Sat - September 27, 2008

Beyond Sacred: Buy This Book! 


Dear Reader,

I want you to buy this book, and I will tell you why.

beyond sacred
Beyond Sacred: recent paintings from Australia's remote Aboriginal communities: the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty (Prahran, Vic: Hardie Grant Books, 2008).


My interest in Australian Aboriginal art started quite by accident. In the fall of 1988 we were in New York City for the weekend, touring the art galleries in Soho in between attending evening performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At one gallery, a friend asked what we were doing Sunday afternoon (when galleries are closed) and advised us that there was a show at the Asia Society that was not to be missed.

The show was Dreamings: the art of Aboriginal Australia. It quite literally changed my life.

The catalog for dreamings the exhibition still does an excellent job of conveying the substance of the exhibition with its bipolar emphasis on bark paintings from the north and acrylics from the desert. I vaguely remember reading the wall texts and gaining a rudimentary appreciation of the plot of the show. But mostly what I remember is being blown away by the color and abstraction of the works from Papunya. (Remember that at this point in time acrylic painting elsewhere in the desert was brand new: the Yuendumu doors were four years old; Art from the Great Sandy Desert had introduced Balgo painters to Australian audiences only a year before.)

The bark paintings in Dreamings left me cold. Perhaps I was missing the shock of the new, for the crocodiles, turtles, and serpents (if not the mimihs and sorcery figures) of the Top End were vaguely familiar and vaguely what I expected of Aboriginal art. Indeed, several years later when I was sharing photographs of works in our collection with a local curator she remarked, unimpressed, "You don't have too many pictures with animals in them, do you?"

I suspect this is a fairly common reaction among those exposed to Aboriginal art for the first time. The dazzle, the opticality, the color of Western Desert art have an immediate appeal to Western eyes that have lived with Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Op, and the graphic traditions of modern advertising for most of our lives.

Twowayne bright tjangala years later, we traveled to Australia for the first time and bought our first painting. It was a backpacker special, and as classic an example of the genre as you could ask for (left, Wayne Bright Tjangala, Rockhole Dreaming, 1990). Over the years that followed as first Fay Bell and then Janis Stanton and Daphne Williams opened the doors of Papunya Tula to us, and Diane Mossenson showed us the art that blossomed in Western Australia, we remained staunchly enthusiastic about the art of the Western Desert, true to that first rush of enthusiasm.

Bark painting and the arts of Arnhem Land remained a closed book.

And then, around the turn of the century, on our fourth or fifth visit to Australia, we went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales (as we did on every trip). And once again I saw art that very literally changed my life.

There on display were four large, abstract bark paintings by John Mawurndjul. Suddenly, for the first time, I was able to see the artistry of the format, to get beyond the accumulated preconceptions and to see a vast genre of Indigenous art with clear eyes. I approached the paintings to examine the details of the brushwork and to discover the name of the artist. On the label I also saw the following words: "From the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty."

john mawurndjul mardayin
John Mawurndjul, Mardayin Ceremony, 2003, courtesy of Maningrida Arts and Crafts
This is not one of the paintings from the Laverty Collection I saw at the AGNSW, but is stylistically quite similar.

And now, let me bring this long story to a close. The revelation that was granted to me by the grace of the loan from the Laverty collection led quickly to the purchase of our first work on bark, a Moon Dreaming by Mick Kubarkku. My interest grew rapidly, piqued by stories of the Elcho Island Memorial and the Yirrkala Bark Petition. The intellectual outreach of the Yolngu, so different from the dense secrecy of the people of the deserts, engaged me in a wholly new way.

A few years later, on the occasion of a major show of works on bark at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, Margo Smith offered me the opportunity to present my first public lecture on Aboriginal art, specifically on representations of the Djangka'wu and Wagilag Sisters stories, and the Mangalili clan lore painted by Narratjin Maymuru and his family.

The urge to write about this art that was born with that lecture took me through countless discarded drafts of articles, outlines for books I discovered had already been written, better than I ever could, and finally, three years and ten days ago, to the first post on this blog. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it focused on the Pintupi and the art of the Western Desert.)

In all the years since that epiphanic encounter at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I've been fortunate to continue my engagements with the Laverty collection in museums around the world and even in their home. But none of those meetings offers the breadth and the scope of what is contained in Beyond Sacred. There are hundreds of works illustrated in this volume, with brief essays from a Who's Who of art centre luminaries from Andrew Blake and Apolline Kohen to Una Rey and Will Stubbs.

The book's four major essays, commissioned by the Lavertys to explore the theme of Aboriginal art as contemporary art, form a most illuminating jigsaw approach to the question. Howard Morphy's "The Laverty Collection: Exploring the Qualities of Aboriginal Art" seeks to illuminate essential aspects of the artistic tradition as embodied in the act and art of collecting. In this respect, his approach dovetails neatly with the opening premise of Judith Ryan's historically oriented contribution, "Shock of the Ancient Made New":

Despite the cynics who regularly declare that Indigenous Australian art has passed its peak and will never be the same again, the greatest collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art can only he assembled by true believers in the maxim that the best art is what is being produced now. This philosophy permeates and underlies many of the finest international collections of early Modernism and the pre-eminient collections of contemporary Indigenous Australian art.

Nick Waterlow's "The Contemporary and Aboriginal Art" also takes Modernism as its starting point, comparing the emergence of that movement with the arrival of acrylic painting from the desert, and chronicling the entrance of Aboriginal art into the contemporary museum. My own contribution, "Transmuted Traditions: The Modernity of Australian Aboriginal Art," takes the tension between ethnography and fine art in the museum world as the occasion for discussing changes in both curation of the art and the artistic traditions themselves.

As I noted in an earlier commentary on Beyond Sacred, I had no hint what my co-authors were up to while I was writing my own piece, and I think that one of the delights of the written words in this book is the way in which the same themes emerge in the essays, and often the same artists as exemplars of those themes. And yet each essay is quite different in tone, approach, and focus.

But the greatest appeal of Beyond Sacred, after all these years, are the paintings and sculpture themselves. In paging through the book, I found heart-stopping moments, like the sudden apparition of Rammey Ramsey's Warlawoon Country Series #1 (2005), a work totally unlike any other by the artist I have ever seen, and perhaps unlike any other Indigenous accomplishment. Or now, looking through it again as I write this essay, I come across work from last year by Wukun Wanambi, dumbfoundingly beautiful versions of the work on display in Darwin this year.

You can sample the delights of this collection now at BeyondSacred.com. But I urge you to go beyond that sample, and give yourself and your friends the chance to indulge in the breadth of the Lavertys' vision of the contemporary art of Indigenous Australia. Buy this book! You won't be disappointed. 

Posted at 01:09 PM    

Sat - July 12, 2008

Perspectives on Indigenous Sovereignty 


With discussions of Native Title due to begin in Perth soon and Kevin Rudd making plans for an upcoming "community cabinet" in Yirrkala on July 30 ("Sorry was the easy part," Sydney Morning Herald, July 12, 2008), I have serendipitously found myself reading two quite different books that are relevant to questions being raised as the Intervention is reshaped under Labor. I didn't plan it this way. Although I'm the type of reader who always has his nose in more than one book at a time, the happy conjunction of discovering in the library Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous sovereignty matters (Allen & Unwin, 2007), edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and pulling David Day's Claiming a Continent: a new history of Australia (Harper Collins, rev. ed., 2001) down from my bookshelf for a bit of bedtime reading was truly accidental. But the two books are nonetheless a compelling if contrasting pair, and they make for good reading at this moment in time.

As the foreword to Sovereign Subjects states:

Aileen Moreton-Robinson's collection is the first major intervention in discussions of Indigenous sovereignty in Australia. It comes at a time that is a crossroads for the rights of Indigenous people in Australia (p. vii).

The book's twelve essays, by as many Indigenous scholars, are divided into four thematic units: "Law matters," Writing matters," "History matters," and "Policy matters." I've been dipping into them randomly, and have not finished all of them yet, but those I have read reflect a diversity of approaches, tone, and interests united by the question of how Indigenous people cope with the problem of sovereignty--or more precisely the lack of it--in the 21st century. As is often true of collections like this, many of the essays were commissioned and written months or even years ago, well before the Intervention began. Indeed, some still speak of Amanda Vanstone as the Minister for Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs. However, in the case of this book, the time lag between composition and publication has only served to sharpen the points that the authors make. Nothing in here seems dated or irrelevant; in fact, the opposite is often true. Since I'm still in the midst of reading the book, a few examples must suffice.

Gary Foley's contribution, "The Australian Labor Party and the Native Title Act," is a historical examination of the role that Labor has played over the decades since 1967. It is not a laudatory review. Readers of Quentin Beresford's recent biography of Rob Riley (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006) will be familiar with the position that Foley here espouses, that "both the Mabo decision and the subsequent Native Title Act 1993 have functioned to deny Aboriginal sovereignty" (p. 139). Legislating the terms under which Indigenous Australians may claim title, and adjudicating the appropriateness of such claims and the conditions under which they are heard and granted, is the ultimate rebuttal of Indigenous sovereignty, for it privileges white law over the moral considerations of occupation and prior "ownership."

