Entire document - Australia Council for the Arts

Australia’s 

Indigenous 

Arts

2 

Dear Reader 

This publication introduces you to just some of the many significant Indigenous 

artists working in Australia today. The term 'Indigenous', like 'Aboriginal', is not 

at all adequate to describe the regional, linguistic and cultural diversity of 

Aboriginal people across a huge continent. However, we hope this publication 

encourages you to engage with a complex culture. 

This publication includes details of Australian works to be presented at the 

Festival of Pacific Arts and the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Noumea, 

New Caledonia, 23 October - 3 November 2000. Participation in these 

events is indicated at the end of each artist’s entry. 

The art form sections (essays, references and individual artist entries) are 

followed by an extensive database on pages 52 - 53. 

The Editors 

A note about language and identity 

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia primarily identify themselves by the language 

groups to which they belong, calling them Nations. Before the white colonisation 

of Australia there were hundreds of language groups. There are fewer now but 

the number is still considerable. You will see that many of the artists appearing 

in this publication are identified by Nation—the language groups include names 

such as Wiradjuri, Larrakia and Arrernte. Another set of terms is broadly regional 

and approximates roughly, but not always, to the states of Australia—Nyoongar 

(Western Australia), Nunga (South Australia), Murri (Queensland), Koori (New 

South Wales and Victoria), and Pallawah (Tasmania). It should be noted that 

spelling of the names for Nations and regional groups varies eg Noongar or 

Nyoongar in Western Australia. 

Editors Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch 

Design i2i design, Sydney 

Cover photographs: John Patrick Kelantumama (aka Yell). Front: Purukuparli 

(Father), 630 mm x 320 mm x 120 mm, (yellow & black). Back cover: Jinani 

(son) 620 mm x 280 mm x 100 mm (turquoise and black). Underglaze pigment 

on earthenware. Collection: Di Yerbury. Photographer: Lucio Nigro 

Produced by RealTime for the Australia Council 

the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body 

Australia Council 

PO Box 788 

Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 

61 2 9215 9000 fax 61 2 9215 9111 

mail@ozco.gov.au 

www.ozco.gov.au 

RealTime 

PO Box A2246 

Sydney South NSW 1235 

opencity@rtimearts.com 

www.rtimearts.com/~opencity/ 

May 2000 ISBN 0 642 47230 0

new media 

music 

visual arts 

film 

theatre 

dance 

indigenous 

literature 

Australia's Indigenous arts are the focus of a great surge of international interest 

in Australia's arts and culture. It is no exaggeration to say that our Indigenous 

arts are Australia's most significant cultural asset. Both ancient and modern, 

they are a profound and powerful force in the Australian cultural landscape. 

Contemporary Australia in its growing maturity recognises that beyond the 

cliched images of Indigenous Australia exists a complex and diverse culture 

stretching back over 40,000 years and which now speaks profoundly to us in 

the present as we seek reconciliation. 

Arguably the world's oldest culture coupled with innovative endeavour in every 

art form has produced an extraordinarily rich and challenging blend of arts. The 

Australia Council, through its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fund, is 

proud to have played a sustained role in this development. 

The Australian program for the 8th Festival of the Pacific Arts represents the 

great diversity and uniqueness of Australia's Indigenous arts from remote 

Australia to our coastal cities. To reflect the significance of the Festival, the 

Australia Council for the first time appointed an Artistic Director for the 

Australian program. Rea is a celebrated artist grounded in the arts and culture 

of her people and on behalf of the Australia Council I congratulate and thank 

Rea for her vision in creating such a brilliant, exciting and illuminating program. 

Much of the material in this publication draws on Rea's program to provide both 

a snapshot and a guide to Australia's Indigenous arts which I am sure will prove 

a valuable resource and provide insights for both Australian and international 

audiences alike. 

Jennifer Bott 

Chief Executive Officer 


Art has always been integral to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's 

lives—as an expression of our spiritual connection with the land and sea, and as 

a ceremonial and educational tool of lore and the Dreaming. 

Diversity abounds throughout our arts and cultures with every community realising 

their own distinctive interpretations. Arts often powerfully reflect our political, legal, 

historical and cultural concerns with many artists bringing issues of dispossession 

to non-indigenous audiences—from land rights to Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to 

the Stolen Generations (children who were forcibly removed from their families). Art 

has therefore played a vital role in our survival since colonisation, allowing us to 

affirm and assert our individual and collective identities. 

An excellent insight into the significance of art to Indigenous Australians, this 

publication also reveals the importance of our art—through its popularity and 

international status—to all Australians. 

Richard Walley 

Chair, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fund 


3

4 

Indigenous art + content + context = many meanings* 

A few weeks ago I was in a taxi on 

my way to a festival meeting when 

the driver, a reasonably young, 

white woman began to launch into 

a rave about 'aboriginal art'. 

Unfortunately, I have been 

subjected to a number of these 

'taxi monologues' and even more 

unfortunately, they are essentially, 

always the same—an excuse for 

white Australians to vent their 

ignorance, racism and total lack of 

understanding of Aboriginal art + 

culture. The taxi driver was 

adamant, "All Australians should be 

allowed to paint the Australian 

landscape. And, we should be 

allowed to use dots and snakes 

and fish (her list was endless). And 

you know what—we are all 

Australians and we all live here and 

you lot—you aborigines (I hate that 

word) don't own this stuff". 

I immediately felt a deep sense of 

despair at what I was hearing. 

Obviously, moving into the new 

century had somehow tricked me 

into believing—maybe even 

hoping—that there had been a shift 

in how white Australians perceive 

and therefore, understand and 

respect Indigenous art + culture. 

But here I was being let know loud 

and clear that Australia is still 

dominated by past ideologies and 

outmoded beliefs. One of the 

strongest of these beliefs has 

always been that we (the 

Indigenous people) must be kept in 

our place, which has always been 

on the fringes of the white society— 

they don't like it when we demand 

our right to be visible in our own 

land and to determine how we will 

be (re)presented. 

There have been many attempts by 

the 'white' art world to homogenise 

Aboriginal art—after all, a fish is a 

fish is a fish and a snake is a snake 

is a … isn't it? Wrong. All 

Indigenous artists are connected to 

specific lands which contain sacred 

sites and therefore, distinctive 'art' 

styles and specific cultural 

meanings are accorded to the 

symbols and icons that each 

community images within their art. 

And while two communities might 

share a symbol or even two, the 

exact meaning for the symbol(s) 

is clearly defined and particular to 

each community's land, stories, 

traditions and creation myths. 

The same white art world has also 

arbitrarily defined and divided 

Indigenous art by divorcing it from 

its essence—that is, the artists who 

actually create the work. In this 

binary, Indigenous art is positioned 

as either 'traditional' which means 

created by Indigenous artists who 

come from regional and remote 

areas of Australia and who are 

viewed as authentic/real (that is 

they look stereotypically ‘blak’) + 

hence, their work has, in the past 

been seen as being of value 

culturally + economically to the 

same white art world. Unfortunately, 

the 'contemporary' work has been 

totally de-valued in this equation 

even though it is also created by 

Indigenous artists who tend to 

come from the urban centres of 

Australia + their work is more often 

than not perceived as 

inauthentic/not 'blak' 

enough/culturally vague + 

unspecific + far too political.** 

I firmly believe, firstly that all 

Indigenous art is political no matter 

what region it comes from and as 

Aboriginal leader Galarrwuy 

Yunupingu states, "We are painting 

as we have always done, to 

demonstrate our continuing link 

with our country and the rights and 

the responsibilities that we have to 

it. We paint to show the rest of the 

world that we own this country and 

the land owns us. Our painting is a 

political act." Secondly, all 

Indigenous art is contemporary, as 

writer and curator Djon Mundine 

once said, "if it is being created by 

Indigenous artists NOW." 

Indigenous Australians (including 

artists) have had to fight long + hard 

for visibility + recognition. For us it 

has been just one of many struggles 

we have been forced to engage in 

for our continued survival culturally, 

politically, socially + economically 

since the British landed on our 

shores in 1788 and declared their 

doctrine of 'terra nullius'. Our fight 

continues on a daily basis but today 

it also involves our 'healing' as well 

as our ongoing struggle for land 

rights + human rights. 

I would like to thank all the artists 

who have generously given 

themselves via their art because, 

like them, I know that our art is 

essential to our living cultures + 

survival as it enables us to re-locate 

+ re-enter our histories. It gives us 

the visibility to reclaim our identities. 

I truly believe it is my generation 

who will take charge of the 

processes needed to revive our 

cultures, building on the rich 

foundations laid by our ancestors. 

I only hope we can continue to 

move forward with the same sense 

of pride, principles, and respect 

towards each other which our 

ancestors displayed. 

Rea 

Artistic Director, 

Australian Indigenous Program 

8th Festival of Pacific Arts 

*This is an edited version of Rea's 

essay for the catalogue, Biennale of 

Contemporary Arts, Noumea. 

**The term 'Blak' was developed by 

artist Destiny Deacon as a part of a 

symbolic but potent strategy of 

reclaiming colonialist language to 

create means of self-definition 

and expression. H Perkins, 

C Williamson, Blakness, Blak City 

Culture!, 1994.

theatre 

Indigenous theatre: The future in black and white 

There's nothing I would rather be 

Than to be an Aborigine 

and watch you take my precious land away. 

For nothing gives me greater joy 

than to watch you fill each girl and boy 

with superficial existential shit. 

Now you may think I'm cheeky 

But I'd be satisfied 

to rebuild your convict ships 

and sail them on the tide. 

I love the way you give me God 

and of course the mining board, 

for this of course I thank the Lord each day. 

I'm glad you say that land rights wrong. 

Then you should go where you belong 

and leave me to just keep on keeping on. 

This is one of the songs from Bran 

Nue Dae, a musical which emerged 

in 1989 from one of the most 

remote parts of Australia: the port 

of Broome on the North-West 

coast. It has since been widely 

performed and toured, its music 

recorded and a television 

documentary broadcast nationally. 

The song itself has become an 

anthem for Aboriginal people, a rare 

unifying force for empowerment. Its 

quality has appealed equally to 

white Australians: its tune is 

infectious and celebratory, creating 

a tension with the words which 

expresses both Aboriginal defiance 

of their situation as a colonised 

people, and an ironic selfaccusation 

for accepting it. The 

author is Jimmy Chi, a musician of 

mixed blood, including Aboriginal, 

Chinese and Japanese; and the 

stage show evolved from the songs 

created by his band, Kuckles, one 

of dozens of bands which play in 

the pubs in Broome. 

Bran Nue Dae in 1989 was a 

turning point in the short history of 

Aboriginal writing for the theatre. 

Twenty years of evolution in writers, 

political activists, actors, dancers, 

singers and song-writers preceded 

it. It was, surprisingly, only in the 

1960s that Aboriginal writers began 

to be published in numbers 

recognisable as a body of work. 

This occurred as part of a gathering 

force of activism by a politically 

aware post-war generation of 

Aborigines and of young white 

people, particularly university 

students. In 1961 Aborigines had 

finally been given the vote. In 1965 

Northern Territory Aboriginal 

pastoral workers were awarded 

equal pay with whites; in 1966 the 

first major land-rights strike took 

place; and in 1967 a national 

referendum overwhelmingly voted in 

favour of transferring judicial 

responsibility for Aboriginal welfare 

from the states to the Commonwealth 

government. Isolated protests 

over local issues, mainly to do with 

living conditions on reserves, 

became by degrees an organised 

civil rights movement which gained 

confidence from the parallel 

movement in the United States. 

Encouraged by public statements, 

individual voices began to be heard. 

Poetry and song came first, drama 

followed. The civil rights movement 

coincided with—or rather shared 

the same roots as—the anti-British, 

anti-American, anti-Vietnam War 

nationalism that changed the 

politics of Australia in the late 60s 

and brought into existence, as a 

by-product, the Australian Council 

for the Arts, now the Australia 

Council. Its Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Islander Arts Board (now 

Fund) has been an important 

source of funds for Indigenous arts 

groups and for the development of 

individual talent. 

Now, after thirty years of growing 

confidence, Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Islander artists have reached 

the forefront of our arts. Thirty years 

ago few urban white Australians had 

ever seen a traditional Aboriginal 

painting—had rarely even seen an 

Aboriginal. Few whites knew 

anything of the Aboriginal way of life, 

with its complex social order and 

spirituality, its practical jokes, its 

ingenious survival skills and its talent 

for parody. We were not even aware 

of our own ignorance—until it was 

exposed by the revelations on stage 

and on television. Today in Australian 

theatre, at least in my view, the most 

important new work is Aboriginal— 

and will, in due course, be the most 

widely seen in other countries. 

The earliest play from this 

contemporary movement was Kevin 

Gilbert's The Cherry Pickers, the 

first half of which was first seen at a 

private performance in Sydney in 

1971. The dialogue was goodhearted 

and good-humoured and 

the subject matter small community 

affairs. I was suddenly overawed at 

being allowed into the domestic life 

of a people whose privacy had, for 

so long and for such good reason, 

been guarded from white eyes. The 

play was later performed in 

Melbourne by the Nindethana 

Theatre, the first of the black 

companies. Kevin Gilbert had at 

that time just been released from 

gaol. He became a leading figure in 

the civil rights movement, 

uncompromising in his ethics and a 

poet of distinction. He died in 1992, 

mourned by both blacks and 

whites. Wesley Enoch is directing 

The Cherry Pickers for the Sydney 

Theatre Company in 2000. 

Other works followed. The political 

revue Basically Black was 

performed in 1972 at the Nimrod 

Street Theatre in Sydney, with a 

cast including Gary Foley, Zac 

Martin and the late Bob Maza, 

soon to be well-known figures. The 

revue was a response to a High 

Court ruling against a traditional 

claim to land ownership, and the 

participants were instigators of the 

Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra—a 

tent bearing the Aboriginal banner 

which had been pitched, as a 

demand for recognition, on the 

lawn outside Parliament House. 

Out of that group grew the Black 

Theatre in Redfern, Sydney. Among 

the plays I saw in that crumbling 

warehouse was Here Comes the 

Nigger (1976), a contemporary 

tragedy by Gerry Bostock. Another 

was Robert Merritt's The Cake 

Man, the first Aboriginal play to 

enter the repertoire of the white 

theatre and in 1982 received with 

acclaim at an international festival 

in Denver, Colorado. Through the 

simple tale of a child's faith it gave 

white audiences a shock of insight 

into the despair of life on a country 

town reserve. Its progress owed 

much to the pioneering actors 

Justine Saunders and Brian Syron; 

and they became major forces in 

the black theatre movement. 

Syron had escaped from an abused 

childhood to New York in the late 

50s, where he became a star pupil 

at the Stella Adler studio, set for a 

promising career in Hollywood. But 

in 1968 he was drawn back to 

Australia, called home, he said, by 

the apparition of a tribal elder. He 

was the first Aboriginal to have had 

that kind of extensive theatre 

training and his school in Sydney 

became a centre for actors, both 

black and white, who sought a 

more daring and Indigenous style of 

expression. He died in 1993, aged 

only 53. 

In 1979, the nudging of a few 

consciences over the Western 

Australian sesquicentenary 

5

6 

provided circumstances in which 

our major black playwright, Jack 

Davis (1917-2000), could make his 

mark. Davis found himself writing 

Kullark, for the theatre-in-education 

troupe of the National Theatre in 

Perth. Through a number of 

metamorphoses a team of actors 

and dancers emerged in Perth to 

give a wholly new status to 

performance by Aboriginal artists. 

Of national reputation are the actor 

Ernie Dingo, who made his debut 

in Kullark, dancer and writer 

Richard Walley and Steve 

'Baamba' Albert. Others, like 

Kelton Pell (currently performing 

nationally in Perth's Yirra Yaakin 

Noongar Theatre's production Solid 

with Ningali Lawford), are beginning 

to become nationally familiar. But 

whites have contributed too, 

notably the director Andrew Ross, 

in partnership with whom most of 

Davis' eight plays evolved, notably 

The Dreamers (1982) and No 

Sugar (1985). Ross founded the 

Black Swan Theatre Company as a 

multi-ethnic performance group in 

Perth in 1991. Western Australia, 

isolated from the rest of the 

country and with one of the 

harshest histories of race relations, 

has been a major force in the 

development of black actors of 

stature. 

