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Australian Aboriginal 'art' is transformed using the Western definitions of authentic art and authentic Otherness. As pointed out before, the terms of this transformation are defined by who holds the power. Western culture has situated Aboriginal culture on the margins of dominant society all throughout history. By looking at the history of Aboriginal culture, plus the traditional origins and concepts of 'art' leading up to the contemporary version, we will have a better understanding of just where Aborigines and their art are situated in relation to the Western world.
The Aborigines have occupied the Australian continent for at least 40,000 - 60,000 years (Sutton 1988:5, Isaacs 1993:38, Attenbrow 1992:3). They are believed to have migrated from South East Asia and, until the invasion of the whites, have been fairly isolated and left to evolve strategies for survival on their own (Hughes 1987:8, Blainey 1976:15-30). Australia is a harsh and variable continent, about the size of the United States, with desert stretching across the middle of the continent and the coast ranging from lush green rain forests to intensely humid, hot and crocodile infested jungles to snow capped mountains. The different tribes inhabited all these areas and each came to know their area of land and the secrets it held for survival.
The general term Aborigine is problematic. Though mistakenly, many people tend to think of the Aborigines as one unified homogenous group, they had no collective term to identify themselves and "the differences between individual groups were important and continually emphasized" (Sutton 1988:6). Often land was the primary way to distinguish individuals. It was through clan ties that an individual gained their links to the land. Clan membership was based on matrilineal or patralinerial decent and each clan had a totemic animal associated with an ancestor. Languages varied from tribe to tribe, but people could usually speak the language of their neighbors (Attenbrow 1992:3).
Division of labor was primarily by gender, with the women doing the gathering and the men hunting. Tools consisted of items such as spears, shields, boomerangs, net bags and baskets (Attenbrow 1992:6). Though Aborigines were nomadic and saw little value in the accumulation of material goods, they were very territorial (Hughes 1987:9). Aborigines valued land, not totally for its material value, but mostly because certain sites were Ancestral property (Hughes 1987:274). The Europeans failed to notice that land was Aboriginal culture's past, religion and way of life.
Though the native inhabitants of Australia had already had some contact with other explorers (the Dutch and Polynesian) it was the year 1788, when the British began their penal settlement, that irreversibly changed the Aboriginal culture. To England, Australia was a place of new resources and a way to conquer the Pacific before the French (Hughes 1987:36-42). When the British saw that the natives had no permanent dwellings and no visual "claim to the land", the land was determined 'terra nullius' (empty land) and it was with this notion that Australia and the Aborigines were invaded (Attenbrow 1992:10).
At the beginning of white settlement, there were an estimated
300,000 Aborigines settled all over Australia (Hughes 1987:9,
Attenbrow 1992:3). Aborigines were viewed by the settlers as
primitive, savage and unchanging. In addition to warfare killings,
water, flour and sugar were poisoned and diseases (smallpox, measles
and influenza) were introduced (Attenbrow 1992:11). Aboriginal
destruction was reasoned to be natural law, as shown in this comment
from a settler in 1849: "Nothing can stay the dying away of the
Aboriginal race, which Providence has only allowed to hold the land
until replaced by a finer race" (Hughes 1987:7). Upwards of 20,000 to
25,000 Aborigines were killed prior to 1930 (Hughes 1987:277; Sutton
1988:8). Of the two-hundred and fifty languages present before 1788,
now only about twenty or thirty are still spoken (Dixon 1989:7). In
Tasmania (an island off the south of Australia), marshal law was
declared to solve "the black problem" and every single native
inhabitant was slaughtered, with the last women dying in 1876 (Hughes
1987:420-24). It is wrong to say the Aborigines did not put up a
fight. Some tried to adapt while others fought to retain their
land.
Fig.
6 This advertisement for Golden Fleece Soap reflects a
popular opinion in 1924. (Parbury 1991:101)
Most
detrimental to the Aboriginal way of life was the loss of their land.
It was the land on which Aboriginals based much of their stories,
myths and religious beliefs. Land was also a economic resource. The
colonists failed to take into consideration Aboriginal sacred sites,
rights or ownership when using the land for commercial gain (Sutton
1988:9). In this way, Aborigines were prevented from living on and
from the land, and with this dispossession "their economic and
spiritual lives and social organization were almost totally
destroyed" (Attenbrow 1992:11).
Policies of "virulent individual and structural genocide and ethnocide during the course of British external colonization" were stressed until the 1930's (Neuenfeldt 1995:23). Then assimilation was sought. The government ripped families apart and until 1970, children of mixed descent could still be taken away and adopted into white families (Neuenfeldt 1995:23). Missions were set up and Aborigines were forced to live on the reserves (Attenbrow 1992:12-13). Though Aborigines grouped together to protest throughout the middle of the twentieth century, very little was done (Attenbrow 1992:15).