Similarly, Tony Birch examines the ways in which historians have built and bulwarked the edifice of dispossession in "'The Invisible Fire': Indigenous sovereignty, history and responsibility." He begins his story with a contemporary incident concerning Olympic medalist Cathy Freeman (whose soubriquet of "our Cathy" is an uncomfortable echo of the government's concerns about "our Aborigines" early in the 20th century.)

In 1950, the Queensland Protector of Aborigines failed to pay the required fee of two pounds, five shillings for a pauper's burial of Annie Sibley, a Freeman family matriarch. In 2005, Freeman's family was forced to pay off the debt at a cost of $990 before being allowed to bury a young family member in the same family plot.

Birch continues to examine the ways in which history haunts contemporary Aboriginal people, from the rough treatment accorded to David Gulpilil in the long grass camps of Darwin through the academic exercises of Keith Windschuttle. He ends his wide-ranging essay with a moving review of director Ivan Sen's 1999 film Dust, in which a sudden severe dust storm brings about an intimate confrontation between generations of black and white, while physically as well as metaphorically laying bare the bones in the countryside that bear witness to hostile historical encounters.

The essay that has resonated most strongly with me so far is "Indigenous sovereignty and the Australian state: relations in a globalizing era," by Maggie Walter. Acknowledging the already parlous state of Indigenous rights, Walter looks at the increasing threat posed by the new global order in which transnational commercial interests are beginning to supersede and jeopardize our conventional notions of national sovereignty. The rise of nationalist movements in the face of this threat and the desire of the middle class to protect themselves from their own disenfranchisement, pose even greater problems for already marginalized minorities within the state. Walter links the ascendance of business interests to an increased valorization of private property, which in turn undermines the principles of communal social organization and ownership fundamental to Indigenous societies. The barbs of the Native Title Act are felt in new and crueler ways.

Upon its first publication in 1996, Day's Claiming a Continent was celebrated (and condemned) for the new perspective on Australian history that underlay its narrative. Day looks at the history of Australia through the lens of attempts to lay claim to the continent, to people its span, and to wrench riches from its harsh environment. Day would probably not disagree with Moreton-Robinson's suggestion in her own contribution to Sovereign Subjects that this struggle has bred a degree of insecurity into the Australian psyche.

More than almost any other general history of Australia, Claiming a Continent foregrounds Aboriginal loss. In his chronicle, Day makes much of the principles of British and international law of the time that "justify" such claims of possession: first discovery, conquest, physical occupation, and moral proprietorship (in which the gradual supplanting of indigenes over time gives the incomers their own links to the new "homeland." Day is exquisitely attuned to what each of these means for both the British and the Aboriginal denizens of the Great Southern Continent.

In this way, Claiming a Continent never long loses sight of the plight of the Aboriginal people, and each chapter in the expansion of British influence, and each justification for it, Day is sensitive to the losses they suffered. Whether it is displacement by hordes of sheep or subjugation to the Christian imperative to civilize and save souls, the Indigenous occupants are inevitably the poorer for the encounter.

I was unaware of Day's book at the time of its publication, and probably at that point would have been too ignorant to fully understand its implications. Reading it today, in light of Keith Windschuttle and Andrew Bolt on the one hand, and Henry Reynolds and Robert Manne on the other, I can imagine that if its publication didn't result in the proverbial firestorm of criticism about "black armband history" it must certainly have stoked the fires that fed Howard's and Windschuttle's attacks in the decade since.

And yet the irony is that for all that Day understands his subject and counts too well the human cost of colonization, his narrative remains inescapably (and perhaps appropriately) the story of the creation of the modern Australian state in its glory and shame. And thus it is fundamentally in tune with, if not always in sympathy with, the European perspective on the re-peopling of Australia. To read such a sympathetic account from an academic historian's perspective in tandem with the angry and defiant essays that Moreton-Robinson has collected is to understand afresh the persistent gulf between the perceptions of Indigenous Australians and those of the political heirs of the eighteenth-century colonists.

 

Posted at 01:47 PM    

Fri - July 4, 2008

Last Drinks 


I've been waiting for Paul Toohey's Last Drinks: the impact of the Northern Territory Intervention (Quarterly Essay no 30) to arrive on these shores since The Australian published a brief excerpt from it ("Life and Death of a Crisis") on June 7. I'm still waiting, but in the meantime Jonathan Shaw has put up a brief review of it on his blog Family Life, and kindly given me permission to quote him. And so, without further ado, and until I get to read the whole thing for myself, here is Jonathan's review.

Paul Toohey isn't afraid of rubbing people up the wrong way. He refers to what I assume is a psychiatric hospital as a loony bin, throws round disparaging generalisations about the Left, insists on talking of Aborigines rather than Aboriginal people, and so on. An extraordinarily wide range of public figures cop the rough edge of his pen, including John Howard, Mal Brough, Jenny Macklin, Noel Pearson, the authors of the Little Children Are Sacred report, Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Clare Martin (especially Clare Martin!), the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (my union) ... the list goes on. Despite all this swagger, and despite working unapologetically for the newspaper formerly known as the Government Gazette, currently the Opposition Organ, he does shed light on the Intervention/invasion/emergency response; he brings a number of Aboriginal voices into the conversation; he forces an acknowledgement of the dire complexity of the situation the intervention was intended to address, and on the complex issues involved in evaluating it. He's a journalist first and foremost, and as such he doesn't rush to an easy summary. His final section about a particular woman's devastated, violent, alcohol steeped life ends with the sentence, 'Hers was the real story of the Northern Territory." But that's more of a rhetorical flourish than anything. when he says

if you were still sitting around, months into the intervention, experiencing explosive waves of political sympathy and anger on behalf of Aborigines, it was a fair bet you'd never been to the Northern Territory

he comes close to putting his view in a nutshell. It's all very well for people sitting in seats in the Opera House to hiss and boo the racism of the intervention (which he acknowledges), the accusations of near-universal child sexual abuse (which he agrees were slanderous ), but if you ask the women of Hermansburg, among other places, they'll tell you their lives and the lives of their families have been improved. He also believes that the good effects of the intervention have been eroded to the point of cancellation by the ALP's modifications of it.

One of the sweetest things abut the Quarterly Essay series is that each issue contains responses to the previous one. This one, more than any other so far, contains within itself a list of people who are challenged to reply.
 

Posted at 01:07 PM    

Sun - June 29, 2008

Yiloga: Tiwi Warriors 


One journalist.

Two photographers.

Five translators.

Eighteen men to a side.

Three thousand spectators.

Yiloga! Tiwi Footy!


Tiwi Footy: Yiloga is the new publication by F11 Productions in Darwin celebrating the history of Australian Rules football in the Tiwi Islands through the story of the 2007 Tiwi Islands Football Grand Final. It is a ravishing book. Photographers Monica Napper and Peter Eve have filled 256 pages with photographs that tell a narrative with drama, coherence, and beauty in a way that I can't remember seeing before. Although the introductory essay by Andrew McMillan tells the backstory, filling in history and culture, and offering glimpses into the thoughts of players and supporters, it is the stunning photographs that are the heart and soul of the book. It is through them that the emotion, the thrill, the complexity of Tiwi Footy, or Yiloga, as it's called in language, is really told. (And speaking of language, McMillan's essay has been translated into modern Tiwi and presented on facing pages to the English version.)

If you just flip through the pages of the book, you can watch the big day unfold. Aerial shots document planes arriving from the mainland, carrying southern fans come to see what it's all about. A barge brings more spectators over from Melville Island. A Catholic mass in Nguiu, kids racing in on the their bikes, a linesman preparing the field, all these are part of the build up.

Switch to players warming up for the game before Ted Egan hands out season medals in a pre-game ceremony. The teams explode onto the field. The first tap sets the game in motion, the rains start, spectators huddle under tarps while kids lark about. Finally the game concludes to celebration and commiseration and the pride of fathers on the winning side hoisting their children in the air. The victory cup is raised and the kids take the field again, dreams of their own championships alive in their eyes.

The barge crosses the Apsley Strait back to Melville Island as other crowds gather at the airport for the flight back to Darwin and dusk settles over the Islands.

Once you've taken the photographic tour, it's time to go back and absorb McMillan's history lesson. The essay is written with his characteristic combination of stylistic flair, deep knowledge, and informed historical research. McMillan's narrative, like that of photographers Napper and Eve, is structured by the events of the Grand Final, but he can take some temporal liberties with his story line that enrich our understanding of what we see in the photographs.

Here is a selection, taken at random, from his essay. Early arrivals from Darwin and points south have some time to kill in the morning before the game begins:

Up around a dirt road reflective with puddles after rain, the local art centres are crowded with visitors shopping for paintings, carvings, ceramics, pottery, spears, printed bolts of cotton and woven feathered armbands, all in that unique Tiwi style.

Down streets shaded by frangipani, the Patakijiyali Museum is an obvious point of call. On a series of boards detailing ceremonial dances and tribal affiliations, mention is made of the Hangman's dance, inspired, as it turns out, by the 1968 Clint Eastwood western Hang 'Em High.

Oddly -- perhaps because it belongs to everyone, not just one clan -- there's no reference in the museum to the Football dance, an act choreographed around the actions of a bounce, a handpass, a mark and a kick.

Nor is there reference to the Bombing of Darwin dance during which old men with arms outstretched are gunned down by young fellas with simulated binoculars and anti-aircraft guns.