From the Northern Territory comes 

Roger Bennett's play about his 

father's life as a boxer, Up the 

Ladder (1990), which has been in 

the repertoire of the Melbourne 

Workers' Theatre since 1995 and 

was a success at the 1997 Festival 

of the Dreaming in collaboration 

with Brisbane's Kooemba Jdarra. 

His Funerals and Circuses had its 

premiere at the 1992 Adelaide 

Festival where he confronted his 

audience with the issue of interracial 

marriage (between a white 

policeman's daughter and a black 

artist). Bennett's plays and poetry 

were characterised by humour, 

music and anger at continuing 

discrimination against his people. 

He died in 1997. 

The struggle for self-expression has 

not been easy. Writing itself, Jack 

Davis has said, is a political act, a 

splitting of the mind between one's 

own thought and the demands of 

black politics. In consequence 

some of the early plays are 

didactic, and anxious in their 

choice of language. They deal 

again and again with the state 

Aboriginal Protection Acts of the 

early part of the century which 

denied advancement, forced blacks 

into white-governed rural ghettos 

and ordered that children be taken 

away from their parents and taught 

assimilation. Other common 

themes are job discrimination, land 

rights and the high incidence of 

black deaths in police custody, a 

phenomenon about which there 

was an extensive, heated and 

finally fairly fruitless judicial inquiry. 

The deaths continue unabated. 

* * * 

Aboriginal writers and performing 

artists have arrived in the western 

theatre at a time when the form is 

more diverse than at any other 

period in its history. Writers today 

are freer to choose their own form 

than they have ever been: the only 

restriction lies in the capacity of their 

peers to understand it and 

performers who can realise it. The 

fact that we have world-class young 

actors today like Bradley Byquar, 

David Ngoombujarra, Ningali 

Lawford, Rachel Maza, Deborah 

Mailman, Lydia Miller, Leah Purcell, 

Kylie Belling, Deborah Cheetham, 

Kevin Smith, Margaret Harvey and 

Lafe Charlton working with major 

companies and directors like Wesley 

Enoch and Noel C Tovey, is an 

important witness to the rate at 

which we are putting aside the 

imitative skills of the past in favour 

of something more recognisably our 

own. The progress of Aboriginal 

writing for the theatre has in the 90s 

discarded polemic for a deeper 

psychology. The plays have become 

more concerned with the emotional 

and spiritual life of the characters, 

more confidently experimental in 

their structure, and more inclined to 

include the white man and woman 

in their view of world. Eva Johnson's 

powerful solo performance What Do 

They Call Me? (1990) is a three-part 

monologue by Connie Brumbie, 

thrown into gaol for drunkenness, 

mourning the children who were 

taken from her in the 50s under the 

Aboriginal protection legislation; her 

daughters Regina, now a middleclass 

married woman brought up 

unaware of her aboriginality; and 

Alison, now a social worker, activist 

and lesbian, who seeks to reconcile 

the family to each other and their 

past. 

One of the first plays to successfully 

create rounded white characters 

was Sally Morgan's Sistergirl 

(1993), about the friendship of two 

women, one black, one white, in an 

alcoholics' ward. The play toured 

nationally from Perth in 1993. Sadly, 

death dogged the cast and the 

season ended abruptly in 

Melbourne and the text was 

suppressed by the author as a 

mark of respect. 

Ningali Lawford's solo show Ningali 

(created in collaboration with Robyn 

Archer and Angela Chaplin) was 

performed all over the world in the 

1990s. In it she tells the story of her 

untroubled childhood in the 

Kimberleys, the loneliness of a city 

boarding school, an extraordinary 

six months as an exchange student 

in Alaska, the rebellion and trauma 

of adolescence and racist 

encounters, and the rediscovery of 

herself through dance and the 

emergence of a strong maturity. 

More than the men, these women 

have used performance to focus 

upon the healing process; they 

have given their audiences lasting 

images of power. Two further solo 

works—part political, part 

confessional—which celebrate the 

inner strength of their remarkable 

performers, have followed Lawford 

to international acclaim. They are 

Leah Purcell's Box the Pony 

(written with Scott Rankin) and 

Deborah Cheetham's White Baptist 

ABBA Fan. Deborah Mailman, 

whose work 7 Stages of Grieving, 

created with director Wesley Enoch 

for the Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous 

Performing Arts Company in 

Brisbane, has also been around the 

world. This is the most innovative in 

structure of all the works so far 

created. It is written in 18 scenes, in 

a free-verse form incorporating 

enactments and film images, a 

variety of storytelling forms and 

symbolism. 

The most recent black playwright 

to come to national attention is 

John Harding, whose play Up the 

Road was first presented by the 

Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait 

Islander Theatre Cooperative in 

Melbourne in 1991. It was further 

developed by the director Neil 

Armfield in 1997 for seasons at 

Melbourne's Playbox Theatre and 

Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. 

Harding's protagonist is, for the 

first time, a middle-class Aboriginal, 

Ian Sampson, a Canberra 

bureaucrat who returns to his 

home town after a decade for a 

family funeral. There he faces not 

only punishment by the woman 

and now-dead brother he 

deserted, but finds himself the 

centre of conflict over government 

policy and local affairs. Jane 

Harrison's Stolen (1998) was a joint 

production by Ilbijerri and Playbox 

Theatre in Melbourne. In 1999 it 

was revived, toured to Sydney and 

then to London, where it was 

warmly received as part of the 

Australia Council’s HeadsUp 

Australian Arts 100 festival 

commemorating the centenary of 

the act to create an Australian

Aliwa, Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre 

Federation. Stolen, again, is a 

powerful combination of the 

personal and the political as it tells 

the stories, in direct unvarnished 

terms, of five Aboriginal children 

forcibly removed from their families 

by government order. The 

production by Wesley Enoch was 

particularly distinctive—adding to 

the play's political statement the 

actors stepped out of their roles at 

the end of the performance to tell 

their own stories. 

The plays continue to be written, 

and within them the concealed 

history of race relations and the 

themes of reconciliation, 

empowerment and, more recently, 

a closer self-examination. They will 

continue to make an important 

contribution to a greater mutual 

understanding and respect; and 

especially a recognition of two 

realities, black and white; and the 

values of that world which created 

them. 

Katharine Brisbane AM, Hon.DLitt, 

Publisher, Currency Press. 

This essay has been edited from, 

"The Future in Black and White: 

Aboriginality in Recent Australian 

Drama", AULLA (American 

Universities Language and 

Literature Association) Conference, 

Vasser College, Poughkeepsie, New 

York State, USA, 1994; IDEA 

(International Drama Education 

Association) Conference in 

Brisbane, 1994. The full version, 

updated from time to time, is 

available on the Currency Press 

website 

(www.currencypress.com.au) and in 

booklet form for teachers. Excerpt 

from Bran Nue Day reproduced 

with permission. 

References 

Penny Van Toorn, "Indigenous texts 

and narratives," and May Britt 

Akerholt, "New stages: 

contemporary theatre" in Elizabeth 

Webby ed, The Cambridge 

Companion to Australian Literature, 

Cambridge University Press, 

Cambridge 2000 

Philip Parsons, General Editor, 

Companion to Theatre in Australia, 

Currency Press, Sydney 1995 

Jimmy Chi & Kuckles, Bran Nue 

Dae, Currency Press & Magabala 

Books, Sydney and Broome, 1991 

Wesley Enoch & Deborah Mailman, 

7 Stages of Grieving, Playlab Press, 

Brisbane, 1997 

Anthology, Plays from Black 

Australia, Currency Press, Sydney 

1989. Contains Jack Davis, The 

Dreamers; Eva Johnson, Murras; 

Bob Maza, The Keepers; Richard 

Walley, Coordah. 

Currency Press publishes an 

extensive list of plays by Aboriginal 

writers including: Roger Bennett, 

Jimmy Chi, Jack Davis, Kevin 

Gilbert, Eva Johnson, Robert J 

Merritt and John Harding. 

7

8 

Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre 

Solid 

This play tells the story of Graham, 

a Noongar from the suburbs of 

Perth who heads north to escape 

drugs, unemployment and personal 

tragedy. On the road to Fitzroy 

Crossing he meets Carol, a 

Kimberley woman returning home 

after a long absence in the city to 

face the traditional law from which 

she has been running. Two 

Aboriginal people from Perth but 

from different worlds, both looking 

for something new. Starring Ningali 

Lawford and Kelton Pell. 

...two of the best young Australian actors of 

their generation. The Australian 

Aliwa 

When the Welfare came sniffin' 

around wanting to take the kids 

away, their Mum took the hard road 

and left her house and community 

to keep the family together. Almost 

fifty years later, her three daughters 

Dot, Ethel and Judith tell a story of 

love and survival in a very special 

family. 

Yirra Yaakin has crafted a fine 

piece of theatre, as moving as it 

is uplifting....a triumphantly 

gentle piece of theatre. 

The West Australian 

Yirra Yaakin is one of Australia's 

leading Aboriginal theatre 

companies. Based in Perth, 

Western Australia in the heart of the 

Noongar Nation, Yirra Yaakin's 

commitment and energy has 

inspired an active and diverse range 

of theatrical, educational and 

developmental projects, providing 

the basis for a growing world-class, 

professional arts company. Yirra 

Yaakin was the recipient of the 

Prince Charles Trophy for services 

to the community in 1997.

Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous 

Performing Arts 

Goin' to the Island 

After seven years on the mainland, 

TJ, a young Murri hothead returns 

home to Minjerribah (Stradbroke 

Island) to celebrate his 21st 

birthday. To his surprise his views 

about sand mining, tourism and the 

cultural revival of his people are 

challenged by his extended family. 

Therese Collie's play uses humour 

as well as dance and musical 

forms that range from traditional to 

reggae and rap. TJ's family chart 

the Island's comings and goings 

from the dreaming to the present 

day to help the young man to 

understand the strong ancestral 

and communal ties that keep him 

goin' to the island. 

In its generosity of spirit and its 

powerful theatricality, this is a 

play which will delight Murris and 

whitefellas alike. 

Brisbane Courier Mail. 

Paradoxes perplex and unsettle 

as they jangle the expected with 

the unexpected to create untried 

symbols and unanticipated 

meanings. RealTime 

Acknowledged as Australia's fore- 

most Indigenous theatre company, 

Kooemba Jdarra is committed to 

producing professional innovative 

Indigenous theatre that continues 

the tradition of storytelling by 

engaging with new forms of 

expression. At the same time the 

company provides opportunities for 

Indigenous artists to present their 

perspectives and have a voice. 

The program includes mainstage 

productions, workshops, touring 

and regional programs, community 

cultural development and 

awareness through training for new 

and emerging Indigenous artists 

and artsworkers. 

Ilbijerri Aboriginal & Torres Strait 

Islander Theatre Co-operative 

Stolen 

Developed by the company in 

collaboration with Playbox Theatre, 

Jane Harrison's play confronts the 

ugly history of so-called 'integration' 

policies under which successive 

Australian governments took 

Aboriginal children from their 

families so that they could be raised 

in white-run institutions. The work 

developed in consultation with the 

Victorian Indigenous community, 

has been written by an Aboriginal 

playwright and performed by 

Indigenous actors. Through the 

stories of five Koori children 

struggling to survive in a society 

intent on destroying their culture 

and their identity, Stolen brings to 

vivid life the complex and 

controversial issues surrounding the 

Stolen Generations. 

In 1990 a group of Indigenous 

artists and community members 

came together to form a 

professional theatre company for 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 

people of Victoria. Since then the 

company has initiated and 

developed performances in 

collaboration with their community. 

In addition to workshops and 

playreadings, they have produced 

two important works—Up the Road 

by John Harding, which had 

seasons in Melbourne and Sydney 

in 1991, and Stolen in 1998. Both 

these plays explore complex and 

controversial issues from an 

Indigenous perspective for 

Indigenous and non-indigenous 

audiences. 

Performers: Tammy Anderson, a 

Moonbird woman, Flinders Island 

mob in Tasmania; Kylie Belling, 

Yorta Yorta/Wiradjuri; Glenn Shea, 

Wathaurong/Ngarrindjeri; LeRoy 

Parsons, South Coast NSW; 

Pauline Whyman, a Riverwoman; 

Director, Wesley Enoch, Stradbroke 

Island. 

Following seasons in Melbourne 

and Sydney, Stolen had a very 

successful tour to London in 2000 

as part of the Australia Council’s 

HeadsUp Australian Arts 100 

festival celebrating Australia's 

Centenary of Federation. 

Stolen is extraordinary ... a restless, time-transcending mosaic, 

dazzlingly realised in Wesley Enoch's production ... as moving as any 

production in London. Michael Billington, The Guardian. 

9

10 

Wesley Enoch and Deborah 

Mailman / Kooemba Jdarra 

The 7 Stages of Grieving 

Originally conceived, co-written and 

directed in Brisbane in 1995 by 

Kooemba Jdarra's then Artistic 

Director Wesley Enoch, The 7 

Stages of Grieving is a solo 

performance co-written and 

performed by Murri artist, Deborah 

Mailman, one of Australia's most 

accomplished actors of stage and 

screen, with images created for the 

production by noted visual artist 

Leah King-Smith. 

7 Stages is an important 

contemporary performance work. 

Deborah Mailman tells a collective 

story which merges personal family 

history with instances of public 

grief. The work has toured Australia 

and internationally to considerable 

acclaim. 

Nura Ward, Nellie Patterson, 

Fiona Foley, Heidrun Löhr and 

Aku Kadogo 

Ochre and Dust 

A performance in an installation 

The installation created by Batjala 

artist Fiona Foley combined with 

Heirun Löhr's monochrome and 

colour photographs, provides an 

evocative stage setting for two 

Anangu-Pitjantjatjara storytellers. 

Nura Ward and Nellie Patterson are 

senior law women and ambassadors 

for Anangu-Pitjantjatjara culture. 

These dynamic women recount 

tales of their lives and their Tjukurpa 

(sacred stories or law that created 

and governs the world). The nature 

of this work at once provides a 

soundscape and photo journey 

through the Pitjantjatjara homelands 

as well as an interactive backdrop 

for the storytellers. This 

collaborative impression of Central 

Australia conceived by Aku Kadogo 

pays homage to the ongoing 

relationship she has with Anangu. 

Ochre and Dust was produced for 

the Perth International and the 2000 

Telstra Adelaide Festivals. 

8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000 

Mailman is a wonderfully open performer… she manages to suggest 

the whole history of the invasion of her country...through a mix of 

reminiscense, great comedy, passionate statement and vivid 

theatricality The Australian

Black Swan Theatre Company 

Bidenjarreb Pinjarra 

West Australian Noongar Aboriginal 

actors, Kelton Pell and Trevor Parfitt 

researched, improvised and shaped 

the story of The Battle of Pinjarra in 

partnership with whitefellas Geoff 

Kelso and Phil Thomson. This latest 

version is presented with the cross 

cultural, Perth-based Black Swan 

Theatre Company which has had 

an ongoing association with 

Indigenous artists. 

The quartet has produced a 

compelling theatrical work that 

shakes up traditionally held views 

of history and discovers clues to 

what really happened in 1834 when 

Governor James Stirling led an 

armed expedition into the territory 

of the Murray River people, 90 

kilometres south of the struggling 

Swan River Colony in Western 

Australia. 

Bidenjarreb Pinjarra, says Kelton 

Pell, is "a story about a crucial 

moment in Noongar history which 

honours the fallen and sets the facts 

straight", told through satire, mime, 

improvised comedy, dramatic 

conflict and tough physical theatre." 

The play had two seasons in Perth, 

a tour of south-west Australia, 

Northern Territory, Melbourne and 

Sydney. In 2000 Black Swan will 

undertake a regional tour of the 

work. 

There is a wonderful fusion of 

comic (and the comic is very 

funny) with the tragic in the way 

they tell it ... a wonderful mix of 

wisdom about how life is lived, 

Bidenjarreb Pinjarra tells us about 

our past. And we grieve. But then 

offers us a powerful paradigm for 

our future. And we hope. 

Sydney Morning Herald 

REM Theatre 

toteMMusic 

In this collaboration between 


artists, a young city dweller is 

introduced to the spirit and dances 

of her people by the visit of the 

Kangaroo Man. toteMMusic 

explores the balance between 

traditional and contemporary 

Australian society. The work 

premiered at the Lucerne 

International Music Festival followed 

by performances at the Flanders 

Festival, Ghent, and the Zuiderpers 

Huis, Antwerp. It was included in 

the Spotlight Program, 4th 

Australian Performing Arts Market, 

Adelaide 2000. 

