<![CDATA[Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss will_owen@mac.com © Will Owen Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:46:25 +1000 Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:47:02 +1000 iBlog 1.4.5 <![CDATA[Reunion ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1917859515/E20080725072630/index.html We're back in Australia for another visit, having landed in Melbourne yesterday, just about 24 hours ago, and still trying to get grounded, so to speak. But the adventure began even before leaving the USA, when we speak an exciting 36 hours in Los Angeles. I managed to spend most of that time reunited with the West Coast contingent on the US art mob that I traveled with a year ago on the Austrade mission to 24 remote art centres.

It's amazing: you put 8 people in a small plane, a small Aboriginal art centre, or a small roadhouse/motel for 24 hours a day for 14 days, and if everyone survives (and we mob not only survived but thrived), there's a certain degree of imprinting that must go on. Because within minutes of being reunited with the crew, I found that the intervening thirteen months seemed to evaporate. It felt less like a renewal of old friendships than a re-instatement of them.

We had the chance to visit two superb American collections of Aboriginal art while in town, though we missed the Regina Wilson exhibition that's on in Santa Monica at the moment.


Standing, l. to r. Richard, Joel, Wolf, Larry; seated, Harvey, Gretchen Will, Kerry.

As I said, we haven't had much of a chance to do anything in Melbourne yet apart from sleep. The town in abuzz with anticipation of the Melbourne Art Fair, and we're looking forward to the opening night next week. A short visit with Samantha Pizzi yesterday to see the riot of color coming out of Tjala Arts in Amata, SA and the opening of a new show from Balgo at Alcaston Gallery featuring Christine and Imelda Yukenbarri and Tossie and Miriam Baadjo is all we've managed to do so far, but adventures await.

I don't know if I'll be able to keep to my regular posting schedule--so much depends on internet connections, but I hope to do better at keeping a diary of events this time around than on the previous trip through the Outback. Somehow that sounds like famous last words. So please keep checking in on me...and hope to see man of you in the days ahead, here in Melbourne, in Sydney, Alice, or Darwin.
  ]]> Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:26:30 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1917859515/E20080725072630/index.html <![CDATA[Kanyini: Connections ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C876664502/E20080713115352/index.html Melanie Hogan's recent documentary, Kanyini (Reverb Films, 2006) is not so much Bob Randall's story as it is Bob Randall's story of the breaking of the ties that cemented his people's culture. Randall achieved national fame in the 1970s when his song, "My Brown Skin Baby (They Took Him Away)" became a country hit and the inspiration for an ABC documentary. Randall is a Yankunytjatjara man, now in his 70s, who was himself taken away from his mother and raised on a mission on Croker Island. His working career spans stints as carpenter and stockman, educator (at Adelaide Community College, ANU, and the Universities of Canberra and Wollongong) and director of the Northern Australia Legal Aid Service. He's an inductee of the NT Music Hall of Fame and the author of an autobiography (Songman)

.

Kanyini (literally to keep, or to have, figuratively a sense of connectedness) take the form of an extended monologue by Randall. His voice as captured in the film is even, reasonable, humorous, patient. You can tell there is sadness and anger flowing beneath this calm exterior, but those emotions never dominate. Randall wants to inform his audience, and he wants them to listen to what he has to say, and so he modulates his delivery. He is a steely, smiling survivor, and he is an educator who knows he has something important to say, something that although you may think you've heard it all before, he knows that you have never quite understood the message. Or as another folk song from forty years ago and half a world away put it, "You know all the words and you've sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song you sang."

Hogan's visual language in the film attempts to create the same unthreatening and familiar tone. While first watching the film, I couldn't decide how effective a strategy this was. Randall's gentle voice is easy to listen to; he is a good storyteller, and an accomplished rhetorician who can captivate. The visuals, however, tend toward the cliched, and risked losing me, and in the process losing the whole first half of the film.

Randall lives today at Mutitjulu Community next to Uluru, and the film makes ample use of the iconic Rock, the spinifex plains, the spectacular sunsets. The trouble is, we've seen it all before in countless documentaries and advertisements. Worse are long, slow shots of Randall staring past the camera's eye into the countryside and the hackneyed fades and dissolves. At one point early in the film, Randall pushes himself up from a sitting position on the ground and walks away towards Uluru and damn it if he doesn't literally vanish into thin air after twenty paces! Too trite, I thought, but perhaps if you're from an Adelaide suburb or Scotland or San Francisco, you haven't seen all this a hundred times before, and the lyrical beauty of it all can be seductive.

There is liberal use of archival footage from decades gone by that is similarly handled in the most conventional ways. Much of this old black-and-white camerawork takes smiling, enthusiastic, carefree children as its subject, watching them run across those unchanging spinifex plains, jumping across scattered boulders, grinning and mugging for the camera. Meant to capture the insouciant spirit of Randall's own youth in the APY lands, these scenes again flirt with banality. There's even a moment when the moving-picture postcard views of Uluru are inset with a sepia colored oval within which the dusky, unclothed natives gambol along a path.

Gradually, though, Randall's narrative took over, and I began to listen to his words, to anticipate his on-screen appearances, and to pay less mind to the pictures of the desert plains. For Randall has a very particular argument to develop around the theme of kanyini, and that argument involves four orienting compass points: tjukurpa (law), ngura (country); walytja (family); and kurunpa (spirit).

Randall introduces these four principles as the essential elements of the Aboriginal experience prior to contact with Europeans, and demonstrates how each of them in turn was diminished, broken, and taken away.

Tjukurpa was the first to go. It was not so much that Indigenous people lost their law as the white people who came in brought their own law and imposed that alien set of principles on the anangu, the people of Randall's country. White law rode over tjukurpa like white men's horses and cattle rode over the land, and in any contest between the two prevailed. And so the first thread was cut, the first connection severed, kanyini first broken.

The second cut was the connection to ngura as people were moved off their homelands, away from the places that defined their identity. Shifted away, they were made strangers in a strange land, doubly dispossessed, interlopers in someone else's country. But at the very least, these mass relocations meant that they still kept the company of their own people, still had family surrounding them.

But walytja, that sense of family and kin, was the next bond to be broken as children like Randall himself were taken away (Randall's father was an immigrant Scot). Generations were stolen, and Randall is perhaps saddest and at his most moving as he tells of the sense of abandonment he felt as a child in a mission a thousand miles and more from his mother, and as he imagines her own bewilderment as grief.

And finally, living in that mission dormitory, Randall was taught about Christianity, taught the new creed that was to replace his sense of kurunpa, the spirituality that was the last surviving link to the old way of life. And it is at this point in the film that his anger comes closest to the surface as he tells how he absorbed the lessons of the missionaries and came to understand the hypocrisy, the disconnect between the teachings of the Bible and the actions of the white men who professed them.