With McMillan's guide under your belt, it's time to go back for a closer, slower look at the photographs. There are portraits, action scenes in which the players seem capable of suspending the law of gravity, candid, unscripted moments, children mugging for the camera, even a dog standing attentively for the camera, proudly wrapped in its team colors. But what I love most about many of these photographs are the details that steal your eye from the sidelines. Here's one that I've snagged from the previews available on the F11 Tiwi Footy website to illustrate my point.


In the index of images that appears at the end of the book, this picture is labeled "Seven jumpers for seven Tiwi teams." My eye was first caught by the brilliance of the jersey's colors, and my attention focused there by the sloping lines of the trees in the upper half of the photograph. The shadow cast by the verandah echoes that diagonal; the sunlight bouncing off the knees of the smiling kids lined up below the jerseys also held my attention front and center. So much so that it wasn't until the third or fourth time I paused over this shot that I spotted the "eighth jumper": the boy caught mid air, and mid-flip, at the left edge of the verandah.

The photographs are filled with delights like this that subtly enrich the experience of Grand Final Day. Early on in the sequence there's a lovely photograph of "The Strong Women's Group preparing for the big day," seated on another verandah, some weaving baskets, others seated around the periphery; one woman rests on her elbow, head leaned against a post. Her pose reminded me of one of Picasso's femmes de luxe; maybe it was that blue guitar tucked away on the periphery that suggested the connection to me.

In the two pages that follow, one sees the the women's verandah in the background as the camera focuses on a group of very young children clustered around a sea turtle lying on its back; the photograph is called "The Strong Women's Group before lunch." On the opposite page, "After lunch," shot in contrasting black and white, shows the empty turtle's shell atop the fire, the last bits being scraped away by a young boy in soccer shorts.

Then, many pages on, that blue guitar reappears as the Strong Women's Group lines up with their baskets to sing before the centre bounce.

I seem to have neglected to mention the photographs of the game itself, or the studies of the players as they stretch out their hamstrings before hand or exult and dance on the field afterwards. This is not because these photographs aren't as stunning in their own way. The action is crisply frozen, with half a dozen straining men caught flying, their biceps shining, the ripples of their jerseys twisting like sculpted muscles themselves, all lines converging on the red Sherrin just inches away from a player's hands.

But even in the most dramatic of these team portraits, the players often seem to be, not the heroes of the day (though they certainly are), but rather somewhat more dramatically posed and garbed members of the community. As the teams burst through banners to take the fields, they are accompanied by sawrming mobs of young boys; when they dance on the field in victory, they are there with mothers and wives; when they leap for a pass, their playing field is surrounded by family.

And this is perhaps the real magic of Tiwi Footy: how it captures the magnetism of the day and the bonds of the community, their pride and their connectedness. I know this is blasphemy, especially coming from an American, but if I were offered a swap of seats at the MCG for the bleachers at the Nguiu Oval, I wouldn't think twice after reading this book.

The authors hope that profits from the sale of the book can eventually be directed towards the creation of a small museum dedicated to the Tiwi Football League, with a women's center as a part of it. National and international exhibitions based on the book could also contribute to their plans. So check out the website and help support the TFL!

 

Posted at 01:58 PM    

Thu - June 19, 2008

Top (End) Books 


Great and very timely news from the publishing world tonight: Niblock Publishing has re-issued two of Andrew McMillan's books, both of which have been out of print for far too long. I've written about both of them before, so I won't go into details here.

The first is Strict Rules: the Blackfella - Whitefella Tour, McMillan's chronicle of the concerts that took Midnight Oil and the Warumpi Band through Indigenous communities across the Central Desert and the Top End. The timing couldn't be better, for this year marks the 20th anniversary of the blockbuster albums that came out of that experience, Warumpi Band's Go Bush! and Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust. The Oils have just rereleased the latter and it comes with a DVD that features an hour of music and interviews from the tour. The film, also called Blackfella/Whitefella, has been even harder to find on the second-hand market than McMillan's book, and it's one of the classic concert films, right up there in my book with Gimme Shelter and Stop Making Sense.

The second is An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land, and I doubt you will find a better introduction, guide, compendium, or history of the world of the Yolngu between two covers. The opening chapter picks up where Strict Rules left off, on Elcho Island, and offers an affecting portrait of the lead singer Burrurrawanga's homeland, made all the more poignant by his death in May of 2007. But it goes on to offer so much more, and should be required reading for anyone with an interest in Aboriginal affairs.

So don't wait for Christmas; buy yourself and your friends a present today! You won't be sorry. I promise. 

Posted at 09:57 PM    

Sat - June 14, 2008

Reading Anthropology 


I don't do a great deal of reading in the anthropological literature, and lately it seems that most of the books I've talked about in this space have been either fiction or politics, when they are not about art. But every once in a while I'm struck by how little I really know about the discipline of cultural anthropology. I recognize important titles, and names of great theorists are dimly remembered from the couple of courses I took as an undergraduate. In the past year I've started reading the discussion list of the Australian Anthropological Society and have subscribed to Anthro-L, a primarily American forum. And so I've been inspired to try to stretch my reading lists outside the realm of Indigenous Australian studies to see what I can learn.

I spent a considerable amount of time looking for a good introduction or overview to the discipline's history and made numerous false starts. Most of what I could find were collections of case studies that have clearly been prepared as textbooks for undergraduate courses that assumed some degree of guidance in the form of a lecturer who could place the discussion in context. But the context was what I was looking for.

I finally came across an excellent, short introduction, illuminatingly called What is Anthropology? (Pluto Press, 2004) by Thomas Hylland Eriksen of the University of Oslo. One of the most refreshing aspects of this short (180-page) primer is that it is not overly weighted towards either side of the Atlantic, but gives, as appropriate, equal time to the British and American schools of thought in the last century, while not neglecting the contributions of the French, either.

The book is divided into two sections, "Entrances" and "Fields." The former present a history of anthropology, an overview of research methods (fieldwork), and discussions of a broad range of "theories." This last chapter comprises discussions of structural functionalism, culture and personality, agency and society, and structures of the mind. This brief overview left me far clearer than I had been on the contributions of Boas, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Levi-Strauss, and Geertz, among others.

The second half of the book appeared at first to be highly selective in its choice of fields of inquiry: reciprocity, kinship, nature, thought, and identification. But as I worked my way through each of them, I realized how much of the literature that I've read in recent years is subsumed under these five topics. Each chapter ends with two or three suggestions for further reading that taken together form just the kind of basic bibliography that I was searching for in the first place.

I was feeling emboldened by my new course of study to the point that when someone on the Anthro-L list made a passing comment about the function of secrecy in the creation of knowledge as described by Fredrik Barth in Cosmologies in the Making: a generative approach to cultural variation in inner New Guinea (Cambridge University Press, 1987), I headed straight for the library's stacks to check it out. It proved to be a humbling corrective, but a fascinating foray nonetheless. I'm sure I understood about 50% of what Barth had to say.

Barth, who was also at the University of Oslo when this book was written, was cited by Eriksen as a theorist who stressed the importance of individual agency, or "methodological individualism": the notion that "all societal phenomena can be studied by looking at individuals, their actions and their relations to other individuals" (Eriksen, p. 67).

Cosmologies in the Making is an attempt to account for the ways in which variations in ritual practice and knowledge have developed among the Ok of the mountainous interior of Papua New Guinea, close to the border with Irian Jaya. Different communities, often separated by distances of only tens of kilometers, display marked variation in protocols relating to sacrifice, sacred decoration, temple construction and adornment, and the degrees to which myth plays a role in ritual. Barth is interested in constructing a model which can account for these ontological variations.

In part, he ascribes differences to the secret nature of ritual, and to the restricted access to only a select few elder men in each of the communities. There are multiple levels of initiation of younger men into these rituals, and in some cases, a ritual may not be performed more than once in a decade. During the intervening years, the knowledge of the particulars of the ritual performance remain sealed, as it were, in the mind of one man, and perhaps his close confederates.

During that period, the essentially metaphoric nature of ritual knowledge is acted upon by the individual consciousness and is susceptible to interpretation and "subjectification." When time comes for the ritual to be performed again, details may have become obscure, to the guardian of the secret knowledge himself, as well as to his cohort or other senior men who have been through the ritual themselves in the past.

Barth postulates that the efficacy of ritual lies in its ability to imbue understanding of the sacred in those who witness it, and in its metaphorical means of communication, the end effect or result, rather than scrupulous recreation of previous enactments, is the measure of its success and appropriateness. Thus variations can be expected to occur and traditions diverge over space and time.

I was intrigued by the reference to Barth's book, as it came close on the heels of hearing Fred Myers talk about painting among the Pintupi in the 1970s and 80s as an assertion of their knowledge, and thus of their status within the community. For those old masters, the fact that they were able to paint their Dreamings stories--able in both senses of having the requisite knowledge as well as the permissions--was de facto an assertion of identity. Among the Pintupi, secrecy acts to secure that status, much as it does among the Ok. Whether there are lessons to be transferred from Barth's analysis to studies of ritual among Indigenous Australians is a topic I plan to pursue in the literature, and would welcome comments on. There don't seem to be obvious connections, but the point of this set of reviews is to establish my naivete on the general subject of anthropological research.

