Australian Art and its Aboriginal Histories

In this year of the Referendum for the Voice and Australian First Nations contemporary art politics, including ‘decolonisation’, Black Lives Matter and the call for ‘truth-telling’, a review of the nation’s eurocentric art history is necessary and timely. Until relatively recently, the category of Aboriginal art was constructed as ‘primitive’ in relation to the more ‘sophisticated’ European-Australian art, while the category of ‘Australian art’ itself excluded recognition of the lived experience and visual cultures of First Nations Australians. As we demonstrate in this journal issue, dismantling the eurocentric notions of art and history, while being alert to racism and the eliminatory tendencies of Australian settler colonialism, is not a straightforward process.¹ The authors have avoided an easy reversal of terms and a naïve presentism by which past events and motives are interpreted in terms of contemporary values. They are motivated by a desire to revise art history, to reaffirm the presence and importance of this country’s First Peoples, with a new consciousness of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous interrelationships.

Several articles point to the problem of categorisation from a historiographical perspective – Charles Green focusing on the occlusion of Indigenous art from nationalist narratives of the twentieth century, Catherine Speck on the reframing of Indigenous art as art rather than as anthropology in the 1950s, and Nikita Vanderbyl on the ambiguity of the use of the term ‘art’ when applied in the case of the late nineteenth-century diplomat William Barak. As well as tackling conceptual issues, the authors’ work of critical reappraisal calls upon us to probe further the possibility of cross-cultural exchange, in spaces where Indigenous agency has previously been unexplored. It is based upon close historical analysis of numerous, often ephemeral, archives, and conducted, where possible, in dialogue with the relevant Traditional Owners and Indigenous communities. Vanderbyl’s and Alisa Bunbury’s studies epitomise this combination of close analysis and collaboration. Similarly, Peter Hughes, Debbie Robinson, and Ruth Pullin and Tom Darragh have turned their expert attention to individual case-by-case analyses, seeking what has previously been refused, overlooked, ignored, or hidden, not only in the lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and their art, but also in the written record – letters, diaries, inventories, newspapers – and personal collections of cultural objects. From this diverse collection of reinterpretations, it is clear that beneath the eurocentric cover of Australian art, there are many stories of cross-cultural encounter and exchange between settler-migrant artists and First Nations people, the effect of which is evident in the art. In other words, it has become clear that Australian art has myriad Aboriginal histories, and it is likely that many more are yet to be told.

As Charles Green seeks to explain in this issue, art history in Australia was very late in making the adjustment to include Aboriginal histories. This belatedness is notable when compared to its sister academic discipline, history. Historian John Hirst introduced a reading (soon undergraduate) course in Aboriginal History around 1972–74 at Latrobe University at the request of some radical students, which was taken over in 1977 by Richard Broome, who taught it continuously until 2012. Art History departments were ten to twenty years behind historians in covering Aboriginal art. Donald Brook, who was Foundation Professor of Visual Art at Flinders University in South Australia, had long held the view that no Australian Department of Fine Art properly recognised Aboriginal art; by the early 1980s, Brook had hired Vincent Megaw to teach it within the Visual Art Programme. The University of Melbourne and University of Sydney Fine Arts Departments, however, did not initiate undergraduate courses in Aboriginal art until 1992/93, when they were established by art historians Roger Benjamin and Jeanette Hoorn in Melbourne and Terry Smith in Sydney.² In Australian public art galleries, a similarly late shift occurred. The acquisition of Aboriginal art was relatively rare before the 1980s when several institutions began to see the need to employ specialist staff and establish collecting programs.³ In the 2000s, public galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria began to experiment with disrupting their chronological, historical narratives of European-Australian art in their permanent collection displays with parallel narratives of Aboriginal art, a trend that has strengthened over time.⁴

