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Week 2 Indigenous Cultures and the Indigenous Context - What does this mean?

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Week 2 Indigenous Cultures and the Indigenous Context - What does this mean?

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Select one of the images below based on your reflection of your lecture and reading. In 300 words explain why this image is relevant to you and your learning journey. Include your name and student number before your reflection.

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Just how many of us can honestly say we have ever given thought to who the Aboriginal man on the $50 note is? What is his story and what makes him so extraordinary to be given such an honour?

This man who appears on the Australian $50 note, forever etched into our history, is David Unaipon. He was born at the Point McLeay Mission (now known as Raukkan), on the Lower Murray in South Australia, on 28 September 1872. David Unaipon (also written as Ngunaitponi) was a writer, inventor, public speaker and preacher.

Not only was he a proud Ngarrindjeri man who was well known for being a spokesperson for improving the conditions and rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The non-drinking/non-smoking advocate made many significant contributions to science and literature.

David Unaipon gained a reputation throughout his life, of being 'Australia's Leonardo' for his promotion of scientific ideas.

Some of David Unaipon's inventions include an improved hand tool for shearing sheep, a centrifugal motor, a multi-radial wheel and a mechanical propulsion device. Unfortunately, he unable to get financial support to develop many of his own ideas in his lifetime.

Despite David Unaipon's many inventions, and despite how well-known and acclaimed he was in Australia, he still faced discrimination because of his Indigenous background and was often refused a room in hotel establishments.

David Unaipon died at the age of 94. A man of great intelligence and vision, he was well before his time and his achievements truly speak for themselves. Below is a timeline of the work and achievements of the great man on our $50 note.

- 1902: 4 January 1902, Unaipon married a Tangani woman from the Coorong, Katherine Carter, née Sumner, at Point McLeay.

- 1909: Unaipon patented an improved hand tool for sheep shearing which provided great economic benefits to the Australian wool industry.

- 1914: Unaipon anticipated the helicopter, applying the principle of the boomerang. His search for the secret of perpetual motion lasted throughout his lifetime.

- 1920s: From the early 1920s, Unaipon studied Aboriginal mythology and compiled his versions of legends.

- 1924: Unaipon became the first Aboriginal writer to be published for his article 'Aboriginals: Their Traditions and Customs' in the Daily Telegraph on 2 August 1924.

- 1928 -1929: He assisted the Bleakley inquiry into Aboriginal welfare.

-1930: His writings were included in Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals (London, 1930). The handwritten manuscript of another one of his books on Aboriginal legends (which is reflected in the $50 banknote) survives in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, New South Wales.

- 1934: Unaipon urged the Commonwealth to assume responsibility for Aboriginal Affairs and proposed that an independent board replace South Australia's chief protector of Aboriginal people.

- 1953: Unaipon was awarded a Coronation Medal. The Queen instituted the medal in honour of her Coronation.

- 1967: Unaipon died on 7 February 1967 at Tailem Bend, South Australia and was buried in Point McLeay (now known as Raukkan) cemetery.

-1985: He was posthumously awarded the FAW Patricia Weickhardt Award for Aboriginal writers.

-1988: He was also honoured with the establishment of an annual national David Unaipon Award for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and an annual Unaipon Lecture in Adelaide

- 1996: The University of South Australia named the Unaipon School within the Indigenous College of Education and Research in honour of David Unaipon and his father James Unaipon, the first Aboriginal teacher in South Australia.
Weeknights, Channel 34 & Foxtel 144 (and on SBS On Demand)
Use the hashtag #ThePointNITV to join the discussion

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David Unaipon and the $50 note: the story behind the image

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WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the following article contains images of deceased persons. Just how many of us can honestly say we have ever given thought to who the Aboriginal man on the $50 note is? What is his story and what makes him so extraordinary to be given such an honour?

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Since its invention, photography has been our window to the past. Photographs freeze moments in time so we can go back and remember. We use them to tell the stories of our history.

But for many Indigenous communities in WA, important moments in their history were kept out of reach.

In the early 1900s, the government took thousands of photos of Aboriginal people, but stored away in archives, they were never seen by the people in them or returned to their families.

That's why the State Library came up with Storylines -an online image database connecting Indigenous people with their history.

Looking for a better way

Damien Webb is the Indigenous Liaison Officer at the State Library. It's his job to connect Indigenous West Australians with the library's heritage collections.

But that's a hard job to do within four walls. Many Indigenous communities live in remote or regional areas. And WA is a big place.

So how do you reach the largest group of people in the smallest timeframe?

You go digital, of course.

A software solution

Storylines uses the software Keeping Culture as a central database for photos. Think of it like a big, online photo album.

The library wanted to make it easy to access, so all you need is an internet connection. A whole generation of Aboriginal history is then only a click away.

You can search by names or places or just browse through the library's collections.

Anyone can submit information about the images, such as the names of the people in them. The library can then verify it and update Storylines and their archives.

This is how the State Library have been able to identify thousands of photographs.

"Community feedback has been incredibly overwhelming. We've identified something like 1000, nearly 2000 photographs that before we started this project had no idea what the photograph was," Damien smiles.

"It was just a picture that would be captioned 'Natives. Kimberley', whereas we now know the names of all four men, how they were connected, what they were doing in this photo [and] what happened after the photo."

Writing a new story

The State Library planned to return photos once they were identified, but they found that, as people learned their stories, many were eager to share them.

Pearl Ashwin got in touch after discovering a photo of her 16-year-old self was in Storylines. She was one of the first Aboriginal registered nurses in Meekatharra. Her photo shows her accepting an award for Civic Achievement.

As a pioneer in her field, she had always been a part of WA history, but knowing her story was being told made her feel like she truly was.

"Her main takeaway from that was that she felt as if she was part of Western Australian history now-that she was part of the WA story," Damien says.

"I think it's really powerful. It's helping people see themselves in this history rather than continuing to divide it."

Pearl has sadly since passed away, but her story can continue to be told well into the future.

The big picture

Back in the day of A O Neville, WA Aborigines were thought to be a dying race. The photos generated by the government were mostly documenting for posterity.

Now they have names, they have stories. People are using them to learn their history.

"It's been really powerful in kind of undermining that whole colonial mindset," Damien says.

Indigenous people even began to share their own photos with Storylines. These family photos are a stark contrast to the original archives. They show the love and light that was present even in the darkest days.

The Mavis-Walley collection stands out as a shining example of this.

"These were family photos-they were christenings and birthdays and weddings and things that most people, Aboriginal or not, can relate to. They just look like everybody's family photos," Damien tells us.

"There was joy and there was survival-families still had birthdays, people still got married, people still fell in love, people still had dreams."

The power of photos

Storylines currently has around 6000 images uploaded. It's accessed by 300 - 500 people a month, and those numbers continue to grow.

It's proved to be an incredibly powerful tool. It's been embraced by many Aboriginal communities across WA. It's even helped to revitalise a traditional dance form called Junba.

Seeing the success of Storylines, Damien believes the project will continue going strong into the future.

"For me, the dream is to have something that really does kind of act as a one-stop [shop] for the whole state," Damien says.

"It is something that we see 5, 10, 20-year plans for."

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Aboriginal Heritage Western Australia Revealed | Particle

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Since its invention, photography has been our window to the past. Photographs freeze moments in time so we can go back and remember. We use them to tell the stories of our history. But for many Indigenous communities in WA, important moments in their history were kept out of reach.

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Charles Perkins On His Way To University, Sydney by Robert McFarlane, b.1942 Aust on Josef Lebovic Gallery

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c1963/1997. Silver gelatin photograph, titled, dated, editioned 1/3 and signed in pencil in lower margin, annotated in pencil verso, 33.6 x 22.5cm. Slight soiling to margins. Annotation reads "Printed by Roger Scott '97." Held in AGNSW. Charles Perkins 1936-2000 was an Indigenous rights campaigner and Federal politician.

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Uproar as students dress as 'traditional' Aboriginal people

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The publication of a photograph of university students at an official college function dressed up to look like "traditional" Aboriginal people, with their faces and limbs painted brown, has forced an internal investigation and rapid re-education program.

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Celeste Liddle, Arrernte woman, unionist, writer, feminist and activist - not necessarily in that order - was the keynote speaker last night at the Queen Victoria Women's Centre's annual International Women's Day address. This is an unedited version of her speech.

I am, through my father's side of the family, an Arrernte woman. For those not sure where the Arrernte homelands are, we're desert peoples and these lands are pretty much in the exact centre of this Australian landmass.

My family are traditional owners of Alice Springs proper, as well as much of the lands surrounding this area. Liddle is a gigantic central Australian family, and as I have previously said: if they're black and they're Liddle, I'm related to them.

Through my grandmother, we are also Perkins's which is another well-known Territory family with a number of high-profile members. My mother, on the other hand, is a white Australian woman and a Clifton Hill-born Collingwood supporter. On her side of the family, we had a number of factory workers who also tended to be union delegates, and just generally blue collar working class types.

My mum was, and still is, a hard core Whitlamite. Between these two sides of the family then, I often state that I didn't have a chance. It was an Aboriginal feminist trade unionist with a dislike for authority or nothing.

I myself was born in Canberra in 1978. A lot of people born in Canberra don't tend to brag about that fact unless they're still living there in adulthood, but I was always really proud of the fact.

For one, while it may have been utterly freezing during winter when I was growing up, school holidays were often spent at a hippy arts programme where we'd do pottery, finger paint, walk on stilts and go yabbying.

A little known fact about Canberra is that while it has a conservative and clean-cut exterior, it also is a town consisting of educated lefties and hippies, so these weird-yet-wonderful progressive experiences were pretty normal.

For another, we were utterly immersed in the political system from a young age, and so via things like a "class parliament" in which I was "Member for Liddle in the Opposition", as well as regular excursions to firstly the old, and secondly the new Parliament House, along with embassies and other state buildings, meant that political knowledge was normalised and indeed, encouraged.

