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Aboriginal Law Bulletin (ALB)
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Johnson, Vivien --- "A Whiter Shade of Palaeolithic: Aboriginal Art and Appropriation" [1988] AboriginalLawB 47; (1988) 1(34) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 4


A Whiter Shade of Palaeolithic:

Aboriginal Art and Appropriation

by Vivien Johnson

A discussion of why we appropriate Aboriginal art and the relationship between the dominant and subjugated cultures.

"Our policy is not to prevent the works of Aboriginal artists being reproduced - on the contrary, we seek to encourage such activity, for we are happy to see that people all over the world are interested in Australian Aboriginal culture. But it is hard to imagine the works of great Australian artists such as Sydney Nolan or Pro Hart being reproduced without their permission. We are only asking that we be granted the same recognition, that our works be respected and that we be acknowledged as the rightful owners of our own works of art. "[1]

The story of Aboriginal struggle against cultural appropriation begins over a decade ago with the pioneering work of the man whose words I have just quoted. This renowned bark painter, musician and leader of the Riratingu people was goaded into action by the sight of one of his paintings reproduced on a tea-towel. His advocacy of the rights of Aboriginal artists attracted bureaucratic support, and in 1976 he presided over the establishment of the Aboriginal Artists Agency (A.A.A.), a government funded and staffed organisation dedicated to pursuing copyright matters on behalf of Aboriginal artists. In the last 12 years, the Agency has pursued numerous actions under the 1968 Copyright Act, all but one of which have been successful. Offending materials have been withdrawn. Royalty and damages payments have been extracted. Important legal precedents have been set for non-Aboriginal access to traditional Aboriginal imagery. Since the lost case, over 150 designs have been registered under the Designs Act to safeguard their traditional owners against disinheritance in the eyes of white law when their designs are printed in editions larger than 50.

On the other hand, it can be argued that registering of designs could actually increase their vulnerability to would-be plagiarists by providing them with a handy source of reference materials. Also, the Copyright Act - as it stands - takes no cognisance of the complex patterns of collective ownership of designs operating in traditional Aboriginal society. Nor can it hope to encompass the moral weight of Aboriginal copyright provisions extending back through millennia. The individualistic bias of the Act neglects the rights of all who bear the culture to benefit from the use that individual (Aboriginal) artists might make of its resources. The artists themselves do redistribute their wealth, but it would be romantic nonsense to pretend that they do this in accordance with western principles of equity or need. Maybe it is their business, but their generosity is directed along the pre-established channels of influence and obligation which operate in Aboriginal communities - it is more responsive to power than poverty.

Nevertheless, the situation now is better than it was before the Aboriginal initiatives. David Malangi s rights to the design incorporated into the old dollar note were completely over-looked at the time by its appropriator, designer Gordon Andrews. Only the intervention of the media eventually secured the artist some measure of social and financial recognition.

Moreover, group ownership of designs is not actually ruled out by the provisions of the Copyright and Design Acts. The limited period of protection they provide would seem to permit the transmission of designs to their rightful inheritors in the next generation before copyright expires - providing the necessary structures are maintained within Aboriginal culture itself. The Copyright Act, for all its shortcomings, is probably preferable to the alternative of some kind of heritage legislation, which might actually curtail the rights of individual Aboriginal artists to make use of "the part of their birthright which gives them a chance to be special and successful".[2]

For designs still under Aboriginal copyright, the legislative and bureaucratic infrastructures are now in place to police the kind of commercial rip-offs which have been the focus of Aboriginal concern with this issue. The parity with non-Aboriginal artists in matters of copyright which Mawalan's eldest son set out to achieve has arguably been achieved - indeed the scales may even be tipped in favour of Aboriginal artists.

