Branded: The Indigenous Aesthetic

I hate the word brand. People have forgotten the importance of sub-culture. We are a community and an intervention.

Ben Watt, Founder, Buzzin’Fly Records

Published June 2011

Jo Rootsey: Painting Country

Dina Ibrahim looks at the Joe Rootsey Retrospective curated by Bruce McLean at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2010 to find an artist who in his short life achieved compelling evocations of his relationship to country.

Published June 2011

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.

Published June 2011

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.

Published June 2011

New Exhibitions Projects Initiatives

Published June 2011

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.

Published June 2011

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.

Published June 2011

Conjure: Zoe Porter

Level Gallery, Brisbane
12 March – 1 April 2011

Published June 2011

Why is there a donkey in that painting?

The painting is by Madigan Thomas of her first contact with pastoralists. She painted her family watching – for the first time – whitefellas traverse donkeys through her country.
ANU PHD candiate Cate Massola who worked at Warmun Art Centre for a year describes the way art and education complement each other in Gija country.

Published June 2011

Alive and Kicking

This issue is subtitled ‘beauty and terror’; let me explain.

I often think of the natural environment of the continent as a metaphor that mirrors the history of colonisation; a kind of infinite pathetic fallacy redoubling on itself.

Published June 2011

Blandowski's Illustrated Encyclopaedia

Freelance curator, honorary associate of Museum Victoria and Blandowski-ite from way back John Kean analyses this prickly Prussian polymath's Illustrated Encyclopedia on Australia at last brought together and to light by the efforts of New Zealander Harry Allen. The book includes contributions by Mark Dugagrist, Brook Andrew, Luise Hercus and Thomas A. Darragh.

Published June 2011

Romantic Landscapes

Laura Fisher worked for three years on indigenous artists' biographies for the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online) and is now completing a doctoral thesis on the indigenous art market at the University of NSW. Here she brings her wide knowledge to bear on representational and romantic landcape paintings by indigenous artists.

Published June 2011