The performers are drawn from the 

Torres Strait in the north, through 

Tennant Creek in the Central Desert, 

to Western Australia. REM integrates 

the performing arts into a vibrant, 

cross-cultural, cross-artform theatre 

and deals simply with concepts and 

attitudes that both children and 

adults relate to and understand. 

Queensland Theatre Company 

The Sunshine Club 

Frank, an Aboriginal serviceman, 

comes home from World War II to 

find that although the wider world 

may have changed, not much is 

different for him. Harassed by 

police, barred from hotels and 

forbidden from dancing with his 

childhood friend, Rose—the white 

minister's daughter—Frank decides 

to take action. With his friends and 

family he sets up The Sunshine 

Club, a place where white and black 

can meet and, above all, dance. 

Commissioned by the Queensland 

Theatre Company, book, lyrics and 

direction are by Wesley Enoch, 

music by John Rodgers and 

featuring a cast of powerful 

Indigenous performers. The 

premiere season included Cairns, 

Townsville, Mackay, Brisbane and 

subsequently the launch of the 

Sydney Theatre Company's 2000 

program. 

...with a heart and a brain, a 

compelling, important take on 

the musical. 

Sydney Morning Herald 

11

12 

The Marrugeku Company 

Crying Baby 

Founded in 1994 specifically for the 

project, Mimi, Marrugeku comprises 

Western Australian urban 

Indigenous dancers and musicians, 

non-indigenous physical theatre 

practitioners from Stalker Theatre in 

Sydney and Kunwinjkju dancers— 

story tellers and musicians from 

Kunbarllanjnja, a remote community 

in Arnhem Land. Marrugeku's Mimi 

was extraordinarily successful, 

playing in urban Australian arts 

festivals, remote Aboriginal 

communities and international arts 

festivals. 

Crying Baby is a large scale 

outdoor intercultural performance 

incorporating stilts and aerial work, 

contemporary Indigenous dance 

and music, installation, weaving, 

film and contemporary sound art. 

Blurring the edges between story, 

history and Djang (or dreaming), its 

focus is on stories from post 

contact/colonial times as well as 

modern life for Indigenous 

Australians living in remote 

communities. 

Key artists include director Rachael 

Swain, choreographer Raymond 

Blanco, visual artist Thompson 

Yulidjirri, musical director Matthew 

Fargher, designer Andrew Carter, 

weaver Yvonne Koolmatrie, film 

director Warwick Thornton. Crying 

Baby premieres as a work in 

progress at the Darwin Festival 

2000 and in its final form at the 

Festival of Perth 2001. 

A stage beneath the stars of 

Arnhem Land; an ancient rock 

face for a backdrop, lit by 

flickering, dancing light; an 

ecstasy of voices, of Aboriginal 

tales and chants; a cast of 

dancers, actors, trapeze-tumblers 

and stilt walkers, performing 

against projected video images, 

banks of TVs and satellite dishes; 

a drama unfolding at once on 

triple interwoven levels, full of 

half-buried symbols, rhymes and 

parallels. Such is the spectacle of 

Crying Baby, the remarkable new 

production of the Marrugeku 

Company and the piece de 

resistance of this year's Darwin 

Festival. 

The Australian 

Leah Purcell 

Box the Pony 

Box the Pony, a semi-factual 

acccount of Leah Purcell's life, was 

the smash hit of the 1997 Olympic 

Arts Festival's Festival of the 

Dreaming and was critically 

acclaimed at the 1998 Adelaide and 

1999 Edinburgh Arts Festivals. 

Subsequent seasons were 

successfuly staged in Sydney and 

Brisbane. At the Sydney Opera 

House it was part of the 

Reconciliation celebrations in 2000. 

The work was included in the 

HeadsUp Australian Arts 100 

festival at the Barbican in London, 

July 2000. 

Leah Purcell (Nation; Waka Waka) 

comes from a long line of 

vaudevillians. In 1993 she was cast 

in Jimmy Chi's ground breaking 

musical, Bran Nue Dae, which toured 

Australia. She appeared in theatre 

works at Brisbane's La Bôite and 

then moved to Sydney to work as a 

television presenter. Leah is an official 

Ambassador for Reconciliation 

through her music and guest 

speaking appearances. In 1999 she 

was voted Best Female Artist at the 

National indigenous Awards. She 

received accolades for her 

appearance in Belvoir Street 

Theatre's production of The Marriage 

of Figaro as part of the Olympics Arts 

Festival in Sydney in 2000. 

While she doesn't shirk from plumbing the depths of her early misfortune, 

overall the play is raw, cheeky, celebratory and very funny. 

Sydney Morning Herald

Deborah Cheetham 

White Baptist ABBA Fan 

This is a moving, funny and 

forthright performance based on 

incidents from the life of Aboriginal 

opera singer, Deborah Cheetham. 

From forced removal from her 

Aboriginal family to her upbringing 

in the strict confines of a white 

Baptist family, to her eventual 

reunion thirty years later with her 

birth mother, Deborah Cheetham 

weaves events from her life with 

songs by Saint Saens, Catalanni 

and Dvorak as her intimate story 

unfolds. Commissioned for The 

1997 Olympics Arts Festival’s 

Festival of the Dreaming, and 

produced by Performing Lines, the 

work's many seasons have 

included the Christchurch Arts 

Festival and the Edge, Auckland 

(New Zealand) and sell-out houses 

for the Zuercher Theatre Spectakl, 

Zurich, 1999. The work was 

included in the Barbican season of 

the HeadsUp Australian Arts 100 

festival in London, 2000. 

...with bitter irony, seldom 

sentimental, her witty torrent of 

words fascinate the audience. 

Solothurner Zeitung, Zurich. 

Tom E Lewis and Handspan 

Visual Theatre 

Lift 'Em Up Socks 

Tom E Lewis (Warndarrung-Marra, 

born Ngukurr) began his career in 

film and TV. Subsequently he 

performed in theatre productions as 

well as devising a solo 

performance, Thumbul. His musical 

career has taken him all over the 

world with the George Dreyfus 

Sextet, the Lewis and Young Jazz 

duo and The Anthropologists. The 

reputation of the non-indigenous 

Handspan is built on innovation in 

form, technique and content. The 

company has undertaken 16 

international tours to 29 festivals 

and events worldwide and in 1994 

won the prestigious UNESCO 

Award for "outstanding contribution 

to the arts." 

Lift 'Em Up Socks began with a 

collection of marionettes loaned to 

Lewis for restoration. Amongst the 

usual European folk tale characters 

were three Australians including a 

small Aboriginal boy. Tom E Lewis 

performs with Rod Primrose, 

directed by David Bell with 

puppetry direction by Heather 

Monk. 

It's like learning to understand a 

new symbolism that converts 

time, for example, into static, 

visual symbols. It is a show best 

enjoyed by allowing the many 

suggestive words and images to 

work associatively. 

The Age 

13

14 

dance 

Indigenous dance: The place, not the space 

Contemporary Australian 

Indigenous dance has reached new 

heights of international recognition 

in the last five years. This has been 

spear-headed by the critical and 

popular success of Bangarra Dance 

Theatre under the artistic direction 

of Stephen Page. Bangarra's 

success has strong links with the 

25 year history of the National 

Aboriginal & Islander Skills 

Development Association (NAISDA) 

where most of Bangarra's dancers 

trained, and Aboriginal Islander 

Dance Theatre (AIDT), the professional 

company associated with 

NAISDA and headed by Raymond 

Blanco which preceded Bangarra. 

Choreographers connected with 

these institutions at different times 

have included Matthew Doyle, 

Monica Stevens, Marilyn Miller, 

Albert David, Bernadette Walong 

and Frances Rings. 

The foundation for contemporary 

Indigenous dance is firmly based in 

an ancient and evolving dance 

tradition which is part of the spiritual 

life of Australian Aboriginal people. It 

is important, however, to understand 

that it is not one tradition, it is 

many, and that the dances are as 

diverse as the numerous language 

and regional groups that make up 

Australian Aboriginal culture. 

Different styles of dancing express 

different narratives in very different 

landscapes and constitute a rich 

source of inspiration and meaning 

for contemporary dance and its 

interplay of aesthetic and spiritual 

concerns. 

The dances of these communities 

are increasingly being performed by 

cultural groups who travel within 

Australia and throughout the world. 

The Doonooch Dancers, based in 

the Shoalhaven region of the South 

Coast of New South Wales, and the 

Torres Strait Island Cultural Group, 

both appearing at the 8th Festival 

of Pacific Arts, are examples of 

such groups. Among the many 

others are the Tal-Kin-Jeri Dance 

Group who research and perform 

the dances and stories of the 

Ngarrindjeri people of South 

Australia. The White Cockatoo 

Performing Group from Arnhem 

Land in the Northern Territory are a 

group of senior men from several 

language groups sharing the same 

social and familial affiliations. The 

company has completed two world 

tours, recently returning from a tour 

to Sweden, Switzerland, Austria 

and Hannover, Germany where they 

were part of EXPO 2000. 

More important than playing to 

international audiences is the 

opportunity for communities to 

experience each other's dance and 

music and for cultural groups to 

perform for Aboriginal children in 

schools. Many communities have 

lost their languages and their dances 

over the last two hundred years. 

Gurruwun Yunupingu, principal at 

Yirrkala School in North East 

Arnhem Land, talks about 

performing Yolngu music and dance 

in schools: "Many audiences were 

astonished and unsure how to react 

because they had never seen or 

heard traditional dance and music 

before. It made many cry, for in 

some parts of the world some 

Indigenous people have lost their 

culture because of the assimilation 

and colonisation" ("Language and 

Traditional Dance Performing in 

Public Schools", Dancing comes 

from the land, Writings on Dance 20, 

2000). The Darwin-based Tracks, a 

dance company working closely with 

Indigenous people, conducts 

residencies in remote Aboriginal 

communities and regional areas to 

help maintain and develop dance 

traditions. 

A strong connection with tradition is 

found also in contemporary dance. 

Not only is there a wealth of dance 

to draw on but also spiritual 

resources. Djakapurra Munyarryun 

is a dancer and songman with the 

Sydney-based Bangarra Dance 

Theatre, He is also the company's 

cultural consultant, providing 

traditional knowledge in 

consultation with the elders of the 

Munyarryun Clan in Dhälinbuy, 

North East Arnhem Land, where he 

grew up. 

Even with developments in touring, 

education and other assistance, 

Raymond Blanco worries that "a 

major shift toward the company 

form of dance" has resulted in 

insufficient accommodation for 

traditionally based Aboriginal or 

Torres Strait Island dancers. "This is 

the root from where our dance 

stems. It doesn't need to be dressed 

up and served in a certain way. It is 

culture and needs to be understood 

entirely." Marilyn Miller, dancer, 

choreographer and assistant to 

Raymond Blanco for the Opening 

Ceremony of the 8th Festival of 

Pacific Arts, says of Blanco's years 

as the Artistic Director of AIDT, that 

"he was courageous enough to say, 

‘well there are all these different 

types of traditional dance—Torres 

Strait and numerous mainland 

dances’, so he always made the 

effort to stage both Islander culture 

as well as Aboriginal culture. He 

staged Lardil influences and Tiwi 

influences and I actually thought 

that was ground-breaking, showing 

how much there was to choose 

from and avoiding clichés." 

As in other art forms, a recurrent 

topic of debate in dance is the 

relationship between Indigenous and 

western forms of expression, with 

Indigenous artists often experienced 

in both. Reviewers look for a 

synthesis of forms and are 

disappointed if they don't see it. 

People wary of the dilution of 

tradition see Indigenous forms as 

suffering cultural assimilation. Marilyn 

Miller describes the complexities of 

the engagement between 

Indigenous and western dance: 

"With traditional dancing, it all comes 

from the place where the people 

are—the geography informs the type 

of stepping that is done, and the 

actual story and your totem’s relation 

to that story will determine how you 

actually form the dancing. 

"In contrast, contemporary dance 

caters for the stage. That takes the 

dance out of any real life 

environment—you only have to 

know your place on the stage. The 

meaning of place is so much 

stronger in Indigenous dance 

because the place where the 

dancing is is determined by the 

bigger event—whether you're 

dancing for a funeral or you're 

dancing for a change of season or a 

wedding. In contemporary dance it 

is just a matter of spacing rather 

than place. And there are not as 

many guidelines for contemporary 

choreography, or as much meaning 

to the sequencing of the move- 

ments, or as much meaning to the 

movements themselves...and that’s 

something that I say to the younger 

ones—you have to know the 

meaning behind the movements, 

whether it's traditional or contemporary, 

otherwise you can’t perform 

it—you're just putting it there." 

Asked about the future for 

Indigenous dance, Miller sees a 

significant role for NAISDA 

students: "A few of the graduates 

have already gone back to their 

communities and hold dance 

classes and choreograph which 

helps with identity in remote 

communities." As for the 

relationship between Indigenous 

and non-indigenous companies, 

Miller offers a mix of reserve and 

optimism: "Some directors have 

brought Indigenous people in to 

choreograph works, but it has not 

become part of a general Australian 

dance vocabulary; they're out there 

as isolated dance pieces...Once 

collaborations start to gel with the 

non-indigenous dance sector there 

will be many more avenues to 

explore within Australia." Miller sees 

Indigenous dance as potentially 

providing an Australian dance 

vernacular. She hopes too that 

more companies than the 

internationally renowned Bangarra 

will come into prominence: "If there 

was an understanding that prior to 

settlement there were over 200 

types of languages and dance 

styles, then that would lead to the 

support and development of a 

greater variety of Indigenous 

contemporary dance forms." 

The Editors 

Quotations from Marilyn Miller and 

Raymond Blanco come from 

interviews conducted by Erin 

Brannigan for this guide. 

References 

Dancing comes from the land, 

Writings on Dance, number 20, 

2000; publishers and editors Sally 

Gardner, Elizabeth Dempster; PO 

Box 106, Malvern, Victoria, 3144. 

Includes essays and dialogues on 

dance and land, ceremony, 

property rights and education. 

Sylvia Kleinert, Margo Neale eds, 

The Oxford Companion to 

Aboriginal Art and Culture, Oxford 

University Press, November 2000. 

For general information on 

Australian dance: 

Dance Forum, Journal of the 

Australian Dance Council, editor 

Julie Dyson, Ausdance PO Box 45, 

Braddon, ACT 2612. 

national@ausdance.org.au 

Ausdance website: 

ausdance.anu.edu.au

Bangarra Dance Theatre 

One of Australia's leading 

Indigenous performing arts 

companies, renowned for its unique 

fusion of cultural tradition and 

contemporary technique: modern 

day Dreaming infused with the 

sacred myths and traditions of the 

past. Artistic Director Stephen Page 

works in close collaboration with 

the creative team which includes 

composer David Page. Djakapurra 

Munyarryun is Bangarra's cultural 

consultant as well as a leading 

dancer, didjeridu player and 

songman. In consultation with the 

elders of the Munyarryun Clan in 

Dhälinbuy, North East Arnhem 

Land, where he grew up, 

Djakapurra is the source of 

Bangarra's traditional knowledge. 

Bangarra's Ochres (1995) toured 

internationally. Fish (1997) 

premiered at the Edinburgh Festival 

ahead of a sell-out season at the 

Festival of the Dreaming in Sydney. 

Bangarra joined the Australian 

Ballet in Rites, choreographed by 

Stephen Page to Stravinsky's Rite 

of Spring for the 1997 Melbourne 

Festival. Performances at the 

Sydney Opera House and at New 

York's City Center brought a new 

level of attention for the company. 

This year, American artists agency 

ICM Artists took on Bangarra's 

overseas tour management. 

New works in Bangarra's repertoire 

include Skin, a double bill 

comprising a work for the female 

dancers entitled Shelter, and Spear 

which explores the challenges for 

Aboriginal men in urban and remote 

communities. Skin premiered at the 

Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival 

for which the company also 

performed the opening ceremony, 

Tubowgule. In 2001 Bangarra will 

tour North America. 

Centuries old experience mixed 

with contemporary 

energy...Bangarra is a dance 

company like no other. 

The Guardian, London 

Bangarra Dance Theatre resonates with a 

spiritual and physical power... vibrantly 

alive, radiatingly fresh and powerful... 