The vibrant and prolific painting of the Western Desert was a principal driver of this change. It originated in 1971–72 at Papunya in the Northern Territory when white art teacher Geoffrey Bardon facilitated senior men to paint their stories with acrylics on small composite boards.⁵ At first, these were locally and sporadically marketed in Alice Springs, but once dealers and collectors became alerted to the sensational power of the works, the humble boards on which they were painted were replaced by large Belgian linen canvases and superior paints. By the late 1980s ‘dot painting’ had become a global success story, eclipsing mainstream Australian art which had always sat in an uneasy and rarely triumphant provincial relationship with the dominant modern art centres of London, Paris and New York. In 2002, Terry Smith encapsulated this groundswell of cultural change when he wrote that ‘settler art’ has been ‘haunted, challenged and eventually overcome by the visual cultures of Australia’s first people’.⁶ In the same year, prominent Kamilaroi-Kooma-Jiman-Gurang Gurang artist and activist, Richard Bell, famously declared, ‘Aboriginal Art, it’s a white thing!’⁷ Bell’s manifesto explicitly criticises the commodification of Aboriginal art for white consumption and calls for control of the Aboriginal art industry to be placed in Aboriginal hands. Bell turned the tables again four years later, embedding the slogan Australian Art – It’s an Aboriginal Thing in his painting of the same name (2006), underscoring and perhaps poking fun at the dynamic shift in power relations noted by Smith that had made Aboriginal art the dominant stream within the category of Australian art.⁸ The articles that follow continue to reflect on the necessary project of integration prompted by this shift. They explore how Aboriginal art and Aboriginal perspectives were historically excluded in narratives of Australian art history forged by the dominant settler-migrant culture of the last 235 years, and the part played by individual artists, curators, art historians and anthropologists in perpetuating, but also in breaking down patterns of exclusion.

In our first article, Charles Green, who in the 1980s and 1990s was an academic and artist and outlying critic for the US contemporary-art journal Art Forum, seeks to understand the ideological reasons why the discipline of Art History in Australia was for so long confounded by Aboriginal art. Focusing on the exclusionary narratives and North Atlantic-centric assumptions that have underpinned contemporary art and art history in Australia since the 1960s, Green turns the spotlight onto the preoccupations of contemporaneous and influential Australian art historians and critics, including Bernard Smith and Terry Smith. Green interrogates art-historical concepts such as ‘a national art history’ and colour-form theory in contemporary art of the 1960s, showing how they were troubled by the material presence/absence of Aboriginal art. Green shows how theories that related to Australian artists’ preoccupation until recently with the North American avant-garde are based on terms and distinctions, such as (Euro-North American) centre versus (Southern) periphery and derivation versus mimicry, which in the context of Aboriginal art are utterly inappropriate. He concludes with the observation that global art history now takes its cue from Australian Indigenous art and Indigenous curatorial practices, as evidenced by Wiradjuri/Celtic artist Brook Andrew’s curatorship of the 2020 Sydney international Biennale, Nirin.

Green argues that practising artists were significantly ahead of art historians, critics and curators in finding a place for Aboriginal art within the canons of Australian art and international modernism. Artists were the first to ‘put transcultural synthesis … into practice’. Green’s argument is borne out in the articles by Peter Hughes and Debbie Robinson respectively. Hughes and Robinson both set out to examine the allure that Aboriginal culture held for two twentieth-century modernist artist-appropriators, who in other respects were very different from one another: Violet Mace and Clifton Pugh. The Tasmanian artist-potter, Violet Mace, a contemporary of the far better-known Margaret Preston, was active from the 1920s to the 1940s. The successful Victorian painter Clifton Pugh established a considerable reputation as a landscapist and portraitist in the 1960s and 1970s. Pugh and especially Mace did not leave a substantial written record explaining their sources and motivations, although, as these articles reveal, both artists expressed a belief that Aboriginality held the key to helping transplanted Europeans uncover within themselves an Australian identity.

Hughes argues that Mace, as a Tasmanian, was steeped in a strong sense of the place, with its bloody colonial history. Her awareness of the Aboriginal presence in colonial history led her first to making copies of the famous ‘Proclamation Board’ held in the collection of the Royal Society of Tasmania. She also copied ink drawings by nineteenth-century Victorian Aboriginal artist Yakaduna/Tommy McRae and Aboriginal images from the Top End. Her sources, which Hughes painstakingly reconstructs, were principally libraries, museums, illustrated newspapers and books. In 1934, she trialled a more direct approach, sending a blank sketchbook to Pastor F.W. Albrecht of the Hermannsburg Mission, asking for them to be filled with drawings by Aboriginal people. From the 1930s, artists like Mace, including women artists Jessie Traill and Violet Teague, were able to travel by motor car to remote missions such as Hermannsburg, the home of Albert Namatjira. Mace did not avail herself of this opportunity, however, choosing instead to study Japanese-influenced, modernist pottery in Britain. As it turns out, she found this irrelevant, preferring to pursue her Aboriginal Australian themes.