Aborigines were forced to assimilate into the wage labor systems, with no where else to turn. After a while, "cyclical declines in the demand for Australian commodities, along with the imposition in the 1960s of equal wages for Aborigines, reduced the demand for Aboriginal workers, causing many to become refugees in their own land, living on the margins of Australian society" (Sutton 1988:10).
The Aborigines at present number about 1.6%-2% of the Australian nation's population and are still "a marginalized minority and the most disadvantaged group in Australian society" (Neuenfeldt 1995:23). Only a couple thousand have not been assimilated and still live the 'traditional' life of their forefathers (Isaacs 1993:38). It was not until 1967 that Aborigines were given citizenship and could be counted in the census (Willis and Fry 1989a:109). In 1972, the labor government, began a policy of self-determination stating that "Aboriginal people were to decide the pace and nature of their future development within legal, social, and economic framework of Australian society" (Attenbrow 1992:16, Jones and Hill-Burnett 1982:233). In 1983, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act was passed, recognizing ownership of Aboriginal land prior to British rule (Attenbrow 1992:17). Many commissions and offices have since been set up to deal with Aboriginal affairs (Sutton 1988:178). In 1992, the high court recognized Native Title to the land, allowing Aboriginal to legally reclaim stolen land. The founding and fictional doctrine of terra nullius used to rationalize the colonization was finally overturned and rejected (Neuenfeldt 1995:23).
It has taken the past two hundred years to achieve these rights and recognition, but there is much more to be done. The current situation is improving in small amounts. Indigenous incomes have not improved in comparison to white Australian wages, Aboriginal health is a major concern and the demand for housing and community services continue to rise.7 Aboriginal infant mortality rates are four times the rate of non-indigenous figures, while indigenous life expectancy is 18 years younger than the national figure. In addition, non-treated preventable diseases in Aboriginals occur 12 times the national rate, and Aboriginal people were in police custody 26 times non-indigenous rates. (Indigenous Australia Today 1994). All these statistics point to the future problems with which Aborigines continue to struggle.
As shown, throughout history Australian Aboriginal culture has been on the margins of society, with no voice or recognition within Western discourse. It has only been through their cultural resources, in this instance, their art that Aboriginals have been heard and acknowledged.
- "My father...said this: My Boy look! Your Dreaming is there; it is a big thing. All Dreamings come from there...Something is there; we do not know what; something"
- (Aboriginal man in Sutton 1988:15).
- Tjakurrijana, mularrarringu (from the Dreaming, it became real)
- (Aboriginal saying in Myers 1991:32).
Aboriginal art entwines all of Aboriginal life and is not limited to aesthetic value. It involves law, politics, rights, obligation, history and ritual. Art was
A central component of the traditional...way of life, of significance in the political domain, in the relationships between clans, and in the relationships between men and women. Art was and remains an important component of the system of restricted knowledge, and at a more metaphysical level is the major means of recreating ancestral events, ensuring continuity with the ancestral past, and communicating with the spirit world (Morphy 1991:13).
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Fig. 7 Two young women in mortuary dress. Aurukun, Western Cape York Peninsula, 1933. (Sutton 1988:27) |
The Aboriginal concept of Dreamings (more of an analogy than a translation) can be described as Ancestral Beings. They originate in the past but continue to exist in the present and future as their spirits are passed down through descendants (Sutton 1988:15). The Dreaming is the beginning of the world when Ancestral Beings created all matter, all reason from the land to societal rules and rites. The Dreamings can function as totemic symbols to those who share the same Dreamings.
The Dreaming is thus the generative principle of the present, the logically prior dimension of the now, while also being a period in which the plants and animals were still women, men and children, before their transformation into their present forms took place" (Sutton 1988:15).
Fig
. 8 Impermanent rituals: Anmatyerre
women's ground design of Ngarlu Dreaming,
Yuendumn.
(Sutton 1988:93)
In other words, most everything originated from the Dreaming but
Dreamtime entities continue to form the future through their
descendants. Sites on the landscape where the Dreaming beings
performed feats are referred to as sacred sites and are still
important today (Attenbrow 1992:4).
It is through
the rituals surrounding the paintings that Ancestral history,
beliefs, laws and stories are continued through Aboriginal life.
"Together these symbolisms constitute a complex code of interaction
that continually remodels, and at the same time reflects, Aboriginal
cosmology, sociality, and notions of the person" (Sutton 1988:14).
These paintings are ritual constructions part of a whole system of
songs and reenactments of ancestral activities (Myers 1994:684).
