I’m stepping out, don’t mess about.
Don’t tell me to be patient.
I’ve been wedded, enslaved, white washed, and saved.
But now, I’m liberated.
The words of Aunty Maureen Watson – who was fiercely Blak and fiercely clever with words of all shapes and sizes – express what Briggs (in his Reconciliation Week breakfast address in Adelaide this year) called the “invincible spirit” that makes up our cultural values. This spirit informs our values of Aboriginal culture. It yells proudly to the world that we do things our way and that our way of doing is Blak resilience, Blak spirit and Blak culture.
In the past decade, we have seen an explosion in the consumption of Aboriginal art and culture around the world, which some might assume signifies an embrace of our cultural values. Dot paintings cover Reconciliation Action Plans, football guernseys, and they probably adorn a water bottle that’s been forgotten somewhere in your cupboard.
This consumption and commodification of culture, which largely fulfils non-Indigenous consumers’ need for “identifiable” Indigenous art, is an external force that assumes authority for determining authenticity. Some of this art, then, is not about our way of doing things – instead it creates a narrowing of Aboriginal cultural expression. I wonder if the Aboriginal flag had been designed today, would it be a dot painting?
The flag design we do have comes from artist Harold Thomas, who created it in 1970 – an era where the cultural momentum was exemplified by Aunty Maureen’s words. Her verse captures the hope for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nationhood and solidarity that sprung out of the political momentum of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
This momentum built as First Nations people poured into cities off missions, and away from the direct control of movement and personhood exercised by successive governments and mission managers. It was the beginning of many of the national Aboriginal community-controlled organisations that support First Nations peoples today: legal centres, health centres, child-care support, arts and culture centres.
There was a huge rise in the political activism and cultural expression of Aboriginal people and it came with innovations aplenty, including political designs that drew on the aesthetic language of the era to produce protest movements, placards, T-shirts and campaign posters. Aboriginal people were engaged in what our communities describe as “self-determination”, meaning our capacity to express and describe our own voices, political positions and the needs of our communities. We were moving out from under the control of the so-called protectors.
Condoman was designed by Michael Callaghan and Paul Cockram at Redback Graphix in 1987. Courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum Collection. Purchased 1990. Photo: Danica Micallef
This movement and new freedom created an explosion of creativity; a renaissance of design, art and politics that was an expression of the lived experiences of the artists. Aboriginal people were Blak, were writing plays and TV series, and designing and displaying identity.
Condoman was an iconic image of my ’80s childhood. This health campaign poster was designed by Aboriginal health workers and riffed on the popular Phantom comic series that lots of Aboriginal kids were reading. It shows how Aboriginal people were extending on, repurposing and subverting the creative mainstream for our own purposes; taking ownership of the image and message to suit the values of our communities.
Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Foley and – later on – Sandra Saunders and the late Destiny Deacon are a few artists whose iconic work provides a visual narrative as part of these political movements. Their work folds in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values of dry humour, turning truth around, returning the gaze, exploring politicised identity and unashamed Blakness (“Blak” was coined by Deacon in the early ’90s).
These artists express their Blakness strongly in their work – both directly or through artifice – without conforming to non-Indigenous notions of Indigenous identity. This is the embodiment of visual Sovereignty – as described by Jolene Rickard – being conveyed through complex cultural expression.
The work of Deacon, Moffatt, Saunders and Foley, now well known nationally and internationally, subverts the notion of the white gaze by turning it back on itself. It avoids the expected expressions of Aboriginality and asks important questions for Aboriginal communities about the meaning of what Briggs (at the Reconciliation Week breakfast) called our “cultural values”: the same values of excellence, invincible spirit, and resilience.
Moffatt’s work, for example, does this by inserting Aboriginality into banal white Australian tropes. It demonstrates that we are still here in the everyday, being ourselves, despite the history, and that the artist decides her cultural expression. There is no performing Indigeneity in simplified terms – these artists simply are engaged in complex expressions of identity, while speaking back to the white ideas of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation in sophisticated ways. And they are doing it with excellence.
Sandra Saunders, Redfern Speech Now What, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
At the same time as this radical explosion in urban art, a parallel movement was also happening in central Australia. In the early ’70s (and some speculate as early as the ’60s), dot paintings emerged onto canvas through the men’s art movement at Papunya. These symbols represented ceremonial body paints and stories told in sand. These are already contemporary versions of traditional lore and come with very specific rules about who has permission to tell those stories of Country, land, Songlines. These dot paintings are active and interactive, they are ceremony, dance and singing up Country. There is a code and those who have grown up with those stories and ceremony understand the book, the story, the knowledge. For the rest of us, it is a pretty painting, but also a pretty painting bought for its imbued meaning.
