AustLit

'The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting, 1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.' (Publication abstract) 

'This article investigates the first exhibition of Aboriginal art to be shown in a state art gallery, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in 1957. The curators were anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt. The exhibition was held when there was a growing interest in Aboriginal art, its links to national identity and the need to exhibit it to educate viewers about the art. The legacies of this exhibition are various including that it signalled a museological shift from anthropological modes of curating Aboriginal art to an aesthetic approach, and it began a conversation between curators, anthropologists, and art historians, and more recently with First Nations curators, about which approaches to employ in presenting Aboriginal art.' (Publication abstract)

'This article focuses on two episodes in the Australian modernist artist Clifton Pugh's (1924–1990) artistic career – his journey across the Nullarbor Plain in 1954 and 1956, and his travels to the Kimberley in 1964 – where his experience of the desert environment and its Indigenous inhabitants resulted in a pictorial engagement with aesthetic and sociological forms of Aboriginalism. Pugh's landscapes contributed significantly to national imagery during the 1950s and 1960s, yet his engagement with Aboriginal art, people, and culture has been overlooked. Drawing on the visual record, critic's reviews, and Pugh's statements and interviews, this article argues that Aboriginalism was a crucial element in shaping his expression of a primal Australian landscape and his own existential search for identity as an artist and as an Australian. It not only transformed his landscape art but also his sense of being and belonging in the Australian environment.' (Publication abstract)

'This article sets out to demonstrate the uneven history of settler-Australians’ labelling of Indigenous cultural objects and documents as ‘art’. Using the case of William Barak (c. 1824–1903) as its example, it asks, how was Barak’s work understood prior to the major re-evaluations of Aboriginal art as ‘art’ in the 1980s? A series of fleeting moments of understanding, exchange and recognition provide a hitherto-overlooked genealogy of the shifting reception of Barak’s paintings and drawings within his own lifetime and up to the 1940s. These moments encompass his agency in diplomatic exchange, his peer-to-peer relationships in Melbourne’s colonial artworld, and the early placement of Barak’s work in cultural institutions leading eventually to the first inclusion of his work in an art exhibition in 1943. Selected examples from this trajectory demonstrate an uneven path to recognition while illustrating their ability to exceed the category of art from a western viewpoint.' (Publication abstract)

'Unaipon descendant, Kym Kropinyeri, had promised to Unaipon and other Ngarrindjeri elders that he would pass on their history, including accounts of what happened to them at Point McLeay mission. This article addresses the Unaipon inventions. We provide a comprehensive account of Unaipon’s patent applications and the Protection-era restrictions that impacted Aboriginal inventors. The fate of Unaipon’s much celebrated 1909 shearing patent is fully explored. Exploitation of this invention is contextualised with reference to the patent activities of one of the most successful twentieth-century agricultural conglomerates that sold shearing handpieces, Cooper Engineering Ltd (Aust). Unaipon’s claim he was ripped off is considered in light of the demands made on him by the Chief Protector, politicians, religious groups, museum staff, and harassment by mission superintendents and police. All these factors impacted the capacity of Unaipon to pursue his scientific interests and delivered him into poverty.' (Publication abstract)

'Everywhen consists of twelve essays and an introduction by the book’s three editors, a Ngarigu linguist and two non-Indigenous historians of colonialism. The book’s title comes from an influential 1956 essay by W.E.H. Stanner on Indigenous views of time, and the essays originated from a 2018 symposium at the ANU on ‘Understanding the Deep Past across Languages and Culture’. The book aims, as the editors write, ‘to explore how Indigenous temporalities can offer alternative perspectives toward understanding the concept of time, a factor so central to the historian’s craft yet so often taken for granted’ (2).' (Introduction)

'This is a fine collection of essays. Each has something to offer the reader: historical knowledge, an entertaining story, inspiration to act. Jenny Hocking calls it ‘Political history at its best’ (ii), and it is hard to disagree – though perhaps it should be ‘histories’. Hocking describes the collection as ‘superbly curated’ by Michelle Arrow, rather than edited. And, indeed, the experience of reading this book is rather like walking through an exhibition of objects, brought together but inherently separate.' (Introduction)