The Artlink Archive Project: Tracking Indigenous voices

In winter 1984 Artlink reported on the Adelaide Festival/Fringe and Artist’s Week Forums including the session “Aboriginal Art: the Politics of Consumption and Display – How should Aboriginal art, past and present, be displayed in museums and art galleries?” Speakers were Cliff Coulthard, Maureen Watson, Mona Tur, Gordon Inkatji, Gary Foley (then recently appointed Chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board) and John [Djon] Mundine. It was one of Mundine’s first appearances in the magazine, where he has played a constant role as writer, critic, commentator, artist, co-editor, curator and historical witness for nearly forty years. But it’s as a curator that Mundine is best known, and for his catalytic role in the unequivocally political work, The Aboriginal Memorial (1986–88). Always provocative, Mundine was performing the ironic agitator while calling out hard truths in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentenary:

For me to say anything political with that [Yolŋu] art, which is really inherently totally political, you know, I’d be branded as some sort of shit-stirrer from the South that should have nothing to do with those tribal people who are these sort of romantic noble savages.^[1] 

Speaking publicly to his (southern) Adelaide audience in 1984, Mundine was contextualising his status within the Ramingining community in north-east Arnhem Land (where he was art advisor), demonstrating the nuances of claiming a voice in the critical debates and identity politics of the time. The same Artist’s Week Forums included a session on art writing: not surprisingly, Indigenous voices were absent on that panel (despite Artlink’s founding editor Stephanie Britton being Chair). The change would come, but it was a slow burn.

Twenty years later, Mundine’s much-quoted treatise on the five stages of Aboriginal art was published in Artlink, reprised in the essay White face: Blak Mask (2005) where he noted that despite

innumerable conferences, talks, symposiums… concerning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, in fact very few if any of these are discussions/debates by and for ourselves. At a recent conference concerning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art all the speakers were Indigenous Australians. I asked the Indigenous speakers to speak more “honestly” to the subject and not promote their institution but asked the “white” audience members to refrain from speaking and even asking questions to allow space for the Indigenous members to speak. To reinforce this, I asked these audience members, against normal practice, to refrain and listen—to “shut the f**k up”.

Despite what I thought was a clear and strong request, amazingly, some in the audience still thought this didn’t refer to them and had to intervene in the discussion.^[2] 

In 2010, Artlink’s Blak on Blak hit the stands, guest edited by Bundjalung journalist and ABC broadcaster Daniel Browning.^[3] This initiative taken by the Board signalled Artlink’s early commitment to Indigenous editors and writers—Indigenous voices—on Indigenous art, though it was not ‘branded’ INDIGENOUS until the 2011 bumper issue, Beauty and Terror, which remains our heaviest ever at 160 pages.^[4] Speaking from his experience editing five Artlink Indigenous issues, Browning recalled the gamble of commissioning writers working outside the field of visual art, a risk that paid off and one that continues. Equally, the value of a historical overview of the Indigenous, transcultural/Australian contemporary art world is one that Artlink and this issue’s editors Tristen Harwood and Dean Cross revel in: it’s in that spirit that Djon Mundine has been invited to re-enter our archive and open the f**k up on the here and now.