The cross-cultural arts project that has driven a wedge through indigenous Australia
IT seemed like a dream arts project for the remote western desert’s Aboriginal communities — a research and exhibition series sponsored by great educational and cultural institutions in the nation’s capital, ethically well-founded, managed by a team of academic and curatorial experts. It would be the first enterprise to map the songlines of indigenous Australia with the tools of modern science, and do so with Aboriginal participation, in a cross-cultural spirit, co-operatively, preserving knowledge, advancing understanding. It would show the world the depth of desert life-ways and history. Even the title chosen for the project expressed the sharp excitement its proponents felt: Alive with the Dreaming!
This excitement was shared by the Australian Research Council, which gave the venture funding of more than $800,000 in its 2011 round of grants. Fittingly enough, the project’s first focus was the most famous of all the songlines, the Seven Sisters story, which winds its way across the dunes and mesas of the desert rangelands. It is a tale of pursuit and subterfuge: a wily man gives endless chase, the sisters flee. For years it has been portrayed by outsiders as a women’s story. One past attempt by anthropologists to research its sites was a women-only affair. The saga has already inspired many majestic artworks by painters in the best-known desert communities, so it was a natural theme for a high-profile exhibition. But there was scope in the new project to explore the meaning of the songlines even further. Were they not, after all, a kind of continent-wide geographic imprinting? Those mazy tracks could be portrayed at last in their true light — as emblems of identity, “rich in spiritual, ecological and economic knowledge”, paths of “iconic significance in the national cultural heritage of indigenous and non-indigenous Australia”.
Fine words for a beginning, but three years on the songlines dream has turned into a nightmare for the Aboriginal desert people caught up in its coils: the museums advancing the project grasp little of the depths of the inland’s religious system; the consultations with song-cycle custodians to date have been bizarre and ill-managed; there are elaborate paper protocols and safeguards but, in practice, no is a word Aboriginal art researchers just don’t understand.
The upshot is that on the eve of the first Songlines exhibition, opening this weekend at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, the Pitjantjatjara desert people of the state’s north are in extreme tension, divided, full of anguish. The exhibition has its coterie of Aboriginal backers and its fierce opponents. It is faction against faction, family against family. No collision in recent decades between the grand designs of the mainstream world and an Aboriginal resistance campaign quite rivals this one for its long-term impact: its controversies dominate the community night-time fires. Senior men and women in the heartland talk of little else.
What began as a dewy research scheme to exalt desert art and knowledge is increasingly being seen in the bush as a mortal threat to traditional law and culture.
This crisis on the frontier built step by step; it is now a perfect storm. Its origins lie in the changing nature of the indigenous art scene. After the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the booming, oversupplied desert art market crashed. The painters in remote art centres needed sales. State museums and galleries stepped in, bought heavily and began devising grand projects: none more elaborate than the Canning Stock Route field trip that produced 100 desert paintings and a glitzy exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
Research funds and co-operation between art galleries and academe were the way of the future and the key figurehead for joint projects was the doyen of Aboriginal art scholars, Howard Morphy of the Australian National University. Morphy was the big name on the Songlines grant. With him from the CSR project came a desert veteran, Diana James, who had worked for 30 years in Pitjantjatjara country, running an art centre and a bush tourism camp. James knew and lodged with Margo Neale, the flamboyant indigenous expert at the National Museum. She also had close ties with the social activists of the NPY Women’s Council — the name abbreviates the far desert region’s language groups, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara. And so a grand coalition took shape: the museum, the university, the social services provider.
The Songlines team had their subject, their funding, their key partners. All they needed was Aboriginal backers and James had taken care of that. In 1995, when working at Cave Hill outstation, she had been asked by the families there to record their songs and stories. James was one of a small group of white friends who went out into the bush in the 1970s and early 80s, high ideals in mind, and made the desert their home. They were a radical generation, workers for health, campaigners for land rights: selfless people but for the pride they felt in their Aboriginal ties.
James now had the chance to fulfil her longheld wish to present and strengthen desert culture. She made field trips to the desert country she knew. Other Songlines teams fanned out across the inland, led by well-paid local Aboriginal guides: the vision of a continent-spanning dreaming track was solidifying. The researchers went to the Martu region near Newman, up as far as Roebourne, out into the West Australian lands, seeking Seven Sisters stories and support for their scheme as they went: seeking, in fact, members for a guiding curatorium who would rubber-stamp their venture.
This was where the tensions began. A sharp clash of ideas about desert religion was looming. The members of the Songlines team had a commitment to knowledge-sharing between black and white. They also claimed to have a man- date: “If we do not share our culture,” James’s friend and female co-worker Inawinytji Williamson had explained to her, “it will die.” But for most western desert men of prominence, the exact opposite is true. Many now feel sharing deep culture kills it, showing sites devalues them, what is hidden is most valuable.
Of course the academics and curators understood secrecy was at the heart of desert law, but few grasped quite how obsessive this focus has become in recent years, as infractions have multiplied. Desert leaders are more hardline today than a generation ago because more of their mysteries have been revealed. Sometimes it’s white anthropologists pushing to see behind the veil; sometimes the grave disclosures that occur are inadvertent. Take the case of the Warburton collection, a set of secret paintings kept in a closed collection in Australia’s remotest large desert community.