Assembling Birrarung Wilam: a case study of Indigenous public artwork in the city

ABSTRACT

Indigenous public artworks in Australian urban spaces have challenged assumptions of Indigenous absence from the city. This paper examines the construction of Birrarung Wilam, in central Melbourne, in the period 2005–2008. We use archival documents and semi-structured interviews to analyse the collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants in a project sponsored by the city. We show the particular mediating contribution of ‘fabricators’: a group of commissioned workers and tradespeople with material-specific expertise. Person to person encounters occurred through the modules of project management, with limited scope for long-term engagement. Despite being embedded in formal state-based recognition, Birrarung Wilam asserts Indigenous self-recognition through the renewal and adaptation of Indigenous material practices and traditions and the refusal to provide straightforward interpretive materials at the site. The study provides support for arguments that challenge a simple binary of co-option and resistance in interpreting such public art practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Recognition
• Indigenous
• materials
• collaborative art
• settler-colonialism
• decolonisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lesley Head http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5114-7614

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The focus of this paper is an Aboriginal collaborative project in a metropolitan centre on mainland Australia rather than the Torres Strait; therefore we use the terms ‘Indigenous’/‘Aboriginal’ interchangeably when discussing Australian Indigenous peoples, except when the context makes it necessary to refer to the Torres Strait Islands. When we discuss a specific country, we use the name of the people of that country following the Australian Indigenous Languages Database (AUSTLANG). We use the term ‘First Nations’ to refer to Indigenous Sovereign Nations in Canada. We use the terminology of authors when referring to their work.