Finally though, 1980s Canberra was a vibrant place when it came to Indigenous politics.

The bicentenary celebrations saw some massive protests in the ACT, and the one I remember more than any others was the Indigenous convergence at the opening of the New Parliament House in 1988.

I had grown up surrounded by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relatives in Canberra with both sides of the family well represented there for some reason. We'd often be gathering at each other's places and in particular, visits to Uncle Charlie's or Uncle Kwenmentyaye's house (I'm not saying his name as he recently passed away, but for those who might know who I'm referring to here, this man wrote the song "Brown Skin Baby" and was the younger brother of my grandfather) meant that there would usually be a lot of the extended family, as well as many other mobs, present.

Never before though, had I seen as many Aboriginal people as I saw at that protest.

Everywhere I looked, there were Aboriginal people - carrying placards, marching and chanting, much to the bemusement of the folks there who had actually gathered for the official opening ceremony of the New Parliament House.

Those people certainly weren't hearing much over the chants of the protesters. The preferred protest chant at this time was "Land rights now, bicentennial bullshit" and we were stoked as kids that we were allowed to join in with this cussing and indeed, our parents encouraged it.

It's a bit sad that 28 years later, beyond Mabo, beyond Native Title, beyond the Federal Apology to the Stolen Generations, we are still having to chant for land rights, and that battle has continued.

I've digressed a bit, and I think it should be known that like a lot of writers, I'm not a terribly "linear" person. But my point for going on this bent is to highlight to you all that when it came to my Arrernte identity and the political imperatives attached to this, I understood this from a young age. It was indeed part of my childhood reckoning.

I was surrounded by people engaged in the struggle as part of my normal upbringing. When I was five-years-old and in the first year of primary school, this girl in my class who was clearly a mean little individual (or at least, the product of mean individuals) referred to me as a "black bum", and I pushed her over.

On my school report that year, it stated something along the lines of "Celeste is an eager pupil who has shown a lot of development in her reading and writing this year. She does, however, need to learn how to control her temper" mainly in reference to this instance. So even, on the rare occasion, I didn't understand that I was Aboriginal, someone would be around to remind me in the playground.

Parallel to this though, was the fact that I had, from a young age, been reminded constantly that I was a girl and that due to this, certain behaviours were expected. I wasn't, for example, supposed to be wilful and stubborn as this was an unseemly way for a young girl to act.

Yet I became known for this from a young age, and my poor mother was left seeking assistance because I was that immovable, even at the age of three. I knew that I was supposed to be "pretty" and well presented, yet while my younger sister would spend hours in front of the mirror, admiring her reflection and preening, they were hard-pushed keeping me clean.

My favourite childhood activities involved rigging up makeshift circus equipment, walking on a barrel in the backyard, and climbing on the roof of the garage. I had been enrolled in classical ballet classes since I was about four-years-old, yet I started to really resent it as I got to around 10. I had wanted to do gymnastics for years because it seemed a lot more fun.

I loathed having long hair and having a face covered with make up for concerts. I knew I was supposed to stand back and that "boys are strong, like king kong. Girls are weak, chuck them in the creek".

Showing therefore that I was more intelligent or physically more able than any of the lads was not the done thing, though concealing this stuff was also incredibly difficult.

I know I was supposed to be playing with dolls and talking about babies and weddings and the like because that stuff is drilled into so many young girls from an early age, and I had peers in primary school who would talk about these things. I found it so incredibly hard to fit in and indeed, as a natural introvert, I just tended to withdraw.

Then when I was about 11, I rejected pretty much all the trappings of enforced femininity as my 11-year-old self saw it. I cut off all my hair and while it may have been a bit of a mullet, it was the 80s and I was pretty proud of it.

I quit ballet and started gymnastics. I got around in mainly jeans and pants and I rejected my name which I perceived to be "too girly", and instead insisted on being referred to as a nickname, which was probably partially influenced by reading too many Famous Five books.

It felt liberating, it felt more authentic. I got relentlessly teased in a way which continued until about year 8, when I underwent a re-feminisation in order to be more socially acceptable. I wish someone would have told me back then that, as an Aboriginal woman from a working class background, I had utterly no hope of ever being socially acceptable and my true power lay in being as socially unacceptable as possible.

So as a kid, I was more than aware that I was Aboriginal and a portion of people in this country saw this as a bad thing. This seemed to get even worse when I was nearly 14 and we moved from Canberra, where I was able to access Aboriginal programmes, to the outer south eastern beachside of Melbourne where no such thing existed.

I was equally aware that I was a girl and this too was bad. My major purpose was to be attractive to men, submissive to men, and defer to men in all their authority.

The battles of class would also continually wage on the playground. My parents had a mortgage they were working through, but we were clearly still very working class and as we didn't have much, while not being outright "povs", we were seen as such because we weren't decked out in Reeboks and were of Aboriginal descent.

Kids who were from wealthier backgrounds would parade this around and encourage envy from their classmates. This was my childhood reckoning. I could either reject it and try and assimilate, or I could own it.

My mum was always sneaking fragments of feminism into our upbringing. She wasn't too keen on us having dolls or toy guns in the house and tended to prefer educational toys and the like. She was still in some ways quite conservative when it came to issues of appearance and how young women should present which, at times, made it hard for her to get me.

But amongst that was a 1960s and 70s progressive and she would question things. I remember her giving me Virginia Trioli's "The F-Word" as a teenager in the hope it would inspire. I think though, my actual reckoning as an Aboriginal feminist came when I read the following poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal called "no more boomerang".

I've done this publicly before, and I apologise to all of those who may have heard me read this previously, but to give a brief background, when I was in year 9, I was the only openly identifying Aboriginal student in my entire high school. During this year, we had a "multicultural assembly" and I was approached by a teacher to contribute something Aboriginal to the proceedings.

I didn't like the school terribly much. Year 8 there had been horrible, the principal seemed to think I was a bit of a trouble maker yet had no reason to think this so I can only put this down to prejudice.

I did well in class but I was incredibly isolated and would, in fact, fake illness to try and get out of going. I was told by some of my male classmates that I had been voted the "ugliest girl in year 8" after a dude poll had been undertaken.

Home was not too good at that stage either, so I felt rather trapped. One day, while hiding in the school library, I had found this book of poems by Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Noonuccal, who had previously been known as Kath Walker, was an Aboriginal activist, a communist and a writer who was a key figure in lobbying for the 1967 referendum, along with a number of other things.

Her first book We Are Going in 1964 was not only the first book to be published by an Aboriginal woman, but it also received critical acclaim despite some feeling it was "too black" to succeed.

This one poem had not only captured my imagination, but had also managed to establish some form of pride in both my Aboriginality and my womanhood, which was clearly lacking at that point. Because of all of this, when asked to do something in the multicultural assembly, I decided to make a statement. I issue a warning upfront about language and racial slurs contained within the text. I will not be removing these because they contain context regarding the times Oodgeroo Noonuccal wrote these in, and I also do not wish to disrespect her words. So this is "no more boomerang" and it was written in 1966:
NO MORE BOOMERANG
No more boomerang

No more spear;

Now all civilized

Colour bar and beer.

No more corroboree,

Gay dance and din.

Now we got movies,

And pay to go in.

No more sharing

What the hunter brings.

Now we work for money,

Then pay it back for things.

Now we track bosses

To catch a few bob,

Now we go walkabout

On bus to the job.

One time naked,

Who never knew shame;

Now we put clothes on

To hide whatsaname.

No more gunya,

Now bungalow,

Paid by hire purchase

In twenty year or so.

Lay down the stone axe,

Take up the steel,

And work like a nigger

For a white man meal.

No more firesticks

That made the whites scoff.

Now all electric,

And no better off.

Bunyip he finish,

Now got instead

White fella Bunyip,

Call him Red.

Abstract picture now-

What they coming at?

Cripes, in our caves we

Did better than that.

Black hunted wallaby,

White hunt dollar;

White fella witch-doctor

Wear dog-collar.

No more message-stick;

Lubras and lads

Got television now.

Mostly ads.

Lay down the woomera,

Lay down the waddy.

Now we got atom-bomb,

End everybody.

- Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1966)

Last time I read this poem out in public, I reflected on my reasons for choosing it as a 15-year-old high school girl in an incredibly white area where I had experienced a lot of isolation.

It's fair to say that a fair chunk of my choosing it had to do with rebellion. I had, by that stage, had to deal with racism and sexism in the schoolyard. I had found it incredibly difficult changing schools at the beginning of year 8, as I had only just settled in at my old high school and while Canberra is also quite monocultural, it also had a certain progressiveness which I did not find in the outer suburban beachfront.

So when I read this poem, I was partially educating people about the process of colonisation (not that I possessed that vocabulary at that stage) and was partially asserting myself as an Aboriginal person, proud of that heritage.

It's funny, but as the years have gone by, I have still drawn on this poem over and over again. There is so much I relate to within it. It was written, for example, as the Vietnam War raged on and Noonuccal's final warning about the self-destructive nature of colonial regimes rang true when I was out on the streets protesting our involvement in the Iraq War.

I remain always opposed to war and as an avowed feminist, I feel it is crucial to remain so. To always preference peace, collaboration and negotiation.

The line about working for a "white man meal" reminds me of my grandmother - a stolen generation woman who was taken to the Alice Springs Bungalow and the Jay Creek Mission in the 1930s, where she was educated in domestic skills so she could then go and work for local white families for nothing; cleaning their houses, cooking their meals, looking after their children.

Despite being told she was going to school to "learn", my grandmother couldn't read until she was taught by my father in her 30s. The "got television now, mostly ads" reminds me why it was I unplugged the aerial of my television set about five years ago, and have not ventured to plug it in again since.

I remember though, on one occasion, the line "one time naked, who never felt shame, now we put clothes on to hide whatsisname" really came home.