The A.A.A. might lament its lack of resources to perform the task of surveillance as effectively as it would like, but in principle at least, there is no great cause for alarm, and certainly none for the rhetoric employed by the C.L.C. paper Land Rights News in a recent article on this issue:

"As the Bicentenary approaches, many non-Aboriginal people are looking to new ways they can steal from Aboriginal people. Not satisfied with a two hundred year history of theft of land, they now choose to steal Aboriginal culture for personal profit."[3]

On the contrary, traditional culture is ihcreasingly being recognised by communities where it has been maintained as an important economic resource for Aboriginal people. Within these communities, the prevailing attitude amongst Aboriginal artists remains as its original spokesman expressed it.

In the 20 years since Aboriginal people were finally given a mandate for self-determination by the encompassing Australian Society, Aboriginal Art has emerged as a force to be reckoned with, rather than a resource ripe for exploitation. Far from dissolving the integrity of the culture from which it draws its inspiration, Aboriginal art's interventions in western culture have succeeded in effectively challenging many of its ethnocentric assumptions.

The question posed by this forum "Have We the Right to Appropriate Aboriginal Imagery?" is an expression of the degree to which one of those assumptions - the idea of Art as some kind of universal human heritage - is now under siege. The corollary of that high flown sentiment is of course that the cultures of subjugated peoples are "ours" for the taking, to appropriate at will. The legal position on this is now quite clear. A fabric designer who had appropriated the work of an Aboriginal artist tried on a version of the humanist justification when the A.A.A. took him to court under the Copyright Act. He defended his right as a citizen of the universe to access to this piece of the "cosmic culture" - and lost the case.

The circulation of images of Aboriginality is well on the way to becoming one of the distinctive characteristics of Australian culture - "low" as well as "high". A flood of appropriations ranging across the entire cultural spectrum - from wallpaper to High Art - have created a situation to which Kenneth Coutts-Smith's much quoted description of "cultural colonialism" rings all too true.

"Cultural colonialism does not massacre and imprison and institutionalise a subservient people, but more gently, absorbs the values of a peripheral culture into the larger system of the dominant one. "[4]

This is the spectre that haunts discussions such as this - that even in addressing ourselves to such a question we are participating in this broader cannibalisation of Aboriginal culture. Against Coutts-Smith, I have argued on a number of occasions that the perspective of cultural colonialism not only limits Aboriginal actors to the roles of victim and dupe, but also denies the historical achievements of Aboriginal art in the last decade in effectively contesting the once taken-for-granted superiority of western artistic endeavour. Local racists claiming to speak for Aboriginal artists desperately argue for a return to the old separatism.

We can find a way out of the irrelevancies of individualistic moralising by applying a sociological perspective and reformulating the question to ask not "have we the right?" but "Why are we appropriating Aboriginal imagery?". I'm not talking about intentions here - good or bad, another boring Bicentennial caucasian guilt-trip - but the long-term historical potential of this process of Aboriginalisation of Australian culture. This is a lot bigger than just "us" here in this remote out-post of High Art, it is taking on international dimensions. Haven't Crocodile Dundee's aspirations to the status of white Aborigine, pretending to the wisdom of indigenous bushcraft, earned him a place in American box-office history?

America well understands the potential of what I will call the technique of "minstrelisation" now being applied to the culture of Aboriginal Australia by members of the dominant settler culture. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. Beginning in the 19th century, the tradition of black and whiteminstrels in the United States produce in the mid-20th century figures like Al Jolson, Amos and Andy, Eddie Cantor, who in their time were the most popular entertainers in the country. They provided a channel along which black American dialects, music, dance and interpersonal style flooded the mass media and developed into the basis of an American vernacular culture. This culture was most fully expressed in rock and roll, where the Mick Jaggers of this world perform in the same minstrel tradition without thought to black face, so completely have the black traditions been identified with.

Though it contravenes the separatist political strategies which are as vital to the Aboriginal movement as they were to western feminism at a certain stage in its evolution, such a scenario for Aboriginal traditions is not, at least to lovers of rock and roll, an entirely negative prospect. Ultimately, minstrelisation did not, in the American instance at least, affect the prior claim or continuance of the black traditions. Against the pessimism of cultural colonialism's prognosis, what we are witnessing might be optimistically construed as cultural decolonisation. By decolonisation, I mean the process whereby forms of the indigenous practices and institutions that prevailed before conquest are restored as the dominant cultural practice.