Naivete is the dominant theme of another monograph that I recently encountered in a serendipitous search of my library's holdings in Aboriginal art. Peggy Reeves Sanday is an anthropologist on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and a consulting curator in the Asian Section of the Penn Museum. She has recently published Aboriginal Paintings of the Wolfe Creek Crater: track of the Rainbow Serpent (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2007). Sanday has stepped outside her usual focus of scholarly interest (gender studies) to write a brief book that is part memoir, part family history, and only part anthropology.

Sanday's father, Frank Reeves, was a geologist on the 1947 expedition that first spotted the Wolf Creek Crater during an aerial survey of the country near Halls Creek. (The first thing that I learned from perusing this volume is that there is no single commonly accepted spelling for Wolf(e), although it was named for Robert Wolfe, the gold prospector who reputedly founded Hall's Creek.) Drawn to the site by a complicated family history, Sanday began her investigations into the local significance of the Crater with a desire to honor her father and her family, and to pierce what she saw as a veil of misinformation suggesting that the place did not figure in the local Dreaming lore.

The result is a lightweight foray into the history, natural and human, of the area, organized in its latter half around a series of paintings commissioned by Sanday that depict her informants' stories of the crater. There is a certain guileless charm to her quest to marry the stories--Djaru tales and her father's "discovery" of the crater--and her emotional connection to the site comes through clearly. But the art is dreary, apart from plates of crayon drawings collected by Tindale in 1953, which still shimmer. In the end, the book is disappointing in that it offers the promise and perhaps even the appearance of depth. But it turns out to be Sanday's story, not the crater's, and not that of the Djaru and their neighbors. 

Posted at 05:33 PM    

Mon - May 26, 2008

Sorry 


Two books exploring encounters between Indigenous Australians and "explorers" of some stripe have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award this year. Alex Miller's Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin 2007) is a follow-up to his Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin, 2002), which won the Franklin five years ago. Having not read the earlier novel, I opted to turn my attention to this year's other shortlister, Sorry, by Gail Jones (Vintage, 2007). I was curious, anyway, to see how a novel with such a loaded, one-word title would play out in this era of intervention and apology.

The short answer is, I'm not sure how well the novel succeeds, at least as an evocation of the principles that resonate in discussions of the Stolen Generations and the Prime Minister's Parliamentary apology. In fact, I'm hard pressed to come to a conclusion about the novel in almost any way. But before I tackle critical judgments, perhaps a brief summary of the plot would be helpful.

The novel is the story of a young girl, Perdita Keene, the child of English immigrants who come to Australia in the years between the wars. Her parents' marriage might be described as accidental: they are two people without a place in the world, whose almost haphazard journey leaves them in an isolated corner of Western Australia south of Broome. Her father, Nicholas, a damaged veteran of the Great War, seeks to become a world-famous anthropologist, but is unable to connect with the Aboriginal people he is sent to study. Her mother, Stella, finds meaning in the world only through the cracked lens of lengthy selections from Shakespeare that she has memorized. Her tenuous hold on reality is further shattered by the harshness of the Outback, and in the course of the events narrated here, she is institutionalized more than once.

On one of these occasions, a young Aboriginal woman, Mary, is brought back to the Keenes' dilapidated shack, an outpost furnished with towers of Nicholas's books and, once the Second World War begins, clippings registering the advance of the Axis powers across the theaters of war. Mary's job is to care for Perdita during her mother's absence, and once the extremely fragile Stella returns, Mary stays on. Billy, the deaf-mute child of the neighboring family, and Mary form the small circle of trusted friends that grant Perdita a place in the world.

The bloody, violent death of Nicholas in his rural bolthole opens the book, but it is not until very near the end that the circumstances of his death are made clear. The trauma of witnessing the murder robs Perdita of her ability to speak cogently. A debilitating stutter reduces her to a silence nearly as complete as her friend Billy's muteness; her youthful incomprehension in the face of this trauma forbids her to speak the truth and condemns her to a silence that is also mirrored in the fate of Mary, who is charged with the murder and taken away to jail in Perth. In the wake of all this tragedy, Perdita is eventually fostered out to the care of a sympathetic couple down south. In the big city, she eventually re-establishes connections with both Billy and Mary, and under the guidance of a Russian therapist, overcomes her stutter and allows the truth of her father's killing to surface from the depths of forgetting to which she has consigned it, unwittingly and devastatingly.

In the course of assembling this narrative, Jones offers her readers a wide array of pleasures. There is history embedded everywhere: stories of the fears of invading Japanese, or of rural communities strafed, of ships bombed and survivors tormented. These are thrilling passages, recalling actual historical narratives. There is great literature woven throughout. Jones's use of Shakespeare is brilliant, at time illuminating, at times mystifying, and in combination sketching the outlines of Stella's mental collapse in a manner that mirrors the trenchant uncertainty one feels in the presence of madness. There is suspense as well, as the question of how Nicholas died, and why, twists its slow way through the story.

And yet at times each of these brilliant devices seems to stand clearly as just that: a device. I was perpetually balanced between my awe at Jones's artistry and my uncomfortable, inescapable recognition of it as artifice. It was if the brilliance of the prose made me all the more aware of the mirror's glare that produced it.

The best moments, I thought, were those that detailed the burgeoning friendship between the two girls, and the chance that Mary provides Perdita, the chance to discover a home in the desert environment of Western Australia that proves to be her parents' undoing. True, Jones runs the risk of producing yet another meditation on the "natural" qualities of the Aboriginal characters, of the white man's dependence on the indigenous to come to terms with the harsh environment and the colonizer's inability to recognize the import of that dependence. But the warmth with which she describes the friendship, and the joy that it brings the aptly named Perdita, the lost one, rings so true that it succeeds in forging the heart of the book's emotional gospel.

I am less certain how well Jones succeeds in the book's central thesis regarding the apology. Mary is unsurprisingly revealed at the end to be innocent of the crime for which she has been imprisoned, yet she insists on maintaining her silence even when confronted with Perdita's understanding of the true course of events. Perdita bows to Mary's determination, and it is only after the Aboriginal woman's death--too late, in other words--that she recognizes that she should have said "sorry," that she should have apologized for forgetting, for her silence, for the trauma that her progenitors forced upon both of them. Read as an allegory for the psychic state of (at least part of) contemporary Australian society, this conclusion almost works. As novelistic psychology, it feels tattered, awkward, and just a bit gimcrack, just as the image of the towers of books in Nicholas's shack feel like a too self-conscious and transparent recasting of Shakespeare's The Tempest to be believable as literal furnishings.

But perhaps I cavil. Sorry does not have the stature of last year's winner of the Miles Franklin, Carpentaria, but then few works of world literature today do. Sorry has sincerity, craft, and thoughtfulness to offer, no mean set of virtues. It is a very Australian novel. Perhaps someone should send Brendan Nelson a copy. 

Posted at 12:03 AM    

Sun - April 20, 2008

Aborigines and Architecture 


In many of Spencer and Gillen's celebrated photographs of the Arrernte people, a family can be seen seated in front of a humpy. We note the old man, his two wives, their children, and perhaps a camp dog. Donald Thomson photographed the fierce elder Wonngu with his family in a dry season camp. In his films of Narritjin at Djarrakpi, Ian Dunlop lets us watch the Mangalili family painting under shade shelters they have constructed in their homeland, as Narritjin instructs his sons in the stories and techniques that prove their rights to the land.

Our attention is deservedly focused on what these photographs tell us about people now passed beyond our immediate ken. We can spot traces of body decorations, and marvel at a nose bone in the old Centralian men. The expressions on the faces of Wonggu's family members are riveting, the crowd peering out from behind intriguing. The delicacy of the cross-hatched lines so expertly and painstakingly drawn on the surface of a sheet of bark astonishes.

What fades into the background is the spinifex-clad hut, the bark sheets seemingly precariously balanced on forked-stick supports, the welter of interwoven branches that provide protection from both sun and rain. In part, I suspect, because we have been conditioned to think of Australia's indigenous people as nomadic as well as people who have mastered their environment with simple technologies, we pay little attention to the built environment we barely see in these photographs and films.

After reading Paul Memmott's Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: the Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2007), I will never be able to look at these photographs in the same way. Thanks to Memmott's scholarship and to the superb design editing UQP has brought to this hefty monograph, I will now be looking for expressions in sticks and spinifex as much as in eyes and mouths. Memmott has produced an eye-opening study of the variety and ingenuity of Aboriginal architecture and told his story with consummate skill. What I thought might be a dry, technical treatise instead provides a shifting panorama of technical, social, and forensic detail that never fails to engage through nearly 400 pages of texts, diagrams, and photographs.

Memmott keeps the reader engaged in part by refusing to proceed in a lock-step manner. On the one hand there are chapters that focus on the unique architectural solutions to Indigneous needs in discrete parts of the country ("Northern Monsoonal Architecture," or "Spinifex Houses of the Western Destern"). Interspersed are others that deal more with the cultural considerations that come to bear on how these architectural solutions are deployed in camps and communities ("Socio-spatial Structures of Australian Aboriginal Settlements," or "Campsite Behavior in Arid Australia.")

And although these chapter titles might sound like the deadliest entires culled from a soporific academic conference, Memmott's lucid writing style (assisted by occasional collaborators on selected essays), descriptive power, and clear enthusiasm for his subject made me turn the pages at a surprising rate and left me reluctant to put the book away when other responsibilities called for my attention.

