From shell work to shell art: Koori women creating knowledge and value on the South Coast of NSW (original) (raw)
Related papers
In 2003 I participated in the production of a digital community project for Victorian Koorie communities. The team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, who contributed their wide-ranging expertise to the Koorie Heritage Archive (KHA) project, are past and present members of dedicated units at the Koorie Heritage Trust based in Melbourne, Victoria, including the Koorie Family History Service, the Oral History Unit and the Collections Unit. The project’s intention was to bring together cultural heritage materials that are significant to Koorie people and currently dispersed throughout state record-holding institutions, private collections and local Indigenous community organisations; to record personal and community histories; and to document family and placenames, which are all important for recuperating and preserving Koorie knowledge, memory and identity. This chapter traces the development of the KHA as a pilot project, and looks at some of the key issues of creating and implementing this specific digital knowledge system, which lays new ground for appreciating and, if necessary, evaluating such projects. This chapter examines how a photograph, held within the media-rich KHA library, can offer a point of orientation to follow a dynamic human mapping of hidden pasts or misplaced histories that transpire from the interplay between memories and cultural artefacts. Through the personal, social and political stories told by Koorie people, I hope to capture the non-textual and often abstract nature of how Koorie individuals and their families navigate their way through the contested arena of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. The lively and transformative Information technology and Indigenous communities 172 Published by AIATSIS Research Publications performance enacted with truth, conviction, tears and laughter, and firmly grounded in the activities of local community life, presents a timely place to consider how the past is reinscribed and reincorporated into a present-day reality. The following is therefore a reflective piece drawing on an 11-year history of working with Victorian Koorie people and a background in performance and visual arts, which emphasises the stories and places at the centre of culture and identity.
Information Visualisation (IV), 2010 14th …, 2010
The transition from ephemeral, ceremonial art to more permanent acrylic-on-board paintings has made Australian Aboriginal art more accessible to the public than ever before. However, early examples contained secret/sacred motifs and stories -knowledge recorded in the paintings that was normally only made available to initiates. In turn, this prompted contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists to hide, camouflage or remove the sensitive material from their work. It is only recently, through inter-gender and inter-cultural collaborations between contemporary Indigenous Australian artists and non-indigenous ethnographers and anthropologists, that the full ramifications of this transition is becoming apparent. This paper discusses 3 case studies where the traditional expression of Kuruwarri, or Ancestral power, has been transformed through contemporary Australian Aboriginal women's art.
Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art (Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo (REGAC)), 2020
Key words: eel traps; Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous sovereignty; collaborative methodologies; generosity. ABSTRACT In 2018, the Mutti Mutti/ Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung artist Maree Clarke was commissioned by the University of Melbourne to create two large scale eel traps for two very different sites. The first a spectacular glass eel trap for the newly renovated Old Quad – the oldest building on the University’s campus and the second, a 10-metre woven eel trap constructed at the Footscray Community Arts Centre in Melbourne’s inner-west. The story of the eel traps is a launch pad and an end point for our discussion about the Living Archive of Aboriginal Art. Like eels and the eel traps, Aboriginal knowledge has endured across millenia – and art-making supports processes for this knowledge to be sustained. We discuss a series of workshops held in Maree’s backyard/artist studio and argue that Maree’s generosity and willingness to share her art-making knowledge with broad networks of people, fosters communal bonds that instil a sense of collective responsibility for Aboriginal cultural knowledge. We then discuss the two eel trap artworks to show how their stories offer different possibilities for decolonising Western knowledge institutions (the university and the art gallery) through engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems. How this emerges through knowledge exchange in Maree’s backyard, we argue, reveals a Living Archive. See this link for complete journal with corresponding article: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/REGAC/issue/view/2428/showToc
Women’s business: cross-cultural collaborations in remote Indigenous art centres. A rich field of writing on Indigenous art and artists has been developed in Australia, particularly since the emergence of the Western Desert painting movement in the early 1970s. Less visible and less rigorously critiqued are cross-cultural collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, and most writing which does addresses this field of exchange highlights male artists working within modernism, conceptualism and postmodernism. This paper documents and examines the relational, inter-subjective nature of cross-cultural collaborations between women artists in remote community art centres. These hybrid studios come with their own unique social, cultural and gendered conditions, but they remain critical sites of connection and production. Sydney based film-maker Lynette Wallworth, painter Ildiko Kovacs and artist and writer Kim Mahood have each established collaborative relationships with artists in remote desert communities and an analysis of their practices and key works forms the basis of this enquiry. The politics and cautions surrounding cross-cultural practices are to be expected given the colonial and postcolonial histories in Australia and the continuing inequities experienced in remote Indigenous communities. Nonetheless, this paper argues that cross-cultural relationships are a valid expression of contemporary cultural expression from both sides of the colonial interface and they can offer genuine forms of Indigenous creative agency.
