A History of Aboriginal Art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Vanessa Russ

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367651381
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000398687
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

In this highly original study, Vanessa Russ examines the gradual invention of Aboriginal art within the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This process occurred as the social histories of Australia expanded and recognised Aboriginal people, through wars and political shifts, and as international organisations began placing pressure on nation states to expand, diversify, and respect multicultural perspectives. This book explores a state art institution as a case study to consider these complex narratives through a single history of Aboriginal art from early colonisation until today.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and Indigenous studies.

1 ‘Ghost Habitats’

The Dispossession of an Indigenous Nation and the Rise of the British Colony in Australia

Introduction

In 2012, Native American artist collective Postcommodity cut a square hole out of the floor of the Yiribana Gallery at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in order to expose the earth beneath it. The artwork, Do You Remember When?, 2012, (Figure 1.1), was exhibited for the Eighteenth Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations, 2012, and included a sound recording of the Gadigal language – the language spoken by Australian Aboriginals from the Sydney area. The reverberation from the sound piece felt as though the land was being brought back to life – bringing the audience back in time, raising questions of ownership and place, and cognising the gallery’s location on, and as part of, Gadigal country once again. This conceptual play with ownership – the destructive act of cutting out a thick layer of cement, the exposure of the earth and the reverberation of sound within a barren space – invited the audience to reflect upon the past inhabitants who would have occupied the gallery’s current site, who had lived and worked on and around the location, accessing the waterways around Woolloomooloo for fishing and the freshwater stream near the Royal Botanic Garden for water, thus challenging the history of the gallery.

Figure 1.1 Postcommodity. Do You Remember When?, 2012. AGNSW. Acc. Biennale 201224. ©Postcommodity, courtesy of the artists and Bockley Gallery. Photograph ©AGNSW, Christopher Smee. Installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Eighteenth Biennale of Sydney, 2012.

This chapter explores the value of recalling the early colonial impact on the site and location of the AGNSW in Sydney, as a way of establishing the colonisation of Australia through a slow series of actions over a long period. Although people may seldom think about the impact of colonisation today, it is important to identify its happenings and evolutions – not solely as acts of history, but as acts of policy, cultural norms and, for some, social privileges. In terms of written history, there are no documents that define Australia before the colonial invasion and takeover and there are no recorded Australian Aboriginal oral histories from the time. This chapter presents an attempt at reconstructing what we know – the loss of plants and animals such as emus who had been known to frequent the area around the gallery, and the gradual reshaping of the landscape into an English manor, with a farm making way for a domain and botanical garden, reflective of the aristocracy of an empire.

The history of art and culture as a Eurocentric construct is visited to give context to the earliest evidence of the history of the AGNSW, as a way of making space for a history of art and culture of place. Here, the relevance of lived history and the role it plays in art history is of interest. There were reasons for such sparsely populated Aboriginal communities prior to and post contact with the Europeans, including Aboriginal laws, religious beliefs and property management. The inability of the English to understand these reasons did not discount the existence of any controlling factors that managed human behaviour – such as marriage, trade and cultural practices. Instead, these factors were denied in the making of Australian history in order to claim control of the continent of Australia. The technological differences between the British and the Australian Aboriginals in relation to weaponry and battle strategy, along with concepts of unification between England, Scotland and Wales, allowed for the successful British takeover of the continent – the spear was certainly no match for musket and gunpowder. The social structures in which Aboriginal communities operated were not capable of generating the capacity to fight wars against invading forces on different scales, and both the seclusion and integration of Aboriginal inhabitants allowed the British to establish the town of Sydney, to move across the Nepean River and to gradually make claims of sovereignty. This turned into the settler narrative that has been used by some European-Australians over the last two centuries to disenfranchise the rights of the original Australians; and should be read as the result of colonisation and Empire-building, with an element of racial vilification to assist with justifying the means to an end.

At its heart, colonisation was always about trade, and while terms such as globalisation and capitalism may be used today, these definitions very much take the shape of colonisation and reflect its continuation to the present day, with slight shifts in vernacular. Australia remains a colony of the British Monarchy and this may be one of the difficulties in attempting to explain why decolonisation of the nation’s art institutions can be fraught with issues and should not be attempted unless the Colony itself is seeking to further its independence and knowledge on what a new approach might look like.