The surprising variations in structural design strategies employed in different parts of the continent are not limited to the expected differences between bark and post construction in the tropical climates vs branch and grass constructions in the desert. I had no real prior understanding of the extent of stone construction in the south, not just for fish-weirs and eel-traps, but for dwellings as well. Nor did I know that in addition to building roofs over their heads, some groups dug sunken floors within their dwellings to enhance the ability of the shelter's walls to act as windbreaks. Nor would I have considered the implications that such sunken spaces required in terms of drainage during heavy rains.

The lesson that Wadigali and Maljangaba people in the Lake Eyre region built domed structures of tree branches and weather-proofed them with claddings of mud was a surprise to me. Even more surprising was the suggestion, based on narrative evidence from the nineteenth century, that a division of labor, a specialization based on expertise, may have developed among these "Mud Dome Architects of the Lake Eyre Basin." Certain individuals were reportedly sought out by their countrymen to direct the construction of these punga. Memmott details the strength of the supporting beams required not simply to support the mud, but also the weight of the workman who needs to mount the dome to replenish the mud covering. He also injects some human drama with a tale of architectural disaster that involves the collapse of one these humpies onto its luckless occupants after dogs digging at the foundations and heavy rains combined to bring the structure crashing down.

Memmott does not confine himself in this survey to documenting traditional structures from pre-contact and earliest contact days. Within the realm of the traditional, he explores "Symbolism and Meaning in Aboriginal Architecture," looking at ritual structures, including the conical mats of Arnhem Land that women use to hide under during sacred men's business, and also to protect themselves and their children from strong sun and inexorable mosquitos. He inspects nomenclature and examines the connections between the names of various architectural forms and Dreaming stories. In this respect he also describes the bark shelters constructed by the Wagilag Sisters and the role dwellings play in the Lardil myth of Thuwathu, the Rainbow Serpent.

The concluding chapters treat of "Fringe Dwellers and Town Camps," and look "Towards a Contemporary Aboriginal Architecture." I was surprised and pleased to see that the former chapter relied on sociological evidence collected by Jeff Collman and presented in Fringe Dwellers and Welfare: the Aboriginal response to bureaucracy (University of Queensland Press, 1988), a book I found fascinating for its insights into socio-spatial arrangements and culture contact. The discussion in Memmott's book adds much in the way of visual detail and clarity to Collman's analysis.

The final chapter looks at how the traditions of ethno-architecture are being transformed from within Aboriginal society, for example, in the growth of "traveller's camps" designed to meet the needs of transients." It also explores the interface between those traditional forms and Western architecture. He looks at the works of the first generation of University trained Indigenous architects to speculate on the possibilities for better meeting the needs of Indigenous culture. He notes, for example, the importance of open space--not a terribly new insight--but one that is placed within an intriguing discussion of the possibility of "architecture without walls" that made me stop and reconsider the very nature of my definition of the term.

A book like Goonyah Goondie + Wurley succeeds or fails on its visual design, for as vivd and engaging as Memmott's prose is, explications of architecture require good illustrations to fully succeed. UQP deserves to win some prizes for its efforts in this publication. Thirty "boxes," spreads of two or more pages that combine photographs, drawings, plans and text, punctuate the text, intelligently inserted so as not to disrupt the narrative flow of Memmott's text. These boxes often draw together major themes and concepts elaborated in the chapters in which they appear and act as visual summaries or indices of the subject under discussion. They supplement other drawings and photographs interspersed in the text that are also always used to good effect.

The photographs collected and clearly reproduced here span a surprising length of Australian history, with some dating as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. Photographs are consistently well captioned, including the dates: an important consideration when architectural styles have been documented only occasionally and in a discontinuous manner. Where photographs are not available to illustrate a particular point, reproductions of eighteenth and nineteenth century drawings and engravings are intelligently used. Eight pages of color plates in the middle of the book are a luxurious and pleasant bonus.

There are plentiful drawing and diagrams, with clear, plentiful labels, scale markings, and explanatory texts. Even the typography displays an unusual and highly laudable degree of flexibility and intelligence. Gutters and margins expand and contract to contribute to a layout that brings related material together on a page. Single columns of text are the rule, but double columns are used occasionally to good effect. If a box must be placed so that it interrupts the textual flow, a clearly visible note at the bottom of the page ("Continued on page...") guides the reader across the break.

I initially approached Goonyah Goondie + Wurley almost out of a sense of obligation: here was a major publication from an important publisher of Indigenous studies on a topic of clear academic significance. I almost couldn't avoid the responsibility of taking a look. I wasn't at all prepared to be captivated, stimulated, and entranced by what I found within the covers. It is a book that is almost certain to change the way you think about and look at Aboriginal culture. 

Posted at 02:58 PM    

Sat - March 1, 2008

New Books: Australian Stories 


The new books shelf at the library has featured a number of titles on matters Australian that caught my attention in recent weeks. Although only one of them is devoted entirely to Indigenous themes, all of them offer something of interest to students of Aboriginal culture. All of them are also the kind of works that you can dip into and out of at your leisure, which is precisely what I've been doing during my lunch hours lately. So, with the caveat that I've read none of these in its entirety, here is the roundup.

By the Book: a literary history of Queensland (University of Queensland Press, 2007, 390pp), is edited by Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay, both of Griffith University. It is organized primarily by geography, with sections devoted to South-East, Central, Western, and North Queensland. The final section is given over to "statewide themes" and includes chapters on travel writing and children's literature, along with "'Biting' Back': Indigenous Writing in Queensland" by Maggie Nolan, lecturer in Australian Studies at Australian Catholic University.

Nolan's chapter reveals what is both good and bad about this book as a whole: it needs to cover a large amount of material quickly. As a result, it offers a broad introductory survey, and thereare sure to be several titles in any section that a reader will want to add to a reading list. Enough is said about each title to whet the interest (or not). But someone looking for insights into the character of Indigenous writing in Queensland, for critical appreciation of an author's artistry, or for new insights into works already read will need to look elsewhere.

A quick preamble discusses oral literature and the difficulties of transferring it to the printed page, noting as an exception The Legends of Moonie Jarl (Jacaranda Press, 1964), whose author/compiler is an uncle of Batjala artist Fiona Foley. Nolan then examines poetry, "life writing," and fiction. Being not much of a connoisseur of poetry since my undergraduate days, I will offer no commentary on the coverage of the first of these three categories, other than to note the obvious prominence it affords Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

The section on biography and autobiography ranges from Elsie Roughsey's stories of Lardil culture in An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New (McPhee Gribble, 1984), through a number of works that offer insight into the mission years and Stolen Generations in Queensland (Jackie and Rita Huggins's Auntie Rita (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994) look most promising), to the unconventional Black Hours (Angus & Robertson, 1996) by Wayne King.

Black Hours was the first book I picked up on By the Book's recommendation. It is the autobiography of gay Aboriginal man from the country town of Ipswich who achieves a cosmopolitan career with the United Nations, working in New York, Egypt, and Thailand among other places. Oddly, Nolan makes no mention of the book's strongest chapters, in which King recounts, in his mother's voice, the stories of families broken by government policies and racism in Queensland. I was growing impatient (perhaps unfairly) with King's woe-is-me chronicle when he suddenly took his story back to Ipswich and let his mother speak. Those thirty pages were heartbreaking and wonderful, and worthy of a wide audience.

The final section on fiction was completed before Alexis Wright's majestic Carpentaria (Giramondo, 2006) was published, although Noland enthusiastically recommends the earlier Plains of Promise (Univeristy of Queensland, 1997). Novelists I'm look forward to discovering thanks to Nolan's quick reviews include Melissa Lucashenko, an author of serious, sweeping political ambition, and Vivienne Cleven, whose eponymous Bitin' Back promises to tackle many of the themes from Wayne King's Black Hours, but as comedy rather than pathos.

Indigenous life stories are the focus of Speaking from the Heart: stories of life, family and country, edited by Sally Morgan, Tjamlaminu Mia, and Blaze Kaymullina (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2007, 319pp.) There is a decided bias towards authors and stories from WA in this collection, along with a focus on what Kaymullina, in his introduction, calls "survival." Given that many of the authors or their parents emerged from the infamous Moore River Settlement in the 1930s, survival is an apt term. But it portends perhaps too much of a militant tone for the voices contained in this short collection.

There are horror stories aplenty, of all sorts, to be sure. But the worst of them are not grand narratives; they are instead replete with small details, the seemingly throwaway observations of many of the authors who casually describe the cruelties and controls inflicted on Indigenous people for most of the twentieth century. (Many of the writers in Speaking from the Heart are now well advanced in years.)

There is Bill Prosser, who matter-of-factly tells us that "Mum and her sister came to Perth after the station manager's wife wrote to the Native Welfare saying they had these bright young girls who they believed would be an asset to the Department" (p. 136). This is how a six-year old girl came to Moore River. His parents married at the age of twenty-three: "Dad wrote to the Native Welfare for permission--you had to do that in those days--but permission was refused. The rector of the Church of England church in Gingin married them anyway, and was nearly put in prison for it" (p. 138).

Prosser's father was a veteran of the Australian Imperial Forces in the Second World War, a legacy that no doubt influenced his own decision to enlist in the late 1950s, although again not without difficulties.

