem Press Chapter Title: ‘ABORIGINAL CULTURE’ AT THE NEXUS OF JUSTICE, RECOGNITION AND REDEMPTION Book Title: Aboriginal Art and Australian Society Book Subtitle: Hope and Disenchantment Book Author(s): Laura Fisher Published by: Anthem Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ffjqck.10 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Anthem Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Aboriginal Art and Australian Society This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ffjqck.10 Chapter 5 ‘ABORIGINAL CULTURE’ AT THE NEXUS OF JUSTICE, RECOGNITION AND REDEMPTION Government practices that are tasked with addressing cultural trauma must address the space where individual psychology imbricates with a socially con- stituted sense of collective victimisation (Alexander 2003, 100; Nagel 1994; Hall 1990). In order to foster a sense of healing and refreshed dignity among members of a formerly maligned social group, the state must not only address the victimised collective, but the wider society on whom that collective’s sense of belonging and recognition depends. The Australian public servants who turned their energies to unravelling the ideology and policies of the assimi- lation era in the 1960s and early 1970s had to contend with precisely these problems, as did those people who became engaged in the Reconciliation movement. Having been essentially entombed in the public imagination, ‘Aboriginality’ had to be resurrected as a living thing, and the state’s bestowal of recognition needed to be made manifest in the public domain. I have made the case that Aboriginal art and other cultural forms have been central to this process, and I wish here to extend this argument a little further and show that in many ways Aboriginal art became metonymic for ‘Aboriginal culture’ in this context. 5.1 Cultural Loss, Cultural Rights and Keeping Culture Strong The events and discourses that have been traced thus far contributed to a post- assimilation constitution of Aboriginal culture at the nexus of justice, recogni- tion and redemption. Aboriginal culture became a locus of meaning and intent in national discourse and public culture, due to the state’s need for symbols of its bestowal of recognition, the consolidation of a pan-Aboriginal platform in advocacy discourses, and the fact that the growing but often anchorless goodwill of the non-Indigenous Australian public needed to find purchase This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 58 ABORIGINAL ART AND AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY in something tangible. Across these domains, public discourses on Aboriginal issues have consistently drawn a causative connection between evincing the worth of Aboriginal culture and evincing the worth of Aboriginal personhood. Before we proceed to illustrations of this, we need to be honest about how difficult it is to pin down the meaning of such a ubiquitous referent as Aboriginal culture. As Raymond Williams wrote of the etymology and social history of the term culture, the various meanings that had assembled around it by the mid- twentieth century ‘indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence’ (1988, 91). This complex- ity was intensified when the belief that race denotes essential, biological char- acteristics was debunked in the latter part of the twentieth century. This left a vacuum for the study of ethnicities and patterns of social differentiation; a vacuum which was filled in part by culture. For anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw, who has studied Australian race rela- tions extensively (1999, 2004), the intellectual aversion to the idea of race (as if the very use of the term is racist) has created as many problems as it seeks to address. She reminds us that, while race is not a ‘material fact’, it exists nevertheless as ‘a fact of the imagination, as are the identities, rivalries and hierarchies which surround it’ (2004, 10). The fact that culture emerged as a favoured term in Australia (as elsewhere) to describe Aboriginal difference brought about a confusion of perceptions about Aboriginal identity and ways of being. It means that perceptions of Aboriginal people’s difference are now often conflated with the West’s exalted understanding of culture. In turn, as we know from the different ways remote and nonremote Aboriginal identity is configured, and as Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition (2002) reveals with great acuity, this conflation has buttressed idealistic and condi- tional judgements about Aboriginality and Aboriginal tradition in national discourse that are very much at odds with Aboriginal ontology. Lorraine Gibson (2013) reflects on the paradoxical effects of this con- vergence of ideas in her ethnography of art practices in the predominantly Aboriginal rural NSW town of Wilcannia, in which she probes the absurdity of the claim, made regularly by non-Indigenous citizens in the town, that the local Aboriginal people ‘don’t have any culture’. The toxicity of such state- ments is obvious, given that they are being made at a time of enhanced national recognition of Aboriginal society through Aboriginal art. They amount to ‘a refusal of who Aboriginal people believe they are’ (2013, 52). Such deni- als speak of local histories of agonistic coexistence while they also point to what has been left out of the visual and public culture idioms of national Reconciliation. Gibson asks, ‘Since the majority of townspeople in Wilcannia are Aboriginal; where we might ask, if not in an Aboriginal community, is This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ‘ABORIGINAL CULTURE’ 59 “real” Aboriginal culture thought to exist?’ (2013, 36–41). Gibson was also made aware of the economy of cultural knowledge in Wilcannia: the way employment opportunities in heritage and land management, for example, drove the imperative of cultural retrieval. This meant that ‘[t]his thing called “culture” is actively being sought at the same time that it is actively asserted as present, real and alive’ (57). Gibson’s ethnography provides just one example of the way in which the concept of Aboriginal culture is negotiated interculturally – rebounding between local and national arenas of sociality and harnessed to perceptions about value and virtue. In Povinelli’s terms, the paradox of Wilcannia Aboriginality lies in the ‘difference between the tradi- tions to which a cacophony of public voices pledge their allegiance and the indigenous people who are the alleged sociological referent of these traditions’ (2002, 47, see also 48). If we return to the arena of politics and social justice, it is clear that Aboriginal culture has been prominent in arguments advanced about the need to reverse the process of assimilation, to rehabilitate Aboriginal people’s sense of self- worth and to correct the view that prevailed throughout much of Australia’s history that Aboriginal people and their culture were inferior. This is illustrated in the rhetoric of prime ministers such as Whitlam and Keating, and the dis- courses surrounding Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Stolen Generations and Reconciliation. For instance, in the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Commissioner Johnston writes that: [Aboriginal people] never voluntarily surrendered their culture and, indeed, fought tooth and nail to preserve it, throughout dispossession, protection, assimi- lation, [and] integration […] They have the right to retain that culture, and that identity. Self-determination is both the expression and the guarantee of that right. (1991b, 1.7.21) Similarly, in his Redfern address, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating asked non-Indigenous Australians to recognise that ‘[w]e took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life’, and to ‘imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless’. He highlighted ‘the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity’ that had been revealed in the Deaths in Custody report, but suggested that: [w]e are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islander cultures. From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. (2001[1992]) This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 60 ABORIGINAL ART AND AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY An important thread of the Stolen Generations Inquiry was that children who were removed had been deprived of ‘community ties, culture and lan- guage’ (National Inquiry 1997, 283, 296–314). As the report states: One principal effect of the forcible removal policies was the destruction of cultural links. This was of course their declared aim. The children were to be pre- vented from acquiring the habits and customs of the Aborigines (South Australia’s Protector of Aborigines in 1909); the young people will merge into the present civilisation and become worthy citizens (NSW Colonial Secretary in 1915). Culture, language, land and identity were to be stripped from the children in the hope that the traditional law and culture would die by losing their claim on them and sustenance of them. (202, original emphasis) The inquiry found that this stripping away of culture was enforced not only by the children’s separation from their families but by the punishment chil- dren experienced if they spoke or sang in their language. In general they were taught to be ashamed of their Aboriginality and to aspire to become white. This notion of cultural loss informed the argument put forward in the inquiry report that the policy amounted to ‘genocide’, because ‘the predominant aim of Indigenous child removals was the absorption or assimilation of the chil- dren into the wider, non-Indigenous community so that their unique cultural values and ethnic identities would disappear, giving way to models of Western culture’ (272–73; Curthoys and Docker 2001). The grieving and sympathetic discourses that circulated in connection with the inquiry lamented the children’s disconnection from their culture and the fact that they were left without a sense of identity. As one testimonial put it: ‘Why was I made to suffer with no Aboriginality and no identity, no cul- ture?’ (National Inquiry 1997, 277). Such declarations of suffering attest to the importance of cultural loss in the Aboriginal cultural trauma narrative. In official Reconciliation discourses, a recurrent claim has been that mem- bers of non-Indigenous society need to understand and respect Aboriginal culture as part of the ‘distinctive character’ of the nation if Reconciliation is to be achieved. The following statement found on the Reconciliation Australia website ‘Share Our Pride’ is exemplary: It is important for all Australians to understand the essential features of Indigenous culture, including our special connection to the land and our com- mitment to family and community. So we can walk on this land together as friends and equals. So you can share our pride. Understanding and respecting our culture also gives you a better sense of the impact on our communities when life-sustaining structures are ignored or broken, as they have been and continue to be. (Bridge 2012; see also CAR 2000) This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ‘ABORIGINAL CULTURE’ 61 These discourses around cultural loss and respect for culture are often strongly inflected with the language of rights, including the concept of cultural rights. As we know, human rights became a powerful platform for advanc- ing Aboriginal interests in Australia from the 1960s onwards and interna- tional law has been a fertile arena of progressive thought around Indigenous issues. ATSIC, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission), political leaders like Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating and many other organisations and public figures have employed the language of human rights, the instruments of international law and the idea of a rights- cognisant international gaze to both criticise and justify state policy.1 As stated by the Aboriginal Arts Board: The existence and operation of the Aboriginal Arts Board is based on the right of the indigenous people of Australia to determine the future of their own cul- tural heritage. The board’s responsibility is to provide support to promote and develop activities which give expression to this basic right. (Australia Council 1979; see also 1982; 1985a) Thus the concept of having a right to one’s heritage and to enjoy one’s cul- ture, articulated by Commissioner Johnston earlier, has been formative of understandings of Aboriginal social justice, and human rights concepts have provided a vocabulary for both defining and advocating for the survival of Aboriginal culture in relation to past and present practices of the state. The ‘Share our Pride’ quotation exemplifies the way Aboriginal culture is often depicted as being synonymous with healthy Aboriginal personhood. Across many discourses, Aboriginal culture is both portrayed as a resilient force that is indivisible from Aboriginal subjectivity, and a fragile thing on the brink of loss. It is also often nostalgically described as a domain free from the ravages of Western society (see for instance Reynolds 2006; Roberts 2011; Don’t Forget Our Elders 2007). The concept of culture is also semantically powerful because it is the preferred term used by Aboriginal spokespeople from remote Australia (partly due to their having a limited English vocabulary) when they speak about their needs and their well-being. These ways of pictur- ing Aboriginal culture are true of statements made in the art context, which is in fact one of the few domains in which remote Aboriginal peoples’ voices are regularly heard by non-Indigenous Australians. Spokespeople for the Aboriginal Arts Board, ATSIC, art centres and Aboriginal artists themselves have consistently telescoped from taking about Aboriginal ‘art’ to Aboriginal ‘culture’. In these discourses, the former is depicted as being embedded within the latter, such that, as the Australians Arts Board declared, ‘the survival of This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 62 ABORIGINAL ART AND AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY skills in traditional art forms is […] vital to the survival of the social struc- ture and beliefs’ (Australia Council 1979, 2–3). The following statement from Yuendumu artist Valerie Napaljarri Martin is exemplary: The art means to carry on our stories, to know it belongs to my family and it belongs to my father and grandfather, so that everyone can know about us, so we can carry on, so our kids can carry on forever, even when we’re gone. So non- Indigenous people can know about us in the future, how we fought to keep our culture strong for the sake of our children’s future. (Quoted in Desart 2009)2 This description rings true in relation to Gibson’s suggestion that ‘art for culture’s sake’ is a far more felicitous notion than ‘art for art’s sake’ among practitioners in Wilcannia, where art is ‘a means to maintain, redefine, redis- cover, remember, remake and teach culture’ (2013, 202). The connection between art and culture is also drawn in the mottos of art centres (many of which are identified as ‘art and culture’ centres) and in exhibition discourses. Ananguku Arts, for instance, carries the motto: ‘Arts kunpu, tjukurpa kunpu, munu waltja tjuta kunpu: Strong arts, strong culture, strong families’, and the motto of Tjala Arts is ‘Nganampa Art. Nganana walytjangku. Business palyanu. Munula tjukurpa kanpu kanyini’ (Our Art. Our Business – keeps our culture strong). We might also recall that the first Indigenous Art Triennial Exhibition at the NGA was titled Culture Warriors and think of exhibition titles such as Strong Women, Strong Painting, Strong Culture (shown at the Casula Powerhouse Centre in Sydney in 2011). The configurations of heritage discussed previously have of course also been integral to the constitution of Aboriginal culture at the nexus of jus- tice, recognition and redemption. As Moran writes, the development of indigenised settler nationalism ‘involved a discourse of sharing culture and heritage’, which entailed that Aboriginal people’s ‘cultural heritage, their long and deep spiritual connection with Australian lands, given as a “gift” to the national community, would indigenise the Australian nation as a whole’ (2002, 1030; Lattas 1997). Instances of this were surveyed previously, in relation to Whitlam’s new nationalism, Bill Hayden’s speeches, in the Reconciliation mantra that Aboriginal culture be seen as intrinsic to the distinctive character of the nation, and in nationalistic celebrations of Aboriginal culture being the oldest continuing culture on earth. This amalgam is often made explicit in funding announcements and media releases in which the allocation of mon- ies to Indigenous art, culture and heritage projects is tied to the ‘important position Indigenous history and expression occupies in Australia’s cultural life’ and the need for the nation to ‘continue to protect, preserve and promote Indigenous arts, culture and heritage to help build a diverse and dynamic Australia’ (Garrett 2010a; Australia Council 2014). Consequently, imperatives This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ‘ABORIGINAL CULTURE’ 63 that may only be directly relevant to a small group of people, such as main- taining localised cultural practices, recording nearly extinct languages and songs, and documenting stories associated with particular areas of ‘Country’ have been facilitated by government grants and initiatives on the grounds that they are national imperatives. This is in part premised on a belief that the state might be able to halt the cultural destruction it has caused. It is also premised on the concern, one that has global resonances and is enshrined within insti- tutions such as UNESCO, that a deficit is suffered by humanity as a whole should particular traditions and languages be lost to history. In sum, the discourses cited here show us that Aboriginal culture has been constituted in the public imagination by a medley of hopes and moral argu- ments that are contingent on very particular political circumstances. Aboriginal culture has been characterised as a realm of plenitude and virtue made fragile by patently unjust acts. It is a fundamental human right, and the basis for a coherent Aboriginal identity and sense of collective self-worth. Its recupera- tion is a path to rehabilitating Aboriginal psychological well-being and settler society’s atonement for the crimes of the past. It is rich and dynamic, deserves respect, and it is what most distinguishes Australian culture. It has remarkable antiquity and is a gem of the universal patrimony of humankind, the further erosion of which would be an indictment of Australian society. As John Morton has argued, definitions of Aboriginal culture in Australian public life seem to always have moralistic intent and involve ‘judgements of worth’ (2006). We can attribute this tendency to the fact that being able to ascertain and celebrate the worth of Aboriginal culture has been pivotal to the state’s and non-Indigenous civil society’s negotiation of their obligations to Aboriginal people. This negotiation has tended to be oriented by the follow- ing types of oppositions: injustice and justice, oppression and empowerment, destruction and survival, loss and renewal, denial and recognition, shame and pride, despair and self-worth, trauma and remedy. As Peter Sutton has written with some disillusionment: A central focus of progressive politics and governmental thinking in Australian Indigenous affairs since the 1970s has been on recovery: recovery of lost politi- cal autonomy, lost property rights, lost regional integration, lost economic self- sufficiency, lost pride, lost languages, lost identities, lost sacred objects, lost human remains. Many have put their trust in the promise that ‘culture’ and its partial recov- ery will do more than restore dignity and the respect of others – it will work wonders more broadly by overcoming economic and social dysfunction. (2009, 65) Within a narrative of cultural trauma that stretches back to the founding moment of colonisation, the state and hostile white