Desmond Taylor from Martumili artists explained this in 2018 at a public hearing held as part of the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual arts and crafts.
“We are maintaining these stories that we put [on canvas] to maintain our history. No other people can make these designs that they have no understanding of,” he said.
This movement to share story on canvas has created an amazing worldwide Indigenous Australian art industry, which is predominately made up of central desert and northern Aboriginal cross hatch painting. These styles of painting have also been used in the Aboriginal political movements of Australia. Prominent examples include the Yirrkala Bark petitions of 1963 and Barunga statement of the late ’80s, which demonstrate that these art practices reflect the lived experiences of Aboriginal peoples and sit at the crossover of the political, traditional and contemporary.
However, in recent years there has been an explosion of so-called contemporary dot-style art originating from other regions across Australia. Some of these paintings are non-Indigenous produced and some are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander produced.
The Indigenous art market is estimated to be worth around $250 million (including merchandise and consumer products) and in 2019/20 it provided $44 million to 19,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait artists. The Productivity Commission’s 2022 report highlighted the souvenir sector as a strong market for fake art, reporting that 55-60 per cent of sales “bearing Indigenous designs” are non-Indigenous authored. The harm this does is obvious, both economically through stolen revenue, and culturally through stereotyping, misrepresentation and personal hurt and emotional distress caused by sacred objects being misused. But while the souvenir market is where much significant harm is being done, I might also ask Community about the impact of those of us painting dots without knowledge of their imbued cultural meaning.
Blak excellence is where we celebrate living in our values, contributing to our cultures, and living with the “invincible spirit” of our Indigeneity. Where we allow ourselves to be self-determining in the way we contribute to the world, our family and our communities; where our Indigeneity isn’t a performance, where we don’t need to seek external validation of that identity, and we are not characterised by our deficit. Many artists exemplify that excellence. Their work speaks of our values, and not of the artifices that non-Indigenous people would like to ascribe to us. We are not superficial two-dimensional white ideas; we cannot be projected upon. Our spirituality, and the ways our traditions and cultural heritage are expressed and understood are ours to define.
Dot painting that is culturally bereft (both of values and knowledge) isn’t Blak excellence. Blak Douglas called this out by examining what he termed “commercial commodification vs cultural integrity” in his Target Culture – POA artwork. Douglas’ red dot turns a lens on the proliferation of dots as the essential identity of Indigenous art and the role of galleries and art consumers in continuing to define and determine authenticity.
Our art is informed by the politics of our times. The politics and political movements around land rights, incarceration rates, child protection, employment, and Sovereignty are still very much a part of the lived experience of Aboriginal people. There has also been a movement in recent years to embrace, revive, renew and connect with language and traditional knowledges, which were often lost and suppressed by colonial physical and epistemic violence. However, the commercialisation and commodification of our culture and traditions undermines our ability to determine our identity and cultural values. It also creates new models of economic haves and have-nots, where not everyone benefits from this capital. This is especially true because – as the Productivity Commission report highlighted – our copyright laws do not yet protect collective intellectual property rights.
We need space for our communities to have conversations about all of this, despite the constant demands imposed on our culture, so that we can ensure that it is us, not others, who benefit culturally, communally and generationally, as well as economically, from our work and cultural expressions. What are the true costs to our communities if we don’t have those conversations?
Indigenous knowledges are our own unique ways of looking at the world and recording our understandings of it. These knowledges are constantly changing and being built upon, like all living and evolving cultures and communities. If you want to support Aboriginal communities, help to build the spaces for these conversations to happen within communities, instead of consuming.
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I have no objection to cultural revival, or commercial manufacture. I think it is necessary for some and it allows us to create ongoing economic benefits for and from our expressions of culture. Briggs exemplifies this in his musical and social expression. But, let’s make sure it’s being created by our communities, is informed by our cultural values and the legacies of the values of our ancestors, and is not just a performance of our blackness for commodification and neo-colonial appropriation. These cultural products need to be based on something genuine, or they become pageantry.
Dameeli Coates is a Wakka Wakka textile artist and curator. She is a recipient of the Arts South Australia and InReview First Nations Arts Writing mentorship. She is working with Mirning artist, writer and academic Ali Gumillya Baker to write a series of articles for InReview.
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