| The
Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Sylvia Kleinert
and Margo Neale, eds) brings together a broad range of writings which
in Part I covers areas from Foundations of Being (religion, ritual
and sacred sites, kinship and gender), Colonial and Post-Colonial
Scenes (colonial continuities and discontinuities, rock art revisited),
Renegotiating Tradition (urban aboriginal art, film and communications,
literature, performance, cultural meeting places), The Public Face
of Aboriginality (aboriginalities, reception and recognition of Aboriginal
art, cross-cultural exchange, the way ahead). Part II is an alphabetically-organised
reference section which supplements and extends the interpretative
essays in Part I.Aboriginal Art and Culture departs from other
publications by giving a voice to the indigenous people: ‘elders
and senior custodians to artists, poets and oral historians, as well
as an emerging generation of indigenous academics’. Editors Kleinert
and Neale state:
Despite a long history of interest in Aboriginal religion, society,
and material culture among scholars and the wider public, Australia’s
Indigenous people have often been positioned ambiguously in relation
to the nation state – even erased from settler narrative myths
of national identity. It is only now, after three decades of political
struggle for equal opportunities and recognition, and the official
acknowledgement of Indigenous people as citizens in their own country,
that a publication such as this Companion is possible.1
From the first European settlement Australia was viewed by colonists and evolutionists
as terra nullius, ‘a land without people or culture — ripe
for exploitation’. 2 Aboriginal history from white settlement
in 1788 to the late 20th century is a catalogue of injustice and tragedy. In
1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity presented ‘Bringing Them Home’,
the ‘National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from their Families’.3 The report was a chilling
and public revelation to the media of the systematic attempt at social and biological
engineering by the forcible removal of Indigenous children in Australia since
early colonisation.
Violent battles over rights to land, food and water sources characterised
race relations in the nineteenth century. Throughout this conflict Indigenous
children were kidnapped and exploited for their labour…Governments
and missionaries also targeted Indigenous children for removal from their
families. Their motives were to inculcate European values and work habits
in children, who would then be employed in service to the colonial settlers.By
the middle of the nineteenth century the ‘protectorate experiment’
had failed and the very survival of Indigenous people was being questioned.
Forced off their land to the edges of non-Indigenous settlement, dependent
upon government rations if they could not find work, suffering from malnutrition
and disease, their presence was unsettling and embarrassing to non-Indigenous
people. Governments typically viewed Indigenous people as a nuisance. The
violence and disease associated with colonisation was characterised, in
the language of Social Darwinism, as a natural process of the ‘survival
of the fittest’. According to this analysis, the future of the Aboriginal
people was inevitably doomed; what was needed from governments and missionaries
was to ‘smooth the dying pillow’.4
Government policy sought to separate Aborigines by reserving land and to establish
a Protection Board that would be given power to control movement, marriage and
employment. Children were separated from their families. Police enforced the
‘law’. Intermarriage was the key to absorption; what was not taken
into account was that they would not lose their Aboriginal identity. In 1937
the Brisbane Telegraph summed the government attitude thus:
Nr Neville (the Chief Protector of Western Australia) holds the view
that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste
problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the
pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population.
Sixty years ago, he said, there were over 60,000 full-blooded natives in
Western Australia. Today there were only 20,000. In time there would be
none. Perhaps it would take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race
was dying. The pure blooded Aboriginal was not a quick breeder. On the other
hand the half-caste was. In Western Australia there were half-caste families
of twenty and upwards. That showed the magnitude of the problem.5
A particularly cynical development in government policy was that people with
more than a stipulated proportion of European ‘blood’ were disqualified
from living on reserves with their families or receiving rations. This tactic
of ‘dispersing’ Aboriginal camps was used extensively. An analysis
of the definition of ‘aboriginality’ has found more than 67 definitions
in over 700 pieces of legislation. In early colonial art the Aborigine was portrayed
as a ‘noble savage’; a romantic image which clashed with actual colonial
experience.
For the great majority of the colonists the natives represented the
lowest condition of human existence. Contact with Europeans debauched their
intricate tribal structure and shattered the economic basis of their existence.