It is after Randall has finally laid out his argument, detailed the four principles that informed his anangu way and expounded on their systematic destruction, that Hogan strips away the romantic vision of Uluru to show us, bluntly and brazenly, the other face of Uluru, the black face concealed by the tin of petrol. A white tin-can mask, one side of its diameter squeezed to a point to accommodate its being place over the nose and mouth while retaining the best possible seal and ensuring the most effective delivery of the intoxicating fumes, carried casually along the streets of Mutitjulu. This is the moment to which all of Hogan's landscapes and all of Randall's histories have been leading, and it is devastatingly effective.

Kanyini is caring and responsibility based on tjukurpa, ngura, walytja, and kurunpa. Its opposite is kawalinanyi, to lose sight of an obligation. Loss of those four compass points has left Randall's community adrift, and he will not rest at that point. The film Kanyini is his attempt to reach out beyond Mutitjulu, to bring a message about devastation to a broader audience. I don't think he and Hogan are doling out blame: they are articulating a sense of history and making visible its results.

Kanyini is in some ways a subterfuge, a "lovin' spoonful" of honey to make the medicine go down smoothly; you won't know what's hit you until it's all over and done. My initial skepticism about the film's romanticizing tendencies was in the end completely blown away by the time I finished watching it. The DVD (Australian format, but playable on any computer or on a region-free DVD player) can be had for $34.95 from the Kanyini website. There's also a book Nyuntu Ninti (What You Should Know), based on the film at $29.95. There's plenty more information available there, including a forum for feedback and commentary by the film's viewers, a study guide for teachers who may wish to use the film in the classroom, and links to the YouTube video of an SBS interview with Randall and Hogan that gives you a preview of the film. (The trailer is also up on YouTube.) Have a look for yourself, and buy a few copies for your friends.

  ]]> Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:30:00 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C876664502/E20080713115352/index.html <![CDATA[Perspectives on Indigenous Sovereignty ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080712134707/index.html 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.

  ]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:47:07 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080712134707/index.html <![CDATA[Bangarra: Urban Clan ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C876664502/E20080705140442/index.html I recently came across Urban Clan (Ronin Films),a portrait of Bangarra Dance Theatre and the three Page brothers, Stephen, storyteller/choreographer, David, songman/composer, and Russell, dancer, who were at its heart for the first decade of its life. (Russell died in 2002.) The film was made and released in 1997, at the time when the second of the Pages' major productions for Bangarra, Fish, was taking life and taking the stage.

The film opens with a shot of songman and Bangarra collaborator Djakapurra Munyarryun's feet as they stride across a dried, cracked mudflat in Arnhem Land. As David Page's music fades in the scene shifts and travels down a tropical river before giving way first to shots of the brothers mugging in a photographer's studio. Next come glimpses of Stephen and Russell dancing, and then home movies of the Page clan in suburban Brisbane (the brothers are three of twelve siblings). In a nutshell, that is the story of Bangarra: the melding of contemporary urban aesthetics and traditional Yolngu ceremony to create a new choreographic tradition, all born out of the dynamic of a close-knit family.

I once asked someone to explain to me what makes "modern dance" "modern." Part of the answer was that, unlike ballet with its pirouettes and lifts and illusion of weightlessness, modern dance is about the floor: the connection of the dancer to the ground, to weight, to gravity. How apt this is for the Page brothers, who speak repeatedly in these interviews about rootedness, about a physical connection to the ground. Even in the watery illusions of Fish, this close connectedness of the dancer to the floor seems never to be lost.


Connectedness as a major theme of Urban Clan finds expression in many ways. For starters, there is the connection forged between the brothers and Djakapurra Munyarryun that binds the boys from the city, brought up without language and culture, to the traditions of Anrhem Land. There are several scenes in the movie where this collobaration is brilliantly demonstrated. In one, Djakapurra begins to sing, then as the camera pulls back, he begins to move in the simple, walking style of Yolngu ceremony; the camera pulls back farther to reveal a line of dancers from Bangarra moving in step with him, slowly replicating, learning, absorbing.

Later on comes another shot of Djakapurra singing, unaccompanied, but this time wearing headphones. There's a cut to David Page in the sound booth, smiling as he listens. Djakapurra completes the verse; he pauses. David cues a clanking, electronic, urban beat, and Djakapurra begins to sing the same song again. The two blend into a single, coherent soundscape, and one might almost think that the vocal line was written especially for David's electronic score, had it not been performed solo just a moment before.

And it's a two way education. Djapkapurra smiles and sways to the beat of David's music. And a bit later on, we see him dancing a pas de deux from Fish that owes its beauty to Stephen's skills as a modern dance choreographer.


Both Russell and Stephen talk about the impact of discovering traditional dance. First exposed to it at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association's (NAISDA) Dance College in Sydney in the mid 1980s, the brothers found liberating inspiration on an expedition to the Top End with the College. Stephen was adopted by Mungajay Yunupingu and began his education in the selfless art of communal, ceremonial dance.

Each of the three brothers is profiled in turn. Early on, the most extended sequence of pure dance is a solo piece featuring Russell, followed by a number of rehearsal clips in which he performs with other members of the company. The middle of the movie focuses on David, who had a short but brilliant career as a child singing star (including an appearance on Paul Hogan's television show unfortunately not documented here). Interestingly, a great part of this segment is as much about the Page family as it is about David and it includes affecting interviews with parents Doreen and Roy. Footage from Stephen's early days at the NAISDA Dance College, of his apprenticeship in Yirrkala, and of his success as a mature choreographer leading a major Sydney arts endeavor round out the family portrait.

Yet the connectedness of the three brothers is never lost in these individual profiles. They weave in and out of each other's stories. Stephen shows Russell a new set of movements or talks with David as he tries to assemble the score for Fish, who jokes that he's "getting bad skin from going back and forth between salt water and fresh." The three of them are seen shooting pool in Sydney with Djakapurra, and cheering David on at one of his performances in drag.

Each of them comments on the importance of family; for them Bangarra seems to be a way of enriching their sense of relatedness as brothers and as family with the larger sense of belonging to an Indigenous tradition that was not part of their childhood but will clearly be part of the next generation of Pages. Near the end, before a performance outside the Sydney Opera House, Stephen holds his young son Hunter in his arms, and introduces him to the audience. A few years later, Hunter would perform with Bangarra at the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics and in 2005 create an important role in Boomerang.

Beyond these insights into the lives and characters of the three brothers, the final glory of Urban Clan, throughout, is the superb performances exquisitely captured by director of photography Jane Castle and editor Emma Hay. Capturing dance on video is a notoriously difficult art, and one that fails more often than it succeeds. To meet the challenge of capturing the breadth of movement across the stage, of giving equal attention to the solo performer and the troupe as a whole, of defining detail while preserving the fluidity of the whole requires a special talent that the crew here seems to have been especially blessed with.

In the solo that appears early in the film, Russell's gaze is locked in on the camera, which zooms in and out, gracefully, almost imperceptibly, so that his entire body fills the frame, whether he is twisting on the floor or standing up and spinning, arms extended. Occasionally when he is standing full height, the camera will zoom in for a close-up of his head and torso, then pan quickly down to his feet, anticipating a return to the ground.

