Arnhem Land

This essay investigates chronologically, the agency of two significant inter-related forces which shaped and impacted the self-determination of Indigenous art and culture from the postcolonial period in Australia. Firstly, is the work of German cultural historian Ulli Beier who in the recommendations he provided in his Report on the mission art business for Dr. H.E. Coombs in 1969 outlined progressive ideas for the setting of future indigenous cultural policy frameworks for the Australian Government. These initiatives were based on his years of experience in Africa and New Guinea promoting the self-determination of indigenous voice within their nation’s culture. They would inform the making of indigenous arts policy across all indigenous sectors within Australia, including the Aboriginal Arts Board AAB of the Australia Council, the second influential force to be investigated within this history. The AAB was established as an independent, government-funded, all-indigenous governed organisation, whose innovative operations would establish the art centres in remote Australia, many cultural bodies and promote the fine arts profile of Indigenous art within Australia, and importantly, internationally. The cumulative impact of the forces set in motion by the AAB initiatives were instrumental in ensuring the promotion of indigenous cultural agendas that would lay important foundations which would lead to significant changes to discourses of the nation’s high art and the acceptance of indigenous art as contemporary within global art discourses.

Les métaphores de la colère ont été documentées et analysées dans de nombreuses langues du monde, et ces travaux ont mis à jour leur remarqua-ble uniformité (et même leur quasi-universalité) à travers les continents. Cet article apporte une contribution supplémentaire sur cette question, et réinterroge le statut particulier des métaphores de la colère à la lumière des données de la langue dalabon (Australie, Territoire du Nord). L'article décrit et analyse les métaphores de la colère du dalabon, en montrant ce qui les distingue d'une part des autres métaphores émotionnelles de cette langue, et d'autre part des métaphores de la colère que l'on rencontre dans d'autres langues du monde. Les métaphores émotionnelles du dalabon ont ceci de particulier qu'elles restent systématiquement ancrées dans des représentations du corps, en s'inspirant la plupart du temps de réactions somatiques aux émotions. Ainsi, en dalabon, les émotions sont toujours représentées métonymiquement comme des états physiques de la personne, et ne sont pratiquement jamais traitées comme des entités indépendantes de la personne, ou encore comme des personnes, des forces etc. Mais la colère se distingue des autres émotions de deux manières. D'une part, elle autorise ce type de représentations : la colère est traitée comme une chose que l'on peut « trouver ». D'autre part, les métaphores dalabon de la colère ne s'inspirent pas de réactions somatiques à cette émotion, mais s'ancrent plutôt dans les connotations morales négatives de la colère. Celle-ci est comparée à une entité vivante et turbulente, ou encore à la maladie, à la pourriture, au poison.

This article examines domestic animals in a different light: the initial responses of Aborigines in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia to the sudden appearance of strange animals in their midst. European explorers and settlers’ accounts of their first impressions of fauna in new lands feature descriptions of strange hopping kangaroos and bizarre-looking platypus. There has been little conveyed, however, about how the First Australians responded to encounters with a whole new suite of animals that engaged with humans in a very different way. What was their attitude toward domesticated animals, given that they did not immediately belong within their totemic way of structuring the world? How did they react when they first saw horses carrying humans on their backs? Were they interpreted initially as a single alien being? Instigated by images from rock art, but accompanied by historic and ethnographic accounts, records of first contact provides some insight into Aboriginal reactions to an unknown domestic animal.  Initial encounters with the horse reveal how colonisation and domestication were inextricably entwined through a particular European mindset of domination, control and containment.

This is a study of the influences of Western institutions and individuals on the formation of Indigenous Australian ethnographic collections. More specifically, it is concerned with the collection strategies employed by these Western institutions and individuals during the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition (AASEAL). The expedition involved three major base camps: Groote Eylandt, Yirrkala and Oenpelli and took place three years after the end of the Second World War. It represents the political, social and economic life, priorities and aims of the time. Following the expedition, the collection of ethnographic artefacts was distributed to ten different institutions around Australia and the United States of America.

