Colonizing bricks and mortar: Indigenous place-making through art objects and artifacts

Abstract

This article explores how Aboriginal people born in the rural areas and country towns of New South Wales have come to live in and engage with ‘the city’ and consider their place in it. Drawing on my ethnographic work with western NSW Aboriginal people, I discuss how their engagement with museum space and collections, with the visual arts, and with place and kin work to occupy and shape the settler colonial landscape, cultural identities, and practice. The article questions interpretations of what constitutes a museum, the relationship of artists to museums, the possibility of multicultural museums unhinged from imperial power structures and their practices and policies of knowing and owning. Jane Jacobs's notion of the ‘constant interplay between positioned and variable metropolitan histories and other histories and the complex intermeshing of the global and local’ is brought into ethnographic focus here, as are ‘postcolonial counterflows and the unanticipated trajectories of identity and power’ which are attendant with the idea of a ‘negotiable politics of difference’.

Notes

1. Jim Specht, ‘Anthropology’, in Ronald Strahan (ed), Rare and Curious Specimens: An Illustrated History of the Australian Museum 1827–1979, Sydney: Australian Museum, 1979, pp 141–149.

2. Andrew Lattas, ‘Essentialism, Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity’, Oceania 63(3), 1993, pp 240–267; Andrew Lattas, ‘Colonising the Other, Dreaming, Aboriginal Painting and White Man's Search for a Soul’, in Julie Marcus (ed), Picturing the ‘Primitif’, Canada Bay, NSW: LHR Press, 2000.

3. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Works, Vol 1, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

4. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

5. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp 52, 192.

6. I use the term museum memories after Fay Ginsburg who has spoken about the re-signification of media (‘screen memories’) by Aboriginal cultural activists. Here, previous images which were often used by ‘government and others to deny recognition to the meaning of Aboriginal alterity’ have been used by Aboriginal people contemporaneously to recuperate history. Fay Ginsburg and Fred Myers, ‘A History of Indigenous Futures: Accounting for Indigenous Art and Media’, Aboriginal History 30, 2006, pp 95–110, p 99.

7. Sandra Pannell, ‘Mabo and Museums: The Indigenous (Re)Appropriation of Indigenous Things’, Oceania 65(1), 1994, pp 18–37, p 19.

8. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, p 8.

9. Thomas, Entangled Objects, p 14. Until otherwise indicated, all references are to this work, and are given as page numbers in parentheses in the text.

10. Tom Hennes, ‘Hyperconnection: Natural History Museums, Knowledge, and the Evolving Ecology of Community’, Curator 50(1), 2007, pp 87–108.

11. Council of Australian Museums Association, Previous Possessions, New Obligations:Policies for Museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, Canberra: Council of Australian Museums Association, 1993.

12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991.

13. Pannell, ‘Mabo and Museums’, p 18.

14. Fred Myers, Painting Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p 6.

15. See Jeremy Beckett, A Study of Aborigines in the Pastoral West of New South Wales, Oceania Monograph 55, Sydney: University of Sydney, 2005, pp 16–17.

16. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, pp 39–49.

17. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, p 39.

18. Lorraine Gibson, ‘Art, Culture and Ambiguity in Wilcannia, New South Wales’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(3), 2008, pp 294–313; Fred Myers, ‘Culture-Making: Performing Aboriginality at the Asia Society Gallery’, American Ethnologist 21, 1994, pp 679–699, pp 689, 690.

19. Lorraine Gibson, ‘“We Don't Do Dots – Ours Is Lines”: Asserting a Barkindji Style’, Oceania 78(3), 2008, pp 280–298.

20. Beckett, A Study of Aborigines in the Pastoral West of New South Wales, p 6. Some anthropologists would argue that studies of settled Aboriginal lives are still viewed less highly.

21. Gibson, ‘Art, Culture and Ambiguity in Wilcannia’, p 306.

22. Gibson, ‘Art, Culture and Ambiguity in Wilcannia’, p 306.

23. Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Desert Australian Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964; Frank Dubinskas and Sharon Traweek, ‘“Closer to the Ground”: A Re-interpretation of Walpiri Iconography’, Man 9(1), 1984, pp 15–30.

24. Munn, Walbiri Iconography.

25. Ginsburg and Myers, ‘A History of Indigenous Futures’, p 95.

26. Beckett, A Study of Aborigines in the Pastoral West of New South Wales.

27. Diane Austin-Broos, ‘Places, Practices, and Things: The Articulation of Arrernte Kinship with Welfare and Work’, American Ethnologist 30(1), 2003, pp 118–135, p 119.

28. Pannell, ‘Mabo and Museums’, p 18.

29. Pannell, ‘Mabo and Museums’, p 18.

30. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Until otherwise indicated, all references are to this work, and are given as page numbers in parentheses in the text.

31. Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Gell, Art and Agency, p ix.

32. Lorraine Gibson, ‘Making Art and Making Culture in Far Western New South Wales’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 1, 2008, pp 67–77.

33. Gell, Art and Agency, p 101.

34. Jennifer Biddle, ‘Country, Skin, Canvas: The Intercorporeal Art of Kathleen Petyarre’, ANZ Journal of Art 4(1), 2003, pp 64–72.

35. Susan Murphy, ‘Storied Place’, in Sense of Place Colloquium 11: The Intersection Between Aboriginal and Western Senses of Place, Pre-Colloquium Papers, Hawkesbury: University of Western Sydney, 1997, pp 117–124.

36. Gibson, ‘Making Art and Making Culture in Far Western New South Wales’, p 68.

37. Phillip Bates, personal communication, 8 December 2002.

38. Gillian Bottomley, ‘Identification: Ethnicity, Gender and Culture’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 18(1), 1997, pp 75–82.

39. Stuart Hall, ‘Who Needs Identity’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage Publications, 1996, pp 1–17, p 4.

40. Hall, ‘Who Needs Identity’, p 4.

41. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, R Nice (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977.

42. George Morgan, Unsettled Places, Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2006, p x.

43. Thomas, Entangled Objects, p 4. Until otherwise indicated, all references are to this work, and are given as page numbers in parentheses in the text.

44. bell hooks, Art on My Mind, New York: New Press, 1995.

45. Ginsburg and Myers, ‘A History of Indigenous Futures’, p 97.