In other sequences, such as the one in which Djakapurra instructs the company in traditional Yolngu footwork, the shifting focus of the camera and its distance from the dancers is used as a revelatory device. There is a lovely sequence late in the film in which a line of men is photographed from an angle near or below the floor of the stage in which the glare of the stage lighting adds dramatic effect without obscuring the dancers.


Throughout, cuts in the framing seem miraculously dictated by the movements of the dancers' limbs rather than by some arbitrary desire to change an angle or move in for a close-up. Although the overall aesthetic is obviously worlds away, the artistry of the camera recalls the stunning facility with which classic Fred Astaire's performances were filmed half a century ago.

Even the fades between dancers on stage and shots of the stringybark forests or the rivers of Arnhem Land, so often a distracting device that increases the "artiness" of the production values while obscuring the beauty of the dance, seem to work here. The technique is used most effectively in the final moments of the film, which depict an outdoor performance on the CIrcular Quay below the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Vast clouds of smoke from iron drums on the shore and barges in the harbor shroud the dancers at night. In the background the lights of the Sydney high rises wink through like the eyes of enormous nocturnal spirits. Spotlights give the smoke a red and sulfurous glow, and the fades to the tropical forest look like vast bushfires through which the spirits of the dancers travel. As with the best of art, the cinematography enhances the themes of the movies, visually uniting cityscape and bushland, reconciling the brothers, the dancers, and their worlds.

Bangarra will be performing their latest work, Mathinna, in which the theme of a journey between two cultures is based on events drawn from Tasmanian history in Newcastle on July 11-12 before opening for a month's run at the Sydney Opera House on July 22. A series of international dates follow in in September and October. The company will join again with the Australian Ballet to present Rites in Paris at the Theatre du Chatelet on September 29-30 and in London at Sadler's Wells October 7-11. Bangarra will then return to North America with Awakenings at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC (October 16-17), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 21, 23-25), and Ottawa's National Arts Centre (October 28).

  ]]> Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:40:42 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C876664502/E20080705140442/index.html <![CDATA[Last Drinks ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080704130747/index.html 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.
  ]]> Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:07:47 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080704130747/index.html <![CDATA[Yiloga: Tiwi Warriors ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080629134811/index.html 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!

  ]]> Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:58:11 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080629134811/index.html <![CDATA[An Exaltation of Barks ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1403073609/E20080628140334/index.html The title of this post is a play on that of a book published in the 1970s, for those of you who were around (in America?) to remember it, entitled An Exaltation of Larks, a whimsical parlor game of a publication based on the possibilities afforded by collective terms of venery (hunting): a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows. An exaltation of larks. Mutatis mutandis, the term works well to describe the riches of the exhibition of paintings on bark from the Arnott's Collection that is about to enter its last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney. The exhibition is called They Are Meditating and was well reviewed by Nicolas Rothwell a couple of months ago ("Silence and Slow Time," The Australian, May 10, 2008).

The mid-1960s, when American Jerome Gould built this collection, was certainly a golden moment in the accumulation of bark paintings. Karel Kupka was concluding a decade of visits to Arnhem Land that resulted in the romantic scholarship of Un Art a l'Etat Brut (Guilde du Livre/Editions Clairefontaine, 1962; in English, Dawn of Art) and collections now in the Basel Ethnographic Museum and the Musee du Quai Branly. Another American, Ed Ruhe, a professor of English at the University of Kansas, put together an enormous collection of bark paintings and ceremonial objects that is now at the heart of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Gould's collection was brought back to Australia by the biscuit-makers Arnott's. The purchase was originally conceived as a bicentenary gift, but delayed five years when the politics of Aboriginal protests over the 1988 celebration convinced those involved that the timing was injudicious. It has been in the possession of the MCA ever since, but like the Papunya collection at the National Museum, has never before been exhibited on this scale.

Curated by Djon Mundine, the current exhibition inevitably recalls Mundine's earlier blockbuster for the MCA, The Native Born, which in 1996 displayed that institution's other major collection of Indigenous Art. The Native Born was more focused temporally and geographically: it grew out of a commission from Bula' Bula Arts in 1984, when Mundine was the arts advisor in Ramingining. But it was also more inclusive, representing the variety of artistic output from the community, including sculpture, weaving, and ritual paraphernalia.


Morning Star Poles at the MCA

They Are Meditating, at least as represented in the catalog, restricts itself to bark painting. (The exhibition also includes a spectacular display of morning star poles or banumbirr that may be the commission executed by artists from Elcho Island in 2002.) The works come from all across Arnhem Land, and represent approximately a decade's creative output from roughly 1965 through 1976.

The catalog opens with a series of essays that form a somewhat confounding whole. First up is a brief excerpt from a 1990 speech by R. Marika made at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala, which is the source of the exhibition's title ("When the old people paint, it is as if they are meditating") and which introduces the themes of sacred art. Marika's remarks are followed by excerpts from Wandjuk Marika: Life Story (University of Queensland Press, 1995). Typographically set out in short lines that causes them to resemble modern poetry, like Ezra Pound's Chinese Cantos, they speak of deep history and modern history and the sensibility that unites the two.

Marika's remarks provide an eloquent counterpoint to Mundine's own historical excursus in the next essay, "An Aboriginal Soliloquy." I have never been an enthusiast when it comes to Mundine's impressionistic, collagist literary style. He tells us (in a paragraph exemplary of most of the essay)

In May 1927 Parliament House in Canberra was officially opened by His Royal High the Duke of York and a performance by Dame Nellie Melba: there was no Aboriginal acknowledgment or significant presence. David Maymirringu Malangi was born on the eastern bank of the Glyde River opposite Milingimbi and the Methodist Mission. The following year painter Binyinyiwuy was born on the mainland on the eastern side of the Glyde River mouth.

Yes, but what of it?

John von Sturmer's contribution, "A Limping World: works in the Arnott's Collection--some conceptual underpinnings," concludes the opening set of essays and perhaps offers a clue about the overall intention of this introduction. It too is a collage of brief, personal reflections on the art, on contemporary Indigenous politics (art as an "intervention" into our normal ways of seeing), and on the artists behind the works on display. It strikes me as the most appropriate style that could be imagined for visitors to the MCA: those who come equipped with little knowledge about Indigenous traditions yet who are conversant with the idiom of the contemporary art catalog will be reassured that they are on familiar ground here.

The second section of They Are Meditating, "From East to West: bark painting across the Top End" is reserved largely for the glories of the collection. The paintings themselves are beautifully presented, most often in full page reproductions Four more essays introduce the stops on this route across Arnhem Land, following the sun and the route of the Wagilag creators across the country.

Lindy Allen's contribution on Groote Eylandt painting is a useful companion to David Turner's essay in One Sun, One Moon (AGNSW, 2007). Together with Creation Tracks and Trade WInds, the exhibition of Groote Eylandt barks at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University in 2006, the works in the Arnott's collection helped to construct a long-overdue history of the development of painting in the western reaches of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Djon Mundine returns to provide the introduction to "The Spirit Within: North-eastern and Central Arnhem." This section of the catalog covers a lot of ground, geographically as well as artistically. The paintings included here represent the work of painters from Ramingining and Milingimbi east to Yirrkala. And it is here that I wish that some sort of organizing principle had been applied to the presentation (or made explicit if it exists).