While many researchers have viewed Indigenous Australian ethnographic collections as uncontaminated evidence of the cultures from which the material was acquired, more recently questions have been asked about the context of the materials, the outside influences on its composition and, in short, whether they are more representative of Indigenous cultures or Western cultures. An analysis of the AASEAL ethnographic collections showed trends in the biases of the Western researchers and institutions and the impact of overarching theories of human nature on colonial collecting is clearly visible in this study. Social Darwinism, colonial guilt and the Great Chain of Being all impacted upon the formation and the present composition of these collections despite all these theories having come under serious scrutiny in the preceding years.

Bark paintings, analysed as an example of the categories of artefact collected during AASEAL, have disclosed their significant impact on museums and art galleries following World War Two. Of particular consequence is the realisation that for many art galleries in Australia, these artworks were the first examples of Indigenous Australian art acquired. This emphasises the impact of these paintings and their influence on future acquisitions particularly by art galleries. Artistic artefacts were ceasing to be viewed by Western society as ethnographic artefacts that belonged in museums. These paintings assisted and perhaps instituted a move towards the Indigenous Australian art being considered for its aesthetic qualities and equal to Western art in Western minds.

Recent debates within the sociolinguistics of multilingualism have highlighted the challenges posed by new complexities in the semiotic space of ‘superdiversity’, where the linguistic repertoire cannot be neatly partitioned according to socially or politically constructed language boundaries. Some have noted, however, that discourses framing these complexities as ‘new’ tend to focus on the City and the West, and risk erasing diversities that have long been acknowledged as commonplace in other – for example, Indigenous – settings. This chapter explores core issues related to the ‘translinguistic turn’ within the context of Indigenous northern Australia. I highlight ‘the ordinariness of diversity’ in local translinguistic practice in this region, and demonstrate that the supposed ‘new complexities’ of globalisation have significant reflexes in the ‘peripheries’ of its reach.

Taking a reflexive auto-ethnographic approach, this article explores the unique process of transcultural adoption by which Aboriginal people have selectively extended their family formations to include as well as “manage” outsiders. Focussing on my longstanding friendship and research collaboration with the respected Ngukurr Elder, and skilful historian, Rosalind Munur, I discuss some of the ways in which adoption into her family has profoundly reset my understanding of the discipline of history and contributed to a new and extended sense of family and personhood. I explore these changes within the concept of a feminist ethics of risk (Welch) that is tied to Aboriginal women’s agency. In recounting this story, I draw attention to some of the ethical and epistemological responsibilities of engaging with Aboriginal Australia.

This article brings together a range of existing research as well as original research (including interviews) to account for the shift in the reception of Arnhem Land bark painting from being understood initially as a form of ethnographic art, to one of contemporary art.

More than fifty years have passed since the staging of the 1948 American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, described as ‘the last of the big expeditions’. Three Australian-produced films were made from silent footage taken during the Expedition. These incorporated narration, sound effects and music. To compose the music for the films, Expedition leader Charles P Mountford called on the services of husband-and-wife Alfred and Mirrie Hill. To help inspire them in the composition process, Mountford supplied the Hills with recordings of traditional Aboriginal song collected during the Expedition—their transcriptions of traditional song formed the basis of scores for the three films: Aborigines of the Sea Coast, Birds and Billabongs, and Arnhem Land. The technical limitations of the equipment then available for field recording had a profound effect on the composers’ interpretations of the songs.

Following a brief discussion of ethnographic film-making in Australia and the political climate which led to the staging of the  Expedition, this chapter interrogates the process of composing the film scores using appropriated traditional song. With examples from the film scores and the songs that influenced their composition, the chapter offers a view to wider community attitudes on appropriation of cultural artefacts in Australia after the second world war.