My father couldn't give the approval at the time because we were still under the Native Welfare Act, so I had to get permission from them first. So Dad and I went and met the Native Welfare's area officer on a Saturday morning in front of the Commercial Hotel in Northam. When the man came out of the hotel, pissed, I signed on the bottom of the card and my father was allowed to sign as a witness to my signature (p. 139).

And when Prosser proceeds to tell his tales of service in the jungles of Vietnam, the stories of encounters with cobras or collecting dismembered remains of Vietnamese soldier to compile a body count are far removed from any consideration of race in Prosser's telling. He is just a soldier, and a frightened one.

Similarly, Beryl Dixon betrays no special bitterness when she tells the story of going out to work at 15 to help support her ten brothers and sisters. She speaks of poverty as an expectation, not a sentence. And there is a sense of inevitability about her story when she admits that the family failed to inform the Native Welfare that Beryl had gone to work in a nursing home for the aged in Rivervale. When the bureaucrats discover this fact, they deem Beryl's parents guilty of neglect and send Beryl and her sister off to a convent. The two girls are put to work in the convent laundry, isolated from each other, unpaid, not even allowed to be together when their mother is granted permission to visit them.

Reading these stories I can not get Keating's question at Redfern out of my head: "How would I feel if this were done to me?"

The third book on my list similarly collects personal stories, albeit much more broadly. A Revealed Life: Australian writers and their journeys in memoir (ABC Books, 2007, 358 pp.) is a selection of forty short reminiscences by a cross-section of Australian authors republished here from the pages of the Griffith Review. The purely Indigenous material in this collection is thin, but the quality of the writing is first-rate throughout and the book is a joy. Andrew McMillan's portrait of Outback politics in the tiny town of Larrimah, "We're All Eccentrics Here," is a classic of Australian writing by any standards.

Other non-Indigenous authors take up a variety encounters with Aboriginal culture. Robyn Davidson, author of the best-seller Tracks, revisits Pitjantjatjara country too late to be reunited with her guide Eddy and experiences a surprising connection with Indigenous culture on a tour around Uluru in "Return of the Camel Lady." Vincent Plush's "Black Unlike Me" rambles around the world in its story of the didjeridu's role as a wind instrument in the context of Western orchestral music ranging from George Dreyfus's Sextet for Didjeridu and Winds to Peter Sculthorpe's orchestral compositions, including Kakadu, Earth Cry and Memento Mori. (Sculthorpe's compositions are available from both the Australian and American iTunes stores in an inexpensive recording by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.)

Among Indigenous authors there is Melissa Lucashenko, whose novels were reviewed and recommended in my first title above, By the Book. Here she contributes a slightly surreal meditation, "Not Quite White in the Head," on being a Queensland blend of Ukrainian and Aboriginal ancestry and reflections on the lure of the sea and the meaning of land. Tara June Winch reflects more astringently on skin color, heritage, and motherhood in her essay, "Mending a Broken Link."

Winch is the author of an extraordinary novel, Swallow the Air (University of Queensland, 2006), which I read just before the holidays and never got around to writing about here. Briefly, it is a coming of age story, the tale of a young girl looking for family and home after the death of her mother. The story is told in a series of vignettes that hover on the brink of prose poems. The narrative links from one section to the next are slight, and several reviewers at the time of publication seemed unable to decide whether the book was a novel or a collection of short stories. I read it as a single, coherent narrative, episodic, certainly, in which the connections are constructed thematically and through the gorgeous description and metaphors that Winch uses to establish a unitary vision in the story of a fragmented life. It is all the more amazing for being the work of a woman who was all of 23 years old when the novel was published.

The final book in my collection today is a bit of a puzzlement in that I'm not sure who its intended audience might be. Being Australian: narratives of national identity, by Catriona Elder (Allen & Unwin, 2007, 390pp.) is of the genre "Australian studies," and might be a text in an introductory sociology class, a book for potential tourists, or something to have around the house and pick up casually for a few moments diversion. It's a bit of an odd book, but still enjoyable. It's good for a snack; it certainly won't fill you up.

The first part tackles classic post-modernist themes in Australian society: class, gender, sexuality, multiculturalism, and indigeneity are key words in the chapter titles of this section. The second half of the book offers overviews of the arts, film, music, politics, and museums. It looks at some uniquely (or peculiarly) Australian traditions: the long weekend, "backyards and barracking," and Canberra.

I include it in this review primarily because it does offer extended commentary on Aboriginal culture and politics as integral elements of "Australianness." The long chapter that concludes Part 1, "The myth of terra nullius: Indigeneity and nation" is the sort of overview that one might expect in any contemporary sociological examination of the country. Less expected are the ways in which Elder selects Aboriginal elements to represent other aspects of Australian culture today.

For example, there is the chapter devoted to art, film, and music. Rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of each of these genres in what is, after all, a glancing appraisal of national identity, Elder is selective. In art she focuses on the work of the nineteenth-century Heidelberg School. In cinema she narrows her gaze to films made in the 1970s. When she examines music, she looks at it through the lens of contemporary Aboriginal expressions (and thankfully, meets the didjeridu only on the chapter's final page). She begins instead with the Warumpi Band and Yothu Yindi before offering a survey of contemporary Indigenous country music and hip hop.

Elder is clearly attempting to construct a picture of Australia that integrates iconic Anglo-Australian culture--ANZAC or diggers, labor unions or protest marches--with their contemporary incarnations, be they black AFL stars, the Gurindji walkoff, the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk, or the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Like the other books I've discussed today, it would likely give Andrew Bolt apoplexy, and I can recommend it for that reason if no other. 

Posted at 12:39 PM    

Sun - January 20, 2008

Personal and Political: two perspectives on the Stolen Generations 


"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."
--John Donne, Meditation XVII 

Since the elections last November, the issue of an apology to the members of the Stolen Generations has been the topic most often discussed when the question of the Rudd Government's agenda for Indigenous affairs comes up in the mainstream media. Having from the start pretty much ruled out a review of the Intervention and immediate action on any of its programs, Rudd did promise to make the Apology his top priority. It was a brilliant symbolic move allowing him to signal his distance from Howard and to cast off, at least in the area of Aboriginal policy, the "me too" label.

The Apology has never been far from the limelight in the last decade, since the appearance of Bringing Them Home, the report of the inquiry led by Ronald Wilson, President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) and Mick Dodson, its Social Justice Commissioner, on the removal of Aboriginal children from their families across Australia during the period from 1910 through 1970. Thanks to Howard and his right-wing supporters as outlets like Quadrant, the very notion of whether there was a Stolen Generation has been questioned. The issue of whether the Federal Government owed anyone an apology for the practice of child removal has been equally contentious. In the meantime, Sorry Day has become part of the Indigenous cultural landscape, linked to the anniversary of the 1967 Referendum. (The report was tabled in Parliament on May 26, 1997, one day shy of the 30th anniversary of the Referendum.)

Prior to the Second World War, when it was assumed that Aborigines were a dying race, it was feared that "half-castes" were not. In a racist and eugenicist policy framework, children of mixed black and white parentage were removed to missions that were halfway houses to Southern cities and marriages to whites that would "breed out the color." This was the stuff of The Rabbit-Proof Fence.

In the wake of Hitler and Stalin and with the rejection of colonialism as empires were broken apart after World War II, Australian policy towards Aboriginal children underwent a shift as well, with removals often justified as alternatives to neglect and wantonness, or as the preparation of children for assimilation into the new, multicultural Australian community.

I've recently finished reading two quite different books that reflect on stories of the Stolen Generations, and I've found them to be illuminating and worthy of consideration as the issues surrounding the Apology and related compensation are bruited with sound-bite coverage in the newspapers today.

The first of these, Quentin Beresford's Rob Riley: an Aboriginal leader's quest for justice (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006) is a major biography of an Aboriginal leader who was also a "stolen" child. It tells the story of a generation of Indigenous politics through the lens of one man's life.

The second is Robert Manne's In Denial: the Stolen Generations and the Right (Black Inc., 2001), which was originally published as the very first Quarterly Essay. Part history in itself, to three parts polemic, In Denial bears witness to the bitterness and petty warfare the report spawned, on a stage that seems far removed from any one person's experience.

In telling the story of Rob Riley's life, Beresford does not attempt anything so simplistic as reducing the varied and important achievements of Riley's decades at the forefront of Aboriginal politics to an attempt to work through the childhood trauma he endured as a result of being forcibly separated and kept at a deliberate distance from his family. But there is little doubt that Beresford find the seeds of the anger, the sense of injustice and perhaps ultimately the despair that drove Riley in the experiences of his youth.

Rob Riley: an Aboriginal leaders's quest for justice is a history of Aboriginal politics in the 1980s and 1990s that is told from the point of view of the Aboriginal participants, most notably, of course, that of Rob Riley himself. Riley's personal charisma and magnetism has outlived him by more than a decade now, and I suspect that his popularity and the affection people felt for him contributed significantly to the selection of this book as the winner of this year's Stanner Award. The stories that are told in this book are often familiar in their general outlines, but are made new for me by reading them from the perspective of an Aboriginal insider, rather than a legislator, historian, or journalist, as I have in the past.