Although all works by a single artist are grouped together, works from the entire region are mingled with no apparent logic. Thus Gawirrin Gumana's austere Barama (a painting that might have been excised from the Yirrkala Church Panels) appears opposite swirling goannas by Charlie Gunbana. On the other hand, ten pages separate Dawidi's Wagilag Sisters Myth from Gimindja's The Gadadangul Snake, which might profitably have been seen in proximity to one another.

Luke Taylor provides an all-too-brief introduction to the art of Western Arnhem Land and the rock art traditions that underlie it. This third section is dominated by a generous collection of works by Lofty Bardayal and Yirawala. It also contains some stunning barks by Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra. Three paintings by Nganjmirra and a fourth by Samuel Garnarradj Manggudja occupy a two-page spread in the midst of Taylor's essay and offer a startling tutorial on traditions that presage the work of Peter Marralwanga and John Mawurndjul in their figuration and use of space inside the frame provided by the sheet of bark.

It is here that the real richness of the Arnott's Collection begins to emerge. Perhaps because there is more coherence to the artistic style presented in this section, perhaps because major artists are so inclusively represented, one begins to grasp an aesthetic vision that was muted in the presentation of more easterly art. One looks at the series of changes Yirawala rings on the depiction of a set of wallabies and begins to appreciate the sacred, abstract mardayin designs. The different ways in which Bardayal and Yirawala impart motion and liveliness to their animals becomes clear. The many ways in which rarrk is treated by the artists offer insights into how patterning operates to impart volume and vitality as well as instructions to the hunter on how to share the hunt's yield.

A pair of paintings from Wadeye forms a coda to the exhibition, and Kim Barber's essay on Christopher Pugar's small oval painting, Life, attempts to draw together history, geography and biography to explicate its origins. Sadly, she offers no commentary on the most immediately striking aspect of this painting. Its designs elicit striking and perhaps inexplicable comparisons to classic motifs of desert painting. In its shape, this little bark resembles a coolamon or a wunda shield. The design is a set of dotted circles connected by short, dotted lines, and the negative spaces between those lines are filled with two different colors of ochre, recalling again the bush tucker or Tingari designs of the desert. All in all, it is a most intriguing and mysterious painting.

The book's back matter includes excellent maps that locate the many communities from which these barks were collected, along with a thumbnail presentation of the works in the show. It is here that the reader must turn for detailed information about the artists, their dates, and their countries of origin. And as you browse these pages, don't neglect to turn the page after you've reviewed the two Wadeye paintings. For there, at the very end, are four small barks from the Tiwi Islands that are otherwise overlooked in the catalog.

The surprising discovery of these tiny masterpieces at the very end of the book brought home to me one more time the particular genius of Jerome Gould as a collector. Although he clearly had favorites among the artists whose work he went after, it is the breadth of his interest that informs this exhibition and that makes its presentation in this comprehensive show so important. Although missions had been selling bark paintings for decades, the presence in Arnhem Land in the 60s of men like Gould, Kupka, and Ruhe must have had a tremendously stimulating effect on the painter's output and the richness and excitement of that period shines through the pages of this catalog.

There's only a little over a month left to see this extraordinary collection in person at the MCA: They Are Meditating closes on August 3, 2008.


  ]]> Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:58:34 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1403073609/E20080628140334/index.html <![CDATA[A Short Coda on an Aboriginal Tragedy ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C2062160667/E20080622140201/index.html In a comment on my previous post on the root of the current Aboriginal tragedy, the one that I believe the Intervention is failing to address, David Spence had the following incisive remarks to offer:

We seem consumed by endless discussion about the ‘means’ but just what is the ‘end’ that we seek with, for, or by indigenous communities?

Maybe it is simplistic, but I think we will not achieve (with, for, or by indigenous Australians) anything of lasting benefit until someone can define a state of affairs which could be considered ‘a successful outcome’.

I have yet to read anywhere, anyone’s idea or definition of what would be considered ‘a successful outcome’. Why is that? Antigone had a simple choice. I wish it were so easy.

I don't know that I have answers to David's questions; I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable promulgating them if I did, for I don't believe it's my place to say what Aboriginal people want, or even what most Australians want. But I think I can point to a couple of problems that are impeding progress towards a successful outcome, whatever that may be.

There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that even when Aboriginal people express what they consider to be a successful outcome, there are often reasons why their desires cannot be met. There has been much talk about the failure of "self-determination" and more that a few critics have blamed the Indigenous communities for that failure. The rest have blamed the government: usually Liberals are heard blaming Labor (or small-l liberals) for promoting such a bone-headed idea in the first place.

In this matter, it is useful to revisit Pam Nathan and Dick Leichleitner Japanangka's study Settle Down Country (Pmere Arlaltyewele) (Kibble Books/Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, 1983). Written during the height of the early days of the Outstation Movement in the Central Desert, it usefully documents both things that people who were attempting to take up the challenge of self-determination wanted, and the government's response to their requests for help in establishing these remote communities.

In the book's fourth chapter, "Country Camps: Struggle for Survival," Nathan and Japanangka survey eighteen settlements in the areas surrounding Yuendumu, Papunya, and Docker River. Although there is some variation from area to area and settlement to settlement, some common themes emerge: housing and ablution facilities, trucks, radios, bores and windmills for water, stores, schools, and health care.

The authors document the status of the fulfillment of these requests, and the record is dismal.

It is clear that there are enormous deficiencies in the provision of essential services to the country camps and these, we believe, could seriously threaten the viability of the movement. The relevant government departments have not provided substantial material support, and certainly no moral support, to the people living on the camps. There appears to be no coherent explanation of the inequities in funding and the provision of services across the three regions involved in this study. The camps in the Papunya region, although by no means well provided for, appear to have more of the services essential for country camp life than the camps in the Yuendumu and Docker River regions.

The primary needs expressed by the Aboriginal people included water, transport, communication facilities, and shelter. Secondary requirement included schooling, health services, employment, stores and ablution facilities. None of these services are adequately provided at any of the country camps, some of which have been established for six to seven years.

Finally, it is remarkable that records kept on the country camps by the relevant departments are not comprehensive. One wonders about the criteria used to determine financial allocations (p. 150).

In the book's final chapter, "Two Sides of Accountability" the authors look at the differing responses of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) and the Aboriginal Development Corporation (ADC). It is their belief that the ADC, which is composed of Aboriginal people, is better at listening, but they also know that it is the DAA that controls the money. They provide an extensive report on an inquiry into conditions in Kintore in 1981, "not to make it hard for the people who work for the government agencies but in the hope that they might start to listen to Aboriginal people and might give them the right to self-determination, including the control of a reasonable share of the public money" (p. 155).

All of this is well-trod territory, and I engage with it once more primarily to recommend Settle Down Country as an interesting and important document from the early days of self-determination that might usefully be consulted, not simply for its historical perspective, but because it is one of the few places outside of official government reports where the views of Aboriginal people about what they want have been recorded and then widely disseminated.