Berliner Morgenpost 

15

16 

Raymond Blanco 

Raymond Blanco is a highly 

regarded choreographer and leader 

in the development of Indigenous 

dance in Australia and 

internationally. In 1991 Blanco was 

appointed Artistic Director of the 

Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre 

(AIDT), an elite ensemble of young 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 

dancers who toured the world. He 

directed the Aboriginal participation 

in the International Theatre 

Workshop in Nottingham, UK in 

1992. In 1993, he premiered a new 

work, Colours, at the Sydney 

Festival and toured throughout 

Australia and Japan. 

On the Spot, Blanco's homage to 

five black women, premiered in 

1994 at the New Zealand 

International Festival and toured 

South America, South East Asia and 

Europe. His Warup Kodomir, based 

on a legend of the Torres Strait 

Islands, toured the Pacific in 1996. 

In the same year, he choreographed 

and co-directed Marrugeku 

Company's Mimi. In 1997 he 

produced Edge of the Sacred for 

the Festival of the Dreaming in 

collaboration with the Sydney 

Symphony Orchestra and composer 

Peter Sculthorpe. In 1998 Aji Aboro 

premiered in Noumea at the 

opening of the Centre Cultural 

Tjibaou as a commissioned 

collaboration with Kanake Dance 

Company, We Ce Ca. 

In 2000 Raymond was 

commissioned by the Sydney 

Festival to collaborate with the 

French street theatre company 

Plasticien Volants. The work 

Ngalyod premieres in Melbourne 

before a European tour in 2000. 

This year Raymond is working with 

Marrugeku Company on their new 

work, Crying Baby, and is Artistic 

Advisor to the Sydney Olympics 

Opening Ceremony. 

In conceiving and producing the 

opening event for the 8th Festival of 

Pacific Arts, Raymond Blanco, 

assisted by Marilyn Miller, will 

collaborate with an established 

network of local dancers, 

community workers, teachers, 

elementary and high school children 

and others involved in New 

Caledonian performing arts. The 

spectacular event will reflect the 

diversity of Pacific cultures and the 

Festival's theme "Words of 

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow". 

The event will take place at 

Noumea's Magenta Stadium and be 

broadcast live on television. 

8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000. 

Marilyn Miller 

Following her early training in 

classical ballet Marilyn Miller 

attended the National Aboriginal 

Islander Skills Development 

Association (NAISDA). In the course 

of her studies she visited several 

remote Indigenous communities 

both learning and teaching dance, 

returning to work as Rehearsal 

Director for Aboriginal Islander 

Dance Theatre and Course Coordinator 

for NAISDA. She danced 

with the Queensland Ballet, the One 

Extra Dance Company, the AIDT 

and Bangarra Dance Theatre. As 

both ensemble member and soloist 

she has performed throughout 

Australia and toured internationally. 

She has lectured on dance in 

Australia from an Indigenous 

perspective and has taught 

extensively. She has choreographed 

dance as well as theatre and 

ceremonial works. 

In 2000 Marilyn guest-choreographs 

with a major theatre company, 

develops a new work of her own, 

takes on a documentary writing 

project and directs the Paralympic 

Torch Lighting Ceremony. With 

choreographers Vicki Van Hout and 

Pinau Ghee, Marilyn recently 

established Fresh Dance Company 

which brings together a group of 

freelance Indigenous dancers. Fresh 

recently co-ordinated a series of 

dance performances for Live Sights 

at the Sydney Olympic Games. 

Marilyn collaborates with Raymond 

D Blanco as Rehearsal Director on 

the opening ceremony for the 8th 

Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000.

The Doonooch Dancers 

A traditional performance and 

teaching group who have taken 

part in major cultural events and 

arts festivals in Australia and 

internationally. Based in the 

Shoalhaven region on the South 

Coast of New South Wales, the 

dancers are: Cecil Nadjatajan 

(Monaro/Dhungutti) who is also a 

recognised songman and 

accomplished didjeridu player, Larry 

Jugerajah (Monaro/Wagaman), 

Andrew Jingrala 

(Monaro/Wagaman), Joe Toonkoo 

(Monaro and Tomakin Wandandian), 

Reuben Goodju-Goodju 

(Monaro/Bunjalung), Arthur Goonj 

(Monaro and Tomakin Wandandian) 

and Robert Googar (Murawari and 

Waghkumara). 

The company was founded in 1991 

by singer-songwriter and traditional 

lore keeper Robert McLeod 

(Monaro and Tomakin/Wandandian) 

who initially established programs 

for Aboriginal men and youth which 

recognised culture as the 

touchstone of Indigenous wellbeing. 

The Doonooch Dancers have 

participated in festivals and cultural 

awareness programs throughout 

Australia and in the USA, Scotland, 

New Zealand and Vietnam. Robert 

McLeod was recently invited to coteach 

an undergraduate course on 

Indigenous Cultures and Modern 

Technology at the Worcester 

Polytechnic Institute in Maryland, 

USA. 

8th Festival of Pacific Arts 2000. 

Torres Strait Island Cultural 

Dance Group 

A company of 16 dancers and 

musicians who create performances 

relating to the history, culture 

and life style of the people of the 

Eastern Torres Strait Islands. As 

well as their program of dances and 

songs, the company, aged from five 

to fifty, includes storytellers and 

craftspeople who are able to lecture 

and demonstrate traditional 

weaving and carving skills of the 

region. The musicians play the 

warup (large drum), lumut (hollowed 

bamboo drum) and gorr (bean pod 

shakers). 

In the face of encroaching western 

cultures, the aim of the group is to 

share and promote a strong sense 

of heritage and identity among the 

Indigenous population of the Torres 

Strait, especially the young 

people.The company works in 

schools and Aboriginal communities 

around Australia and has travelled 

extensively within the Pacific region 

as well as to the USA, Canada, 

Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. 


17

Mornington Island Dancers of 

the Lardil People 

Drawing from the living Aboriginal 

tradition of the Lardil People where 

songs that are received in dreams 

are translated into dance, the 

company presents the traditional 

Aboriginal song and dance of 

Mornington Island. This reinforces 

the closeness of the people to the 

land in revealing the presence of the 

unseen spirits of nature, from 

hunting and the birdlife, animals 

and sea creatures to the powerful 

presence of legendary ancestors of 

creation such as the Rainbow 

Serpent. 

The performances are lead by either 

one or a number of traditional 

songmen. The music (didjeridu) and 

song is always presented live. 

Dancers are selected from the 

community at Mornington Island. 

Now, after 27 years of touring, the 

company's lead dancers are the 

children and grandchildren of the 

original performers. Adult male 

dancers will usually be initiated into 

the cultural law ceremony and 

recognised by the community to 

represent them in sharing their 

unique tradition. Men and women 

lead various dances and where 

appropriate younger children are 

included. Through their extensive 

touring program the company has 

participated in many Australian and 

overseas events. 

Bernadette Walong 

Bernadette is an independent 

dancer-choreographer and teacher 

based in Sydney. She has danced 

in works by many Australian 

choreographers and was former 

Assistant Artistic Director, 

choreographer and dancer with 

Bangarra Dance Theatre. In 2000, 

Bernadette participated in New 

Moves (new territories) 2000 in 

Adelaide and Glasgow, Scotland. 

She has toured Australia and Asia, 

the Pacific and Europe and has 

worked as choreographer in 

residence in Australia, Cuba, 

Vietnam, China and Taiwan. 

Her work Savage Burn, based on a 

poem, "to want...to have...to hold, 

bind...to let," and describing the 

various stages of a personal 

relationship, continues an ongoing 

exploration of dancing en pointe on 

surfaces such as stones 

(Slipstream, Australian Ballet, 1998), 

gravel (The Seed, NORPA, 2000), 

and natural ochre (Ochres, 

Bangarra Dance Theatre, 1994-6). 

In Savage Burn (Australian Dance 

Theatre, 1999) the surface was 

sand. 

Outside the Camp is complex 

and beautiful...never overstated, 

despite the depth of emotion 

involved in these memories of 

our recent past. RealTime 

Tracks Inc. 

Outside the Camp 

A child travels across Darwin's 

harbour to an island where he is 

about to spend the rest of his life. 

This sad story of a boy taken from 

his family is told through dance, 

puppetry and song. It is a work of 

fiction based on the stories of 


people's experience of the Channel 

Island Leprosarium (1931-1955). 

For this performance, Tania Lieman, 

Ken Conway and Tracks' codirector 

David McMicken are joined 

by Stanley Stanislaus, whose father 

is of Tiwi descent, his mother from 

Central Australia, and Allyson Mills, 

a Larrakia/Jawoyn/Gurindji/ 

Kungaraka woman. Originally 

performed with the harbour as 

backdrop at the Darwin Festival, 

2000. 

Tracks is a cross-cultural Northern 

Territory dance and performing arts 

company with strong links with 

Indigenous artists and communities. 

The company is known for 

innovative, large scale outdoor 

performances that bring together 

participants from diverse cultures 

and disciplines. Central to the 

company's work are residencies in 

remote Aboriginal communities and 

regional areas.

music 

The music of survival, pride, and indomitability 

For a long time, the Indigenous 

music of Australia was commonly 

associated with the sounds of the 

didjeridu (historically an instrument 

in fact only played in certain parts of 

the country), clapping sticks and 

traditional singing. As revealed in 

Clinton Walker's book, CD and film, 

Buried Country, there is another, 

more recent, if often forgotten 

tradition in Australia in which 

Indigenous performers made 

American country and western 

music their own. Contemporary 

Indigenous music takes many 

forms. The country tradition is still 

very much alive. There are the 

musicals of Jimmy Chi (Bran Nue 

Dae and Corrugation Road) and 

Wesley Enoch and John Rodgers 

(The Sunshine Club). There are 

opera singers. There are rock bands 

and solo singers of many styles who 

are enormously popular across 

Australia. As Gary Burke has 

pointed out in "Contemporary 

Aboriginal Music, an overview," the 

songs often express a connection 

with the land, are personal and 

frequently political. As well as 

providing a rich means of 

expression, and careers, Indigenous 

musicians are keeping alive tradition, 

communication and, as singer and 

arts festival director Robyn Archer 

argues here, are developing 

innovative and exciting forms. 

Editors 

I imagine the first music I heard 

from Aboriginal Australia was Jimmy 

Little’s Royal Telephone. That was 

the 60s—and I too was on 

Bandstand, the popular music TV 

show. Jimmy was a handsome 

young pop star and there was 

nothing about his chart success 

then that could possibly mirror his 

second coming in the charts today. 

Today’s context is politically 

charged, and any cultural 

manifestation from Aboriginal 

Australia bears the whole import of 

those politics. A couple of months 

ago on Australia’s National Day at 

EXPO 2000 in Hannover, Germany, 

it was no accident that Deborah 

Cheetham was compere and that 

the evening concert included not 

only Mara!, Fruit, and The Australian 

Art Orchestra with the Sruthi Laya 

Quartet (from India) but also Jimmy 

Little singing with Karma Country 

and Nabarlek, a very tight eight 

piece rock outfit from an outstation 

in Arnhem Land in northern 


My next awareness came in the 70s 

through Auntie Leila Rankin in 

Adelaide. Though Leila passed 

away some years ago, the Ethnomusicological 

Centre she set up as 

an autonomous department of 

Adelaide University still bears fruit. 

In those days you’d go to the 

Centre and find an elder teaching a 

little kid to paint, or a big meeting 

with everyone on the floor and a 

feast of Kentucky Fried. Leila would 

call the place whatever she 

wanted—what she did there was 

much more than music. But there 

was the ‘Aboriginal Orchestra.' 

You’d go to rehearsals and see 

young girls and boys sawing away 

at violins and blowing trumpets 

(under a whitefella baton) to render 

a Bert Kaempfert hit from Swingin’ 

Safari. Leila always said it was to 

keep the kids off the streets, but for 

some it meant more than that—like 

the little Vietnamese boy in calipers. 

He had been adopted by white 

Australian parents and identified 

more strongly with Aboriginal kids 

than with his white Australian 

counterparts. And out of that 

orchestra grew not only a great little 

jazz ensemble, but the enduring 

band No Fixed Address. 

When I was working with Ningali 

Lawford on her one-woman show, 

Ningali, her grandfather’s words 

echoed constantly—"you lose your 

language, you lose your culture." 

Now when I hear Nabarlek or 

Saltwater Band, both from up 

north, singing in Language, you 

realise that the popular music form 

was always a way of preserving 

culture and preserving language. 

For a while in the 80s, all the bands 

were into reggae, mainly I think 

because it was a music they heard 

being used politically in other 

contexts. It was a ready tool, and 

Aboriginal Australia’s triumph in 

survival has been its easy ability to 

appropriate any cultural tool it 

needs to make strong statements. 

It wasn't long before bands like 

Yothu Yindi from the north and 

Scrap Metal from the west turned 

Aboriginal Rock into an artform. 

This in turn eventually led to the 

Broome revival, and Jimmy Chi and 

his collaborators appropriated a 

further form, the popular musical, to 

make a new kind of statement in 

the widely travelled and televised 

Bran Nue Dae and, subsequently, 

Corrugation Road. 

When I started programming the 

1998 Adelaide Festival, around mid 

1995, I felt as if the great strengths 

of Aboriginal public culture were in 

visual art and popular music. I 

wasn’t aware of huge new stirrings 

in drama or dance at that time. 

There were lots of choices in music 

and I ended up with concerts from 

Tiddas, Archie Roach and Ruby 

Hunter, and a wind duo with Tom E 

Lewis on didjeridu—a lovely fusion 

of black and white music. These 

concerts were very popular, sellouts 

in fact. The intimate surroundings 

allowed Tiddas and Archie and 

Ruby to be real ‘singers’—the 

people that told the stories about 

their people and their land. It was 

exceptionally strong stuff. 

The Olympics Festival of the 

Dreaming had given everyone a 

huge kick along in 1997. It allowed 

me to fill the 2000 Adelaide 

program with all kinds of Aboriginal 

presence and it wasn’t hard—there 

were innumerable choices. We 

ended up with Beyond the Pale, a 

sensational contemporary visual art 

exhibition curated by Brenda L 

Croft, the beautiful jewel Ochre and 

Dust featuring storytellers Nura 

Ward and Nellie Paterson, and the 

Indigenous Playwrights Conference 

as well as a play, The Story of 

Lanky, by Owen Love. 

But front and centre was a new 

wave of bands. We were hearing 

about them from up in the 

NorthernTerritory. Hearing about the 

football matches that have always 

acted as meetings and how they 

were now sporting new young 

bands. There was an Aboriginal or 

Pacific band every night in the 

Festival Club—and we managed to 

incorporate Warumpi, Nabarlek, 

Kaha (a local Maori band), Onslaught 

and Letterstick. Lajamanu Teenage 

Band was on the list too, but the 

floods played havoc with their 

schedule. The opening of the festival 

was dedicated to this music, and at 

the end we were able to tour all the 

way up to the Pitjantjatjara lands in 

northern South Australia where a 

couple of thousand local people 

turned out. 

And if that’s what I was aware of, as 

a city-bound eclectic, then all of that 

was just scraping the surface of 

what’s actually out there. Up in 

Darwin in 1999 there was one night 

that knocked me out—a concert in 

the Smith Street Ruins. Lots and 

lots of people and Letterstick Band 

going for it with a song that had the 

whole audience jumping and yelling, 

fists in the air "Freedom for East 

Timor! Freedom for East Timor"— 

the rock music form appropriated at 

first to express Aboriginal strength, 

anger, passion, history, culture— 

now strong enough to stand up on 

its own two feet and lend its 

strength to others in trouble. And at 

the same time they were making it a 

blast, a delight, a night for dancing. 

In Hannover, the audiences and 

organisers were amazed by 

Nabarlek. In Germany, where there 

19

20 

have been continuing problems in 

grasping the nature of 

contemporary Aboriginal culture 

(the desire only for dot paintings, 

only ‘authentic’ dance and lots of 

didjeridu,) this felt like a step 

forward. The guys are very quiet off 

stage and amazingly powerful on. 

Their ability to go unplugged for 

some traditional song and dance 

only strengthened the case of their 

unadorned and powerful rock 

performances. Unlike the 

theatricality of Yothu Yindi’s great 

performance, Nabarlek appear just 

as musos—black jeans and T-shirts 

and a down-to-business act. They 

seem representative of the power 

that underlies Aboriginal Australia’s 

cause in the twenty-first century. 