I don't know how many people present here follow my Facebook page - a few, I'd imagine. I've been running that page for nearly two years now and for the most part, it's been a bit of a sanctuary.

There are a lot of good people on it who accept my hardcore rules about it not being a space for the centralisation of privileged white male voices and contribute all sorts of wonderful stuff. It's generally respectful and has a fair smattering of Indigenous, feminist and unionist/lefty politics on it.

Yet on one occasion, it got really threatened. I had posted something on it, and it led to me being barred from posting four times until I undertook the required checks to reinstate my account.

So what had I done? I had apparently breached Facebook's codes with regards to nudity.

I don't know if people remember, but last year the Indigenous comedy show 8MMM was released on ABC. I was very much looking forward to this show, particularly since it was based in Alice and therefore I knew quite a few people involved.

Yet there was controversy because when 8MMM released a promotional trailer for the show prior to it going to air. This trailer was banned by Facebook because it featured topless desert women painted up for ceremony engaging in traditional dance.

Facebook saw these topless women as "indecent" and in violation of their no nudity clause. On hearing this, I was outraged that Arrernte woman undertaking ceremony could ever be seen in this way so I posted the trailer up on my own page stating as such.

What I didn't count on was a group of narrow-minded little white men deciding to troll my page so each time I posted it, I not only got reported by them but I also got locked out and the video got removed.

Initially, I had just accompanied the video with a chipping comment about white people putting their silly body-shaming issues on to Aboriginal women, but after the fourth lock out, I got a bit angry. I may have responded to them like this:
Dear pathetic little losers who keep reporting articles about the censorship of desert women undertaking ceremony as "nudity". Your racist, misogynistic and, dare I say it, ageist views of these women is your problem, not theirs. These are proud and cultured women who, despite centuries of assimilation programmes, continue to survive and practice culture. Perhaps that is what offends you the most: you cannot assimilate these women into your prudish and deeply flawed ideas of decency and by merely existing in their cultural space they threaten your relevance? Poor petals. Or perhaps I deleted your comment or banned you and you merely cannot abide any space where you are not relevant at all? Either way. May I suggest you get a hobby? Perhaps you can start you own page about how disgusting you find women's bodies and how wrong other cultures are compared to yours. I mean, Facebook could always use a few more of those pages as millions of them simply aren't enough. Or perhaps even take up Chess, though you probably wouldn't like it considering the most powerful piece is a female. Either way, take your sad little white man tears and sod right off.
It was fascinating. Yes, I admit I had posted the original video on my page to call out Facebook's ridiculous standards, but the actions of these frightened little men was something else entirely.

They clearly took great offence at Aboriginal women, a lot of whom were not young, not only inhabiting their bodies in a way that showed no shame but also undertaking culture within a country which has continually tried to stop them from doing so.

My father, for example, was caned at school if he so much as dropped a single Arrernte word on the playground. I knew that should these women be young, blonde girls probably not of age, these "men" would not have a problem with their nudity. Indeed, on checking some of their pages I saw plenty of these types of pictures posted everywhere.

I say this, by the way, not to demonise young, pretty, blonde women but to point out that the offence actually comes from the male gaze, and what that gaze deems acceptable.

Aboriginal women are not acceptable. Older women aren't acceptable, particularly if their breasts are pendulous rather than perky. Women being semi-naked for the purpose of taking part in women's culture are not acceptable.

If they are going to be semi-naked, it needs to be for the enjoyment of men.

Finally, Aboriginal culture is unacceptable. We are a colonised landmass and therefore we should be doing everything to merely fit in, rather than celebrate our difference.

I remember talking to two older Aboriginal women one time who were not too happy with some non-Indigenous protesters who had used nudity in order to show their solidarity with an Indigenous cause.

We were unpacking why it was that we felt it was inappropriate, and it was a fascinating discussion because we were all coming from a culture where prior to colonisation, public nudity wasn't even an issue.

So the Indigenous stance becomes complex. If you go to traditional communities nowadays, it is often expected that people will dress modestly in order to show respect.

Yet prior to colonisation, showing your body wasn't considered disrespectful. It was considered normal, natural and functional. Bad parts, good parts and dirty parts did not exist, they were all just parts which had purpose.

Where things are seen as functional, they're rarely judged for being inadequate or wrong and so forth. Naked, pendulous breasts were indeed respected as a sign of a female elder and mother who had given life and nourished others.

The idea that any of these parts had shame attached to them was completely a symptom of colonisation. Where imported religious beliefs infiltrated via missions, suddenly the functional became the dirty and the shameful, and people who had no concept of physical modesty suddenly needed to adhere.

The conclusion we came to was interesting. The reason people covered up in these communities was not so different from the reasons people walked around naked and without judgement before. It was to protect the right to be seen as a functional human being without being chastised for it.

The mode of delivery had just changed due to the process of colonisation, so now these imported layers of bodily understanding had been imposed on top of traditional ways of knowing.

This was but one way this plays out continually for Aboriginal women today.

When I started writing, I was quickly labelled an "intersectional feminist". It wasn't a label I chose for myself and indeed, when first hit with it, I had to look it up.

It seemed that I earned this label because I speak continuously from an Indigenous left-wing feminist perspective.

The thing is, I don't actually know how else to speak. I have always been all three of these things at once and it is very much how I experience the world.

I don't usually have to work at being intersectional either, in ways that other people higher on the social strata tend to. They have to be more cognisant of their privilege and know where to make space in a way which I rarely do, because I'm the type who needs to be "included".

Because of these various markers, when I started my blog " Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist ", I was convinced no-one would read it, except perhaps other Aboriginal lefty feminists. Indeed, the title of it was a complete joke: me owning the angry black woman trope in my own little section of the anti-media in the hope that I'd scare off those who usually hung around the traditional media - privileged white dudes.

That a piece was picked up from it by a Fairfax editor six weeks after I started it for publication was completely unexpected. That other feminists seemed to embrace it was also unexpected. I think the most unexpected was when I realised it had become popular within anarchist circles. That was until I read just how many anti-government sentiments I had written in the text and how many times I referred to smashing the system. Then I thought, "oh yeah, I can see why now".

It ended up giving me some insight on whereabouts I actually sat on the political spectrum.

I think because of all this, I tend to be a bit more tolerant of what some deem "white feminism" than a lot of my sisters of colour. One of my biggest Indigenous feminist inspirations when I went to university was another poet: Lisa Bellear.

Lisa was a Stolen Generation woman and an Aboriginal lesbian feminist. She was a strong community activist and absolutely everyone in the Victorian community knew her. She was also a radio broadcaster and avid community photographer who would almost always pass the photos she took of people back to the subjects for their own collections, because she did not believe in owning their images as a community member.

She passed away at the incredibly young age of 45 and still today, the hole she left in the community here is sorely felt.

At University, she was an older woman who took me under her wing, imparted knowledge and friendship freely, and was a true inspiration. Like with Oodgeroo Noonuccul, I'm going to read out a poem of Lisa's which inspired me and gave me a lot to think of . And like "No more boomerang", I have also previously read this one in a public space, so I apologise to those for whom this will be a repeat. This one is entitled "Women's Liberation". It was written in the mid-1990s, I believe:
Talk to me about the feminist movement, the gubba middle class hetero sexual revolution way back in the seventies when men wore tweed jackets with leather elbows, and the women, well I don't remember or maybe I just don't care or can't relate. Now what were those white women on about? What type of neurosis was fashionable back then? So maybe I was only a school kid; and kids, like women, have got one thing that joins that schemata, like we're not worth listening to, and who wants to liberate women and children what will happen in an egalitarian society if the women and the kids start becoming complacent in that they believe they should have rights and economic independence, and what would these middle class kids and white women do with liberation, with freedom, with choices of do I stay with my man, do I fall in love with other white middle class women, and it wouldn't matter if my new woman had kids or maybe even kids and dogs Yes I'm for the women's movement I want to be free and wear dunlop tennis shoes. And indigenous women, well surely, the liberation of white women includes all women regardless . . . It doesn't, well that's not for me to deal with I mean how could I, a white middle class woman, who is deciding how can I budget when my man won't pay the school fees and the diner's card club simply won't extend credit. I don't even know if I'm capable of understanding Aborigines, in Victoria? Aboriginal women, here, I've never seen one, and if I did, what would I say, damned if I'm going to feel guilty, for wanting something better for me, for women in general, not just white middle class Volvo driving, part time women's studies Maybe I didn't think, maybe I thought women in general meant, Aboriginal women, the Koori women in Victoria Should I apologise should I feel guilty Maybe the solution is to sponsor a child through world vision. Yes that's probably best, I feel like I could cope with that, Look, I'd like to do something for our Aborigines but I haven't even met one, and if I did I would say all this business about land rights, maybe I'm a bit scared, what's it mean, that some day I'll wake up and there will be this flag, what is it, you know red, black and that yellow circle, staked out front and then what, Okay I'm sorry, I feel guilt is that what I should be shouting from the top of the rialto building The women's movement saved me maybe the 90s will be different. I'm not sure what I mean, but I know that although it's not just a women's liberation that will free us it's a beginning.
I think Lisa's book "Dreaming in Urban Areas" can still be found in some libraries and bookshops around the traps if people want to find it. But this poem resonated for me.

That tightrope that we walk being Indigenous activists and feminists can be a precarious one. And within the text, Lisa addresses everything from the radical feminists who believe that the feminist revolution will cure all society's ills to the 80s liberal feminists who believed that economic empowerment and access to the same power structures as men was the key.

Like Lisa, I have been an identifying feminist from a young age. I think I was about 16 when I rejected the title "Miss" in favour of Ms and 17 when I addressed my school on an open mike day, telling all the women to ditch our razors because defuzzing was a rubbish waste of time.