Riley's involvement with the battles for land rights from Noonkanbah onwards and his role in seeking reforms arising from deaths in custody put him squarely in the frame of the largest issues of his time. His work with the Aboriginal Legal Service in Western Australia transformed that organization. On the opposite coast, he was an early and important Indigenous presence in Canberra, as advisor to Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Gerry Hand in Bob Hawke's government.

In Beresford's portrait, Riley is not a man easily given to compromise. He was disdainful of a system of land rights recognition that was based on Indigenous people needing to demonstrate continued association with land they claimed, or indeed to justify the right at all. To Riley, land rights counterbalanced dispossession, and he saw the kinds of compromise that eventually became enshrined in Australian law in the 1990s as fundamental failures, especially to Aboriginal people whose connection to the land had been completely severed decades if not centuries earlier.

He is also a driven man, who knows little relaxation over two decades, and seemingly less peace. His life as told in these pages has a relentless quality to it. Perhaps because Beresford chooses to open the book, literally in the first paragraph, with Riley's suicide, there is an air of inevitability, of prediction, and of inescapable fate in all that follows. In the end, I think it is unfair to the complexity of Riley's personality and undercutting of his achievements to predicate the entire story of his life on its end like this. Beresford comes much closer to the critical point in the final paragraph of his introduction than he does in its first:

Rob's story has much to offer contemporary Australia. It sheds light on the still unresolved intergenerational impact of past racial policy, while opening up to closer scrutiny Australia's response to Aboriginal demands for political change. The life Rob chose in confronting white Australia with the demand for understanding and justice provides many insights into the challenges faced by Aboriginal activists of this era. Despite the tragedy of his death, his life is a story of survival against great odds. Rob triumphed against a childhood ravaged by emotional and material deprivation. Forged by the history of racial oppression, he sought to change the course of history so others would have opportunities historically denied Aboriginal people (p. 8)

Manne's essay begins with a combination of historical perspectives on child removal and brief biographical sketches of individuals, like Riley, who suffered at the hands of bureaucrats well-intentioned or not. His scale is generational rather than individual, however, and his arena is most decidedly political rather than personal. In a way, he is more concerned with Bringing Them Home, the report and investigation, that he is with the generations themselves.

It is useful to be reminded that the HREOC inquiry was not an investigation with the status of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The overall budget was much smaller for one thing; the HREOC had no subpoena power for another. It is likewise useful to read reports of the manner and motivations of removal across the country, and to remember that were individuals with complex motivations, some contradictory, on the government and mission side of the story.

It is also important to understand Manne's conclusion: that no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the motives, no matter what the outcomes, the greatest horror in the story of the Stolen Generation is the absolute refusal, if not the inability, to recognize the terrible human cost of separating mother and child. The failure to imagine not just the consequences, but the action itself from the Aboriginal point of view is the most damning judgment that can be placed on the perpetrators.

It seems a shame--an understandable one, but nonetheless misplaced energy--that Manne spends so much of his time in this essay not simply documenting the shoddy arguments by which those on the Right tried to talk away the import of Bringing Them Home but attempting to refute them as well. Perhaps it was important to fight against denialism at that moment in time, when Keith Windschuttle had just appeared forcefully on the scene to redirect the controversy over the Stolen Generations into a larger disputation about Aboriginal deaths on the frontier.

But in some ways it now seems that Manne got himself trapped in the terms of debate framed by the Right. . He gets trapped in the very nit-picking, legalistic, point-scoring kinds of arguments he accuses his opponents of indulging in. Worst of all is the argument over whether the policies of removal represent an Australian instance of genocide.

In the end, whether 25,000 children constitute a generation, whether breeding out the color or breeding out the savagery was the motive, whether the revelations of Nazi programs of racial eradication changed the policy in Australia, or simply the way it was defined seem ultimately beside the point. Casting "Aboriginal Protectors" in the mold of what has become the archetypal evil of modern times--making Neville and Cook the confreres of Eichmann and Mengele--ultimately seems to me to buy Manne nothing but more ammunition for his opponents to lob at him. If a refusal to acknowledge something as genocide can be transmuted into a refusal to offer an apology at all, more harm than good has been done.

That thousands and ten of thousands of individuals suffered as a result of the policy of removals has been and can be amply demonstrated. Whether that harm has been fully understood is debatable; I suspect that it has not. The time has come to attempt such an understanding without allowing the shadows of ideological debates to dim the light that needs to be cast. Works of individual biography like Beresford's Rob Riley can help further that understanding.

One hopes that an apology will as well. To apologize sincerely requires humility, and I am reminded once again that humility is a very complex virtue. And it will take courage as well as humility to guide us away from the Manichaean battles of Robert Manne and Andrew Bolt and toward a nuanced model of compassion for future generations. 

Posted at 03:05 PM    

Sat - December 15, 2007

Master of Arts: New Work by Howard Morphy 


Two weeks ago in Charlottesville I had the great good fortune to receive an advance copy of Howard Morphy's latest monograph, Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007). This new book is like a river stone, its arguments polished by years of being turned over in the author's mind, flashing with brilliance; it is an opportunity for extensive and satisfying contemplation and of great utility to students of aesthetics and epistemology, anthropology, art theory and history, and cultural studies.

Among Morphy's earlier monographs have been deep studies of Yolngu ritual, in Journey to the Crocodile's Nest: an accompanying monograph to the film Madarrpa Funeral at Gurka'wuy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1984), and Yolngu art, in Ancestral Connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge (Chicago, 1992). Readers already familiar with those seminal investigations will find their themes extended in Becoming Art as Morphy looks at ways of integrating Yolngu systems of thought into broader, more world-encompassing (i.e. cross-cultural) perspectives. Readers new to Morphy's work will be delighted by an erudite but accessible introduction to Morphy's research. Whereas the earlier works were undoubtedly written for an audience of anthropologists, I believe that Morphy here seeks to reach a broader audience, much as the book itself looks to move the world of the Yolngu into a larger arena.

The nominal focus of the book is Yolngu art, which Morphy has studied for thirty-five years. However, its scope is vast, comprehending in its well-illustrated 200 pages many of the questions raised in the compendious The Anthropology of Art: a reader (Blackwell, 2006) that Morphy edited and published last year. He asks us to question overly narrow definitions of art, especially what he terms the "exclusionary rules" by which the Western category of "fine art" is determined. In doing so, he charts an understanding of art across cultures that will allow us to better understand the art of the Yolngu.

In order to understand the trajectory of Indigenous Australian art, it is important to consider the kind of thing art is to the producing societies and how that influences the relationships that Indigenous Australians see between artworks and the conclusions that they draw from those relationships. By making Indigenous art discourse part of the data of art history and critically examining the ontological concepts and their relationship to practice, we should become aware of conceptual similarities and differences between different traditions. And in the case of different art traditions that occupy the same temporal space we should be able to better understand how they articulate with one another--in the case of Aboriginal art, how Indigenous artists embrace contemporary Australian art worlds (p. 145).

Or as he aphoristically sums up a fundamental principle early in the book, "there is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human. It is the common humanity that creates the possibility of anthropology; it is the diversity of humanity that makes it necessary" (p. 7).

That latter quotation appears in the introductory chapter of Becoming Art, which is entitled "Cross-cultural Categories and the Inclusion of Aboriginal Art." It is in some ways the most daunting chapter of the book, as in setting the stage for the development of subsequent arguments, it addresses critical definitions, and relies on the reader's willingness to engage to an extent in matters of anthropological theory more than considerations of Aboriginal art per se.

But for readers whose primary interest lies in the field of Aboriginal culture, this chapter fully repays the investment as Morphy relates his theme of cross-cultural study not just to art, but to land rights, to the legacy of colonization and colonialism, to the history of collecting by scholars and museums, and to the controversies over the presentation of Indigenous art as either "fine art" or "ethnographic curiosity." Moreover, it is studded with sudden insights that cut through years of abstruse argument in these areas, as when he suggests that "the category of fine art is not a category of objects but a way of viewing objects that are prized exemplars of aesthetic value or, in the case of some more recent works (following from Dada and Duchamp), conceptual significance" (p. 20).

The next three chapters form "A Short History of Yolngu Art." Morphy begins by tracing the history of Yolngu contact with outsiders, largely from the second decade of the twentieth century, and examining the records of Yolngu material culture that emerged from those encounters through the work of missionaries and anthropologists like Donald Thomson. A subtle awareness permeates this part of the book of the fortunate circumstances that have allowed what history we have of the Yolngu to have emerged as it did. The relatively recent contact and the early participation in that contact by the enlightened and sympathetic Thomson (and the equally sympathetic missionaries Webb, Chaseling, and Wells) spared the Yolngu from the depredations of social Darwinism that plagued other parts of Australia.

In the Centre, it was not until Frank Gillen turned his attention to the Arrernte that much consideration was given to recording Indigenous culture, and even then, it was with the presumption that it represented only a more primitive stage in human evolution, worthy only in how it recorded what we no longer were. By contrast, early studies of Yolngu art have granted an unprecedented scrutiny to the subject for what it revealed about a society that was recognized as holding complex and sophisticated traditions of its own.