Since its beginnings in 19th century Europe, industrial society has been marked by a desperate search for models of its own salvation in the very cultures being displaced by industrialisation.

As Roger Bastide wrote of the American experience of this process:

"The spiritual void which the city creates at the heart of each human individual is resented naturally, just as much by Europeans as by the Negro. As a result the European turns increasingly to Africa or Black America [or in our case Black Australia] for the satisfaction of those vital needs which industrial society can no longer answer."[5]

That observation was made in 1974. How much more does it apply now in the New Age of information with its Baudrillardian chorus: if this world is less real than its representations, they are infinitely less real than Aboriginal Dreamings to the last dreamers of western culture, stumbling in the deserts of High Tech.

However, as a technique in which a subjugated culture is emulated within a carefully regulated and socially approved context, minstrelisation raises the issue of the relations of power between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists engaged in this process. So long as there remains a radical difference between the emulators' participation in the institutions of their dominant culture - in this case the white art world - and that of the members of the subjugated group, this problem will exist. The minstrel - the emulator - has only to learn a minimal number of cultural techniques to be identified with the subjugated group - in this case with Aboriginality. He or she can take up and shed the mask at will.

The Aboriginal artist must not only contend with the problems of continuing to "pass" in their own culture, despite their success in ours, but must also master the cultural devices of the dominant group, always running the risk of "unmasking" and embarrassment. It is this inequality that "we" must confront and overcome - in ourselves mainly. Aboriginal artists themselves are becoming increasingly adept at negotiating the rapids of western culture.

Women Dreaming

Re-appropriation/dissemination: was a line of T-shirts with labels explaining meaning and origin of designs, available exclusively from Outback Arts Australia by direct arrangement with the artist, whose signature (Clifford Possum) also appears on the T-shirts beneath the reproduction of his painting.

Kaapa Tkampitjinpa Winparrku Serpents

Reproduced initially by arrangement with Papunya Tula Artists as a tapestry for the Victorian Axis Centre, subsequently without permission by a line of T-shirt manufacturers, later withdrawn from sale.

The Dreamtime Awakes as Inetrior Design

From the Clunies-Ross wallpaper and fabric Press Kit:

Australia's legendary Dreamtime is the source for one of the most ambitious and adventurous wallpaper and fabric collections ever designed, and produced, in this country.

More than a year of exhaustive research into Australia's primitive artforms was undertaken before Clunies-Ross designers began to put down on paper the first fascinating concepts that were to become Australians".

Of the wallpaper designs Dream time forms the nucleus from which all the other symbols and patterns are drawn. It epitomises the immense care to which Clunies-Ross designers have gone to embody some of the world's most unusual artistic expressions in an overall effect that will look perfectly at home ... in people's homes.

Tiny dots in flowing patterns, abstract shapes and geometrics all merge together in Dreamtime and provide a backdrop for the traditional "x-ray" animals of folklore, the kangaroo, the dugong and the turtle. Stylised men in dugout canoes paddle serenely across lakes of swirling colour.

The Corroboree design is a series of tiny dots which the ancients depicted as symbolic pathways to campsites and ritual areas. Arnhem Track has a similar feeling but is less formal and "flows" softly across the wallpaper.

he Australiana" fabric designs include Dreamtime, Papunya, Molong and Durrus Stripe in a variety of eye-catching colourways all of which are expected to have ready acceptance in Australia.

Describing "Australiana" a spokesman for Clunies-Ross Australia, said; "The traditional art of our country is quite unique and so it required an immensely sensitive approach to adapt it to the modern home environment."


[1] Wanjuk Marika "Copyright in Aboriginal Art" Aboriginal News DAA February, 1976

[2] Chieka Dixon Art Network 1984 No 13 p6.

[3] Land Rights News, December 1987.

[4] Kenneth Coutts-Smith "Aboriginal Art", Fuse February/March 1982, p310.

[5] Roger Bastide African Civilisations in the New World, Hurst Condon, 1974, p224.


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