Robinson investigates how Pugh also explored Aboriginal art in museum collections and in lavishly illustrated books of the 1950s but, unlike Mace, travelled extensively in the outback. Robinson explores the transformative impact on Pugh’s paintings of two trips he made in the 1950s and 1960s. These were the start, as he put it, ‘of the Aboriginal thing that was happening to me’. If Mace was the bookish historian of Aboriginal visual forms, Pugh was the heroicising mythmaker, seeking catharsis and redemption through a mixture of Christian and Aboriginal iconography, searching for his own identity as much as that of the country. Notably, in both cases, the artist’s relationship with actual Aboriginal people was tenuous or non-existent.

In his opening article described above, Green focuses on the shift in the recognition of Aboriginal art that took place in the Cold War period between 1962, when Bernard Smith’s foundational text Australian Painting, 1788–1960 was published, and 1988, the year the Australian Bicentennial took place, controversially marking white settlement/invasion. This is also roughly the period Robinson maps in Pugh’s career. By 1988, Pugh was able to appreciate in retrospect the gravity of the insights he had gained by his decades-long engagement with Aboriginal culture. Demonstrating a new level of cultural awareness, he returned highly sensitive cultural material that, earlier, he had unthinkingly appropriated.

A ‘problem’ for eurocentric art history is that even the term ‘art’ itself fits uncomfortably as a category for the range of Aboriginal visual cultural practices which include ceremonial body painting, ancient paintings and carvings on rock, carved wooden artefacts, bark painting, weaving and more. Before the Western Desert painting movement created a bridge – that is, for much of the twentieth century – Aboriginal art, as such, was represented by and largely confined within the academic disciplines, archives and exhibition spaces of anthropology and archaeology. The resulting academic silos, duplicated in the ethnographic museum versus art gallery division for the collection and display of Aboriginal art, proved formidable barriers to integration. Green observes that one of the reasons for ‘[Bernard] Smith’s omission of any reference to Aboriginal art [in Australian Painting] followed from his stubborn belief that he was not capable of writing on Indigenous culture, that it was properly the subject of inquiry by anthropologists not art historians like himself’. It was largely left to the discipline of anthropology and pioneering visual anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century, including Charles Mountford, Ronald and Catherine Berndt and Nancy Munn, to develop the argument that Aboriginal art should be acknowledged and studied as such.

In her article, Catherine Speck explores a pivotal moment in the 1950s in the transition of eurocentric ‘ownership’ of Aboriginal art, as it were, from the spaces and discipline of anthropology to those of fine art. This is accomplished through what she calls the ‘exhibitionary pathway’. Speck examines the reframing of Aboriginal art-as-art engineered by an Australian husband-and-wife team of anthropologists from the University of Western Australia, Ronald and Catherine Berndt. In 1957, the Berndts mounted an exhibition, Australian Aboriginal Art: Arnhem Land Paintings on Bark and Carved Human Figures, in Mooroo (Perth), of bark paintings they had collected from their fieldwork expeditions in the 1940s. Speck states that previous exhibitions emphasising Aboriginal art as ‘design’ had been held in museums, department-store art galleries and international expos whereas this was the first time Aboriginal art had been shown in a state gallery. Here they were framed as the contemporary art of a living culture, in contrast to the primitive art of a static culture. Speck argues the exhibition sparked a debate that is still ongoing about whether Aboriginal art needs to be accompanied by explanation about sociocultural context to be translated to a non-Indigenous audience or whether it should stand alone as an aesthetic statement, akin to the mode of exhibiting modernist abstraction. The ‘legacy’ of this exhibition traced by Speck and the debate it has engendered calls for an Indigenous model of curatorship, a proposition that is also referred to by Green.

The three remaining articles in this issue focus on Australian artists of the nineteenth century, one of Wurundjeri Woi Worrung ancestry, one German and one Irish. Two of the articles, one on Indigenous artist William Barak and the other on British artist Richard Browne, analyse the contexts in which each artist produced art on Aboriginal themes and how this ‘Aboriginal-themed’ work was collected, contextualised and understood differently over time. The third article, on Eugene von Guérard, sheds new light on the artist’s collecting of Aboriginal cultural objects. Each author is fired by new ways of collaborating with Aboriginal communities to understand how the art is relevant to them today.