Yet Lisa's sentiments at the end, where women's liberation is a beginning rather than what will ultimately free us, is a thought I share and indeed, extend to all the movements I am a part of.

I am a committed trade unionist, to the point of where I work for one union and am a member of two others. Yet if the workers' revolution only really works to free white men then in my book, it's failed to truly liberate workers.

Likewise, while I am a committed sovereignty activist, I have previously held gripes about being cast as a "backbone" of Aboriginal society because I am a woman.

If women within the Indigenous movement are continually relegated to the support roles and the ones who hold together everyone else, then it won't actually "liberate" because to do so, Aboriginal women need to be seen for the autonomous thought-leaders and frontliners that we are.

Lisa here has, of course, pulled apart the feminist movement and the danger it faces with liberating those who stand to benefit the least from said liberation: white women with financial means. And that, for me, is exactly what "intersectionality" is about: the liberation of the most vulnerable within any movement; those on the lowest rungs of society; because if the liberation of these people is successful, then all others will also benefit due to the power strata.

Instead of "trickle down liberation", it's starting at the bottom and smashing all the systems of oppression as we work our way to the top.

My view is very much, as an Aboriginal woman fighting within a colonised society, a lot of the issues that face white women also face me too, as we have not decolonised yet.

However, there are usually additional levels of complexity that need to be addressed: additional issues which contrast and issues which contradict. I think, for example, that the fight for birth control access in the 60s was one which was universal in a society which wished to control our fertility.

However, as mentioned by Aboriginal feminists back then, we were also fighting, in the face of the policies which led to the Stolen Generations, to keep our children with us.

As an Aboriginal woman, I feel the same pressures to be attractive, to dress and act in certain ways, while at the same time I am continuously being judged for being Aboriginal.

It's not enough to look attractive enough, I have to also look dark enough. It's not enough to sit back and defer to men, I'm supposed to also defer to white women who are higher on the social strata than me.

Sometimes within the Aboriginal community, we take on things the feminist movement has long disposed of such as beauty pageants for women, then we label them as empowering because they're Indigenous initiatives. The ability to criticise this from a feminist perspective becomes difficult because we're criticising the efforts of a displaced peoples.

Yet I cannot suddenly reconcile the idea that taking on oppressive practices which have been imposed upon white women for centuries becomes suddenly empowering when done in an Indigenous context. It doesn't.

This is a dynamic I face often. I have previously said that where oppressive practices towards Aboriginal women exist in traditional cultural practices, we don't always, as Aboriginal women, have the freedom to criticise them because in the face of colonisation, we are continually fighting to hold on to our culture.

There are so many out there in society, particularly the powerful white men, who are eager for the opportunity to discredit Indigenous people and practices and therefore we end up having to fight from the back foot all the time.

It's why I also don't have a lot of time for "choice feminism" - choice is inextricably linked to privilege and therefore to choose your destiny and call it empowering is more available the higher up the rungs you get.

The women who were continually referred to when the Northern Territory Intervention was being proposed as being the ones the government was saving from abuse had utterly no agency. For starters, they were always talked about yet I cannot recall a single instance where I saw one of them being talked to.

They were impoverished, they lived in remote areas and isolated towns, they were, of course, Aboriginal in a society which continually centralises whiteness and they were women in a society which continually centralises men.

They had no avenue for recourse through the government to overturn what was being done to them, they had no financial ability to seek independence, they had no self-determined services and indeed their entire lives were being governed. And there was a lack of interest from the general population with regards to this oppression, indeed, they continually seemed okay with the government justifications for removing all the rights from this group of people because they really don't want to know any better.

So when I'm saying that liberation occurs for all when those on the lowest rungs of society are liberated, I precisely mean women like these women. We need their voices and their freedom if we indeed want to strive to be an egalitarian society comprised of respect and esteem for one another.

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Looking Past White Australia And White Feminism - New Matilda

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Celeste Liddle, Arrernte woman, unionist, writer, feminist and activist - not necessarily in that order - was the keynote speaker last night at the Queen Victoria Women's Centre's annual International Women's Day address. This is an unedited version of her speech. I am, through my father's side of the family, an Arrernte woman.

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Tracey Moffatt - The Movie Star: David Gulpillil on Bondi Beach - Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

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Tracey Moffatt The Movie Star: David Gulpillil on Bondi Beach, 1985 type c colour photograph 48 × 72cm Edition of 20

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Explore the online digital archives developed by Indigneous people, Government, independent galleries and people. Select an  images from one of the digital collections. Reflect on how it portrays Aboriginal People, what is missing, was community consulted, who owns the digital archive, who is the 'gate keeper'  How could this have been done better?

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Spencer & Gillen - A journey through Aboriginal Australia

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This website showcases notebooks, films, audio recordings, illustrations and photographs collected during Spencer and Gillen's studies in anthropology between 1875 and 1912

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The identification of Aboriginal men who are known to have served on Gallipoli has continued to grow from the 56 soldiers acknowledged in 1915. In 2018 the names of those who took part in the landing or arrived in the following months has surged to over 70.

This is in line with the increase in total numbers of known Aboriginal volunteers: the latest edition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers for the AIF: The Indigenous Response to World War One (published 2018), contains in addition to commentary and context, the names of 189 volunteers not represented in the 2015 edition. This and the fact that since publication the names or eight more men have been uncovered shows that the process of uncovering these men is still an ongoing one.

While acknowledging the service of all Aboriginal men is important, it is their presence on Gallipoli which symbolically places them and their comrades within the Anzac story central to Australia's war remembrance. The Gallipoli service of these men shows not only this but that Aboriginal men volunteered from the outbreak of war in 1914. By examining their service records, photographs and other documentary sources it is readily apparent that the Aboriginal heritage of almost all of these men would have been evident to the recruiters. This makes it clear that from the first, at least some recruiters and medical officers were prepared to ignore the provision of the Defence Act 1901 (amended 1909) which prohibited the enlistment of men not substantially of European origin - and that their actions were not simply linked to low recruiting levels.

Aboriginal men went on to volunteer throughout the course of the war and to serve elsewhere in the Middle East, France and Belgium. The Australian War Memorial estimates that approximately 160 Aboriginal men were killed or died of wounds during this conflict - and included amongst these are some of the 34 Aboriginal men known to date to have been decorated for bravery. Australians have repeated Lest We Forget over the one hundred years which have elapsed since the end of the First World War. However it is an inescapable fact despite this that we did forget the service of Aboriginal men - and later women. As the century draws to a close the situation has begun to change, accelerating in recent years, so that now on Anzac Day 2018 it can be truly said that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who served Australia have at last received the public recognition and remembrance by their nation that they have always deserved.
Philippa Scarlett
25 April 2018

I was saddened to learn at Christmas of the death in September of Don Elphick. Don was known to the wider community for his role in rugby league football and described in an online obituary as 'an instrumental part of the Canberra Raiders formation and entry into the NSWRL for their debut season in 1982, after a long and distinguished period with ACT rugby league.' but his lasting legacy for many will be his publications, with his Wiradjuri wife Bev, of information relating to New South Wales and in particular Wiradjuri Aboriginal people. These include Riverina Aboriginals http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2903590?lookfor=d%20elphick&offset=4&max=40, Camp of Mercy http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3080605 and an index to Aboriginal people mentioned in surviving Protection and Welfare Board minutes http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1906858?lookfor=d%20elphick&offset=9&max=40 . His research started as a project to locate the missing sister and brothers of his mother in law Flora, born Smith. The Smith children were taken from Warangesda mission and sent to Cootamundra Girls home in 1921 - the two boys then transferred to Kinchela Boys Home. Bev's mother was able to survive - in itself a very difficult story - but knew nothing of the fate of her siblings. Don by brave and persistent research located Lillian Smith as a very old woman in a Katoomba boarding house - demented and living in the past she could not recognise or relate to Flora as the little girl she remembered as her 6 year old sister. The tragedy was that the Board had consistently untruly told relatives seeking information about her that there was none. Don did track down one brother Clarence but by then he was dead. He was never able to find Bruce Shannon (Fred) Smith. Despite this he continued to pursue his research in the interests of other Aboriginal people and there are many today both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal including me who have benefitted inestimably from his efforts. Just one aspect of this has been the identification of Aboriginal servicemen which in many cases could not have been achieved without his research.

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The identification of Aboriginal men who are known to have served on Gallipoli has continued to grow from the 56 soldiers acknowledged in 1915. In 2018 the names of those who took part in the landing or arrived in the following months has surged to over 70.

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Since its invention, photography has been our window to the past. Photographs freeze moments in time so we can go back and remember. We use them to tell the stories of our history.

But for many Indigenous communities in WA, important moments in their history were kept out of reach.

In the early 1900s, the government took thousands of photos of Aboriginal people, but stored away in archives, they were never seen by the people in them or returned to their families.

That's why the State Library came up with Storylines -an online image database connecting Indigenous people with their history.

Looking for a better way

Damien Webb is the Indigenous Liaison Officer at the State Library. It's his job to connect Indigenous West Australians with the library's heritage collections.

But that's a hard job to do within four walls. Many Indigenous communities live in remote or regional areas. And WA is a big place.

So how do you reach the largest group of people in the smallest timeframe?

You go digital, of course.

A software solution

Storylines uses the software Keeping Culture as a central database for photos. Think of it like a big, online photo album.

The library wanted to make it easy to access, so all you need is an internet connection. A whole generation of Aboriginal history is then only a click away.

You can search by names or places or just browse through the library's collections.

Anyone can submit information about the images, such as the names of the people in them. The library can then verify it and update Storylines and their archives.

This is how the State Library have been able to identify thousands of photographs.

"Community feedback has been incredibly overwhelming. We've identified something like 1000, nearly 2000 photographs that before we started this project had no idea what the photograph was," Damien smiles.