The history of Australia is similar to that of other previously British-ruled countries, such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States. All were reconstructed in the eyes of the conqueror for the extraction of resources to Europe and all had pre-existing inhabitants who occupied the lands prior to annexation. The evidence on Australian Aboriginal existence suggests a minimum of 60,000 years of occupation and establishes the culture as the longest living continued culture on Earth. This recently revealed history has yet to impact the settler narrative of Australia, but may do so in future generations. In terms of Aboriginal occupation overall, it is suggested that there was a form of migration from Asia to Australia, via the islands of Indonesia, and that can be seen with ongoing contact that has included the confiscation and destruction of Indonesian fishing vessels by Australian authorities as recently as 2019. In the context of thousands of years, the connections between cultural similarities and existing languages suggest that Australia played a part in the Asian region before colonisation, however, Aboriginal people were fully independent and without direct impact for centuries.

The act of forgetting

The writing of history in primary and secondary schools in Australia has contributed in part to ignoring Aboriginal occupation. It is not hard to recall images of etchings that represented Captain James Stirling sailing up the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) in Perth and to debate in class about how it was not so bad that the English had arrived, for otherwise, it would have been the French or Dutch. This discourse established a clearing of history and a justification that did not allow room for Aboriginal perspectives. To have a settler history, even a convict history, was classed above being related to the land and original to place. Capitalism, seen as a driver of colonisation by big business such as mining, is all that mattered, making the Indigenous relationship to land an inhibitor to market shares. Money was the only real driver, however, the act of forgetting history has allowed people to justify what may be viewed today as unconscionable behaviour in terms of the destruction of sacred and social places of significance across the country. In ‘Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque’, Rob Nixon writes that: ‘environmentalists sometimes refer to “ghost habitats” as those ecological shadows of a once powerful presence in the landscape, traces from which one can reconstruct what otherwise appears to have vanished entirely’, or what he also refers to as the ‘gradual violence of forgetting’ (Nixon 2009, 250).

Nixon goes on to write:

A transnational ethics of place can help us integrate into the powerful conventions of pastoral, the violence beneath colonial and postcolonial uprootings. As an imaginative tradition, English pastoral has long been both nationally definitive and fraught with anxiety. At the heart of English pastoral lies the idea of the nation as a garden idyll, where neither labour nor violence intrudes. To stand as a self-contained national heritage landscape, English pastoral has depended on the screening out of colonial spaces and histories, much as the American wilderness ideal has entailed an amnesiac relationship toward the Indian wars of dispossession. But what happens when memories of colonial space intrude upon pastoralism, disturbing its pretensions of national self-definition and self-containment? The result is a land of writing that I called postcolonial pastoral, writing that reflects an idealised nature through memories of environmental and colonial degradation into colonies. Postcolonial pastoral can be loosely viewed as a kind of environmental double-consciousness.

(Nixon 2009, 245)

The gradual rise of new wealth, assisted by the law enforced removal of Australian Aboriginal people from their lands, and the increased legislation imposed on the poor and the destitute, would assist in the transformation from a space where sustainable practices – such as the use of fire to maintain the under grasses and the continued care for plants and animals to maintain their abundance – were overlooked in order to transform the Domain and the Royal Botanic Garden into spaces for the elite of Sydney. It was common practice for all estates in England to have substantial grounds surrounding castles and manors. These grounds were known as domains to the estates and provided private places for the occupants of these estates.

The early steps to colonise the site where the AGNSW now sits included the cutting down of palm trees and the building of a tented camp. This was followed with the building of the Governor’s house on Phillip Street, which was surrounded by several acres of gardens, a flour mill, a farm and stables. Now known as Government House, it is important to recognise it as the house of the Governor. The Domain stretches from Albert Street to St Mary’s Cathedral, down to Woccanmagully (Farm Cove). It encircles Government House with Macquarie Street to the west and the AGNSW to the east. The Royal Botanic Garden is within the Domain, although today it is thought of as a separate space between the Mitchell Library and the AGNSW, separated by the Cahill Expressway.