In my second response to David's query, I would like to return to a theme that I passed over obliquely in my last post, which is that of choice. Antigone's choice is necessarily tragic because of the way in which her options are structured. What if it is not a question of what the goals or the ends are but how the pathways to them are structured or defined that means the difference between success and failure, between hope and tragedy?

Again, I will resurrect a much-discussed dichotomy for the purposes of illustration. One high-positive value for Aboriginal people is education, or literacy, which entails attendance at school. Another high-positive value is participation in ceremony, such as sorry business, whereby children learn "proper culture," Anangu way, or Yolngu way.

Parents want both for their children, but it seems that in today's world, choosing one implies the destruction of the other. The demands of sorry business can take a child out of school for weeks at a time; months possibly given the death rate in some remote communities today. Regular attendance at school presents a host of problems if parents and kin must leave the community to participate in extended ceremonies. Must children be sequestered in a dormitory environment in order to maintain their attendance at school? Who looks after them when kin are far away? Do they then grow up literate, but at the cost of cultural knowledge that can only be obtained through observation and participation?

I don't know if there is an answer to those questions, but perhaps, if cultural immersion and literacy are both high-positive values that Indigenous parents want their children to achieve, can we give some thought to how both might be accomplished? Is there a way to avoid another tragedy?  ]]> Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:02:01 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C2062160667/E20080622140201/index.html <![CDATA[The Tragedy Behind the Intervention ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C2062160667/E20080621133033/index.html The eponymous protagonist of Sophocles' drama Antigone has long defined the essence of the "tragic" for me. Her home city of Thebes was riven by a war of brother against brother who personified the doctrine of mutually assured destruction by slaying one another outside the city's gates. At the opening of the play, the new king, Creon, has declared that one brother, Eteocles, will be given a hero's funeral; the other, Polyneices, is to be left out to rot and to be consumed by dogs. No one is to give Polyneices the proper rites of burial, under pain of death.

Their sister Antigone is thus put in an untenable position. She is caught between two moral imperatives that are mutually contradictory. Obedience to civil law compels her to leave Polyneices unburied. Obedience to sacred law demands that she give comfort to the soul of the dead through proper burial. And yet she must choose one or the other; there is no middle ground. And whatever action she takes, whichever law she chooses to honor, she will simultaneously dishonor and betray the other law. If she obeys the gods, she will disobey Creon and die. If she obeys Creon, she will dishonor the gods and bring ruin upon her city. In order to fulfill one obligation she must renounce the other.

In his classic 1954 monograph, Renunciation as a Tragic Focus: a study of five plays, Eugene Falk describes this enforced renunciation as the essential principle that defines tragedy. Two high-positive values are arrayed against one another, and the protagonist, forced to choose one, necessarily destroys the other.

On this anniversary weekend, marking one year since the Howard Government announced the Intervention in Aboriginal communities throughout the Northern Territory, a pair of articles have appeared in The Australian: one explicitly invokes the tragic, while the other unwittingly evokes the tragedy that lies behind the Intervention.

Of all that I have read about the Intervention in the last few days, nothing compares with Nicholas Rothwell's lucid, extensive "No Question of Turning Back" (The Australian, June 21, 2008) for a critical analysis of what has happened and of the future directions being mapped out by the Rudd government.

Rothwell has always been sympathetic to the aim of relieving the suffering that has become endemic in remote Aboriginal communities, and has been outspoken on the need for drastic correctives. More than two years ago now, and more than a year before Brough's "48 hours" of planning for the Intervention, Rothwell had this to say:

It is time for the unthinkable to be put on the agenda. One logical course of action would be for the federal Government to declare a state of emergency in many of the communities and ghetto camps of the centre and the entire north, and to employ the army or a civic service volunteer corps to provide viable settlements with proper facilities and to impose a system of benign social control. This is an unpalatable prescription for those who fancy the ideals of Aboriginal self-determination. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today ("Cry of the Innocent," The Australian, May 20, 2006).

Of course, the Howard-Brough plan wasn't exactly what Rothwell envisioned, although in his reporting he has often supported its ends and sometimes its means. Now Rothwell has done a superb job of distilling the bureaucratic complexities of the emergency response, this "human engineering on a grand scale." In this piece he admirably outlines not simply what Brough attempted, but more importantly for today, illuminates the changes Jenny Macklin has wrought to the Broughian program. Finally, he looks to what lies ahead under her leadership.

Rothwell provides a lengthy exposition of the current state of affairs, and in what follows I will here only selectively highlight a few of the topics he covers.

The Intervention under Rudd and Macklin continues to build on Noel Pearson's agenda to reform social welfare. It wants to emplace mechanisms to guard against corruption in the administration of government support for Aboriginal affairs, address the complexities of native title, and rework the distribution of mining royalties for the long-term benefits of Aboriginal owners. There is a new experiment underway on Groote Eylandt, for example, to divert royalties towards programs that facilitate and support initiatives in education, alcohol management, and tourism.

Overall, Rothwell focuses on the successes of both the Brough and the Macklin programs, and he offers an encouraging view of the present moment while acknowledging that there remains a multiplicity of viewpoints, often contradictory, about those successes and the means by which they can be achieved. If he ignores the downside of this human engineering--the overt racism that is entrenched in the entire spectacle of social engineering for Aboriginal people, the discredited social Darwinism that remains a living, breathing monster beneath the political landscape--I will not complain. His mission here is not to curse the darkness but to show where a few candles have begun to radiate a flicker of hope.

But it is because he remains silent about this racism and social Darwinism that I can not accept his final assessment. He may well be correct in his evaluation of the Labor response as somehow marred by its " calm, and constructive" speeches that betray a "managerial" approach lacking in "moral outrage." But to say that Brough had "the grace to see a tragedy" in the remote Northern Territory ennobles a government that does not deserve the distinction. Even if you grant Brough the passion and sincerity that has sometimes been ascribed to him, both his assessment of the problem and the solutions he proposed missed the essentially Sophoclean dilemma that faces the Indigenous people who attempt to govern their lives, to whatever degree, by their own Law. Brough never saw the tragedy at the heart of Aboriginal communities.

To illustrate one aspect of that dilemma, let me turn to Natasha Robinson's June 21 contribution to The Australian's review of the Intervention, "Secrets in the Shadows." Robinson's piece represents the worst sort of demonizing journalism, an exemplar of the insensitivity and lack of comprehension that justifies the indignities and privations of the emergency response by painting Indigenous people as violent savages, unconstrained by any sense of decency or real law. They deserve the Intervention, she argues, because they are incapable of civilizing themselves.

The chief locus of her argument resides in the recent troubles between Papunya and Mt Liebig, following the unexplained death of a 14-year old boy after a footy match and focusing on the specter of payback that is now haunting the two communities. She interprets this system of "vigilante justice" as representative of a mind set that leads inevitably to sexual abuse of all sorts (not just of children but of women in general) and to the shielding of perpetrators from a true justice that can only come from the dispassionate hands of white law.