"It was just a picture that would be captioned 'Natives. Kimberley', whereas we now know the names of all four men, how they were connected, what they were doing in this photo [and] what happened after the photo."

Writing a new story

The State Library planned to return photos once they were identified, but they found that, as people learned their stories, many were eager to share them.

Pearl Ashwin got in touch after discovering a photo of her 16-year-old self was in Storylines. She was one of the first Aboriginal registered nurses in Meekatharra. Her photo shows her accepting an award for Civic Achievement.

As a pioneer in her field, she had always been a part of WA history, but knowing her story was being told made her feel like she truly was.

"Her main takeaway from that was that she felt as if she was part of Western Australian history now-that she was part of the WA story," Damien says.

"I think it's really powerful. It's helping people see themselves in this history rather than continuing to divide it."

Pearl has sadly since passed away, but her story can continue to be told well into the future.

The big picture

Back in the day of A O Neville, WA Aborigines were thought to be a dying race. The photos generated by the government were mostly documenting for posterity.

Now they have names, they have stories. People are using them to learn their history.

"It's been really powerful in kind of undermining that whole colonial mindset," Damien says.

Indigenous people even began to share their own photos with Storylines. These family photos are a stark contrast to the original archives. They show the love and light that was present even in the darkest days.

The Mavis-Walley collection stands out as a shining example of this.

"These were family photos-they were christenings and birthdays and weddings and things that most people, Aboriginal or not, can relate to. They just look like everybody's family photos," Damien tells us.

"There was joy and there was survival-families still had birthdays, people still got married, people still fell in love, people still had dreams."

The power of photos

Storylines currently has around 6000 images uploaded. It's accessed by 300 - 500 people a month, and those numbers continue to grow.

It's proved to be an incredibly powerful tool. It's been embraced by many Aboriginal communities across WA. It's even helped to revitalise a traditional dance form called Junba.

Seeing the success of Storylines, Damien believes the project will continue going strong into the future.

"For me, the dream is to have something that really does kind of act as a one-stop [shop] for the whole state," Damien says.

"It is something that we see 5, 10, 20-year plans for."

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Aboriginal Heritage Western Australia Revealed | Particle

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Since its invention, photography has been our window to the past. Photographs freeze moments in time so we can go back and remember. We use them to tell the stories of our history. But for many Indigenous communities in WA, important moments in their history were kept out of reach.

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Content warning: Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Australians are advised that this web page contains the names and images of people now deceased.
The faces in the photographs look out from over a hundred years ago, dressed in their Sunday best - Aboriginal people growing up on a church mission in Victoria's Gippsland. They look back from a time when the State forced them into regulated lives on missions and took away their children in the name of assimilation.

"You can easily look at these photos and think what pitiful lives, but if they could speak we would hear stories of achievement, determination and resistance," says writer, photographer, and oral historian Dr Sharon Huebner.

Those stories of achievement and determination may not have been recorded, but Dr Huebner says they can still be found in the experiences of their descendants if the photographs become the agent for combining history, memory and connection.

In an ambitious project to inject Victorian Aboriginal voices and perspectives into a history that has long ignored them, Dr Huebner is using the University of Melbourne Archive's Strathfieldsaye collection of 19th century photographs to connect the faces in the photographs with their contemporary families.

Albert Darbie and Alfie Stephens, c.1898. Strathfieldsaye Estate Collection (1976.0013), University of Melbourne Archives, PA.198 p.3 (Ramahyuck Album 8.4.3)

"The work of researchers like Dr Huebner is very important," says University of Melbourne archivist Stella Marr. "The human face is both very complex and powerful, so for relatives to connect with a photograph, meet their direct family, or community, in the eye can be a source both of pain and also a site of potential healing."

Dr Huebner hopes that by connecting contemporary families to a history they may often be unaware of, she will be able to bring together the lost Aboriginal experiences of the past with the memories of current Stolen Generation survivors and their families. By doing so, she says the voices of the present can enliven the history of their ancestors and counter the passive role they have been relegated to in the history books.

The Moffatt family, with Larry Johnston (old man on the right). Strathfieldsaye Estate Collection (1976.0013), University of Melbourne Archives, PA.198 p.8 (Ramahyuck Album 8.4.8)

"Photographs of ancestors represent more than colonial injury," says Dr Huebner, a Hugh Willamson Foundation Fellow at the University of Melbourne Archives. "If the photographs can go back to the descendants and elders in the Koorie community then their own memories of growing up on a mission become the method for reviving lost memories of ancestors. We can better imagine the cultural lives of these people in the photographs.

"So even though the lived memories of these people are not handed down, the community can tap into their own knowledge to more fully interpret what the photographs represent in the context of kinship and ideas of belonging."

The project is an extension of Dr Huebner's previous work in reconnecting Aboriginal families in Victoria and Western Australia to their ancestor Bessy Flowers (1849-1895) who lived at the Ramahyuck mission in Gipplsand, Victoria. Bessy is unique in that her letters have survived as well as historical photographs of her. In partnership with Bessy's kin Ezzard Flowers, a Wirlomin Minang Noongar man from Western Australia, Dr Huebner has written and produced a unique multimedia story of Bessy, No Longer a Wandering Spirit that for the first time tells her story through the lived memories of her Koorie descendants and Noongar relations.

Bessy was sent away from her ancestral Minang country in the Great Southern of Western Australia at 18 and sent to live at Ramahyuck where she eventually married a Koorie man from Ebenezer Mission in north-western Victoria.

"I remember looking at the photo of Bessy for the first time. I saw humility, respect and strength, the main traits that I believe sustained her throughout her life from Minang country to Koorie country" - Ezzard Flowers in No Longer a Wandering Spirit.

A skilled teacher and pianist, Bessy never returned to the west and spent the latter part of her life battling missionary and colonial authority to keep her family together.

"One of the biggest shifts that needs to happen in this nation is to let Aboriginal people negotiate these histories on their own terms and to intervene in the history of their ancestors with their own voices," says Dr Huebner.

"These photographs are too easily viewed as representations of a dying race of people who were powerless, when Bessy's letters reveal a strong and determined person. But it is rare for the words and views of Aboriginals to be preserved, so we need to fill that gap in our knowledge by making space for the Aboriginal experience and the Aboriginal voice."

Bessy Flowers as a young girl. Picture: Battye Library of WA

The Ramahyuck mission was originally carved out of the Strathfieldsaye station that was bought by William Henderson Disher in 1869. For the Disher family, Ramahyuck became a place for social outings and churchgoing. William's son Clive eventually married the daughter of the Reverend. When Clive bequeathed the estate to his alma mater, the University of Melbourne, the photo collection came with it.

"Many of these photographs were created by professional photographers such as Frederick Cornell - who in his 1850s montage 'Aboriginal Mission Station, Ramahyuck' presents individuals as nameless examples of their race - representing the 'success' of the mission," says Ms Marr. "The story less often told is that the Disher Family have many of these photographs in their personal photograph album where they have been lovingly colour tinted by hand, adding blue to ribbons or pink to flowers. The people in these photographs are also not only named, but their relationships are documented."

For example, on the verso of a photograph of a young Aboriginal woman in the collection someone has annotated 'Bridgette - Stephen's love'.

"Generalisation suffocates histories - it is these unique, individual examples which we must work to give voice to - whether that comes from archival sources or community engagement projects," says Ms Marr.

The Strathfieldsaye records and photographs have been used by many other researchers over the years including most recently in Rachel Perkins' film The First Australians; but Ms Marr says what is unique and exciting about Dr Huebner's work is that it is bringing together community knowledge to enrich and expand the archival records and our knowledge.

Louisa Hagenauer, wife of Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission founder Frederick Hagenauer, in her garden with three Koorie men. Strathfieldsaye Estate Collection (1976.0013), University of Melbourne Archives, PA.198 p.15 (Ramahyuck Album 8.4.15)

Connecting the Strathfieldsaye photographs to contemporary descendants will be a major detective task, but Dr Huebner has the advantage of having worked for over 15 years helping to connect Koorie people to their lost family histories. She will also use the genealogies compiled by anthropologists, including the extensive fieldwork in Victoria of Diane Barwick who died in 1986, and whose research is now held in the State Library of Victoria.

"If the photographs are informed by a lived experience, even if it is remote from when the photographs were taken, a different perspective can be brought to them. One perspective will be that life was indeed hard on the missions, but families will also bring to the photographs their own positive memories of childhood and this supports an understanding that the people in the photographs would also have had similar empowering experiences," Dr Huebner says.

Preserving precious Indigenous languages

"This isn't to diminish the reality of our colonial history and its impact on Aboriginal lives, but it allows Aboriginal people to weave into their history a narrative of pride and dignity that they can use as a foundation to look forward and imagine futures they can determinedly step into."

But time is running out to retrieve the stories of those who grew up on the missions.

"The opportunities are diminishing because as elders pass away we risk losing those stories of growing up on a mission. These stories need to be passed on to younger people in order to generate intergenerational bridging between these histories bound by the strength and resilience of kinship."

"If you believe your culture is shattered and scattered and finished, or your language is gone, then you are a dead man walking. But if you believe you can reconnect to your language and your culture, you become empowered." - Ezzard Flowers in No Longer a Wandering Spirit.
No Longer a Wandering Spirit: the story of Bessy Flowers will be presented at the State Library of Victoria on Thursday December 1 at 6pm.
Banner Image: Mena Cameron (daughter of Bessy Flowers), Lydia Gilbert and Annie Harrison, c.1898, Strathfieldsaye Estate Collection (1976.0013). University of Melbourne Archives, PA.198 p.9 (Ramahyuck Album 8.4.9)

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Dr Sharon HuebnerHugh Williamson Foundation Fellow, University of Melbourne Archives

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Stella MarrArchivist, Collection Management, University of Melbourne Archives

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Aboriginal voices in the afterlife of photographs

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Content warning: Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Australians are advised that this web page contains the names and images of people now deceased. The faces in the photographs look out from over a hundred years ago, dressed in their Sunday best - Aboriginal people growing up on a church mission in Victoria's Gippsland.