The paths and roads through the Domain were constructed in 1831 to assist with public access and the space acted as a ‘mustering point’ for the Federation March in 1901. The area was a point of departure for soldiers leaving for war and at other times it has acted as a speakers’ corner for protests and public expressions. The first cricket game held in the Domain was highly criticised, but since then the space has been used for annual sporting and cultural events. It has provided a location for the short-film festival Tropfest and free concerts by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, as well as having hosted visits by the Honorary Dalai Lama. One of the information posts of the Royal Botanic Garden and Domain Trust near the AGNSW in 2012 presented a map of the area in 1816. The text highlighted the loss of space from the original map due to excavation for the Cahill Expressway in 1958 and notes that the Domain Trust was taking a strong stand against proposals for further encroachments on the Domain.

On the western boundary of the Domain sits the Mitchell Library, overlooking the Royal Botanic Garden. The Conservatorium of Music is housed in what was the horse stables of the Governor’s house and closer to Warrane, or Sydney Cove, is the iconic Sydney Opera House, which stands on what is known as Bennelong Point or Dubbagullee, down the road from St Mary’s Cathedral and not far from the Australian Museum. These buildings are all of cultural significance in Sydney and are located on or near culturally significant ceremonial grounds to the Gadigal people, who have continued to engage with these sites up until the present. Figure 1.2 is a photograph of Warrane in the 1800s, masking the original country beneath, while still presenting early architectural development.

Initiation of the Colony

This story really starts at Warrane. When Captain Arthur Phillip first landed in Warrane (also known as Sydney Cove or Circular Quay) he believed it to be the perfect location to drop anchor. Both Warrane and Woccanmagully (also known as Farm Cove) were small coves with little sandy beaches and a population of tall trees. They also had freshwater streams that ran down into the coves, and while the stream at Woccanmagully is today more of a pond cut off by a man-made wall and footpath, the water continues to make its way into the cove.

Figure 1.2 Charles H. Kerry. Circular Quay, Sydney, circa 1895. photograph. Digital Collections, National Library of Australia. Call Number: PIC Box J3 #P802/91. This area is also known as Warrane or Sydney Cove.

The other stream, commonly known as the Tank Stream, continues to run under the skyscrapers and concrete into the harbour. These streams were the lifeline for any sort of survival for Australian Aboriginals and later for Europeans residing in the area. At the head of Woccanmagully was a ‘bora’ ceremonial ground called Yurong, where major ceremonies like the Dog Dance and the Kangaroo Dance were performed to ‘impart the young men the power over the hunting dogs and the power to kill the kangaroo’ as noted by the panel in 2012 (Royal, Panel). It has been estimated that seven Australian Aboriginal clans lived around Sydney and its coastal areas. Speaking a common language, they are still known as the Eora today. The name Eora means ‘people’ or ‘of this place’ and includes the Gweagal, Gadigal, Gameygal, Wangal and Wallumedegal and others. In this small area of Sydney, between Watsons Bay down to Warrane and including the Domain and the Royal Botanic Garden, the Gadigal clan of between fifty to eighty people resided.

The importance of considering place is its potential to extend the worldview of art history, particularly in the context of the discipline that continues to be driven by a Eurocentric model, which often excludes those of non-European heritage – mostly because there is no other way to deconstruct hierarchical structures, even if they are fundamentally inventions, without evidencing the other as having been there. Lucy Lippard writes in Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, that a sense of place can expand both the idea of art history and the nation state (Lippard 1998, 10). Lippard argues that everyone has the ability to appreciate a sense of place within the spaces that are most familiar to them. Place means more than a small town; it can also mean urban and industrialised places. Although places may have formed differently, the same place may have more than one history; becoming plural spaces with art as a result of cross-cultural communities. Lippard says that history can often be ‘described as a fiction written by the conquerors’, while other histories stay ‘hidden, sometimes literally buried’ (Lippard 1998, 13). Yet, ‘we study history as great waves that pass over the land, changing how we use and think of it’ (Lippard 1998, 13). Apart from elements of ‘nostalgia and longing’, we rarely see it as our story (Lippard 1998, 13). But the fact is that the history of place goes right u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Ghost Habitats’: The Dispossession of an Indigenous Nation and the Rise of the British Colony in Australia
• 2. The Early History of the Art Gallery of New South Wales: 1871 to 1940
• 3. Modernism and an Australian Aboriginal Art Collection: 1940 to 1971
• 4. Curatorship in the AGNSW and Australian Aboriginal Art: 1973 to 1990
• 5. Australian Aboriginal Art Inside/Out: 1990–2020
• 6. Conclusion
• Index