Ruth Pullin investigates how the colonial landscape painter Eugene von Guérard amassed an important collection of Aboriginal cultural objects. Pullin curated Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed, a retrospective exhibition on von Guérard the artist at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2011–12. In her current article she turns her attention to von Guérard as a collector and documenter. Pullin worked on this project with Tom Darragh of the Museum of Victoria, who has translated a series of letters held by the Ethnological Museum in Berlin into English from old German for the first time. The letters, which may be read in full in a complementary article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, document the provenance and expatriation of von Guérard’s collection of Aboriginal cultural objects, which he acquired by direct purchase either from the makers or from squatter friends, along with sixty-four objects acquired on consignment from the dealer Henry Hart who operated out of the Royal Arcade in Melbourne.⁹ These cultural objects were sent to the Ethnological Museum in Berlin in 1879, where they remain today. Pullin also explores the artist’s association with the young Gunditjmara artist Johnny Dawson, who drew in the European manner like the better-known Yakaduna/Tommy McRae whose sketch drawings were copied onto pots by Violet Mace. In an extraordinary record of their mutual acquaintance, von Guérard and Dawson drew sketch portraits of one another in 1855 (SLNSW collection).

University of Melbourne curator and specialist on Australian prints, Alisa Bunbury, undertakes a forensic re-examination of the pen-portraits of Aboriginal individuals made by the Irish convict (later emancipist) artist Richard Browne in the 1810s and early 1820s, about whom little is known. Bunbury’s article is revealing of a type of investigative art-historical methodology that goes beyond analysis of imagery to dig deep into the materiality of the artwork-as-object. Bunbury examined the types of paper Browne used, their watermarks and the handwritten fonts of their inscriptions to establish that he produced repetitive sets or suites of drawings that were sold together, and to weed out copies not by his hand. She has combed through auction and donation records to yield information about who originally acquired his work and has collated sources to confirm as far as possible the true identities of Browne’s subjects. She has traced evidence to establish who did (and sometimes who did not) commission Browne’s Aboriginal works in New South Wales and presents new information about their sale to tourists, French explorers, and Wesleyan missionaries. In the case of the French, Bunbury documents a fascinating afterlife for Browne’s images years later when they were appropriated to make composite ‘Australian’ prints and drawings. Bunbury also tackles the task of rehabilitating the ethical status of Browne’s figures, once held up by Bernard Smith as examples of ‘hard primitivism’ and ‘grotesque caricatures’, with implications of racism. The ultimate purpose of Bunbury’s extensive stocktaking is to serve the Awakabul and Worimi peoples who today proudly claim Browne’s once-derided ‘caricatures’ as images of their ancestors. Similarly, Pullin and Darragh have made Aboriginal cultural objects, which left Australia’s shores over 140 years ago, newly accessible to their Traditional Owners through their foreign-language translations and research, thereby opening up a possible future conversation around repatriation of those objects.

Lastly, Nikita Vanderbyl, like Green, explores the ‘problem’ of Aboriginal art for eurocentric art history, prior to the pivotal re-evaluation of Aboriginal art in the 1980s. Vanderbyl concludes that the problem was one of categorisation, asking, how was Aboriginal art categorised before this? Her methodology is to isolate certain moments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when painted images on paper and bark (many of which are lost) by the Coranderrk leader William Barak were briefly and insecurely acknowledged as ‘art’ by the dominant settler-migrant culture, and to analyse the contexts in which this naming occurred. One such moment was when Barak painted a corroboree as a gift for Governor Loch in 1887, as compensation for Loch being prevented by public outcry from seeing a corroboree in person (corroborees being characterised by some vocal critics as barbaric relics of the past). Vanderbyl argues that this use demonstrates how Barak’s work, at the same time as being acknowledged as art, ‘exceeded’ or sat outside the category of art, as it was understood by the white population in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Victoria. This occurred because Barak was engaging through the work in an act of cultural diplomacy, understood to be an equal exchange between leaders, and because the work stood in for the event in a way that was uniquely associated with the Aboriginality of its maker.

Another ‘moment’ was when Barak was recognised as a dignitary and fellow artist by a handful of non-Indigenous artists, including some associated with the Australian Impressionists. The latter, following the modern practice of painting en plein air, sought remnant Wurundjeri Woi Worrung bushland to paint in suburban Melbourne. A few of them painted Barak’s portrait and acquired some of his works. When these works entered public collections via the donation of the artist John Mather, however, they were considered to be obscure curiosities suitable for the museum rather than the art gallery. This ideological division between art and ethnographic object was perpetuated by the anthropologist and director of the Melbourne Museum, Baldwin Spencer, who simultaneously amassed two important but separate collections; a personal one of Australian art dominated by the Impressionists and another of Aboriginal objects for the museum.¹⁰ It was not until the 1940s that Leonhard Adam, a German immigrant curator in Melbourne, who was interested in incorporating Aboriginal art into a global discourse of ‘primitivism’, ‘rehabilitated’ Barak’s productions into a different Western discourse of art, once again via an exhibitionary pathway. Vanderbyl, however, challenges the idea that recognition as art is the goal; to label such works ‘art’ is to underestimate and deny their Aboriginal specificity and politically complex function within the ‘extremely disrupted circumstances’ of colonised Melbourne and Barak’s status as a revered ancestral Elder of the contemporary Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung community.