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Week 4  Indigenous Cultures and  Copyright Law

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Week 4  Indigenous Cultures and  Copyright Law

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Albert Namatjira's legacy as the foremost Indigenous painter of his generation has endured, despite the divided opinions of his contemporary critics.

His work has been acknowledged by British royalty, hung in the drawing rooms of the mega-rich and exhibited worldwide. His coveted, creviced landscapes of valleys, copses and bone-dry riverbeds, with their softened palettes of primary colours that defy caricature of the desert and its harsh light, sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the rare occasions they come under the auctioneer's hammer.

The sidelines of associated merchandise - postcards, tea towels, biscuits tins, for example - are worth a fortune in themselves.

So it is shocking - perhaps astonishing to some - that Namatjira's Arrernte family should, for several generations, have endured intense poverty because they did not own the copyright to his work. But it should not be at all surprising given the Commonwealth of Australia's historic and ongoing treatment of its Indigenous people - even those it has regarded as appropriately assimilated or culturally "exceptional" by its own norms.

The vaults of museums and auction houses the world over are bursting with the priceless works of some of the finest artists in the world, taken on completion before the paint could dry or "traded" in exchange for tobacco - their only legacy now, in the communities from which they were appropriated, is a generational addiction to tobacco with all its associated disease and suffering.

But the copyright to Namatjira's works has finally transferred to his grandchildren. It followed a long battle between, on the one side, the family and their pro-bono legal representatives Arnold Bloch Leibler, the social change organisation BIGhArt and leading cultural institutions and, on the other, Legend Press, a non-Indigenous Sydney art publisher that has enjoyed majority or full control of Namatjira's copyright for six decades.

The continuous pressure from the family and its supporters, coupled with a recent intervention by the entrepreneur Dick Smith, a childhood friend of the Brackenreg family that owns Legend Press, and the campaigning journalism of Rosemary Neill of the Australian and the ABC's Daniel Browning, resulted in a deal late last week to transfer the copyright to the artist's descendants.

The arrangement will be worth, potentially, millions of dollars to the Namatjira clan and their community. It will also give them (through the Namatjira Legacy trust) control over how copies of the painter's work are commercially - or otherwise - used in, for example, catalogues for his exhibited paintings.

The family (and some galleries) has argued that such use has been at best highly restrictive.

It is a wonderful result for Namatjira's legacy and, of course, his people. But it is also a salient reminder of just how oppressive post-colonial Australian society was for Indigenous people less than an average (white) lifetime ago, how pitifully slowly things have changed and of the enduring inequity between black and white Australia.

The complex story of how the Namatjira copyright was sold in full to Legend in 1983 (after, in 1957, the artist having entered an agreement with the then principal of Legend, John Brackenreg, for a 12% royalty) by the Northern Territory public trustee, has been well told.

The then public advocate has even publicly expressed his regret at the 1983 sale of the Namatjira copyright for $8,500, which was made without any consultation of the family.

While the long tussle over the copyright has pitted moral against legal rights, the central - and sometimes, perhaps, overlooked - issue has always been the fundamental denial of Indigenous agency. For it is hard to imagine that Australia would ever permit the family of any non-Indigenous artist of Namatjira's cultural stature to be treated accordingly in the 1950s let alone the 1980s.

White Australia - as it then, in the 50s, knew itself - had embraced Namatjira ... to a point. It's often said he operated between two worlds (black and white), as one of the first Indigenous people to be granted citizenship and, hypothetically at least, its associated privileges. His embrace of some whitefella painting techniques to bring his watercolours a more actual or literal interpretation of country (as opposed to earlier more figurative Indigenous paintings, that so appealed to ethnologists and anthropologists, of creationist stories and myth) drew European eyes.

But they also inspired occasional critics among some of his people, who thought he should stick with his more traditional painterly and craft roots, and the white salons and academies who unfairly dismissed his work as derivative.

Namatjira's life played out tragically. But the resolution of his copyright restores appropriate dignity to his legacy and justice to his family.

It is not, however, the end. Indigenous art and culture more broadly - story in all its forms including visual art - has been appropriated since first colonial contact.

If the story of Namatjira's copyright has a broader resonance it is that sadly many other Indigenous creators will probably never, in life or posthumously, be afforded such agency.

* Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
Topics

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It's hard to imagine the family of a white artist being treated like Albert Namatjira's | Paul Daley

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Albert Namatjira's legacy as the foremost Indigenous painter of his generation has endured, despite the divided opinions of his contemporary critics. His work has been acknowledged by British royalty, hung in the drawing rooms of the mega-rich and exhibited worldwide.

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Fitzroy's Union Hotel stands in red-bricked, retro-decorated elegance on an inner-city corner. It's a popular spot for Melburnians: Greens have held meetings there; emerging bands have found their fans. It's also where I found this portrait of an Aboriginal girl.

In Canberra, meanwhile, ACT Labor MP Bec Cody recently "blasted" Sussex Inlet RSL Club on the New South Wales south coast for having tiles on the walls of its urinal that similarly sentimentalised Aboriginal people.

"The RSL would think it grossly offensive to place a portrait of the Queen, the Australian flag, or a Rising Sun emblem in the toilet"

"The RSL would think it grossly offensive to place a portrait of the Queen, the Australian flag, or a Rising Sun emblem in the toilet," Cody said of the tiles, which depicted men sitting and poised with boomerangs. "So why does it think caricatures of our first Australians is acceptable?"

Clearly, the positioning of the tiles in the men's toilets is part of what caused them to offend Cody. But context also plays a part in the reception of these examples of "Aboriginalia". The velvet painting at the Union Hotel is displayed in a knowingly ironic, retro setting. The RSL tiles were likely mortared in place after the second world war. Without the context of self-conscious vintage charm, they look simply outmoded.

For over a century, European-heritage Australians have been consuming Aboriginalia - Aboriginal cultural designs and figures in souvenirs and bric-a-brac. It includes garden ornaments, ceramics, figurines, prints, fabric design, swap cards, linen, stationery and biscuit tins.

For over a century, European-heritage Australians have been consuming Aboriginalia - Aboriginal cultural designs and figures in souvenirs and bric-a-brac. It includes garden ornaments, ceramics, figurines, prints, fabric design, swap cards, linen, stationery and biscuit tins. These items have drawn on Aboriginal motifs and emblems and depicted Aboriginal children as "picanninies", women as "Lubras", men as "Myalls" and elders as "noble savages".

Today, it might be easy to see that the images presented on these objects indulge in racist stereotypes. They appropriated sometimes sacred designs that were intended for restricted viewing. And they figured a dispossessed people as racial types, suggesting that authentic Aboriginal identity was purely tribal and something to be trivialised as curios and knick-knacks.

But thousands of these items are still in circulation. This bath toy (above), for instance, comes from a tourist shop near Cairns. What are we to make of them today? Is it appropriate to now own such objects in a knowing, retro-trashy way - when racism is still alive and well in Australia?

A brief history of Aboriginalia

Artists such as Margaret Preston embraced Aboriginal symbolism in the period between the first and second world wars. But after a display of Aboriginal motifs and emblems in David Jones, prompted by a scientific expedition to Central Australia in 1940, Aboriginalia was taken up with gusto for use as homewares and souvenirs in the rapidly expanding tourism market.

Sydney-based pottery studios such as the Anna Studio and Martin Boyd Pottery produced an array of ceramics featuring Aboriginal tribesmen, women and children. The images were of people impervious to the passage of time, jettisoned in some pre-contact imaginary and unscathed by white incursion.

Significantly, the potters and artists were often postwar immigrants from Europe. They may have identified with a sense of displacement, or wanted to understand their new home through some quintessential essence expressed through the primordial "native".

They were not alone in searching for a distinctively national symbolism for Australia. However, Aboriginal figures had often been positioned in early 19th-century engravings as "framing devices" on the periphery of nascent cities. While there is a long tradition in art of human figures such as shepherds or peasants being used in foregrounds to establish scale, this peripheral positioning of a people then being pushed off their land added a disturbing layer of meaning. By the 1950s, meanwhile, Aboriginal designs and motifs were being appropriated into abstract modernism.

But the figurines of a racialised people, of warriors, beautiful girls and adorable children, took this interest into a different realm of curiosity, namely objectification. Elder women, who were often savagely vilified in popular newspapers as "unsightly frights", never appear among these figurines. Lithe young women, deep-chested warrior tribesmen, dignified elder "noble savages" and sweetly smiling "piccaninnies" were particularly prized.

In the early prints of artists Peg Maltby and Brownie Downing, endearing Aboriginal children are orphaned by the bush rather than being at home in the country of their birthright. They find playmates with baby native animals but are divested of family and community. They seem to be crying out for the care that only the state, it was thought, could properly provide.

Some of these figures were mass-produced in Japan and thus recycle African-American child figures in souvenirs destined for Australian tourist towns. Indeed, the "piccanniny", a type of racialised childhood, had itself long since toured the globe, from its origins in the Portuguese sugar colonies as "pequenino", meaning "tiny", through to the Southern slave states of the Americas, and on to our shores.

As historians have argued, the trade in piccaninny figures peaked at the height of the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. Those sweetly smiling babies must have offered some indemnity to white people against the knowledge that a state-wielded crime of cataclysmic proportions was unfolding.

At the same time, portraits of the star of the 1955 film Jedda, Rosalie Kunoth-Monks (who became an activist and one of our more stirring orators), were printed on ceramic dishes.

Scenes from Eric Jolliffe's popular cartoon series Witchetty's Tribe were made into wall plaques.

And this image of a young girl weeping is taken from a photograph in Axel Poignant's groundbreaking 1957 photo-essay Piccaninny Walkabout (later renamed Bush Walkabout) in which Rikili and her brother are lost.