Moving beyond this period of early contact, Morphy examines the emergence of bark painting into the marketplace, in the first place as an economic engine for the support of the mission communities. Later, as the work became familiar to audiences in the southern cities, there began the process of exhibition in galleries and museums in Australia, as well as abroad through the work of advocates like Karel Kupka. Complementing this growing engagement by outsiders with Yolngu art was the interest of the Yolngu themselves in deploying their art as a means of reaching out to white Australia. The Elcho Island Memorial, the Yirrkala Church Panels, and finally the Bark Petition were all important demonstrations of Yolngu belief in the ability of their artwork to cross cultural boundaries and communicate their concerns to a broader audience.

The final chapter of this first section, "Dialogue and Change," charts the growing acceptance, through the work of Tony Tuckson and Stuart Scougall, of Indigenous art in Western institutions of fine art, especially as represented by the collections of major Australian museums. But it also looks at the way this engagement altered the forms and techniques of Yolngu art production. In this respect, Morphy's outline becomes art history in the conventional, Western sense, examining changes over time in production, materials, and subject matter. As he does so, he is able to remind us once again how the lens of "fine art" has successively refocused through time, not just (spatially) with regard to indigenous traditions worldwide but also with the production of aesthetic objects within Western traditions as yesterday's masterpiece becomes tomorrow's embarrassment.

The next section of Becoming Art, "Engaging with Art History" builds from this base. Morphy begins with a chapter that offers a primer in the understanding of Yolngu art from within Yolngu traditions and from a Yolngu perspective. It encapsulates some of the material presented in detail in Ancestral Connections. Its concentrated format provides an excellent introduction to the complexities of Yolngu conventions in painting, examining the connections between designs, clans, and country, and also elucidating the ways in which (as in Western art history again) one is able to create "sets" of artworks on the basis of such elements.

What follows next is the most surprising and in some ways satisfying chapter of the book, "Style and Meaning: Abelam Art Through Yolngu Eyes." Any treatise that attempts to present an ethnographically alien style of (for instance) art always walks the fine line between the familiar and the strange. Too much of the former risks overemphasizing common humanity, too much of the latter, our diversity; too much of either inevitably does some violence to the complexity and the problems of extending understanding across the cultural divide.

Morphy neatly avoids this trap and provides a wonderful example of the struggle to achieve cross-cultural comprehension by presenting the history of a conversation that occurred in 1976 in which the great Yolngu artist Narritjin Maymuru, his son Banapana, Morphy, and Morphy's academic advisor, Anthony Forge, took part. Forge's own area of study was the art of the Abelam people of Papua New Guinea. The Abelam have little to say about the content of their paintings and do not relate them to mythic stories or cultural histories in a way that corresponds to either Yolngu or Western methods of organizing either the thematic or iconographic elements of their art. By allowing us to witness the manner in which Narritjin and Banapana "make sense" of the images of Abelam art, Morphy allows us to gaze at a reflection of our own attempts to bridge such divisions, to observe the strategies by which we may be able to approach an understanding of what we mean by art, how we define its elements, and how we interpret it.

This episode of cross-cultural investigation leads to Morphy's discussion of "Art Theory and Art Discourse Across Cultures." In this chapter he attempts to look at the distinctive ways in which anthropology and art history have tried to approach the art object, often unnecessarily and self-defeatingly working at cross purposes to one another. With respect to the art object the disciplines have too often emphasized their differences rather than what they have in common. Morphy wants instead to deploy the techniques of anthropology "to develop an art history that is sensitive to the different ontologies of art cross-culturally--to different ways in which people talk about and conceive of artworks" (p. 145).

He also illuminates the cross-cultural examination of artworks by contrasting the manner in which Kuninjku and Yolngu arts organize themselves. Here again, readers of Ancestral Connections and Luke Taylor's major study of Kuninjku art, Seeing the Inside: bark painting in Western Arnhem Land (Oxford, 1996) will find themselves on familiar ground, although the synthesis of the differences in the traditions that Morphy offers here is enlightening (especially after the preceding discussion of Abelam art). Less experienced students of the art of Arnhem Land will find this a valuable lesson in the distinctions that exist in the art of the Top End. Thoughtful readers in either category will be encouraged to consider this cross-cultural approach more broadly within the realm of Indigenous art.

The book's final section, "Yolngu Art and the Chimera of Fine Art," returns to the themes expounded in the preliminary chapters and looks back over the questions that still vex many discussions of Indigenous Australian art. Although it is widely accepted that Aboriginal art has a place in the cultural constructs of the Western art world, its markets and museums, there is still much disagreement among the commentariat about what exactly that place is and how the art is to be handled there. (I am somewhat abashed to admit to having reiterated some of these arguments myself over the years of writing here.)

These disagreements manifest themselves in the physical arrangement and presentation of Indigenous art in the Western spaces given over to culture, in museums and galleries. Although the question of whether to include Indigenous artworks is largely settled, it still informs debates over the presentation and display of objects in art museums. Is Indigenous art better served by being segregated from other types, as Renaissance art is from Modernism? Is it appropriate to include detailed information in the display that provides cultural context, explicates meaning or utility? Or does such ethnographic data distract from the aesthetic contemplation of form, or worse still, implicitly devalue the object?

Morphy engages with these questions in a large part, I believe, to silence them. The question is not one of "art or ethnography," as though these categories are mutually exclusive and inherently hostile. We do not need to decide for one or the other, but to recognize that the perspectives that inform each enhance our appreciation overall. The understanding of an art object from Yolngu country placed in a Sydney gallery benefits from the inclusion or the availability of cultural contextual material that the audience or viewer does not bring with him, in the manner that he brings an understanding of Christianity, visual perspective, or Romanticism to the gallery, however unconsciously. Providing information about the ownership of clan designs does not, or should not, constitute an identification of the painting in which they appear with an inferior aesthetic.

On occasion, the segregation of Indigenous art within the gallery may be a means of enhancing a culturally appropriate understanding; indeed, segregation of Dhuwa from Yirritja paintings may be just as appropriate. The converse is also true, of course, when the juxtaposition of traditions assists in comprehending something larger about the nature of art. And it is to this point that Morphy wants to direct us. As suggested earlier, the concept of "fine art" is a misleading one. It is itself, even within the Western tradition, a recent invention, as culturally bound as Yolngu representational strategies, but far more problematic when it reduces the field of vision and discards large and potentially valuable compasses of experience.

Morphy is concerned with breaking down barriers. He sees this book as a "journey connecting Yolngu art to more general discourses about art" (p. 171). Perhaps even more importantly, he wants to bring Yolngu discourse about art into an even larger conversation. He hopes that we can come to not simply see Yolngu art for what it is in its own context, but to hear what Yolngu have to say about their art and by extension about their culture, their civilization. In the uneven and unequal dialogue between cultures that has occurred in Australia over years since colonization began, the Indigenous people have learned a great deal more about the culture of the colonizers than Europeans have learned about them.

The Yolngu have, since the beginning of contact nearly a century ago (and indeed with the Macassans in centuries preceding) used their art as a means of reaching out to the aliens in their midst. Morphy's book is a quietly passionate plea for us to construct categories of knowledge that will encompass their ideas, so that we may better recognize our common humanity and respect our human differences. He hopes that this will happen not only in art galleries and museums, but in part on the basis of such recognition as may occur in those spaces, in all of the many other arenas in which Yolngu and balanda meet, in which Indigenous and settler Australians are joined. 

Posted at 11:40 PM    

Sat - November 17, 2007

Alexis Wright's Carpentaria in the New York Times 


This week's New York Times Book Review carries an essay by Jane Perlez, unfortunately headlined "Aboriginal Lit," profiling Alexis Wright's masterpiece, Carpentaria (Giramondo, 2006). The bad news is that the book still hasn't found an American publisher, but maybe the attention focused on it by its appearance in the Times will help to rectify that situation.

Perlez gives good coverage of the attention and awards that Carpentaria has garnered, including the Miles Franklin and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She provides a few lovely quotations to give the prospective reader a teasing taste of Wright's vivd prose style, and hints at the magnitude of the story enclosed in the novel's pages.

In the second half of the essay, Perlez provides some context for this achievement. She references the "first" Aboriginal novel, Mudrooroo's Wild Cat Falling (Angus & Robertson, 1965) and mentions other contemporary Indigenous authors, some of whom are new to me, including Samuel Wagan Watson and Tara June Winch.

In the concluding paragraphs, Perlez notes the irony and the importance of Carpentaria receiving national and international attention as the Howard Government attempts to reconstruct Indigenous society. Necessarily brief, the characterization of both the causes and effects of the Intervention are presented in a simplistic manner that doesn't begin to hint at the complexities involved. Nonetheless, Wright has the last words on the matter. In assessing Howard's election eve motivations, Perlez quotes Wright quoting Angel Day, the novel's matriarch, asking "Where is the trust, anyone mind telling me that?"

Wright ends on a hopeful note:

There are a lot of Australians of good will who are wanting to find out more about the indigenous people of this country and who want to be more grounded in the indigenous story.... There’s more worry in the country about climate change. People want to know: How did the indigenous people survive? Australians are saying, ‘This meanness towards other people is not us." I’ve had to rethink how I think of my own country.

After reading this short piece I began to wonder just how much coverage the Times has given to the events of the last five months in the Northern Territory. So I search their archives and discovered a brief news note reprinted from the Associated Press's wire service on June 22, the day after Howard and Brough announced the Emergency. Two months later, on August 24, "Papunya Journal: Far-Reaching Policy for Aborigines Draws Their Fury," originally published two days earlier in the International Herald Tribune