Clad in old rags to hide their nakedness from the eyes of the newcomers,
the Aborigines became, during the 1820s and 1830s, the butt of a cruel and
insensitive colonial humour.6
In Peter Read’s collection of essays, A Rape of the Soul
So Profound (1999) he is concerned with the Aboriginal people
who were removed from their families while children, and raised
apart from their indigenous inheritance. Read wrote about this practice
long before it was even talked about. Of recent history he says:
‘While all the post-war advancement organisations were devoted
to education, welfare or political progress, none to my knowledge
adopted the plank of ending the child separation policy. Few manifestos
even mentioned it. Perhaps the whites’ own lack of comprehension
of the extent of the policy and the cruelty of its execution helped
to prevent separation from entering the agenda of serious political
intention.’ 7In the 1960s political conflicts became
more focussed. Indigenous Australians were given citizenship in
their own country. Most however, lived in squalor, were unemployed
and the infant mortality and crime rates among young Aborigines
were alarmingly high. In 1965, Charlie Perkins, the first Aboriginal
student at Sydney University led a ‘freedom ride’ through
New South Wales. In 1972 a tent embassy was set up on the lawns
across from Parliament House in Canberra. A new Aboriginal flag
was created. In the seventies and eighties protest art was produced,
expressing aspects of the Stolen Generation and asserting the fundamental
need for land rights. In the 1980s, the decade of Australia’s
bicentennial saw indigenous calls for the insertion of black Australian
history into the white colonial narrative under catch-cries such
as: ‘Australia has a Black History’, and ‘We have
Survived’. The 1990s saw Indigenous people engaging in every
aspect of the cultural, political, social and economic life of the
country, and achieving new levels of visibility. The Oxford Companion
to Aboriginal Art and Culture could not have been written without
the quite ingenious mobilisation of Australia’s indigenous
people. Furthermore, it could not have been produced without the
extensive research, starting in the 1940s and 1950s (Roland and
Catherine Berndt, C.P. Mountford and T.G.H. Strehlow) the foundations
of an understanding of Aboriginal art. In the 1970s significant
work was done which has continued to the present day. It followed
that in developing an understanding of the art it was possible to
understand Aboriginal culture especially the relationship with the
land. Over the past 15 years in particular there have been many
exhibitions and publications on particular artists and aspects of
Aboriginal art. The Companion deals with many ramifications
of this process including the commercialisation of art in order
that communities survive, and its downside in terms of appropriation
and copyright infringement.
The indivisibility of art and culture in indigenous societies is embodied
in the expression ‘art is culture made visible’ There is no
exact equivalent for the Western term ‘art’ in any of the hundreds
of Aboriginal languages studied. The closest equivalents are terms with
the core meaning of ‘impression’, ‘mark’ or ‘track’,
which refer primarily to traces left by the ancestral creator beings in
forming the country — they are physical manifestations of the omnipresent
ancestors indelibly printed upon the land, and its flora and fauna. It
is these marks that have been recalled by artists, in dynamic visual and
oral forms, and in song and ceremony, over millenia. In the present, ‘Indigenous
art’ is also about the maintenance and affirmation of Aboriginality
— an identity derived from continuing traditions that have their
genesis in relationships to land and place.8
It would not be possible to present an exhaustive publication, such is the
complex character of Aboriginal culture and the great variation in different
parts of the country. Aboriginal Art and Culture is a scholarly publication
and a great mine of information. Furthermore, it is an affirmative product of
over 200 contributors including many indigenous artists and writers. The small
number of colour illustrations display the aesthetic power and drama, the layers
of history and meaning that can be found in both traditional art and contemporary
art practice. Most importantly perhaps, in the light of the struggle these individual
artists have endured, this book is a testament to the courage and hope of individuals
who have proved that Aboriginal culture could not be utterly destroyed. Janet
McKenzie
1. Kleinert, S and Neale, M. The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal
Art and Culture. Oxford University Press, 2002; v.
2. Ibid, vi.
3. ‘Bringing Them Home’. The report of the National Inquiry
into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children
from their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission,
(President Ronal Wilson) Sydney, April 1997.
4. Ibid, 27—28.
5. Ibid, 30.
6. Smith, Bernard. Australian Painting, 1788—1970.
Oxford University Press, Melbourne; 1971: 2.
7. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Allen and
Unwin, Sydney; 1999: 169.
8. Kleinert and Neale, op cit. vi—vii.
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