In a first for representations of Aboriginal children, the story is about these (named) children's prodigious bush skills, which they rely on until their smoke is sighted by their parents the next day.

While a number of the local-based potteries closed due to Japanese factories usurping their designs, the painter Brownie Downing's following took off in the 1960s, both here and in Britain, thanks to the marketing skills of her husband, a publisher. Her wares and illustrated books are still dotted through antique markets and vintage stores and much valued, perhaps more so now with a sense of knowing irony.

A troubling presence

The figures found in Aboriginalia evoke a troubling presence, in which visual appeal, sometimes libidinal, stands in for the profound ambivalence at the heart of settler-colonialism, which has benefited from the violent dispossession of a people.

While townships were campaigning to exclude Aboriginal kids from schools, families from housing and adults from pubs, these nostalgic, perplexing images were being taken into white homes in the form of bric-a-brac.

While townships were campaigning to exclude Aboriginal kids from schools, families from housing and adults from pubs, these nostalgic, perplexing images were being taken into white homes in the form of bric-a-brac.

On a number of missions and stations, residents were encouraged to produce and decorate implements for the tourist markets. As such there were many Aboriginal producers of souvenirs and Aboriginal ephemera, such as the potters at Hermannsburg. The entrepreneur, performer and indefatigable activist Bill Onus set up Aboriginal Enterprises in 1952/3. Today the descendants of Onus and the workers he trained continue to make an invaluable contribution to Australian arts.

Sociologist Adrian Franklin has described the "semiotic drenching" of souvenirs with Aboriginal motifs and argues "these objects became 'repositories of recognition' of what was often entirely absent, denied or undermined in the everyday political and policy spheres". These objects, he suggests, gave some expression to the sadness surrounding dispossession and removal.

In more recent years, Indigenous artists such as Destiny Deacon and Tony Albert have repurposed Aboriginalia. Thus it is finally being historicized, interpreted and recast through Aboriginal eyes.

Deacon uses dolls and kitsch ephemera from her own extensive collection to turn the tables on the uncritical consumption of racist imagery.

In one of her best backhanders, she puts plastic, black babies in cupcake shells and titles the photograph Adoption. The work references Aboriginal child removal but also the 19th-century denigration of Aboriginal mothers as not only infanticidal but cannibals - of their newborns. These lonely little babies are proffered as edible. Deacon ties the white consumption of black babies to the acquisitive impulse of settlers for black babies that led to state welfare and protection boards removing Aboriginal children en masse.

Albert, meanwhile, has used Aboriginalia to create murals. One spells out the word "Headhunter". The other uses ashtrays featuring Aboriginal people to spell out the word "Ash" in the expression "Ash On Me".

Albert describes his work as a reclamation of these objects. The people muted by Aboriginalia are speaking through them to assert that culture has been central to their persecution.

At the Australian War Memorial, however, the faces of an Aboriginal man and woman are still among 26 gargoyles depicting our nation's flora and fauna. The gargoyles have been criticised as racist kitsch and described as "disgraceful" by an Aboriginal elder. The war memorial, mind you, also rejects the notion of frontier wars as part of our foundational story.

The manager of the Union Hotel told me no-one had ever complained to him about the painting of the bare-breasted woman (and the Union's clientele includes Aboriginal locals).

But he wondered if there would have been complaints if a white woman had been so displayed. The difference, of course, is that images of topless white women aren't seen as descriptive of their race. Nor do they make a visual pun, as the Union painting on black velvet does, on the denigrating aphorism "black velvet" - a term that described white men's fantasy of unfettered sexual access to Aboriginal women.

So what should be done about those tiles at the Sussex Inlet RSL? I think they should be recast from an Aboriginal perspective. Local Indigenous artists could be invited in to respond to the memories evoked by them. They could then add their lived experience of being Aboriginal and literally put themselves in the picture.
The author wishes to acknowledge the research of Trish Barnard at the Glenn Cooke Collection, Queensland Museum.
Liz Conor, ARC Future Fellow, La Trobe University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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'Aboriginalia' - The politics of Aboriginal kitsch

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Fitzroy's Union Hotel stands in red-bricked, retro-decorated elegance on an inner-city corner. It's a popular spot for Melburnians: Greens have held meetings there; emerging bands have found their fans. It's also where I found this portrait of an Aboriginal girl.

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Christian Thompson argues that use of Aboriginal design by high-end fashion studios like Rodarte demonstrates a respect for culture that continues to honour the human form.
Aboriginal art practices are part of a global economy and the recent collaboration between fashion designers Rodarte and the late Papunya Tula artist Benny Tjangala is testament to the international scope and universal appeal of Australia's only authentic and original art movement. The California-based self-taught sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavey - the names behind Rodarte - are known for their beautifully tailored garments and uber cool ready to wear collections. Their Fall 2012 collection maintains their reputation as innovators on the world fashion stage, and Rodarte's collaboration with Tjangala further enhances this notoriety in a sea of structured piete dresses, blouses, high waisted pants, knits and evening gowns.

The fashion industry has always turned to the work of artists for inspiration and Benny Tjangala's work joins an illustrious list of international artists such as Cy Twombly, Van Gogh, Marina Abramovic, Salvador Dali and Picasso in all having directly inspired major fashion houses and their designers. In a statement first published on fashion news site Fashionista, Rodarte commented on Tjangala's influence on their new collection: 'We deeply respect and admire the work of other artists. Through the appropriate channels, we licensed the Aboriginal artwork that influenced prints in our collection. As a result, the artists will share in proceeds of the pieces inspired by their work.'

What we see in this remarkable symbolic convergence of two esteemed forms of high art production is an engagement of performance as a genre that imbues a new sense of cultural providence from both the art and fashion context. On one hand, we have traditional painting from the world's oldest continuous living culture and on the other, the elite production of wearable couture gracing the New York catwalks.

Traditionally, paintings on bark panels and the body would be utilised in the context of ceremony to pay homage to our ancestral spirits and creation narratives. In the fashion world the adornment of the human body layered with sartorial elegance and opulence celebrates beauty. Both reference the human form as a central site of ritual and inspiration. Tjangala's designs feature on five of the garments from the Rodarte collection, including two floor length gowns, one with detailed patterning and another with handprints and ruffled details and a fitted sleeveless leather mini dress. In all five outfits, Tjangala's signature bold patterning is employed discreetly enough so as to maintain artistic integrity, but in a manner that also utilises the vivid impact of his personal aesthetic and his traditional country.

Aboriginal art is a huge industry in Australia, which brings in millions of dollars to our local economy. We are all too familiar with the generic recruitment of Aboriginal art - emblazoned across planes and airline uniforms, tourist shop t-shirts, tea towels and placemats - often in a superfluous and crude manner as a preoccupation with building national identity. This serves as a facade to a country that has been built on a self indulgent mythology of the fair dinkum Aussie battler, peaceful settlement and the thinnest of territorial claims; a shiny veneer veiling much more profound and unresolved issues of nationhood and sovereignty.

Rodarte was attracted to the work of Tjangala on a purely aesthetic level - his use of colour, his valiant brush strokes and the distinctive style of his western desert heritage. The Papunya Tula movement has powered onto the international art scene through the landmark exhibition Papunya Tula, Genesis and Genius, curated by Hetti Perkins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney in 2000, and the permanent representation of Tjangala's countrymen Tommy Watson and Ningurra Napurrula in the interior of Jean Nouvel's architectural venture in Paris, Musee Du Qaui Branly.

The momentum behind the Papunya Tula art movement is not defined by localised political agendas and discussions. Rodarte's attraction to the work of Tjangala therefore reinforces the dynamic allure of the Papunya Tula work to international audiences. Despite the criticism surrounding the use of Tjangala's work by a commercial fashion house, there will evidently be an increased presence of such collaborations, and an ongoing emergence of Aboriginal Australian diaspora in the world.

I contend that these types of consensual collaborations are essential in gaining autonomous recognition and financial independence while also working to transcend the polarisation of the complex multicultural face of modern Aboriginal Australia. Tjangala's work defies attempts to be drawn into provincial arguments about ownership and returns our art back to its rightful place - as a revered and influential form of contemporary art production. It demonstrates our ability as a culture to adapt and change form and to find creative and exciting platforms to share our experience and culture with the world, thus contributing to a global discourse.
Christian Thompson is a contemporary artist and currently Inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholar at Oxford University. This was originally published in the Australian Design Review.

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Christian Thompson argues that use of Aboriginal design by high-end fashion studios like Rodarte demonstrates a respect for culture that continues to honour the human form. Aboriginal art practices are part of a global economy and the recent collaboration between fashion designers Rodarte and the late Papunya Tula artist Benny Tjangala is testament to the international scope and universal appeal of Australia's only authentic and original art movement.

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Clothing created by Istanbul-based designer, Bunyamin Aydin, incorporated dot paintings, Australian animals and the numbers '1788' which mark European colonisation in Australia.

The luxury sportswear designs were unveiled at Paris Fashion Week while models sporting tribal-inspired face paint lined the runway.

Fashion and lifestyle commentator, Nick Remsen wrote in Vogue that given cultural sensitivities the style was predictably controversial.

"Aydin always tries to bring an international focal point to his streetwear concepts, and this season he focused on Australia and New Zealand," Mr Remsen said in Vogue.

"He wanted to combine both Aboriginal and British influences.

"Unfortunately, this area was inevitably going to be dicey, considering the colonialist persecutions by the latter of the former, and the still existent sensitivities toward relations.

"Tribal-inspired face paint, for example, was unnecessary."

Aydin said in an interview with Pause Magazine that he was inspired by the history of Australia and New Zealand.

"Aboriginals, Islanders, and Maori people are the natives and their cultures, traditions and rituals are rich in culture," he said.