How the knowledge within country informs Aboriginal arts practices and affirms and sustains identity
Australian Aboriginal peoples have a long history of relationships connected to Country: Australia's landscapes and seascapes and all the animals and plants and peoples that inhibit them. With an increasing shift of Aboriginal people to large urban areas and regional centres it does mean that many Aboriginal Australians now pass through, dwell, and live within the Country belonging to other Aboriginal Australians. This does not mean that one's connections to Country are lost, or that the significance of Country is no longer present. Pamela Croft and Bronwyn Fredericks live within Rockhampton region of Central Queensland: the Countries of the Darumbal (mainland and coastline) and the Woppaburra (Keppel Islands), who are intricately linked through history and relationship within Country. Within broader Australia, this region is marketed as the 'Beef Capital of Australia' and where 'the beef meets the reef' (Great Barrier Reef). It is also at the southern end of one of the world's greatest wonders; the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef. This presentation will demonstrate how the knowledge base from within the Countries of the Darumbal and Woppaburra can and does inform land-centred artistic crafts practice in the every day and enables a focus on cultural sustainability for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous generations to come.
Arts, 2019
A network of Indigenous art and culture centres across Australia play a significant role in promoting cross-cultural understanding. These centres represent specific Indigenous cultures of the local country, and help sustain local Indigenous languages, traditional knowledge, storytelling and other customs, as well as visual arts. They are the principle point of contact for information about the art, and broker the need to sustain cultural heritage at the same time as supporting new generations of cultural expression. This interview with Dr Valerie Keenan, Manager of Girringun Aboriginal Art Centre in northern Australia, provides rare insight into the strategies, challenges, and aspirations of Indigenous art centres and how the reception of the art impacts on artists themselves. It provides a first-hand account of how Indigenous artists strive to generate a new understanding of their culture and how they participate in a global world.
Challenging the colonisation of birth: Koori women's birthing knowledge and practice
Women and birth : journal of the Australian College of Midwives, 2017
The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination for social and cultural development. This fundamental right has been impeded worldwide through colonisation where many Indigenous peoples have had to adapt to ensure continuation of cultural knowledge and practice. In South East Australia colonisation was particularly brutal interrupting a 65,000 year-old oral culture and archives have increasing importance for cultural revival. The aim of this research was to collate archival material on South East Australian Aboriginal women's birthing knowledge and practice. Archivist research methods were employed involving a search for artefacts and compiling materials from these into a new collection. This process involved understanding the context of the artefact creation. Collaborative yarning methods were used to reflect on materials and their meaning. Artefacts found included materials written by n...
2017
My heritage is Wiradjuri, a Central New South Wales nation with a powerful connection to Lake Cargelligo and a number of inland rivers. Our old ties with the river have facilitated strong ties with tribes up and down the rivers which have extended as far as South Australia. In addition, Wiradjuri has strong familial associations with Yorta Yorta, Gamillaroi and historically significant ties to neighbouring nations, such as the Wonnarua with whom we collaborated during the 1826 uprising against the British (Miller, 1995). Our broad associations also included ceremonial and marriage arrangements with peoples further afield, such as Aboriginal people who shared Mount Bogong in the Victorian Alps. Cultural ties and reciprocity arrangements extended as far as Southern Queensland and during the Bunya Pine ceremonial cycle, there were huge gatherings of people, including Wiradjuri, who travelled significant distances to share food. This is the present location of the College of Indigenous ...
2004
This paper presents the case that the Aboriginal arts industry in the Northern Territory is deeply connected with the history of community-based adult education. The paper traces the history of Aboriginal adult education in the Northern Territory from the 1940s through to the 1960s - a period dominated by the assimilation policy. Many adult classes in Aboriginal communities during this period were art-related, which, it is argued, laid the foundation for the development of the Aboriginal arts industry. This is illustrated by examining the history of adult education at Papunya in central Australia and the beginnings of Papunya Tula. Other examples are also briefly described