The Broome Mix is useful to bear in mind when thinking on all things multicultural - cultural diversity. In Broome that's culture - a mix of Aboriginal, Asian and European.
Exhibition review: Works by Nola Routoulas, Helen Karpathakis, Nora Mantzioris and Alexandra Akritidis.
Artzone Gallery, Adelaide South Australia April 1991
Fortunately the artists are capable of overturning all the newly acceptable conceits about them, and they might deny most of the assumptions that multicultural academics make about them, whilst still giving a new window on our world, as indeed, all good art from anywhere will.
With the exception of some programming on SBS and the ABC, artists receive very little exposure on television. The limitations of television, the need to maintain a wide audience reach, the difficult question of what is 'good art' in a televisual sense, all may help to explain the absence of living artists from this, the most powerful of all media.
An exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art 'Aboriginal Art and Spirituality' opened at the High Court of Australia in 1991. The exhibition to tour after its opening in Canberra.....All of the works in the exhibition speak quite overtly about the highly problematic intervention of the missions, the politics of racism and the way in which Aboriginal spirituality will always remain linked to the land.
In December 1990 the South Australian Government announced a new 'Multiculturalism-in-the-Arts' Program to encourage major arts organisations in receipt of government funding to increase their activities for people from linguistic and culturally diverse backgrounds.
The Network links NESB, ethnic and arts organisations, sets up cross cultural and other training programs for artists, arts organisations and the media and lobbies governments and other funding bodies to reassess their policies and practices.
Since the birth of Australian television, non-anglo Australians have suffered from an acute case of foreign accent syndrome. Unfortunately 35 years on they are still suffering, not only from bad accents usually spoken by Anglo actors playing NESBs, but from the dearth of authentic storylines and subsequently the lack of accurate representation of NESBs on our TV and screens.
A great starting point for more research in this area. List prepared by Dr Helen Andreoni, of the School of Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies, University of New England.