"You can see minimal details in my collection that are inspired by traditional clothing, face paint, and art from the region fused with British colonial details like royal and floral embroideries."

This latest controversy comes after luxury fashion label, Chanel, was seen selling a boomerang for almost $2000 in May this year.

The product was criticised for cultural appropriation and sparked calls for better legal protection to be put in place for Indigenous designs.

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'Streetwear meets Aboriginal culture' Turkish designer accused of cultural appropriation

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Clothing created by Istanbul-based designer, Bunyamin Aydin, incorporated dot paintings, Australian animals and the numbers '1788' which mark European colonisation in Australia. The luxury sportswear designs were unveiled at Paris Fashion Week while models sporting tribal-inspired face paint lined the runway. Fashion and lifestyle commentator, Nick Remsen wrote in Vogue that given cultural sensitivities the style was predictably controversial.

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Updated May 17, 2017 09:29:51

French high fashion brand Chanel has come under fire for appropriating Aboriginal culture by selling a boomerang that retails for almost $2,000.

The black "wood and resin" boomerang - priced at $1,930 - is one of several items available in the "other accessories" line of Chanel's recently-launched 2017 spring-summer pre-collection.

The collection also includes a $2,220 tennis racquet, $4,860 set of beach racquets and balls and a "price available on request" paddle board.

The boomerang came to prominence on social media when American make-up artist and vlogger Jeffree Star posted photos of the item - which he is presumed to own.

Social media users have ridiculed the whole collection as exorbitantly priced, but the boomerang has come under particular condemnation for appropriating Indigenous Australian culture.

One user wrote: "Cultural appropriation hits a new low - I sincerely hope that Chanel is donating all the profits to underprivileged Aboriginal communities."

Writer and activist Nayuka Gorrie wrote: "Have decided to save for the next three years so I can connect with my culture via Chanel."

The National Museum of Australia describes boomerangs as playing "an important role in Aboriginal culture as objects of work and leisure", but following the arrival of Europeans in Australia they became popular as a souvenir by the late 19th century.

Since then cheap imitations have flooded the market, but there has been a recent push to better protect local creators.

Chanel should make appropriate reparations: expert

Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology, Matthew Rimmer, said the controversy highlighted the need for law reform.

"The legal system has only partially responded to the problem," Professor Rimmer said.

"Landmark copyright litigation was brought in the 1990s over rip-offs and copycats of Indigenous art ... but further reform is needed.

"At an international level, more should be done to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in respect of Indigenous intellectual property."

He also said that Chanel should offer some reparations to the Indigenous community.

"As a good corporate citizen, Chanel should apologise fully, withdraw the boomerang from sale, and make appropriate reparations to Australian Indigenous communities."

Chanel 'regrets some may have been offended'

Chanel released a statement saying the brand "is extremely committed to respecting all cultures and regrets that some may have felt offended".

The boomerang is still available on the Chanel website.

It is not the first time Chanel has produced boomerangs, with a silver monogrammed version recently sold on luxury second-hand website TheRealReal for $295.

A number of fashion labels have been criticised in recent years for cultural appropriation.

In 2015, Valentino was condemned for using white models with cornrows to show off its latest collection, which the fashion label's designers acknowledged as being heavily influenced by Africa.

Victoria's Secret was forced to apologise in 2012 for putting a Native American-style headdress on a model in one of its fashion shows.

The outfit was broadly criticised for ignoring tribal culture and history.

In 2011, Hindus took part in angry protests after a Byron Bay fashion designer exhibited swimsuits with the image of the goddess, Lakshimi, at Australian Fashion week.

Topics: indigenous-culture, aboriginal, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, fashion, design, community-and-society, australia, france, united-states

First posted May 16, 2017 20:48:32

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Chanel's $2,000 boomerang sparks complaints and confusion

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Updated May 17, 2017 09:29:51 French high fashion brand Chanel has come under fire for appropriating Aboriginal culture by selling a boomerang that retails for almost $2,000. The black "wood and resin" boomerang - priced at $1,930 - is one of several items available in the "other accessories" line of Chanel's recently-launched 2017 spring-summer pre-collection.

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Posted August 09, 2017 07:41:44

As he painstakingly creates his intricate Torres Strait Islander designs telling the stories of his ancestors dating back for millennia, artist Laurie Nona stealthily incorporates unique markings that act as a sort of barcode, to deter would-be counterfeiters.

"Nobody's got a fingerprint like yours. From the grassroots, that's how we come to protect our own work and find out these people who are fakes," he said.

"You are self-patenting... so you have evidence to say, 'this is my work'."

Mr Nona is part of a movement to battle those who create works masquerading as traditional Aboriginal designs, which are not protected as intellectual property under Australian law.

As the annual Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair kicks off this weekend, showcasing the works of 66 art centres from across Australia, buyers are being urged to purchase ethically in the face of companies creating mash-ups of Indigenous designs and mass-producing them in Asia before selling them through Australian tourist shops.

"If someone copied someone's original artwork and put it on a shirt it's an infringement, but if somebody gets a factory in China to make a pastiche of Aboriginal design, but not copying anyone directly, that's not protected," Indigenous Art Code CEO Gabrielle Sullivan said.

The sale of fake Indigenous art is an insidious practice that, while not illegal, is immoral, she said.

"It violates culture, it's taking the economic opportunity away, but it's also taking control of that resource that's [the artist's] to manage and they've got no say in how that's done," she said.

Indigenous art is defined by the way it represents a cultural connection to country, said Mr Nona, and it's "ridiculous" that intellectual property has no legal protection.

"Art is our story, it's our identity, it's who we are, it's a living culture," he said.

He urged the Federal Government to develop more stringent protections for artists.

"It really takes the core out from inside of you, it just really dampens the spirit because you're telling your true story, and here are people taking patterns and colour just for the sake of creating a fake image so they can make money," Mr Nona said.

"It really gets under your skin that some fake-arse is taking something they have no connection to, they have no idea what it means.

"They're stealing, they're insulting, you name it. They're doing everything wrong."

'It's not from here, it's from Bali'

The Rocks, Circular Quay, and Paddy's Markets, in Sydney, Melbourne's Swanston Street, the city centres of Cairns, Darwin, and Alice Springs: all are high-end tourist locations that sell imitations of Indigenous art, Ms Sullivan said.

She was dismayed to find the sheer quantity of works appropriating Aboriginal culture available for sale.

When asked, some store owners "were really honest and said, 'it's not from here, it's from Bali in Indonesia'," she said.

"One shop in Melbourne actually said, 'there's two shelves of stuff that's authentic, the rest of it's not'."

Ms Sullivan is lobbying the Federal Government on behalf of artists across the country for greater protection of their culture and works.

"There's a lot of crap out there," she said.

Often, consumers may not know how to spot the difference between an authentic work and a knock-off, she said, or they think that the real deal is too expensive.

"That's a myth," Ms Sullivan said.

"A fake didgeridoo they're selling for $400, but you can get a genuine yidaki from Buku-Larrnggay Mulka (Art Centre) in Yirkala for $400, or from Beswick for $200.

"In many instances there is an authentic alternative, and if there's not it's probably because the product's so gammon anyway; there's no Aboriginal wine bottle holder."

'It's only greed'

The fake trade doesn't just have an economic effect, but can also disrupt cultural practices, said Abe Muriata, an artist with Girringun Arts in northern Queensland.

"It does a lot of damage... Our young kids, they can see a beautiful artwork in the shops in town, and they can say to themselves, 'I can do that and make money out of that'," he said.

"It's history, it's a tradition that is ancient, and if we lost that, it's very sad."

He said there needed to be a concerted effort to educate consumers to avoid buying inauthentic goods.

"I think about [artists] really being exploited, their culture being exploited... it hurts them," he said.

"It just robs the people... There's no culture in that, it's only greed."

He warned the Federal Government that protecting Indigenous art was about protecting heritage for all Australians.

"That's the heritage of Australia, you know, 60,000 years old, don't let it go down the gurgler," he said.

Aboriginal Art Fair prepares to show off culture

The Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF), emphasises ethics in the trade and is seen by artists as a supportive place to sell their works, usually via their community art centres.

The fair helped promote their art, with a goal of long-term economic sustainability, but executive director Claire Summers said she worried about the vulnerability of artists who were not connected to art centres.

"An artist has the right to be represented to ensure their work is sold in an ethical way, and if an artist doesn't know what their rights are then they might not know that they're being ripped off," she said.

"When you're buying direct from an artist on the side of the road, you don't know anything about that piece of work, you don't know where that artist has come from... and you don't know if you're fairly paying that artist.

"That artist might just want $50 so they can go and get something to eat at the end of the day, but in actual fact they should have received $2,000 for that work."

'Have respect for what you're buying'

Centres can foster artists' careers, catalogue their work, and record and preserve their cultural details such as their country, skin name, and moiety.

"It goes deeper than just a piece of art, this is about cultural preservation and respect for where that artist is from," Ms Summers said.

DAAF has grown from showcasing 16 art centres in its first year to hosting 66 this year; in 2016, more than 10,000 people visited the fair, and bough a record $2 million worth of art.

One hundred per cent of that goes back to art centres and artists, Ms Summers said.

Artist Regina Wilson, from Durrmu Arts in Peppimenarti, said that art was a key way for culture and traditional stories to be passed along generations.

"I would like to tell the tourists, if they buy a painting have respect for what they're buying and give the artists really good money for it and look after it in a special way."

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, visual-art, indigenous-culture, consumer-protection, government-and-politics, darwin-0800, nt, qld

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'It violates culture': Indigenous artists battle mass-produced knock-offs

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Posted August 09, 2017 07:41:44 As he painstakingly creates his intricate Torres Strait Islander designs telling the stories of his ancestors dating back for millennia, artist Laurie Nona stealthily incorporates unique markings that act as a sort of barcode, to deter would-be counterfeiters. "Nobody's got a fingerprint like yours.