ITHIN AN ANGLO-SAXON MINDSET, THERE IS THE TENDENCY TO THINK AND SPEAK of animals, such as the horse, as distinct entities. In the following narrative, however, the horse is crucially inter-linked with humans and the guns they carried; the strange and unknown humans they encountered; the buffalo the horse assisted to hunt down; and the diseases and parasites horses carried within them. Encounters with the horse provide an entry point into a cross-cultural and cross-species landscape on the colonial frontier of northern Australia.1

In 1995 Mrs. P. B. Burarrwaŋa and the students of Gatirri School, Mata Mata illustrated a song that she and her nephew George had written and reflected on. It was all about their homeland and the life they led in North East Arnhem land and the islands of the Arafura sea.

In Maningrida, a remote, largely Indigenous, community in northern Australia, code-switching is a commonplace phenomenon that sits within a complex of both longstanding and more recent multilingual practices. Approximately fourteen languages are spoken among Maningrida's 2500 inhabitants, and interaction is characterised by high levels of individual multilingualism and various code-mixing practices. While a unified communilect does not exist, convergences are observable in terms of shared community language features. The task of describing the nature and functions of code-switching in such a context is complicated by a number of factors: code-switching has been described as a feature of stable 'egalitarian' multilingualism in Australia, and as such may constitute a reflex of the maintenance of linguistic boundaries, shaped by broader ideologies privileging linguistic diversity and distinctiveness. However, it can also be a practice symptomatic of a changing local language ecology, a precursor to language shift or the emergence of a contact variety. Further complicating factors in Maningrida include the presence of shared lexical items which can blur the lines between borrowing and code-switching, and the nature of dialectal variation in the region, which may rely partly on the indexical values of 'shibboleth' forms. This paper will focus in particular on Burarra-English code-switching in Maningrida, which is implicated, along with dialect-levelling processes and shared cross-linguistic stock, in the formation of an urban koine variety of Burarra. We draw on long-term linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in the community to describe the shape and functions of this form of partially-conventionalised code-switching, as well as constraints (both grammatical and social) on its use. Burarra-English code-switching within this context provides an opportunity to explore competing social-psychological pressures of divergence and convergence in cultural and linguistic practice. As such, we demonstrate what this particular site of linguistic practice can reveal about the complexities of code-switching on the ground.

This is the story of a group of contemporary Indigenous artists on the small island of Milingimbi, off the coast of central Arnhem Land. It is not a story of cultural annihilation, but rather, one of renewal. It shows the resilience and adaptability of traditional Indigenous family systems, and how one community has internally guided transformations in familial and clan relationships in order to meet their changing needs in the modern world.

As a contribution to ongoing examinations of expeditions and how their research results have been presented, this paper considers the role of some individual collectors and explorers whose collections resulting from expeditions were later donated to the Smithsonian. Transformations in museum expeditions (at least, their ethnographic components) are shown to have, over time, followed a pathway similar to the transformations in museum exhibitions, evident especially in the changing relationships between the collectors (or collecting institutions), the people whose cultural products and records were collected, and the collection’s or expedition’s audience. The paper also illustrates some recent Smithsonian efforts to revisit, present and interpret these early
expeditions through online and print publications, and provides examples of some current uses of expedition source materials (such as archives and collections). The paper concludes by looking at some other
attempts to make collections acquired during expeditions available to the descendants of those encountered during the expeditions, and to include their perspectives in any contemporary interpretation  of such collections.

Yolngu Homeland  (2015, 58 mins) is about Garrthalala as a place and how the community who live there are connected with other beings, including ancestors, animals and plants. Aboriginal people have lived in Arnhem Land for over 45,000 years. Over time they have developed a deep, spiritual connection with the land. Totemic beings of significance include the saltwater crocodile, crows, dogs and dingoes, crabs, sea eagles, turtles, and yams. The film follows 'Yolngu time' where the pace is measured and not run according to the institutional timeframes of wider Australia. Homeland communities are increasingly under threat from a lack of financial support and investment into infrastructure from the State with a push for Yolngu to move into town centres, despite the fact that the quality of life on outstations is significantly better. This film was inspired by Ian Dunlop’s collaborations with Yolngu during and the Yirrkala Film Project series. The intention of ‘Yolngu Homeland’ is to show a positive side to a homeland community and how living on homelands are a means of maintaining a connection to Country, to other beings and to a unique way of life.