Robinson is so caught up in her disgust with the primitive as she defines it that she become blind to the implications of her own reasoning. While claiming that "payback" shields whistleblowers and perpetuates the cycle of violence in Aboriginal communities she can not hear her own arguments clearly.

The prosecution of sexual abuse cases is tortuously slow; few child sex abuse cases reach the stage where charges can be laid. Even when cases do get to court and are proven, the victims are not safe. A woman who was sexually assaulted in her home in Hermannsburg was attacked following the perpetrator's jury conviction this year, forcing her to flee her community with her two children.

Substitute the name of another town for "Hermannsburg." Is this not a story we have heard over and over again from those who operate shelters for battered women around the world? And yet Robinson goes on to claim that "Complicating the picture is the ongoing tendency of traditional Aborigines to rely on customary law in punishing perpetrators of sexual abuse or any other crime."

Senior Papunya man Sammy Butcher says that despite changes to territory law that make customary punishment illegal, spearings and other forms of traditional payback are still common. Asked if such punishment was more effective in child abuse cases than reporting to police, Butcher says customary punishment is the first priority of many traditional senior men. "We've got to do that first and then go to the police," he says. "The police can deal with it afterwards."

Butcher, of course, is no ignorant primitive. He is the onetime lead guitarist and composer with the Warumpi Band, a man who now struggles to protect the youth of Papunya. He employs his experience of the whitefella world to manage a music studio in the community that offers direction and purposeful activity to the town's youth; he has helped to lead the successful fight against petrol-sniffing in Papunya. At the same time, his remarks as quoted by Robinson demonstrate his commitment to traditional law.

And it is here that I want to return to my opening illustration, to demonstrate how tragedy strikes in remote Australia in a Sophoclean manner and how men like Butcher are caught in the trap of dual allegiance. There is the law that governs "customary punishment" and there is the white man's law that has decreed such justice unlawful. Like Antigone, the traditional senior men must obey their sacred law and face the consequences of a Creonic retribution, or they must adapt to the imposed systems of justice and in so doing, continue to destroy the basis of their indigenous social order.

The quandary over payback is just a single example. The responsibility to walytja--kin, family, relationship--that leads to overcrowding in homes and communities stands in opposition to the dictates of housing authorities, and sometimes to the advice of health professionals from the medical establishment. The tradition of juvenile autonomy and the demands of the Australian education system stand in unreconciled opposition.

Unlike Antigone, those who opt to follow the dictates of their own law are not given swift death in return. Instead they are left to die one slow piece at a time, until choice, that central element of Sophoclean tragedy, is removed from them, until will is drowned in alcohol, until obligations are abandoned and respect for walytja is lost along with self-respect.

That so many people--including the former Minister--cannot recognize this stressful, lacerating trap that Aboriginal people inhabit, this choice of options which inevitably leads to the destruction of one or another of a pair of conflicting, high-positive values, is not in itself a tragedy. But it is a damned sorry state of affairs, and one that continues to contribute to the real Aboriginal tragedy. Until Indigenous people can make choices that do not force them to renounce their essential identities, no amount of social engineering will resolve the dilemmas they face.  ]]> Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:25:33 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C2062160667/E20080621133033/index.html <![CDATA[Top (End) Books ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080619215740/index.html 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.  ]]> Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:57:40 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080619215740/index.html <![CDATA[Reading Anthropology ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080614142129/index.html 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.  ]]> Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:33:29 +1000 http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1693819711/E20080614142129/index.html <![CDATA[Contemporary (Aboriginal) Art, History, and Criticism ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1403073609/E20080607122212/index.html In my post from a week ago ("Art News on the Web"), I noted with appreciation the return of Nicholas Rothwell to the art beat at The Australian. Since then, Rothwell has published two more significant pieces in that newspaper's pages. The Weekend Australian for May 31 contained a review of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty's new publication Beyond Sacred: recent paintings from Australia's remote Aboriginal communities. (Hardie Grant Books, 2008) entitled "Ancient and Modern." Then the Australian Literary Review for June 4 published a lengthy and important piece of meta-criticism, "More Than Dreaming: bringing to light a blaze of beauty." In this latter piece Rothwell extensively investigates the current status of critical writing about Aboriginal art. It's one of those pieces of writing that leaves me shaking my head and thinking, "I wish I'd said that."

The Lavertys' Beyond Sacred is an extraordinary book, the record of a collection assembled over two decades that includes some of the finest examples of Indigenous art from the Western Desert, the Kimberley, and the Top End, and Rothwell lauds the vision of the Lavertys in building and presenting their collection. He recognizes their genuine love for the art and the artists who produce it, the scrupulous collecting practices, their impeccable taste. But he laments the lack of insight that the book provides into the "instincts and desires" that propel this collecting, and offers a critique of the "intellectual agenda" that the Lavertys have opted to pursue in the essays that accompany the catalogue of their collection: "Our aim is to showcase some of the best pictures in our collection as great contemporary art." Rothwell demurs.

[T]o that end they offer up a raft of essays by familiar experts, buttressing this argument from several perspectives. ... The trouble is, this dog pack just won't hunt, and the Lavertys, by erecting their complex superstructure, succeed in blurring the exact qualities that Beyond Sacred -- with its selection of tradition-based works -- seeks to showcase.

Before I go any further, I must engage in "full disclosure."

I've admired the Lavertys' works on loan to public art galleries for nearly a decade. We first met in Broome in 2005, and I have visited with them briefly at the opening of Dreaming Their Way in Washington DC in 2006 and again at their home in Sydney a year ago. From the first hour, our friendship has been characterized by a shared delight in the vitality of the art we love, by spirited conversation and debate, and by respect.

In May of 2007, the Lavertys invited me to contribute an essay to Beyond Sacred in support of their thesis that great contemporary Aboriginal art is indeed great contemporary art, doing me the inexpressible honor of having my views placed side by side with those of Howard Morphy, Judith Ryan and Nick Waterlow in the first section of essays in the book. My copy of the book arrived in the mail only yesterday evening, and I have not yet had the chance to read the other essays; indeed, I've barely skimmed the 300 pages of extraordinary photographs of art, interspersed with Peter Eve's gorgeous and affecting landscapes and portraits.

Although I cannot speak for them, I do think we share at least a few perspectives on the nature and value of contemporary Indigenous art. In particular, I agree with their assessment of this art as great contemporary art, and this leaves me with a bone to pick with Mr Rothwell, for I feel that he has missed a point in his assessment of their intentions and achievement in publishing Beyond Sacred. Near the end of his review, he puts forth the following propositions.

The masterpieces of the Laverty collection may well be made within an evolving stream of art, and be contemporaneous in time frame, but in one key respect they are as far from the knowing, ironic contemporary as they could be: and it is precisely their difference that makes them so attractive and collectable.
...
The great indigenous work of the Centre, the Kimberley and Top End lies before our eyes: unreachable, irreducible, unknowable, by the great collectors, or by any other outsider. It stems from a closed, mysterious space, it speaks of ritual and beliefs communicated in concealed language; it has a core beyond its visible heart. This is the precise reverse of the contemporary. It is the thing of most cherished value in the indigenous domain: the secret Westerners want, and seek to buy, and cannot have. Such is the pull that draws the Lavertys on, and yet it goes almost unmentioned in the theoretical apparatus they have built like a castle around their raw desire.