And there are very many like them 

throughout the country—many of 

them coming from places just as 

remote as Nabarlek’s outstation. 

The simple power of these bands, 

their eloquent position on any 

stage, makes a mockery of a lot of 

the empty rhetoric surrounding 

Aboriginal issues—especially the 

kind that seems ignorant of this 

relatively new straightforward 

statement of survival, pride, and 

indomitability. 

And while the sets of these bands, 

and the smaller ensembles (like the 

Stiff Gins) and individual singers are 

always entertaining, and in many 

ways just bloody good music, their 

pleasure for me continues to lie in 

the power of the medium for other 

ends. As a singer who’s always 

been pre-occupied with content in 

song as much as form and style I 

guess this is predictable. But for 

those who haven’t yet tasted this 

new wave of bands, I guarantee it’s 

every bit as satisfying as pleasure in 

the detail of Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Island visual arts at present— 

and that’s some claim. At first 

hearing and sight you might just 

think ‘rock’, but the more you hear, 

the variety of style, the claim on 

language, you realise just what a 

form this is, and how many riches 

can be enjoyed from its evergrowing 

store. 

Robyn Archer 

Singer and music theatre performer 

Robyn Archer was Artistic Director 

of the 1998 and 2000 Telstra 

Adelaide Festivals, and is Artistic 

Director of both the Gay Games VI, 

Sydney 2002 and the inaugural 10 

Days on the Island festival, 

Tasmania, 2001. 

References 

Gary Burke, "Contemporary 

Aboriginal Music, an overview", 

Cairlin Rowley ed, Australia, 

Exploring the Musical Landscape, 

Australian Music Centre, Sydney, 

1998 

John Castles, Tjungaringanyi: 

Aboriginal Rock, in Philip Hayward 

ed, From pop to postmodernism: 

popular music and Australian 

culture from the 1960s to the 1990s, 

Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992 

Jennifer Isaacs ed, Australian 

Aboriginal Music, Aboriginal Artists 

Agency, Sydney, 1979 

Karl Neuenfeldt ed, The didjeridu: 

from Arnhem Land to the internet, 

John Libbey, Sydney, 1997 

Clinton Walker, Buried Country, The 

Story of Aboriginal Country Music, 

Pluto Press, Sydney 2000, book, 

CD and film (Film Australia) 

The Australian Music Centre in 

Sydney has an Indigenous music 

catalogue of books, cassettes and 

CDs available for sale, as well as an 

extensive resource library. 

Australian Music Centre, PO Box 

N690, Grosvenor Place, NSW 1220 

ph 61 2 9247 46 77 fax 61 2 9241 

2873 info@amcoz.com.au 

www.amcoz.com.au 

Mark Atkins 

Among Australia's most successful 

exports are the musicians who play 

traditional instruments: Mathew 

Doyle, Richard Walley, Alan Dargin, 

Adrian Ross and Mark Atkins. A 

descendant of the Yamitji people of 

Western Australia and of Irish- 

Australian heritage, Mark is a 

master of the didjeridu but also 

storyteller, song writer, drummer 

and visual artist. He has a long 

history of performances in Australia 

including major festivals, tours to 

European festivals and was a 

featured player with the London 

Philharmonic at a Festival Hall 

concert in 1996. With the Aboriginal 

artist Janawirre Yiarrka, he set up 

the musical ensemble Ankalai 

developing the technique of circular 

breathing to a fine art. Mark Atkins 

has also collaborated with REM 

Theatre on composition for a 

number of their productions. 

Christine Anu 

A Torres Strait Islander, Christine 

graduated from the National 

Aboriginal and Islander Dance 

School and worked extensively with 

Bangarra and the Aboriginal and 

Islander Dance Theatres. More 

recently her career has included 

major roles in musicals such as 

Little Shop of Horrors and Rent and 

film performances, including Baz 

Luhrmann's forthcoming Moulin 

Rouge. Her highly successful first 

album Stylin' Up won her an 

Australian Recording Industry 

Award (ARIA) for Best Female Artist 

in 1996. She has performed at 

music festivals and events 

throughout Australia and 

internationally. A number of her own 

songs appear on her new album 

Come My Way (Mushroom Music).

22 

Kev Carmody 

Kev Carmody is a key figure in the 

important history of Indigenous solo 

singer-songwriters, effectively 

blending the personal and the 

political. His debut album, Pillars of 

Society, was released by Larrikin 

Records in 1988 and acclaimed for 

its political power—"the greatest 

protest record ever made in 

Australia" (Sydney Morning Herald). 

In Buried Country, Clinton Walker 

writes, "It was a mark of the 

Australian music industry's 

increasing maturity that, by the late 

80s, artists like Kev Carmody and 

Archie Roach were able to relatively 

readily establish themselves on the 

professional circuit." Carmody has 

made eight albums with Festival 

Records. 

Troy Cassar-Daley 

At twelve years of age he busked in 

the streets of Tamworth, at sixteen 

his band Little Eagle toured the 

North Coast of NSW and Troy then 

travelled outback Australia 

developing his songwriting skills. 

His debut EP Dream Out Loud was 

released by Sony Music in 1994, 

the title track topping the country 

music charts. His debut album 

Beyond the Dancing won the 1995 

ARIA Award for Best Country 

Record. At the 1996 Country Music 

Awards Australia (CMAA) in 

Tamworth, he won Best Male Vocal 

Award and toured with his lifetime 

idol, Merle Haggard. At the 1998 

CMAA Awards, Troy won three 

Gold Guitars and the Entertainer of 

the Year Award. In 1999 he again 

took out Best Male Vocal and Song 

of the Year at CMAA, performed at 

the International Showcase at Fan 

Fair in Nashville and made his 

second appearance on the Grand 

Ole Opry. 

Coloured Stone 

Starting out as a family band 

playing at community events, 

Coloured Stone released their first 

single titled Black Boy in 1984. It 

topped the charts on CAAMA 

(Central Australian Aboriginal Media 

Association) Radio in Alice Springs 

for nine months as well as the 

Radio Australia lists in the Pacific 

Islands. Their first LP Koonibba 

Rock was named after the sacred 

rock hole corroboree ground at 

Koonibba in South Australia, home 

of the band's leader Bunna Lawrie. 

For over 20 years, the band has 

travelled to remote communities, 

towns and cities throughout 

Australia, toured internationally, 

been nominated for ARIA (Australian 

Recording Industry) Awards, and in 

1999 won the Deadly Sounds 

National Aboriginal and Torres Strait 

Island Music Award for the most 

outstanding contribution to 

Aboriginal Music. In 2000 Bunna 

Lawrie was awarded the prestigious 

Don Banks Award by the Australia 

Council's Music Board—the first 

time this award had gone to a rock 

musician or an Indigenous artist. 

Members of the band are Jason 

Scott (lead guitar), Dwayne Lawrie 

(drums), Russell Pinkie (bass), 

Ashley Dargen and Bunna Lawrie 

(singer/songwriter and rhythm 

guitar). 


Aboriginal music was transformed in 

the 1980s by three groups—No 

Fixed Address, Warumpi Band and 

Coloured Stone—who ushered in a 

new era of black rock and ultimately 

killed off the dominance of country 

music. In this big three's wake, 

Aboriginal music exploded, 

spawning a wave of 'settlement 

bands' that led all the way to Yothu 

Yindi. 

Clinton Walker, Buried Country: the 

story of Aboriginal Country Music, 

Pluto Press, Sydney 2000 

Mathew Doyle 

Of Aboriginal (Nation: Muruwari) and 

Irish descent, Matthew Doyle 

trained at NAISDA (National 

Aboriginal and Islander Skills 

Development Association) in dance 

and music and became a founding 

member of the Aboriginal and 

Islander Dance Theatre. After 1992 

he freelanced, primarily as a 

didjeridu player, singer and dancer 

in numerous collaborations and 

through his business, Wurunini 

Music and Dance. He has released 

four CDs and in the worldwide 

millennium ABC TV broadcast he 

played a new work by Australian 

composer Ross Edwards from the 

top of the Sydney Opera House 

sails. He choreographed parts of 

the opening and closing ceremonies 

of the 2000 Olympic Games in 

Sydney. Blackman Whiteman, 

Matthew's collaboration with 

experimental singer and 

instrumentalist Colin Offord is 

touring internationally. 

Ruby Hunter 

Ruby Hunter (Ngarrindjeri clan of 

South Australia) was forcibly 

removed from her parents at eight 

years of age, experiencing a 

traumatic upbringing in institutions 

and white foster homes. She had 

always sung but says she caught 

the music bug watching Archie 

Roach, her long time partner, who 

encouraged her to write and sing. 

Her debut album, Thoughts Within 

(1994), was nominated for an ARIA 

award. She wrote all twelve tracks 

for her new album, Feeling Good 

(Mushroom Music, 2000), her 

inspiration drawn from every aspect 

of her life including her travels to 

places as isolated as Aurukun in 

Cape York. Feeling Good was also 

nominated for an ARIA Award. Ruby 

Hunter has toured with her music to 

Europe, Canada and the US, and 

performed all over Australia 

including special guest spots with 

Archie Roach, Suzanne Vega and 

Patti Smith.

24 

Roger Knox 

Roger Knox was born in Toomelah 

Aboriginal Mission, growing up with 

country music and gospel. In 1984 

with his Euraba Band he recorded 

Give It A Go, followed in 1985 with 

The Gospel Album. The more his 

popularity grew, the more interested 

he became in playing to neglected 

Aboriginal audiences in remote 

communities and prisons, including 

banding together with Vic Simms, 

Mac Silver and Bobby McLeod in 

1990 for a tour to detention centres 

and Indian reservations in the US 

and Canada. Back in Tamworth for 

the 1991 Festival, Euraba played a 

triumphant homecoming. Roger is 

currently working on a new album 

for Central Australian Aboriginal 

Media Association (CAAMA) Music. 

Saltwater Band 

The band consists of eight young 

musicians from remote Elcho Island 

off the coast of North East Arnhem 

Land. Their first release, the album 

Gapu Damurrun, showcases two 

styles of contemporary Indigenous 

music—traditional songs that sound 

as if they were written yesterday 

and contemporary pop songs 

influenced by reggae and ska. The 

Saltwater Band is Geoffrey 

Gurrumul Yunupingu, the band's 

most experienced musician, 

songwriter and former member of 

Yothu Yindi, lead singer and 

songwriter Manuel Nulupani 

Dhurrkay; Jonathon, Nigel and 

Andrew Yunupingu; Joshua 

Dhurrkay and Lloyd and Adrian 

Garrawitja. The band has a strong 

commitment to issues that affect 

Aboriginal people. 

Jimmy Little 

Born at Cummeragunja near 

Echuca on the Murray River, Jimmy 

Little is an Australian music legend 

with nearly 50 years in the 

entertainment business— 

Australia's first black pop star in the 

60s and Pop Star of the Year in 

1964. He has recorded over twenty 

seven albums and toured the 

country, acted in films by Tracey 

Moffatt and Wim Wenders and 

spent several years teaching. 

Jimmy made a triumphant comeback 

in 1995 when Festival 

released his new album, Yorta Yorta 

Man. In October 1999 he was 

inducted into the Australian Record 

Industry Association (ARIA)'s Hall of 

Fame following the commercial 

success of The Messenger, an 

album of classic Australian songs 

from writers such as Neil Finn, Paul 

Kelly, Ed Kuepper, Nick Cave and 

Steve Kilbey. International 

appearances include EXPO 2000 in 

Hannover, Germany. The 

Messenger won the 1999 ARIA 

Award for Contemporary Album of 

the Year.

Nabarlek Band 

Nabarlek come from Manmoyi, a 

tiny community in central Arnhem 

Land. Their success as a traditional 

dance group performing Dreamtime 

stories at community festivals 

allowed them to purchase 

instruments—guitars and 

keyboards and a real drum kit 

instead of upturned flour tins. The 

title of their first CD, Munwurrk, 

means bushfire and was suggested 

to the band by the old people of 

their community. Bushfire is 

essential to the existence of the 

people as it helps the hunting of the 

kangaroo and brings renewal to the 

country. The songs on the album 

derive from traditional stories and 

songs rewritten within a 

contemporary format. Nabarlek 

have toured extensively in 2000, 

starting with the Adelaide Festival, 

regional South Australia and the 

Northern Territory. They recently 

appeared at EXPO 2000 in 

Hannover, Germany. 

Archie Roach 

Archie Roach is a singer and 

songwriter, a poet and storyteller in 

the tradition of his ancestors 

recounting real life as well as 

Dreamtime stories. Born in 

Framlingham Aboriginal Mission in 

South West Victoria, Archie was 

taken from his family and spent 

time in institutions before being 

fostered by a non-indigenous family. 

In 1990, his album Charcoal Lane 

was produced by Melbourne 

musicians Paul Kelly and Steve 

Connolly and featured the song 

Took the Children Away which has 

become an Aboriginal anthem. The 

album won two ARIAs and a 

Human Rights award, hit US Rolling 

Stone's Top 50 and has since gone 

gold in Australia. His album Looking 

for Butter Boy (1997) won three 

ARIA awards in 1998. Archie has 

travelled extensively in Australia, 

appeared at festivals such as 

Womad, toured Europe and Asia 

and remote Aboriginal communities 

in Cape York. He is currently 

collaborating with Bangarra Dance 

Theatre on their production, Skin. 

Stiff Gins 

Nardi Simpson, Kaleena Briggs, 

Emma Donovan are the Stiff Gins, 

three vocalists who met at a 

contemporary music course at The 

Eora Centre in Sydney. All have in 

common musical families. Emma's 

experience is in country music. 

Kaleena first appeared on Koori 

radio in a compilation of young 

Indigenous music. Nardi has 

training in classical and 

contemporary music and is a 

talented arranger and composer. 

Stiff Gins won the University Bands 

Competition (1999) and since then 

their many appearances in 

concerts, on radio and television 

have been greeted enthusiastically 

by audience and critics. 8th Festival 

of Pacific Arts, 2000 

25

26 

Warumpi Band 

Originating in the early 80s, 

Warumpi took their name from the 

honey-ant dreaming site located 

near the Aboriginal settlement of 

Papunya, 240 kilometres from Alice 

Springs. They toured the Northern 

Territory and Kimberley region 

playing to communities, outback 

stations and isolated townships. 

Warumpi wrote, recorded and 

released the first rock song in an 

Aboriginal language, Jailanguru 

Pakarnu (Out From Jail), in 1983. In 

1984 their debut album Big Name, 

No Blanket was released with the 

songs Blackfella/Whitefella, 

Breadline and Fitzroy Crossing 

receiving national airplay. In 1985 

the band toured Australia, Papua 

New Guinea, Solomon Islands and 

Vanuatu. They inspired and 

accompanied Midnight Oil on a 

month long tour of Aboriginal 

communities in 1986. In 1995 the 

band completed a highly successful 

tour of Germany, France, Poland, 

Switzerland, Italy and the UK. After 

20 years in the business Warumpi 

play their last gig in Darwin in 2000. 

George Rrurrumbu, Neil Murray and 

Sammy Butcher are all pursuing 

solo careers. 

Richard Walley 

Richard Walley is one of Australia's 

leading didjeridu players, appearing 

throughout Australia and 

internationally. To preserve his 

Nyoongar culture of South Western 

Australia, in 1978 he formed the 

Middar Aboriginal Theatre which 

played a key role in developing a 

generation of Indigenous 

performers. Walley has acted, 

written, designed, danced and 

worked as a musician in numerous 

stage and television productions. 

He is currently director of the Perthbased 

Aboriginal Productions and 

Promotions. In 2000 he was 

appointed Chair of the Aboriginal 

and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fund 

of the Australia Council and a 

Member of Council. 

Ebony Williams 

A Sydneysider of Wiradjuri and 

African American descent, Ebony 

Williams' career as a rapper 

"translating Indigenous Australian 

experience into the language of hip 

hop" dates back to 1995 when she 

took part in Hip Hopera, an initiative 

of Urban Theatre Projects, a 

community theatre company based 

in Sydney's western suburbs. Her 

song Open Up Your Mind, dealing 

with the Indigenous struggle and 

the rise of Pauline Hanson and right 

wing politics, appears on First 

Words on the Mother Tongues 

label, the first all-female hip hop 

label in the world. Ebony appears 

with Amber Romeril and guests at 

the 8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000 

Yothu Yindi 

In Buried Country, Clinton Walker 

describes the hugely popular Yothu 

Yindi as "The first Aboriginal band 

to break out on the world stage". 

