Fearing Truganini
Tasmanian essayist and poet, currently working as Indigenous Visiting Research Scholar at AIATSIS in Canberra, Greg Lehman looks over David Hansen's recent award-winning essay entitled 'Seeing Truganini' and finds it wanting.
More from this Issue
Working in Indigenous Art Centres
Felicity Wright speaks from long experience, as a worker and as a reviewer of art centres on Aboriginal lands. Her thoughtful article teases out many do's and don'ts in this highly contested field.
Ken and Julia Yonetani / Janet Tavener
Still Life: The Food Bowl: Ken and Julia Yonetani Artereal Gallery, Sydney, June 2011 Mildura Palimpsest #8, 9-11 Sept 2011 GV Art, London, October 2011 Melting moments: Janet Tavener Incinerator Art Space, Willoughby 2 -27 March 2011
Elcho Island: Morning Star over London
Artlink's UK contributing editor Jo Higgins interviewed Melbourne-born London gallerist Rebecca Hossack about her Indigenous art program and her attempts to raise its profile in London. She has two galleries and each summer for three months both galleries show only Australian Indigenous art in her Songlines series. Recently Elcho Island art featured.
Landscapes and Horses: Ivan Durrant
Curator: Rodney James Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery 16 February - 26 April 2011
To hold and protect: Mulka at Yirrkala
The Mulka Project is a Yolngu archive and production centre incorporating a theatre, media lab, project office, audio video library and museum. “As the Mulka Project is growing up we need to be clear that it is just a resource and the law and culture is coming from the land where people are staying, even where there is no one staying, its patterns, the designs and culture, are coming from the country.” states Djambawa Marawili.
Euraba Paper Company, Boggabilla
Associate Lecturer at the College of Fine Art in Sydney Tess Allas writes about when she was NSW Regional Indigenous Cultural Officer and first met the women of Boggabilla who formed the Euraba Paper Company which won the Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize in 2010.
Donning Oxford
Christian Thompson who is one of the two inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholars at Oxford University writes about this experience and how it makes him think of his upbringing and the responsibility it entails. "...it is our arrival at Oxford that reminds me of how much work we still have ahead of us as young Aboriginal people and future leaders of our communities. This is something you feel as an inherent responsibility when you meet people daily from all around the world, whose communities are facing similar hardships and the symptoms of the ravages of colonisation; time is of the essence."
Torres Strait Islander watercolours
The Queensland State Library Executive Manager of Indigenous research and projects Tom Mosby writes about the Margaret Lawrie Works on Paper Collection and the role of art in the lives of Torres Strait Islanders. Between July and October 2011, the watercolours in the Margaret Lawrie Works on Paper Collection will, for the first time, be exhibited together as part of 'Strait Home' at the State Library of Queensland.
An encounter with the National Galleries
Lecturer in the Australian Indigenous Studies program at the University of Melbourne, Odette Kelada describes her visit to the National Gallery of Australia's new Indigenous galleries and the National Portrait Gallery that is just next door and views them as sites of contemporary Frontier warfare.
Rewriting the Labels
Indigenous culture is moving out of dedicated spaces and into the mainstream. Ultimately all Indigenous culture is claiming the space for experiences that have not been widely told and this broadens the space for the stories of everyone whose stories are untold.
Space Antics: Sue Henderson, David Marsden, Penny Mason
Burnie Regional Art Gallery 19 March - 8 May 2011