In this assessment I think Rothwell does an injustice both to contemporary art in general and to contemporary Indigenous art in particular. There is a reductive logic to asserting that contemporary art is ironic and knowing, double-edged and self conscious, while Aboriginal art succeeds because of its core of mystery and concealment. There is a truth to these statements, of course, but it is not the whole truth. And I think that the very point of the Lavertys' endeavor in Beyond Sacred is quite literally expressed in its title: it is an attempt to push art criticism beyond the consideration of the sacred and the mystical in Aboriginal art and to ask the reader to begin to consider those formal qualities it shares with contemporary non-Indigenous art.

As Rothwell himself put it in his review of the catalog for John Mawurndjul's retrospective, Rarrk--John Mawurndjul: journey through time in Northern Australia (Craftsman House, 2005), "Mawurndjul and his fellow masters of North Australian Aboriginal art are thus staking a claim to be regarded as artists without adjectives, contemporary painters who just happen to be from a particular cultural background" ("How the West was won over," The Australian, January 19, 2006).

It is true that some aspects of that "cultural background" are unique and may never be knowable to those who stand outside the tradition from which they develop. It is entirely appropriate that some of those concerns are not open to the scrutiny of Western eyes. However, there is much that can be appreciated, understood, and explicated. And this is the work of the art historian who must engage with the products of Indigenous artists and their traditions. To deny the art historian the opportunity to bring his intellectual framework to the conversation is tantamount to denying anthropologists access to the communities in which the art is produced. And to do so can be to condemn those communities to misunderstanding and prejudice, to mistake their difference for inferiority, and to fail to recognize the breadth of their achievements.

There is much that needs to be done to build an effective body of criticism and history around the work of the artists from remote communities in Australia. Beyond Sacred is a call to begin that work.

There is a need to document the history and diffusion of painting and its associated cultures throughout the continent. And, as Howard Morphy argues in Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007), this is an endeavor in which art history and anthropology should cooperate, rather than being at odds with one another as they so often have been in the last century. The essays in Susan McCulloch's recent The Heart of Everything: the art and artists of Mornington and Bentinck Islands (McCulloch & McCulloch, 2008) suggest links between the Wellesley Islands and the Central Desert in both styles of dotted body painting and the songlines of the Dingo Dreaming. Similarly, the trade in pearl shell from the northwest coast around Broome through to the Centre suggests a common origin for the meander designs found in the works of artists as different as Aubrey Tiggan and Jacky Giles.

These connections, and more, need to be explored and documented. This will require that art historians cease thinking about "Aboriginal" art and begin to define the "schools" and "movements" in Indigenous painting and sculpture, the variety of styles, motivations, and desires that occupy the continent. The history of influence that such studies will generate must also take into account the influence of western aesthetic traditions on these Indigenous artists. To deny such an influence or to dismiss it as somehow corrupting of something essential is to condemn Aboriginal artists to an ahistorical existence and in so doing, exclude them from the realm of art history.

If this work has barely begun, it is in part because art historians, especially academic art historians, often have little motivation to do the work of art history in the Indigenous sphere. As long as the art retains the whiff of the ethnographic, they can leave such interpretation to their colleagues in the anthropology departments, who are however, much more interested (by and large) in investigating different questions. But even the traditional areas of anthropological research--questions of kinship, reciprocity, diffusion--can, to follow Morphy's suggestion, illuminate art history.

Without the work of art historians, Aboriginal art and culture will remain largely within the sphere of the ethnographic. I believe that one of the goals of Beyond Sacred is to try to place Aboriginal art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the frame of fine arts, to offer it a place within the discourses of art history so that the necessary and fundamental work of documenting influence, diffusion, tradition, and change can be done. Until that fundamental research is accomplished, we cannot begin to see where this art fits into broader historical movements. Beyond Sacred argues for the place of Indigenous painting and sculpture in the intellectual endeavor known as art history.

This is not to deny Rothwell's claim that the art "speaks of ritual and beliefs communicated in concealed language; it has a core beyond its visible heart" that generates considerable appeal. It is to release the art from the notion that such a core is its chief, even its only significant attraction. The formal qualities of the art are certainly what first drew me to it, at the Dreamings exhibition, which I saw at about the same time that the Lavertys, "already passionate collectors of contemporary abstract and figurative paintings, were swept away by what they saw" at Brisbane's World Expo in 1988. This vibrating visual presence (linked to those spiritual beliefs, to be sure) gives the paintings a structure that is susceptible to analysis in Western terms and without reference to the underlying belief system. It is time that such analysis begins in earnest, and we must be grateful to the Lavertys for issuing the call and providing such a rich resource for the undertaking by documenting their collection in this way.

But what of that "hidden core"? Let me turn aside from the particulars of Beyond Sacred for a moment to consider the question of the esoteric, if not the sacred, in contemporary art. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines esoteric as "designed for or appropriate to an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples; communicated or intelligible only to the initiated." Surely this definition encompasses the body of knowledge that underlies contemporary Indigenous art. But just as surely, it applies to certain aspects of Western art of the late twentieth century.

For an example, I want to reach back a bit in that history, to the great flowering of abstract art in America. This is the art that engaged me before I encountered Dreamings, and is akin to some of the works the Lavertys were collecting before 1988. I'm thinking of, for example, the great bronze veils and "Unfurled" paintings by Morris Louis, or the early black paintings of Frank Stella. Louis's veils communicate a sense of majesty, a concern with color, and precious little in the way of content or representation, yet they are admired by thousands of museum-goers around the world.

Very few people who see these paintings are probably aware of the "esoteric" agenda that lies behind their creation. That agenda reaches back to the achievements of the Abstract Expressionists, and their desire to liberate painting from the representational. Louis wanted to solve the problem in a different way; he wanted to get beyond the illusion of space that persists in the great canvases of Jackson Pollock: Blue Poles retains the specter of volume and depth despite the "overall" application of paint. Louis's solution was to attempt, in so far as possible, to obliterate the distinction between the surface (the paint) and the support (the canvas) and to do so by making the paint as thin as possible, so that it became absorbed in the weave of the canvas, one with it.

This concern with flatness, with an acknowledgment of the fundamentally, essentially two-dimensional nature of painting, found expression in countless works by other artists of the 1950s and 60s. Kenneth Noland's bull's-eyes and Jasper Johns's flags took "flat" objects as their subject matter; Warhol's silk-screened dollar bills gave the notion a different twist. Frank Stella, meanwhile, began to insist that the shape of the support should dictate the design it carried, and from the simple rectangle of the first black paintings, he progressed to ever more elaborate experiments with shaped canvases, moving from notching the corners to constructing enormous "running V's" and culminating in the experiments of the Irregular Polygons.