They blend Western and Aboriginal 

music, aiming to embrace all 

peoples through international 

touring and drawing on ancient 

traditions and modern sounds. 

Their Tribal Voice (1991) CD 

included the band's first hit single, 

Treaty, an Australian Top Twenty hit 

that was 22 weeks in the national 

charts. It was also the first song in 

an Aboriginal language (Gumatj) to 

gain extensive airplay and 

international recognition. They have 

produced numerous CDs with 

Mushroom Music. Their latest (and 

sixth album) titled Garma contains 

"songs about country, songs about 

history, songs of hope and a couple 

of love songs as well." Yolngu 

members of Yothu Yindi live in the 

tribal homelands of north-east 

Arnhem Land 600 kilometres east 

of the Northern Territory capital of 

Darwin. Some live in Yirrkala, a 

coastal community on the Gove 

Peninsular that was originally 

established by the Methodist 

Missionary Society in 1935. Others 

live in Galiwinku, a former mission 

on Elcho Island originally 

established in 1942.

28 

visual arts 

Millennia Indigenna 

In this short guide, it is impossible 

to do justice to the prodigious 

numbers, diversity and excellence 

of Australia's Indigenous visual 

artists. The small sample (from a 

huge bibliography) of books, 

journals and catalogues listed at 

the end of the essay is where you 

will find some justice done. 

However, what Djon Mundine's 

essay and Rea's selection for the 

Biennale of Contemporary Art in 

Noumea do so well is show that 

Australian Indigenous art is a living 

and ever evolving phenomenon, 

and that arbitrary notions of the 

traditional and the contemporary 

are inadequate touchstones for 

comprehending the works. Nor is 

the notion of cultural identity fixed. 

Mundine describes generations of 

Indigenous artists and their distinct 

rebellions against enforced 

concepts of identity that are the 

legacy of colonialism. Affirmation of 

a spiritual connection to the land 

enters a dynamic relationship with 

other forces—urban life, new 

technologies, art theory and politics. 

The Editors. 

In 1900 white Australian 

bureaucracies had begun to set 

definitions of Aboriginality and as a 

consequence, degrees of 

authenticity in Aboriginal art. Today, 

at the beginning of the 21st century 

questions of identity and authenticity 

continue to be a problem for certain 

sections of society and the art 

world. However, for an ever 

expanding number of young, 

sophisticated, articulate and 'out 

there' Aboriginal and Torres Strait 

Islander artists it is a problem that is 

seen to be irrelevant. The argument 

is look at our art, we create art on 

our own terms. Even so these 

artists are still defiantly black, 

although they expect their work to 

be appreciated as universal. 

Earlier generations had a hard time 

of it just being recognised as 

Aboriginal. They came in three 

waves: those from the 1950s, 60s 

and 70s—Roy Bull, Jeffrey 

Samuels, Raymond Meeks, Lin 

Onus, Gerry Bostock, Trevor 

Nichols, Gordon Syrons, Kevin 

Gilbert and others. These artists 

struggled in a world that wouldn't 

believe in their Aboriginal art and, to 

an extent, in their personal 

Aboriginal heritage. It's almost the 

case that Aboriginal people have 

had to express themselves in some 

kind of art in order to be considered 

real Aboriginals. 

Artists from the 1980s—Fiona 

Foley, Ellen Jose, Tracey Moffatt, 

Karen Casey, Gordon Bennett, Les 

Griggs, Lawrence Leslie, Avril Quaill, 

Michael Riley, Bronwyn Bancroft, 

Sally Morgan and many others— 

never forgot their origins and often 

were at the forefront of political 

movements over this period. I 

remember in 1987 Tracey Moffatt 

on the TV news being arrested in 

the UK for protesting against the 

appropriation of the Aboriginal flag 

by the 'first fleet' re-enactment. 

Following the Koori 84 art show 

when the term 'urban Aboriginal art' 

was first heard, a group of mainly 

young graduating Koori art students 

met at Fiona Foley's flat in inner 

Sydney to form an artists' cooperative. 

Foley had been inspired 

in this venture by visiting Aboriginal 

artist co-operatives in Arnhem 

Land. They chose the name 

boomalli, a Wiradjuri word meaning 

'to strike' and spelt co-operative 

with a 'k' to complete the acronym 

BAARK (Boomalli Aboriginal Artists 

Residents Ko-operative) as in the 

bark sheets traditionally used for 

paintings—a practice much more 

widespread then than it is today. 

The 'k' made it 'cool' to the local 

Koori community and added a bit of 

Germanic-historical-intellectual 

credibility within the art world. Many 

of the group had attended art 

colleges and become politicised in 

the process. 

Fiona Foley Native Blood 1994 

courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 

Fiona Foley (Nation: Batjala) is a highly respected Australian artist working in 

paint, printmaking, photography and installation. Of her Native Blood series, 

she says, "Within my retrieval of Badtjala archival material there was a 

mysterious and striking image of one of my forbears...Hidden in the 

humiliation of the colonizer's gaze is a gift, the shape of a breast. The only 

way I could come close to her was to recast her in my image.." (Colonial 

Post Colonial, Museum of Modern Art at Heide). Fiona Foley has had many 

solo exhibitions throughout Australia and her work has been included in 

major group exhibitions including most recently Aboriginal Art in Modern 

Worlds at the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and National Gallery of 

Australia, Canberra; Bonheurs des Antipodes, Musee de Picardie, France 

and Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. With photographer Heidrun Löhr, Fiona 

Foley created the installation for the performance Ochre and Dust featured 

at the 8th Festival of Pacific Arts.

Photography had come into popular 

use at the last gasp of European 

colonialism, the final colonisation of 

Oceania, the South Pacific. 

Ultimately and blatantly, 

photography was another tool for 

colonialism to label, control, 

dehumanise and disempower its 

subjects who could only reply in 

defiant gaze at the lens controlled 

by someone else. For many 

Indigenous artists, to take up 

photography (both chemical and 

digital) as an artform was a 

conscious move to counter this 

history. At the close of the 

millennium, however, these 

Indigenous practitioners have 

moved from mere reaction to more 

personal human themes. Brenda L 

Croft's moving memorial to her 

deceased father and brother 

through a series of digital 

compositions can be understood by 

anyone. Michael Riley, a Wiradjuri 

artist initially worked in documentary 

photography and film and has 

moved laterally from this path of 

family and friends to environment, 

history and wider social issues. 

Artists such as Trevor Nicholls, 

Harold Thomas and more recently 

Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt 

are reputed to have wanted to be 

known as artists in their own right 

rather than be stereotyped 

(ghettoised) as Aboriginal artists. 

Ian Abdulla Impressing the girls 1999 

courtesy Greenaway Art Gallery 

While to them their Aboriginality is 

never in question and their art says 

this in many ways, their white peers 

have sometimes striven to confine 

them within this category. Tracey 

Moffatt composes her private, 

eclectic dramatisations of history. 

Starting with issues of colour, she 

plays with truth and reality and 

through it, her own identity. She 

remains Aboriginal but her art deals 

with personal issues, puts up 

smoke screens—her playfulness 

makes the viewer ask, is she 

Aboriginal, Jewish, gay, 

straight...and does it matter? 

Ian Abdulla addresses the 

dispossessed Aboriginal people 

whom Australian society continues 

to ignore, the rural poor, both black 

and white. His paintings depict the 

menial, itinerant work through which 

these people eke out an existence. 

Events are often portrayed in a 

nostalgic light as he maps his 

landscape (not dreaming), seeking 

out cultural and childhood 

memories. Autobiographical, the 

paintings are in reality a truer history 

than most for both black and white 

in South Australia. Recording this 

minority history also preoccupies 

Robert Campbell Jnr. His incentive 

to paint comes from a commitment 

to record events for his family. Both 

are practically self taught although 

encouraged and mentored by 

sympathetic white Australian artists. 

"Created from a lively synergy of text and imagery, the narrative paintings of 

Ian Abdulla (Nation: Ngarrindjerri) are fresh and vivid—often peppered with 

humour and political barbs... Apart from their historical importance, Ian's 

paintings...affirm the culture of rural Aborigines throughout the country who, 

despite being dispossessed, have been determined to stay on their own 

land." (John Kean, 1992). He has published two illustrated books (Omnibus 

Press) and exhibited widely in Australia including Beyond the Pale, 2000 

Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. He 

is represented in all major Australian public collections. Internationally he has 

exhibited in Holland, Canada, Spain, Cuba and Japan. 

Tracey Moffatt Scarred for Life, 1994: Birth Certificate 1962 

courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 

Tracey Moffatt is a successful and highly inventive artist working in 

photography, film and video. A feature of her work is the "staged" narrative 

that juxtaposes truth and fiction, natural and artificial. In the series Scarred 

for Life "the tableaux, which incorporate stories from her past and those of 

her friends, critique the very genre they adopt: the true/life 

photodocumentary." (Art in America, July 1995). Her films, Night Cries 

(1990) and Bedevil (1993), are simultaneously disturbing and visually 

sumptuous. She lives and works in Australia and in New York where she 

had her first solo show in 1997 at the Dia Centre for the Arts. In the same 

year her work was featured at the Venice Biennale. She is included in major 

Australian collections and has exhibited widely within Australia and in the 

US, Asia and Europe. 

Choosing to live and work in 

Brisbane, Gordon Bennett has 

turned the tables on 

postmodernism in his borrowing of 

western art imagery and cherished 

icons to present his own 'black 

armband history' of Australia's 

colonial past. A highly intelligent 

and clever amalgam of colonial 

images and his own visual 

commentary challenge official 

sentiments of Australian and 

western art history. 

Then there are the artists of the 

1990s—social conditions had 

changed; a new generation had 

passed through art institutions in 

reasonably significant numbers— 

Judy Watson, Destiny Deacon, 

Gordon Hookey, Bianca Beetson, 

Clinton Nain and others. The 

youngest of these, Brook Andrew, 

Rea, Darren Siwes, Christian B 

Thompson, Mark Blackman and 

others use computer generated 

imagery, digitally manipulated 

photography and mixed media— 

print on metal, or overlaid digitally; 

timber marked by incisions; spray 

paint or burns, found objects—are 

all arranged in clever ways to get 

the message across. 

This new generation of artists, 

generation Dhu (a suffix added to a 

noun, meaning made from/out of) is 

the result of a period of change over 

29

30 

Destiny Deacon Someday I’ll fly away from It shows no fear 1999 

"A consciousness of the violent gaps and distortions in Australian history is at the centre of the 

work of Destiny Deacon (Nation: Ku Ku/Erub/Mer). Her strategy is not to rewrite that history in a 

more comprehensive or more accurate way; rather she begins with the remnants and illusions that 

shape the present and works toward a confrontation with our cultural assumptions so that, at the 

very least, the obvious search for authenticity is revealed as the most obscene and indulgent form 

of identity" (Nikos Papastergiardis, catalogue, Beyond the Pale, 2000 Adelaide Biennial of Australian 

Art ). Destiny Deacon has been exhibited widely in Australia including at the 1999 Australian 

Perspecta exhibition, the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery, and the 48th 

Venice Biennale as well as in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Germany and the UK. 

the last thirty years within funding 

bodies, curatorial practices and 

collecting and exhibiting criteria in 

institutions. The creation of a 

separate Aboriginal and Torres Strait 

Islander Arts Board (now Fund) of 

the Australia Council in the early 

1970s and its 'Aboriginalisation' in 

the 1980s meant a vertical 

integration from Indigenous policy to 

Indigenous artist and 'product'. 

More importantly, a new breed of 

curators are using their positions to 

broaden the readings of Indigenous 

art. The first real Torres Strait 

Islander exhibition, Ilan Pasin, This 

is Our Way (still touring Australia), a 

wide survey show of historical and 

contemporary work was curated 

and researched by Torres Strait 

Islanders Tom Mosby and Brian 

Robinson. This was a major 

statement in recognising the 

separateness of TSI history from 

Aboriginal history. Researchers had 

been discussing showing an 'erotic' 

Indigenous exhibition for decades 

but it was Garry Lee, a Larakeyah 

artist-curator who was to present 

his Love Magic show in early 2000. 

In similar fashion, although a 

number of smaller surveys of the 

Papunya movement had occurred, 

the first major show by a state 

gallery, Papunya Tula: Genesis and 

Genius opened this year at the Art 

Gallery of NSW curated by Hetti 

Perkins. In its tenth year, the 

Adelaide Biennale finally recognised 

the new wave of young Indigenous 

artists by inviting Brenda L Croft to 

put together a completely Australian 

Indigenous show, Beyond the Pale. 

Even apparently stable forms of 

'traditional' visual art connecting 

land and identity do evolve. From its 

beginnings in the 1970s the now 

internationally known 'dot and 

circle' school of painting has 

changed from formulaic 

representations to play with colour 

and composition and scale. It is 

much more personally expressive 

than prescribed—Emily Kame 

Kngwarray caught the public 

imagination and broke all the rules 

in the art world, evolving a 'new' 

type of undefinable painting. One of 

the Warlpiri women painters now 

coming into her own, Dorothy 

Napangardi, goes from the 

macro—overview of tracts of her 

land—to the micro—a shopping list 

of bush food and useful plants. 

Sheena Wilfred's paintings follow a 

similar style in representing the land 

as a litany of plants and creatures. 

A different evolution is evident in 

the work of Judy Watson. Watson 

had already made a name for 

herself at the end of the 1980s with 

a range of prints and her 

installation, The Guardians. In their 

first real recognition of urban 

Aboriginal art, the latter piece, an 

arrangement of five silhouette 

ancestral figures, was acquired by 

the Art Gallery of NSW in 1987 

along with a painting by Jeffrey 

Samuels and several works on 

paper by Fiona Foley. Watson has 

since moved on to an 

expressionistic style of layered 

painting composition to win the 

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri Yala 

(Wild potato) dreaming 1971 

Private collection 

Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, 

courtesy Art Gallery NSW 

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri (Nation: 

Anmatyerre) worked as a stockman 

on Napperby Station in the 

Western Desert. An accomplished 

woodcarver, he painted the Honey 

Ant Dreaming mural on the 

Papunya school wall along with a 

number of other artists. Billy 

Stockman was chairman of the 

Papunya Tula Artists of the Western 

Desert in the 70s. He lives in Alice 

Springs and has been exhibited in 

The Face of the Centre (1985), 

Dreamings (1988-89), Dot and 

Circle (1985), Dreamings of the 

Desert (1996), and Twenty-five 

years and Beyond (1999). His 

painting Yala (Wild Potato) 

Dreaming (1971) is one of the 

many outstanding works in 

Papunya Tula: Genesis & Genius at 

the Art Gallery of New South 

Wales, 2000. He visited the US for 

the opening of the exhibition 

Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal 

Australia in New York (1988) and 

has travelled to Papua New 

Guinea, New Zealand and South 

Africa.

Moët et Chandon Art Award and 

general acclaim. Most recently she 

and other members of this wave 

have taken on the Australian art 

world in winning a series of 

coveted public art opportunities. 

Among this 90s group, a number 

of 'urban Aboriginal' artists, 

including Destiny Deacon, began to 

label their work as 'Blak art', both 

reclaiming the colonialist word 

'Black' in their own terms and 

dealing with general issues of 

present experience that don't 

necessarily have a dreaming story. 

This is a strong statement of selfdefinition 

by artists who are not 

willing to wait for the art academe 

to pigeonhole them. They align 

themselves with the international 

post-colonial artists and curators of 

colour. Destiny Deacon, of Torres 

Strait Islander descent, who has 

lived in Melbourne most of her life, 

has exhibited from the early 1990s. 

She uses arrangements of objects 

of nostalgia and cultural memory in 

a reflection on contemporary 

existence with a fine sense of 

awareness, irony and biting, steely 

wit. The story continues. 

Djon Mundine 

Djon Mundine (Nation: Bandjalang), 

OAM (Order of Australia Medal for 

services to the visual arts) is a 

freelance writer and curator of 

Indigenous art, formerly Senior 

Curator of Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Islander programs at the 

Museum of Contemporary Art, 

Sydney. 