Fig. 9
The Artifact before the Art. Aboriginal men making bark
paintings, 1922. (Sutton 1988:18)
The
knowledge and designs are passed down through a system relating to
kinship, just as land rights (Myers 1991:32).
Perhaps, most importantly, it is not the paintings that contain meaning. It is through the linking of song and dance in ceremony that the meanings come to exist (Morphy 1991:101). The painting in itself does not possess the power of the ancestors but through the "attributed properties" from ceremony that ties beliefs and meaning together, the paintings meaning "comes to be known" (Morphy 1991:101). A good example of this external, extended meaning is realizing that to Aborigines the concept of ownership exists, but it is ownership of the Dreamings themselves and their description, not their physical preservation in paint (Magaw 1982:214).
Aboriginal painting has worked its way through time in the form of cave painting to sand/body painting to acrylic painting (Isaacs 1993:38). Much of the history of the recognition of Aboriginal objects as art can be traced along with the progressing political acknowledgment of Aboriginal rights and the creation of a market for their objects by anthropologists and missionaries.
Fig. 10
Sun
Women in her hut, Melville
Island,
1954, ochre on bark. "The sun woman is seated in her
hut..[it] is represented by a black ring" (Sutton
1988:77).
Painting was done on mainly on flat surfaces (burial posts, bark,
bodies and the ground)(William 1976:272) (see Fig 10). Up until the
twentieth century, white contact had little influence on Aboriginal
art, though sometimes the whites were incorporated in the stories of
the Dreamings. Aborigines had few material possessions for Europeans
to observe and, in addition, much of it was
inaccessible8
because it was considered restricted knowledge (Sutton 1988:147). It
is important to remember that up until the 1930's, systematic
genocide and dehumanization of Aborigines was encouraged. Few had an
interest in what Aboriginal culture produced.
It was not until the latter half of the 1930's that the mediums began to change. Tribes started painting on flattened bark. According to one account in the Yirrkala area, it was by request of an anthropologist that the new forms were tried (Williams 1976:272). Other merchandise such as boomerangs, carvings, weapons, didjeridoos (drone pipes for ritual) and bags were more popular. The main consumers consisted of anthropologists, museums and some private individuals (Williams 1976:274).
Though, in the 1950's, Aboriginal artifacts were not seriously considered art by the West, the market for goods expanded considerably. In Yirrkala, a missionary encouraged bark painting as a "means to express pride in their culture heritage and a possible source of income" (Williams 1976:274). He, too, introduced different ways of creating more sellable art (e.g. the size of a painting, adding intricate lines). Many of these were produced for tourists but in the art world, they were perceived as inauthentic and commodities (Willis and Fry 1989a:109). Aboriginal presence was only seen in history museum, not art museums.
It was in during the 1960's and 70's (a time, too, of stronger political recognition and rights) that the Aboriginal art market intensified. Tourist demands increased for small carvings and bark paintings. There was also a demand from private collectors for larger bark paintings with specific individual artists (Williams 1976:276). In 1971, several senior men from Papunya (200 km north of Alice Springs in Central Australia) completed a mural on the school wall using acrylic paints and hard board (Isaacs 1993:39). The "art was not just a translation into a new medium of traditional repertoire of symbols of ground painting and body designs" but the style was "realistic or explicit and non-symbolic" with discernible images (Megaw 1982:208). This could be due to Western influence or a way to alter sacred symbols. Either way, the paintings became known as the Papunya Tulu artists, the creators of the Western Desert acrylic paintings (see Fig. 11). Urged on by anthropologists, art galleries and collectors, the market increased.
Fig. 11
Billy
Stockman,
one of the first Aborigines to do contemporary acrylic
paintings at Papunya, 1988. (Isaacs 1989a:14)
The beginning of the 1980's was stagnant in terms of Aboriginal affairs (due to a conservative government), but the presence and visibility of Aboriginal art increased at home and internationally (Willis and Fry 1989a:109). In the mid-eighties Aborigines found more support through the Australia Art Council and Aboriginal artists produced works for the Sydney Opera House, the new Parliament House and the new international airport terminal (Isaacs 1993:39). The reproductions of acrylic paintings on canvas became readily accessible, from tourist art, postcards and hunt/gathering scenes, to large acrylics seen in art museums and galleries. Many exhibitions toured international (Dreamings: the Art of Aboriginal Australia made its début in New York City) and Aboriginal acrylic paintings moved into the "international art scene" (Myers 1991:28). Signed pictures became more common (Megaw 1982:211).
Currently, Aboriginal artist and paintings continue to gain a presence in the world, especially that of fine art. As the Aboriginal culture becomes more important and recognized throughout the world, anthropologists and art critics alike have articulated dilemmas this presence poses to the future of Aboriginal culture.