***Email: [email protected]: [email protected]

In addition, two stand-alone articles appear in the following pages. While they sit outside of the themed suite introduced by the guest editors above, their subject matter and concerns are not entirely unrelated. Drawing from her own transcription of an example of the early mapping of Van Diemen’s Land, Imogen Wegman assesses a representation of the Derwent River that became a key source for the first official maps of the region. Overlooked in previous histories of early colonial mapping, Meehan’s map is revealed by Wegman as foundational to dispossession. A study of the visual technology of early occupation, Wegman’s article reminds us ‘that every square kilometre taken by the Europeans in Van Diemen’s Land was lost to the palawa and pakana peoples’.

The last article in this issue concerns the life of the inventor and writer David Unaipon (1872–1967), commemorated on Australia’s fifty dollar note as an outstanding Indigenous figure of the first half of the twentieth century. The authors seek to correct misunderstandings of his career as an inventor. Kym Kropinyeri, a descendant and family spokesperson for Unaipon, asserts that others took credit for, and made money from, some of Unaipon’s inventions and that he ‘lived on the border of starvation all his life. Nobody really cared about him’. In the second section, Kath Bowrey investigates the patents that David Unaipon sought for his inventions and documents the assistance he received from J. Herbert Cooke. However, as Bowrey explains, the ingenious Unaipon faced three obstacles. He was a sole inventor and not a company employee, he lived in a nation with a small manufacturing base, and the Chief Protector, under the Aborigines Act 1911 (SA), was entitled to retain, sell or dispose of any patent owned by Unaipon, thus inhibiting ‘his freedom to conduct scientific research, write and pursue commercial partners’. Unaipon’s determination to live independently resulted in his arrest in 1926 for refusing to follow the direction of the Superintendent of the Point McLeay mission. The Kropinyeri and Bowrey article is a case study in Australia’s era of protective patronage and of that era’s legacy in family memory.

These articles are followed by our reviews section. Flavia Marcello reviews the Immigrant Networks exhibition which was held at Carlton’s Museo Italiano. Curated by a team of researchers from four universities across Australia, the exhibition highlighted the important contribution made by non-Anglophone migrants to our nation’s industrial development. Paul Ogborne reviews the touring exhibition Disrupt, Persist, Invent: Australians in an Ever-Changing World at the National Archives of Australia (NAA), where the three curators sifted through the thousands of records held at the national institution to uncover the personal stories of those involved in effecting social change in Australia.

In an extended review essay of The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, Richard P. Boast considers the book to be a milestone both in Australian historiography and in the wider field of global legal history. A smaller than usual collection of book reviews completes our reviews section, with the promise of many more reviews to come in our next issue. Our thanks as ever are extended to all our reviewers and the review editors for their valuable contributions.

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

2 Email correspondence from Terry Smith, Richard Broome, Vincent Megaw and Roger Benjamin to Caroline Jordan, September 2019.

3 Wally Caruana, ‘21.1 Black Art on White Walls? Institutional Responses to Indigenous Australian Art’, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, eds Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 456.

4 Daniel Thomas, ‘S and D at NGVA [Brook Andrew’s Sexy and Dangerous (1996) Opens the First Floor Exhibition Installation at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, at Federation Square]’, Art Monthly Australia 157 (March 2003): 27–32.

5 See Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya: A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004).

6 T. Smith, Transformations in Australian Art, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 9.

7 R. Bell, ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art – It’s a White Thing!’, http://kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html (accessed 8 August 2023).

8 Steve Dow, ‘The Uncompromising Art of Australia’s Richard Bell: “There’s got to be a day of reckoning”’, The Guardian, 4 June 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jun/04/the-uncompromising-art-of-australias-richard-bell-theres-got-to-be-a-day-of-reckoning

9 Thomas A. Darragh and V. Ruth Pullin, ‘Eugene von Guérard and the Ethnological Museum Berlin: Correspondence 1878–1880’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, vol. 135 (1–2) (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, in press).

10 Susan Lowish, Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art (London: Routledge, 2018), 136–8.