2. One of the oldest artefacts of Aboriginal material culture currently
in existence originates from Twofold Bay on the south coast of
NSW - a shield collected from the lands of Thaua clan of the Yuin
Nation in 1840. It is held in the collections of the British Museum
along with many natural history specimens and stone tool artefacts
that have a provenance to the south coast of NSW.
Aboriginal culture on the south coast of NSW has always been of
international and particularly of scientific interest. In 1827 Alexander
Berry, Scottish settler and namesake of the town of Berry, excavated
the grave of a well known local Aboriginal leader Arawarra and
unsuccessfully attempted to send his cranium to the Edinburgh
Museum1. Inadvertently he also gave one of the first recorded
descriptions of any Aboriginal mortuary or burial practice as they
occurred on the south coast of NSW.
Attitudes to the understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal cultural
experiences and histories associated with regions such as the
south coast of NSW are in constant process of rediscovery and re-
interpretation. Over the past thirty years a massive transformation has
occurred in the way Australia uses visual art to represent its history and
culture. The participation of Aboriginal people in the arts has shaped
the art that is produced by non Indigenous people for the better and
opened Australian art to an international reception that did not exist
prior to the 1980s.
In the 1980s Trevor Nickolls, Robert Campbell Jnr, Harry J Wedge
and Ian W Abdulla were the first wave of Aboriginal men from south
east Australia to see Aboriginal art as an opportunity to publicly tell of
their experiences and proudly identify as Aboriginal in a public arena.
Outside of a boxing ring or a football field, there were practically no
opportunities for Aboriginal men and even less for women of their
generation to participate in the public arena in Australia during this time.
The four artists selected for this exhibition represent the legacy of the
self-determinations, cultural legitimacies and importantly, the modern
contributions of women to the development of a unique south east
Australian Aboriginal artistic and cultural expression.
The urban art movement could more or less be described as a post
bicentenary art movement. The Aboriginal protest movement in NSW
that was forged through the opposition to the bicentenary celebrations
was continued by many Aboriginal artists after 1988, and Aboriginal
artists used their art to draw attention to the injustices that still existed
such as inequality of life expectancies, Black deaths in custody, or the
political recognition and acknowledgement of the wrongs to the stolen
generations.
The enormity of the Aboriginal art movement has occurred like no other
in Australia’s history - sometimes coming from the remote and the
regional and sometimes unearthed from underneath our modern cities
and urban landscapes. The four artists in this exhibition bring a diverse
range of personal and artistic experiences together for this exhibition
OUTLOOK
to present an outlook of how Aboriginal art is being used to connect to
country and express the legitimacy of an Aboriginal artistic perspective
as it exists on the south coast of NSW.
Aboriginal cultural practices and connections to country were in many
cases obliterated by the industrial impact of the maritime and pastoralist
industries along the south coast and ‘progress’ encouraged numerous
incursions into the territories and language regions of Aboriginal people
in south east NSW.
One of the most significant examples of the art that existed in south
east Australia’s is dendroglphys - the carving of designs into trees
or wood. These were likely to be markers for travel, indicators of a
gravesite, or locations of ceremonial significance whose importance
and meaning was not recognised during the colonial annexation of
these areas. Today these are principal sites of significance for many
south east Australian Aboriginal people indicating the evident Aboriginal
history of today’s urban areas prior to colonisation. Warwick Keen's
work has developed as an adaptation of this tradition of wood carving
into a visual aesthetic and an artistic language of his own where the
carving of repetitions provides both the background and the surface of
the finished artwork.
For the artists in this exhibition it is important to acknowledge that the
local custodians of Aboriginal culture on the south coast have their
own practices of cultural maintenance that are not neccesarily based in
the visual arts. The artists in this exhibition are members of, and have
connections to, many different communities across Australia, just as the
south coast is home to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from
right across Australia.
Historically, Aboriginal people largely existed through caricatures and
stereotypical representations in the imagination of post war Australia.
The representation of Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal artists
dominated perceptions of Aboriginal people until at least the 1980s in
Australia and the image that Warwick has appropriated is emblematic
of what a non-Aboriginal person would expect an Aboriginal person “to
look like”.
This artwork has a pop art composition but at the same time subtly
embodies the artistic tradition of the dendroglphys that have informed a
large section of Warwick’s body of work.
This artwork is emblematic of the issue of identity that underpins
many urban Aboriginal artists' work and through representation as
an Aboriginal artwork challenges audiences' expectations of what
people expect to see when viewing Aboriginal art. Though this image
was originally not produced by an Aboriginal artist, Warwick Keen's
artwork shows how images can be used to demonstrate the changing
perceptions of Aboriginal people over time.
Peter James Hewitt, Floatin Buds Budda, 2010, mixed media on board, 120 x 90cmWarwick Keen, Aboroptical #1, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 150cmCaroline Oakley, (detail) Identity of Self Discovery, 2010, medium, 48 x 63.5cmAroha Groves,