society arguably stand This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 64 ABORIGINAL ART AND AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY accused with respect to all the former terms in the oppositions I have out- lined and all of the losses in Sutton’s list. Aboriginal culture, as a highly elastic and morally charged idea inflected with the West’s elevated understanding of creative and intellectual pursuits, has been viewed as the vehicle for making amends and reversing the effects of unjust policies of the past. 5.2 Aboriginal Art as Metonymic for Aboriginal Culture I make the suggestion that Aboriginal art has become to some degree met- onymic for Aboriginal culture in Australian public culture because the art has been one of the most potent and amenable means of circulating positive images of Aboriginality in the public domain and symbolising the redemptive intentions of non-Indigenous civil society and the state. This can be illustrated on four fronts. First, it is clear that positive conceptions of Aboriginal culture that were so essential to the task of drawing a line under the era of assimilation ulti- mately found the most traction in the domains of the arts and land custo- dianship. Both resonate with the predispositions of left-leaning civil society and further, the arts and ecology enable the complexity of the dreaming to be authenticated and the value of Aboriginal knowledge and skill to be hon- oured with the greatest cogency. In these domains, Aboriginal culture is recog- nised as an entity of sophistication and intelligence that can be compared to other great traditions around the world.3 To focus on the arts specifically, it is unquestionably the case that the revered status of art within Western culture opened up a sphere of value with which Aboriginality could be affiliated by the state and by sympathetic non-Indigenous civil society. As James Clifford points out, ‘one of the most effective current ways to give cross-cultural value (moral or commercial) to a cultural production is to treat it as art’ (1991, 241; see also Amato 2006). On this point it is pertinent to recall that the polymath economist and bureaucrat H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs whose career traversed the Holt, McMahon and Whitlam governments was a persuasive advocate of both Indigenous interests and the arts and that both Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating were art lovers who made the arts and Indigenous affairs central and highly nationalistic platforms of their leadership. Therefore the treatment of the arts and Indigenous affairs as kindred concerns has a long history, and ideas around their virtue suffused the intellectual culture of those members of the community and government who were sympathetic to these leaders.4 One way in which this cross-cultural value has been asserted is through the characterisation of Aboriginal art as a conduit for respect and understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, an idea that has frequently been reiterated in journalistic, political and art world discourses. For example This content downloaded from ������������130.65.109.155 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:30:09 UTC������������� All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ‘ABORIGINAL CULTURE’ 65 in 2006 the high-profile collector Colin Laverty remarked that ‘[s]o far, art has been the key way that Australia at large has come to understand and learn about and have respect for Aboriginal people’ (Rothwell 2006a). Laverty’s remarks recall the aspirations of progressive thinkers in the 1940s and 1950s, who, in their efforts to dispel racist beliefs about Aboriginal people’s primitivity and assert the intellectual and emotional parity between ‘them’ and ‘us’, would point to Aboriginal art and material culture to substantiate their claims. This was true, for instance, of A. P. Elkin, who was head of Anthropology at the University of Sydney between 1933 and 1956 and instrumental in establishing the assimilation policy (and here we must bear in mind the relevance of humanitarian principles to assimilation when it was initially conceived). Formerly a cleric and teacher of theology, Elkin had observed the tragedy of frontier relations in the Kimberley and became a passionate advocate for Indigenous justice and equality (Wise 1996). In a foreword to Charles Barrett’s and R. H. Croll’s 1943 publication Art of the Australian Aboriginal, Elkin argued that the more the art of the aborigines is publicised, the more appreciative we will all be of that race whose country we have usurped, and whose culture is capable of enriching our own literature and art […] [T]hey find pleasure, beauty, and meaning in the result of their artistic efforts. Such a people consists of men and women of like passions as ourselves. (1943) Similarly, in his preface to the popular publication Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art, which introduced Aboriginal artefacts and motifs to a genera- tion of Australian artists and designers and was …