Asymmetries in the bush

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Notes

notes

1 I have made this painting sound anonymous, but it wasn’t. In the time between assembling my notes and writing this account, one of my notebook pages went astray, the very one that recorded the artist and title of the work in question. Several attempts to retrieve the missing information–attempts made by Kate Fagan and others as well as by me–have proved unsuccessful, which means that I must take the unwanted responsibility for appearing not to take seriously the Aboriginal artistry that has been sidelined for much of Australian cultural history. My intention was to place it centre stage, but perhaps there is something inevitable about this parapraxis, about this slippage in a revisionist account that has not quite acknowledged its proximity to the intellectual habits of a colonial culture, habits that I might have assumed I could undo at will.

2 If I had known better, I would not have taken the guide book at face value, and would have been less jittery. As John Kinsella has pointed out, to represent the emu as vicious is a travesty. The drought conditions of 1932 meant that large numbers of emus were searching for water in farm land that they would normally keep away from. Anxious farmers jumped the gun–literally–and called in the army. Their excessive use of firepower was condemned at the time as absurd.