References 

Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art, 

Thames & Hudson, London, 1993 

Catalogue, Beyond the Pale, 

curated by Brenda L Croft, 2000 

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 

Art Gallery of South Australia, 2000 

Sylvia Kleinert, Margo Neale eds, 

The Oxford Companion to 

Aboriginal Art and Culture, Oxford 

University Press, November 2000 

Visual Arts & Crafts resource 

directory, ATSIC 

P O Box 17, Woden ACT 2606 

Tel: 61 2 6121 4000 

Artlink, Reconciliation? Indigenous 

art for the 21st century, Volume 20, 

No 1. 2000 tel 61 8 8356 8511 

fax 61 8 8235 1280 

artlinkmag@webmedia.com.au 

Australian Art Collector, Special 

Issue, Aboriginal Art, Issue 13, 2000 

tel 61 2 9281 7523 

fax 61 2 9281 7529 

artcollector@gadfly.net.au 

Darren Siwes I Am Expecting 

(sandstone house) 1999 

Darren Siwes (Nation: Kaurna) is a 

young South Australian artist whose 

work has come to public attention 

in recent exhibitions, notably 

Australian Perspecta (1999) at the 

Art Gallery of NSW and at the 2000 

Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art 

at the Art Gallery of South Australia. 

An artist who approaches his 

photographic work in a painterly 

manner, Siwes is interested in the 

urban landscape and perceptions of 

reality, and the challenge of "trying 

to find natural composition yet 

create surreal images." 

(catalogue, Beyond the Pale, 2000 

Biennale of Australian Art) 

Rea Jim #3 (l), Rea #9 (r) from the 

series Don’t shoot until you see the 

whites of their eyes 1999 

courtesy of the artist 

Rea (Nation: Gamilaroi/Wailwan) 

works in photography and 

computer-generated digital imaging. 

In Don't shoot till you see the 

whites of their eyes (1999) she 

explores the relationship between 

kitsch and the black body, 

combining self portraits with a 

series of digital images taken from 

an old postcard depicting a 

'traditional Aborigine.' The 

soundscape that accompanies the 

exhibition is a conversation 

between the two in English and 

Language (Aboriginal). Between the 

images are twelve plinths 

containing twelve glass heads. 

Rea's work has been featured in 

major Australian exhibitions 

including the 1996 and 1998 Moët 

& Chandon and Beyond the Pale, 

the 2000 Adelaide Biennale of 

Australian Art. She was artist in 

residence at the Banff Centre for 

the Arts (1996) and in 1999 

completed the first part of a 

collaborative residency in London. 

She was recently awarded the 

2000 Biennial Indigenous Arts 

Fellowship by the New South Wales 

Ministry for the Arts. Rea is one of a 

number of peers chosen by Artistic 

Director Peter Sellars to participate 

in the planning of the 2002 

Adelaide Festival. 

31

32 

8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 

Biennale of Contemporary Art 

Many of the artists featured in this 

exhibition speak in their artists' 

statements about their personal 

experiences of 'healing' by creating 

art which re-connects them to their 

cultural histories via their family 

memories + ancestral stories. I 

encourage viewers to take a little 

special time-out to read their words 

carefully + I ask you to think about 

what each artist is saying as you 

look at their work. 

In selecting the Australian 

Indigenous work for the Biennale 

d'Art Contemporain, I was very 

aware of the endless arbitrary + 

meaningless categorisations that 

have been used to divide us, 

minimise us and tokenise us. I felt 

that it was essential that I avoided 

any and all references to 

'traditional' + 'contemporary'. I 

wanted to simply present the work 

for you to engage with, to look at 

for yourself and make your own 

connections. It was also equally 

important for me to ensure that the 

artists were 'visible' in the exhibition 

via their words + their images. 

Each piece of work is unique and it 

deserves to be seen as such. 

Please spend a bit of time looking 

closely at all the work because you 

never know what you might 'see'. 

Rea 

Curator 

Australian Indigenous Program 

Biennale d'Art Contemporain, 

Noumea 2000 

Brook Andrew 

Nation: Wiradjuri 

NGAJUU NGAAY NGINDUUGIRR 

(I see you), Digital Photograph 

(duratran), 20 x 465 cm, neon blue 

light, text, 1998. Artist's collection. 

"The installation is a diptych of 

flashing blue neon text set 4 metres 

adjacent to a floating transparency 

(of eyes mounted on perspex, a 

close up of an Aboriginal man’s 

eyes from an 1880s 

anthropological/archival photograph 

from the archive of the Australian 

Institute of Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Islander Studies). ...I have 

aimed specifically to confront (the) 

issues which stereotype and divide 

Aboriginal Australia. Therefore, I 

aim to confront 'us' all—the 

everyday looker—where the 

Aboriginal gaze looks back— 

invades back." (from artist's 

statement, Biennale catalogue) 

Brook Andrew lives and works in 

Sydney where he is studying for a 

PhD at the College of Fine Arts, 

University of New South Wales. He 

has participated in group shows at 

the National Gallery of Australia, 

Canberra as well as in Sydney, 

Melbourne and London and has 

had solo exhibitions in Melbourne, 

Adelaide the UK. His work is in the 

collections of the National Gallery of 

Victoria, National Gallery of 

Australia, Canberra, Griffith 

University Art Collection, The Vizard 

Foundation Collection, Melbourne. 

Biennale of Contemporary Art, 

Noumea.

Mark Blackman 

Nation: Murri Batjala People 

(Murri-unga) 

Blackboard Series: Maths—Axiom 

1; Music—Advance Australia 

Where?; History—Axiom 2; each 

60.5 x 124.5 cm; sand and acrylic 

on board and mixed media, 

stainless steel and brass, 2000 

"In the blackboard pieces I'm trying 

to create a classroom scene, give 

information and asking people to 

think about things, to think about 

how a blackboard operates in a 

classroom...All the sadness and 

joys of life and the importance of 

preservation—of not forgetting— 

inspire my work. Wherever I go, in 

Australia and overseas, I explain the 

cultural symbols in my work to 

adults and children in seminars and 

workshops. I think the first thing 


people need to reconcile is our 

doubts about who we are." (from 

artist's statement, Biennale 

catalogue) 

Mark Blackman lives and works in 

Adelaide, South Australia. He has 

participated in group exhibitions at 

Tandanya National Aboriginal 

Cultural Institute in the 2000 Telstra 

Adelaide Festival, in Ireland, the 

Philippines and South Africa, as 

well as the 13th National Aboriginal 

and Torres Strait Islander Art Award 

national tour. He has solo 

exhibitions in Byron Bay, New 

South Wales, and at Tandanya, 

Adelaide and is represented in 

international collections. Biennale of 

Contemporary Art, Noumea 

Brenda L Croft 

Nation: Gurindji 

from the series In My Father's 

House: Suffer the little children; 

Don't go kissing at the garden gate 

II; We looked up and there was a 

light; My mother recognised the man 

in the little boy; Every day we had to 

pray on our knees in the dirt; each 

30 x 30 inches, Digital Ilfachrome 

prints, 1998. Artist’s and Hugh 

Morgan collections. 

"My father, Joseph Croft, was born 

circa 1926 somewhere on Victoria 

River Downs (then one of the 

largest cattle stations in the world), 

in the Northern Territory, in the 

traditional country of the Gurindji 

nation. At less than two years of 

age he was forcibly removed from 

his mother and community by the 

NT Police under the jurisdiction of 

the Northern Territory Government. 

"In My Father's House is a 

memorial not only to my father and 

brother but a memorial to all those 

children stolen from their families 

and denied knowledge of their 

heritage. This work is all about 

chasing and catching those 

memories as they fall. Dad, Mum, 

little Brother, this is for you." (from 

the catalogue, In My Father's 

House.) 

Brenda lives and works in Perth, 

Western Australia. Group exhibitions 

include Signs of Life: Melbourne 

International Biennial; Retake, 

National Gallery of Australia, 

Canberra; The Boundary Rider: 

9th Biennale of Sydney, as well as 

shows in the UK, Germany and 

China. She has had solo exhibitions 

in Sydney and Perth. Brenda's work 

is included in the collections of the 

National Gallery of Australia, Art 

Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of 

Western Australia, and National 

Gallery of Victoria. Biennale of 


33

34 

Julie Gough 

Nation: Palawa 

Driving Black Home, a series of 15 

postcards, dimensions variable, 

postcards and timber, 2000. Artist's 

collection. 

"Driving Black Home is an ongoing 

series of photographic works I am 

compiling as I make my way around 

this island...I see this big ongoing 

journey as an act of remembering. 

It is also my way of considering and 

disclosing the irony that although 

our original Indigenous place names 

were all but erased from their 

original sites, Europeans then 

consistently went about reinscribing 

our ancestors' presence on the 

land. I propose that these 'settlers' 

recognised the rights of occupancy 

of Aboriginal Tasmanians— 

evidenced by their renaming of 

'natural' features across the entire 

island in the image of Black, Native, 

Nigger and Abo…" (from artist's 


Julie Gough lives and works in 

Hobart, Tasmania where she is 

studying for her PhD in Fine Arts. 

She has participated extensively in 

group exhibitions across Australia 

including shows at the National 

Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; 

Djamu Gallery, Australian Museum, 

Sydney; Museum of Modern Art at 

Heide, Victoria, and the Adelaide 

Biennial, Art Gallery of South 

Australia. She also participated in 

the Liverpool Biennial of 

Contemporary Art, UK and has had 

solo exhibitions at Gallery Gabrielle 

Pizzi, Melbourne, Victoria. Her 

awards include the SAMSTAG 

International Visual Arts Scholarship 

for 1997/8. Her works are in 

numerous collections. Biennale of 

Contemporary Art, Noumea

John Patrick Kelantumama 

(aka Yell) 

Nation: Wantarningiwi, Tiwi 

Purukuparli (Father), 63 cm x 32 cm 

x 12 cm, yellow & black; Jinani 

(Son), 62 cm x 28 cm x 10 cm, 

turquoise & black; underglaze 

pigment on earthenware, clay fired 

to 1140 degrees celcius. Collection 

Di Yerbury. 

"Long time ago there was 

Purukuparli, his wife Bima and son 

Jinani. And there was a man too— 

he was the moon man—the lover of 

Bima. Purukuparli, he jealous of 

moon man and one day they had a 

fight and as the fighting finish, 

Jinani was very sick. Moon man ask 

Purukuparli to take his son away for 

three days and Purukuparli said, 

'No. You can't take my son away 

from me. And then we all die— 

same like my son." (from artist's 


John Patrick Kelantumama lives on 

Bathurst Island, Northern Territory. 

Group exhibitions include shows on 

Bathurst Island, in Sydney and 

Melbourne, as well as the 16th 

National Aboriginal & Torres Strait 

Islander Art Award Exhibition, 

Museum and Art Gallery of the 

Northern Territory; and the 5th 

National Indigenous Heritage Art 

Award, Australian Heritage 

Commission, Canberra, ACT. His 

sculptural ceramics are in the 

collections of the National Gallery of 

Australia and the Art Gallery of 

South Australia. Biennale of 


Yvonne Koolmatrie 

Nation: Ngarrindjeri 

Eel Trap, 560 x 955 x 560 mm; Fish 

Trap, 370 x 900 x 370 mm; Yabbie 

Trap, 440 x 800 x 440 mm; woven 

dried sedge rushes, 1993; lent by 

the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 


"(Koolmatrie's) delight in making 

traditional forms, especially the 

highly sculptural eel traps and 

yabbie traps for which she has 

become so well known, is matched 

by her enjoyment in creating 

objects unrelated to traditional 

survival activities." 

"Koolmatrie's eel and yabbie trap 

forms are created for exhibition 

rather than for use within foodgathering 

systems. Their inclusion in 

such exhibitions as Below the 

Surface, which toured nationally 

and fluent, Australia's representative 

exhibition at the 47th Venice 

Biennale in 1997, locate them 

within contemporary visual art 

practice. An elaboration of this 

context was their positioning within 

the 1992 exhibition Murrundi as a 

group of objects comprising an 

installation, which referenced their 

traditional use." (extracts from 

Doreen Mellor, Beyond the Pale: 

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 

2000, exhibition catalogue, ed. 

Croft, Brenda L, Art Gallery of 

South Australia.) 

Until just recently, Yvonne lived and 

worked in Gerard, South Australia. 

She now lives and works in 

Murgon, Queensland. She has 

participated in numerous group 

exhibitions including: Emily Kame 

Kngwarray, Yvonne Koolmatrie and 

Judy Watson, Australia's 

representation at the 47th Venice 

Biennale and national tour; Off 

Shore: On-Site, a component of the 

Olympics Games' Festival of the 

Dreaming, Casula Powerhouse Art 

Gallery, Casula, NSW; Murrundi: 

Three River Murray Stories, 

Contemporary Art Centre of South 

Australia, Adelaide. Her works are 

in the collections of the Art Gallery 

of Western Australia, Perth; National 

Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art 

Gallery of New South Wales, 

Sydney; National Gallery of 

Australia, Canberra; Powerhouse 

Museum, Sydney, NSW. Biennale of 


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36 

Naminapu Maymuru-White 

Nation: Clan: Manggalili; Moiety: 

Yirritja; Homeland: Djarrakpi 

Yingapungapu, 133 x 52cm; 

Milngiyawuy, 96 x 370cm; both 

works earth pigments on bark, 

1999. Naminapu Maymuru-White 

and Buku Larrnggay Arts, Yirrkala, 

Northern Territory. 

Yingapungapu: "...the central icon 

of this painting...represents a 

Yingapungapu, a sand sculpture 

created for the first time at Djarrakpi 

to cater for the bodies of the 

Manggalili first dead—the Guwak. It 

is designed to keep the 

contamination of death confined 

within this space." 

Milngiyawuy: "The river in the 

middle of the painting is shown as 

it is today after it was sung into 

the sky by these Manggalili 

heroes—the Milky Way." (from 

Biennale catalogue) 

Naminapu Maymuru-White lives 

and works in Yirrkala, Northern 

Territory. Group exhibitions include: 

New Tracks Old Land, an exhibition 

of Contemporary Prints from 

Aboriginal Australia, touring USA 

and Australia; Native Title, Museum 

of Contemporary Art, Sydney, NSW; 

Saltwater Country—Bark Paintings 

from Yirrkala, National Tour, 

Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Alice 

Springs. She won the 1996 Telstra 

National Aboriginal and Torres Strait 

Islander Art Award for Best Work on 

Paper. Her works are in the 

collections of the Berndt Museum 

of Anthropology, University of 

Western Australia; Museum and Art 

Gallery of the Northern Territory, 

Darwin; National Gallery of 

Australia, Canberra; National Gallery 

of Victoria, Melbourne. Biennale of 


Dorothy Napangardi 

Nation: Warlpiri 

Women Dancing at Mina Mina, acrylic 

on linen. 2000. Collection: Dorothy 

Napangardi and Gallery Gondwana 

Fine Art, Alice Springs NT. 

"Dorothy Napangardi is Gallery 

Gondwana's most experimental 

and contemporary artist...She 

paints her country, Mina Mina, with 

no traditional iconography from her 

familial lines and has created her 

own innovative language to 

describe her country. Dorothy's 

paintings are created by an intricate 

network of lines that collide and 

implode on top of each other 

creating a play of tension and 

expansion losing the viewer in a 

myriad of intersections." (Gallery 

Gondwana Fine Art; Biennial 

catalogue) 

Dorothy Napangardi's work has 

been exhibited in the 8th National 

Aboriginal Art Award, Darwin; 

Warlpiri Women, Gallery Gondwana, 

Alice Springs, NT; Napangardi 

Dreaming, Ceremony and Song, 

Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, NSW; 

Dorothy Napangardi and Walala 

Tjapaltjarri, Adelaide Festival, 

Gallery Australis, SA. Her solo 

exhibitions include: Dorothy 

Napangardi, Hogarth Gallery, 

Sydney; Rebecca Hossack Gallery, 

London, England. Highly 

Commended, 16th National 

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander 

Art Award, Darwin, NT; Northern 

Territory Art Award, Alice Springs, 

NT; Best Painting in European 

Media, 8th National Aboriginal Art 

Award, Darwin, NT. Her works are 

in the collections in Australia, 

Germany and the USA. Biennale of 

Contemporary Art, Noumea

Rosella Namok 

Nation: Aangkum/Ungkum 

Kungkay or Yiipay, 124x174 cms; 

Taywaylina, 124x174 cms; both 

works acrylic on canvas, 2000. 

Artist's collection. 

Kungkay or Yiipay: "Kungkay is 

northside and Yiipay is southside. 