Art historians have laid out this intellectual agenda for those who are willing and able to be initiated into the academy of criticism. In the West, we have our own sequenced series of introductions to higher learning and revelations of esoteric knowledge that rely on a comprehensive understanding of the visual traditions and the thinking of artists engaged with exploring the rules that govern representation in that tradition. Without that education or initiation, one will not know what to make even of a large body of coherent work, such as could be seen in the recent retrospectives of artists like Brice Marden and Sol Lewitt.

Now this agenda is not going to be available to just anybody who walks into a museum or otherwise encounters the art. This abstruse theorizing is never going to be accessible to someone unless he passes through a series of initiations that go by the name of education in our society, initiations that are as stratified and long lasting and themselves result in social stratification not dissimilar to what happens in aboriginal societies.

On the other hand, access to sacred knowledge in aboriginal societies has its own kinds of restrictions and gateways. While Rothwell asserts that non-indigenous people can never see into the hidden core of the art, the same can be said of many within Aboriginal communities as well. To take a simplistic example, men and women are said to be excluded from one another’s realms of knowledge, although the degree to which this is absolutely so is arguable and argued.

Similarly, knowledge of particular Dreamings and the rituals associated with them is not universally held. As Fred Myers details in Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, one gains rights to stories (and thus to painting those stories) through a variety of means. These are usually through association with particular country by place of conception or birth, or the place of conception, birth, or death of an ancestor or kinsman.

Myers also makes it clear that there is some room for negotiation in the area of access to land and its stories. In a society where all people stand in some kind of kinship relationship to one another one can, as Myers describes, argue for access to knowledge. Whether or not an individual is successful depends on many things—the eloquence of the argument, the political interests of those with more direct or stronger claims to the country, or indeed whether such owners still exist or are in danger of dying out. There is transfer of knowledge and country across affinal lines under certain circumstances where it is deemed important that the knowledge be transmitted to someone rather than being lost.

The point that I wish to make is that there are differences in degree as well as in kind in access to esoteric knowledge among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Would it be impossible for an Aboriginal artist to stand in awe of a great painting, even if he were ignorant of the Dreaming story and the associated ritual that it represents? Might he still not be able to judge the quality of its evocativeness, to intuit its power?

For those of us outside the tradition, a different form of initiation is required to further our appreciation of Indigenous art. Rothwell's brilliant essay in the recent issue of the Australian Literary Review praises the great and recent outpouring of critical writing in the realm of art history that promises to make Aboriginal art accessible to a broader audience and to deepen the comprehension of those for whom it is already a work of intellectual and emotional engagement.

Among the more fascinating insights he offers is the notion that four distinct strains of critical writing have become associated with four major, distinct areas of Indigenous style. A language of theory and social engagement dominates writing about artists who have grown up and been schooled within mainstream Australian society, the so-called "urban Aboriginal artists."

What Rothwell describes as "classical" art history, with an emphasis on history, thrives in the arena of Kimberley art, where a modern history of subjugation and massacre has repressed much traditional iconography and given birth to a genre that combines elements of the Western styles of landscape with a narrative approach to representation. The approach is useful today in chronicling the rise of new art centres: Rothwell cites Sally Butler's monograph Our Way: contemporary Aboriginal art from Lockhart River, but it is equally applicable to McCulloch's The Heart of Everything on the art of the Wellesley Islands.

Art and anthropology come closest to cooperation in a field that Rothwell styles "indigneous aesthetics," that flourishes in discussions of art from Arnhem Land, and is, unsurprisingly, best represented in the analyses of Howard Morphy. It is unsurprising as well that it applies best to the work of the Yolngu of Eastern Arnhem Land, who have been most forthcoming in setting out their own intellectual agenda, in attempting to most openly convey to Western eyes and minds the philosophy that underpins their visual strategies.

In opposition to the relatively forthright declarations of the Yolngu, the people of the Central Desert are masters of reticence, and here Rothwell suggests that "connoisseurship and genealogical detective work" are the most effective tools in the art historian's kit for assessing and unraveling the "scrim of signs" that encode a "deep, sensuous visual language." I would like to suggest that here, too, the lessons of anthropology that help us to understand the social and cultural milieu from which these art works emerge, along with the kind of historical investigation (perhaps what Rothwell subsumes under "genealogical detective work") offer great promise. In this regard I would suggest that it is the scholarship of Fred Myers that has done the most to advance our understanding of both the formal and cultural structures underpinning Desert art, especially that of the Pintupi. Earlier I mentioned Myers's ethnography, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self; his more recent Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art is as much a landmark of art history as the earlier work was in anthropology. Rothwell rightly remarks that that critical writing on Desert art "has long been darkened by Bardon's shadow," but the light of Myers's scholarship and the insights gained from long association with the greatest of the Desert painters has done much to illuminate the landscape.

However, the most valuable lesson I garnered from Rothwell's ALR essay was the importance of a book that I have overlooked for almost a year now since I barged it home on my back all the way from Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art: Brought to Light II: contemporary Australian art 1966-2006 (Queensland Art Gallery, 2006). It is an enormous, imposing book that has been silently reproaching my neglect from the corner of an ottoman in my study. I have repeatedly deferred investigating its sixty-two essays, twenty of which are studies of individual Indigenous artists or (less commonly) communities.

The essays follow a roughly chronological sequence--roughly because many of the artists, from Fred Williams to Pedro Wonaemirri, have had careers that span decades. That sequencing, though, has the happy effect of interspersing discussions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art throughout, although the balance tips towards the Indigenous in the book's latter half. But this editorial decision locates Indigenous art of the last forty years squarely in the midst of other contemporary art and thus reinforces the message of the Lavertys' Beyond Sacred.

Even better, many of the individual essays combine the strains that Rothwell has isolated in his review to good effect. Thus John Kean's essay on Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri is part biography, part contact history, part anthropology, and part structural critique. Christine Watson's comparative analysis of the works of Lilly Kelly Napangardi and Mitjili Napurrula depends heavily on the structural qualities of the works, while acknowledging their connections to other Luritja and Pintupi painters.

Rothwell singles out for special praise John von Sturmer's essay on the sculpture of Aurukun, an extended elegy for the mounting loss of a dynamic connection to ritual, country, and tradition on the west coast of Cape York. In this respect, von Sturmer stands alongside Rothwell in asserting the primacy of the ineffable and the mysterious, which lives apart from the intrusions of Western civilization. And yet, I would argue that all great art partakes of the ineffable, and we are no more able to adequately define or explicate what moves us deeply in front of the works of Michelangelo or Joseph Albers than we are when confronted with the recent canvases of Alma Webou from Bidyadanga that have aroused the Lavertys' passionate appreciation.

In the end, I find it instructive to return to the principles Howard Morphy articulated in Becoming Art. He argues for the inclusion of Indigenous art in the realm of art history (and thus, I would argue, in the sphere of contemporary art): "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" (p. 145, my emphasis). Or put another way, "the category of fine art is not a category of objects but a way of viewing objects that are prized exemplars of aesthetic value" (p. 20).