Kungkay, that's round Quintal 

Creek...a good fishing place where 

every one goes down, catches 

heaps of fish, white fish, salmon, 

black bream." 

Taywaylina (Lightning Flash): "The 

lightning was wild...it cracked right 

through the house so we turned the 

lights off but the lightning kept 

making it bright. The whole place 

was so dark with that stormy cloud 

building up...but when the lightning 

hit it lighted up the whole place...no 

one was walking 'round...everyone 

was frightened...Isiaih, my small 

boy, was screaming...I was trying to 

calm him down." (from artist's 


Rosella Namok lives and works in 

Lockhart River, Queensland. She 

has exhibited in Beyond the Pale, 

Adelaide Biennial, 2000 Telstra 

Adelaide Festival; Message Stick 

99, Visions Australia touring 

exhibition of Lockhart River Art 

Gang; and the 15th Telstra National 


Art Awards, travelling exhibition. 

She has had solo exhibitions at the 

Hogarth Gallery, Sydney. Her works 

are in the collections of the National 

Gallery of Australia, Canberra and 

the State Galleries of New South 

Wales, South Australia, Western 

Australia and Queensland. Biennale 

of Contemporary Art, Noumea 

Michael Riley 


Cloud Series: untitled II; untitled V; 

untitled VII; video and inkjet prints 

on banner paper, 2000; Empire, 17 

minute abstract soundscape, video, 

1997. Artist's collection. 

"Cloud is a new body of work 

investigating Michael Riley's 

enforced Christian upbringing and 

the wider impact of such an 

upbringing on Indigenous 

communities throughout Australia. 

The work addresses processes of 

assimilation: the removing of 

Indigenous peoples onto reserves to 

'die out' and the imposed 

conversion to Christianity. 

Recognising both negative and 

positive outcomes of his upbringing, 

Cloud seeks to make sense of a 

history that defies simple resolution." 

"Empire is the acclaimed and 

evocative 1997 film directed by 

Riley for the Festival of the 

Dreaming, with music performed by 

the Tasmanian Symphony 

Orchestra." (from Biennale 

catalogue) 

Michael Riley lives and works in 

Sydney, NSW. His works have been 

included in many group exhibitions, 

a few of which are: Beyond the 

Pale, Adelaide Biennial of Australian 

Art, 2000 Telstra Adelaide Festival, 

Art Gallery of South Australia; Flesh 

+ Blood, Museum of Sydney, 

Sydney, NSW; Re-Take, National 

Gallery of Australia, Canberra; 

Beyond Myth/Oltre 1l Mito, 48th 

Venice Biennale, al latere section, 

Venice, Italy. Riley has had solo 

exhibitions in Sydney, Dubbo, 

Melbourne and London. His works 

are in many collections. Michael 

Riley is also an acclaimed film/video 

artist, his output including 

documentary and experimental 

works. Biennale of Contemporary 

Art, Noumea 

37

38 

Elaine Russell 


Memories of Mission Life, 48 x 30 

inches, acrylic on canvas, 2000 


"These are some of the memories I 

have of when I was growing up on 

Murrin Bridge Mission, in central 

NSW, back in the 1950s. My father, 

Clem was the handyman on the 

mission back then and when we 

had some spare time he would take 

us into the bush to teach us how 

and where to look for bush tucker! 

In the left-hand corner of my 

painting you can see Dad showing 

one of my brothers where to look 

for witchetty grubs —up in the gum 

trees, and what wild berries to eat. 

Some were poisonous, some were 

not, you had to know which was 

which." (from artist's statement, 

Biennale catalogue) 

Elaine Russell's works have 

appeared in the 3rd National 


Heritage Art Award, Canberra; 

Faces of Hope, Amnesty 

International, Art Gallery of NSW, 

Sydney; Chip on the Shoulder, 

Boomalli Aboriginal Artists' Cooperative, 

Sydney; 16 Songs: 

Issues of personal assessment & 

indigenous renewal, the Saint Louis 

Art Museum, Missouri, USA. She 

has had a solo exhibition at the 

Aboriginal and South Pacific Gallery, 

Sydney, and is in the collections of 

the Museum & Art Gallery of the 

Northern Territory, Artbank, Art 

Gallery of New South Wales, The 

New Children's Hospital, Sydney 

and the NSW Premiers Office. 


Noumea 

Christian B Thompson 

BIGIYI (Dream to Dream): Stratagem 

1, Stratagem 11, Stratagem 111, 

Stratagem 1111; digital prints on 

Aluminium, each 1200 x 50cm, 


"(Thompson's) Bidjara heritage is 

the foundation of his work, as he 

reaches back through time, through 

the family photo album, sorting 

through those fading orange-tinted 

snapshots, through his patrilineal 

connections to his ancestors." 

"A child of the 1980s he is the latest 

addition to a long line of other 

artists that grew up in urban and 

rural settings, whose work 

references influential elements from 

their childhood, references shared 

by many non-indigenous 

Australians." 

"The linked experience of these 

artists is one of dislocation from their 

traditional homelands and cultural 

practices, yet they all defiantly 

project a proud sense of identity and 

accomplishment in rural and urban 

environs." (extracts from catalogue 

essay, BIGIYI (Dream to Dream), 

Brenda L Croft, April 2000.) 

Christian B Thompson lives and 

works in Melbourne, Victoria. 

Selected group exhibitions: 

Emergence E, Graduation show, 

University of Queensland Library; 

Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, 

Queensland; The Real Thing, 

Boomalli Artists Members show, 

Boomalli Aboriginal Artists' Cooperative, 

Sydney, NSW; Big Small 

Installation, University of Singapore. 

Solo show: BIGIYI (dream to dream), 

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 

Victoria. Biennale of Contemporary 

Art, Noumea

Sheena Wilfred 

Clan: Wagilak; Moiety: Dhuwa; 

Language: Ritharrngu/Kriol 

Dilly Bags, Tools and Weapons, 

163 x 123 cm; Campsite along the 

Roper River, 141 x 123 cm; both 

works synthetic polymer on canvas, 

1999. Artist's collection c/o Karen 

Brown Gallery, Darwin. 

Dilly Bags, Tools and Weapons: 

"This painting is about all the old 

ways of collecting foods. We still 

use these things but not always. 

Looking at these bush berries 

makes me hungry. Sheena spends 

much of her spare time collecting 

bush foods and fishing." 

Campsite along the Roper River: 

"Sheena talks about places she 

would go with her mother for 

relaxing, fishing and talking. This 

painting visits three campsites 

surrounded by an abundance of 

bush foods and animals." (Biennale 

catalogue) 

Sheena Wilfred lives and works in 

Numbulwar, Northern Territory. 

Group exhibitions include: Gertie 

Huddlestone and Sheena Wilfred 

Huddleston, Shades of Ochre 

Gallery, Darwin, Northern Territory; 

Telstra National Aboriginal and 

Torres Strait Island Art Award & 

touring exhibition 1997, 1998 and 

1998, Darwin Museum and Art 

Gallery of the Northern Territory, 

Darwin, NT. She has had a solo 

exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, 

Melbourne, Victoria. Biennale of 


Andrew Williams 

On the Lugger, silk screen print on 

paper, 30 cm x 42 cm, 1997; 

Pamle (Family) History, lino block 

print on paper, 56.5 cm x 76 cm, 


Pamle (Family) History: "This image 

is about my own personal family 

and it shows some of the main 

male members in the family and 

images relating to the history of my 

lineage. These members being my 

Great Grandfather; Great Uncle and 

Grandfather both of whom fought in 

the Second World War; Uncle 

(godfather), my Father and images 

of my Father and one of his older 

brothers, as young children. All of 

the images were taken from old 

family photographs and then used 

in this print. I want to show how 

important photographs of my family 

are to myself as items of inspiration 

and they are also resources for 

myself and my artwork." (from 

artist's statement, Biennale 

catalogue) 

Andrew Williams is a Torres Strait 

Islander living in Cairns, Northern 

Queensland. Group exhibitions 

have included Baggage 

Transfer/Tranship, an airport 

intervention, Cairns Domestic 

Airport, Cairns TAFE College and 

2000 Telstra Adelaide Festival; Ilan 

Pasin, this is our way, Torres Strait 

Art Exhibition, Cairns Regional 

Gallery and touring nationally; and 

in New Tracks Old Land, Touring 

Exhibition, USA. His work is in 

many private and public collections. 


Noumea 

39

40 

Joyce Winsley 

Nation: Nyoongar 

Lizzard, 3D fibre work, Guilford 

grass, moulded and stitched, 1999. 


Story of the Lizzard sculpture. 

Why Snake and Carda (lizzard) had a fight. 

One day the Snake bit the Carda and after he was bitten he ran into the 

bushes and came back well. Then another time the Carda went past the 

Snake and he bit him again. 

So the Carda took off into the bushes and came back well again. 

So this made the Snake wonder why he never died. 

So the Snake waited for Carda so that he could bite him. When he came 

Snake bit him and then followed him to the bush that cured him. 

When Carda left, Snake tried to pull the bush out. 

When Carda came back and saw him they then had a fight. 

(from artist's statement, Biennale catalogue) 

Joyce Winsley lives and works in 

Narrogin, Western Australia. Group 

exhibitions include: Beyond the Pale, 

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 

Art Gallery of South Australia, 2000 

Telstra Adelaide Festival; Small 

Figures Big Lives, Fremantle Arts 

Centre, Fremantle, West Australia; 

Doll, Adelaide Festival Centre, 

Adelaide, and Object Gallery, 

Sydney. She has had a solo show at 

Narrogin Gallery, Western Australia 

and her work is in collections that 

include the Art Galleries of Western 

Australia and South Australia. 


Noumea 

Mangkaja Arts Resource 

Agency 

Nations: Walmajarri, Wangkajungka, 

Mangala, Juwaliny 

Yilimbirri; Wayampajarti Kurtal; 

two dances on painted canvas, 

7 x 4 metres 

Two groups of Mangkaja artists will 

perform two ceremonies on a 

painting, which will measure 

approximately 7x 4 meters and 

which has been especially created 

for the Biennale d'Art Contemporain 

in Noumea. One group is from the 

river, the traditional owners of Fitzroy 

Crossing and the other group is from 

the desert people who moved in to 

town when the equal pay laws were 

passed in the early 1970s. 

Two ceremonies will be performed. 

Yilimbirri is the story of the Bunuba 

resistance fighter Jandamarra, who 

fought against the incursion into his 

country by the pastoralists in the 

late 1800s. The story is entwined 

with the creation of the area of 

country in which Jandamarra hid in 

a monumental landscape riddled 

with caves and passages through 

rocks. 

The second group will perform the 

Wayampajarti Kurtal ceremony. 

There are two main waterholes in 

the desert and the dancing and 

singing tells the story of the travels 

of ancestral spirits across the 

country during the Ngarrangkami 

(Dreamtime). (From the Biennale 

catalogue) 

The Mangkaja Arts Resource Centre 

is located in the town centre in 

Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia. 

Mangkaja Arts is governed by a 

committee which meets regularly 

and the members are responsible for 

decisions affecting the development 

of the centre. During 1999-2000 the 

work of Mangkaja artists has been 

exhibited at various galleries 

throughout Australia. Works have 

been shown internationally in the 

Lyon Biennale, France and the 

Mangkaja Group Show, Minnesota, 

USA. Biennale of Contemporary Art, 

Noumea

Nicole Cumpston Mark Blackman 

Nakkondi/Look—Indigenous 

Australians 1999/2000 

Photography by Nicole 

Cumpston and Andrew Dunbar 

Nakkondi/Look is an exhibition of 

100 black and white photographs for 

the 100 years of the 20th century. Its 

willing subjects are Indigenous 

people, some well-known, many 

not, individually, in groups and in 

many different settings. 

Heather Kemarre Shearer, an 

Arrernte woman from Central 

Australia, Aboriginal visual artist and 

Indigenous Arts Officer, Arts SA, 

speaking at the launch of 

Nakkondi/Look at the State Library 

of South Australia as part of the 

2000 Telstra Adelaide Festival said, 

Points of Contact 

"This exhibition is not about image. 

This exhibition is about providing a 

reality to challenge perceptions, to 

showcase a cross-section of our 

community that is our life." A 

journalist wrote, "The 

photographers have approached 

the project with open eyes‚ and 

invite their audience to do likewise: 

to look and see Aboriginal people 

as they really are, not as they may 

be conventionally portrayed" 

(Adelaide Advertiser). 

Born in Australia of Aboriginal and 

Afghan descent, Nicole Cumpston 

lectures in Photography at the 

Taoundi Aboriginal College, Port 

Adelaide and studies in Visual Arts 

at the University of South Australia. 

She has had numerous exhibitions, 

both nationally and internationally as 

well as facilitating the work of many 

other artists. Andrew Dunbar is a 

non-indigenous photographer 

whose career includes 

photojournalism, commercial and 

advertising photography and fine-art 

photography, Since 1996 he has 

been the recipient of many awards 

and commendations including the 

1998 Australian Editorial 

Photographer of the Year and the 

prestigious Ilford Trophy. In recent 

years Dunbar's work has been 

internationally exhibited. 8th Festival 

of Pacific Arts 

Andrew Dunbar 

A collaboration between Indigenous and non-indigenous students at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University looking at the possibilities of 

reconciliation is presented on CD-ROM. "It brings together visual and audio art forms within Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions. The many strands that 

have been woven together to form this project have provided us with our own point of contact from which to nurture and develop our relationship as artists 

and our role as agents for Australia's new cultural paradigm." Lise MacDermott and Fiona Fraser (Co-ordinators). 8th Festival of Pacific Arts 

41

42 

film 

Making bigger stories: the development of Indigenous filmmaking in Australia 

Sally Riley, a member of the 

Wiradjuri nation, filmmaker and the 

Manager of the Indigenous Unit of 

the Australian Film Commission 

(AFC) spoke to the editors of this 

guide, describing the 

achievements and aspirations of 

Indigenous filmmakers in Australia, 

the networks of support and the 

challenges to taking the next step 

into making feature films and 

longer documentaries. Feature 

films by Indigenous directors have 

been few—Rachel Perkins' 

Radiance (1998) and Tracey 

Moffat's Bedevil (1993). 

Expectations are high that, given 

the opportunity they deserve, the 

current generation of Indigenous 

filmmakers is more than capable 

of creating some remarkable 

feature films. 

Riley described the major role in 

developing Indigenous filmmakers 

played by the Indigenous Unit of 

the AFC and SBS Independent 

(the film production wing of Special 

Broadcasting Sevices TV) in 

producing an ongoing series of 

short film initiatives commencing in 

1996 with From Sand to Celluloid, 

followed by Shifting Sands (1998), 

Crossing Tracks (1999) and On 

Wheels (2000). Distribution within 

Australia through the AFI 

(Australian Film Institute), 

screenings on SBS TV and ABC 

TV (Australian Broadcasting 

Corporation), appearances and 

awards in international film festivals 

and the AFI's educational 

marketing of the films have meant 

that the series continues to 

develop Indigenous filmmakers and 

alerts audiences to considerable 

talent and distinctive storytelling. 

Another major player has been the 

National Indigenous Documentary 

Fund, giving support to a strong 

documentary impulse in 

Indigenous filmmaking, A 

significant number of filmmakers 

work in both drama and 

documentary. 

Film dramas 

The filmmakers in From Sand to 

Celluloid, Shifting Sands, Crossing 

Tracks and On Wheels are Wesley 

Enoch, Darlene Johnson, Sam 

Watson, Ivan Sen, Richard Frankland, 

Erica Glynn, Warwick Thornton, 

Rima Tamou, Mark Olive, Mitch 

Torres, Danielle Maclean, Catriona 

McKenzie and Sally Riley herself. 

Riley is particularly impressed by 

Ivan Sen (Tears, Wind and recently 

Dust), "He's such a beautiful stylist 

with a great eye," and Catriona 

McKenzie, "a fantastic writer with a 

great sense of story but she's also 

got an incredible sense of style. 

Erica Glynn is another favourite, 

with films like My Bed Your Bed and 

My Mother My Son." 

She says of Richard Frankland, a 

musician and filmmaker who has 

made the dramas No Way to Forget 

and Harry's War that "he has also 

been involved in a number of 

documentaries. Our filmmakers 

seem to move between 

documentary and drama and not 

just specialise in one area. Last year 

Richard won Best Short Film at the 

Hollywood Black Film Festival in 

Los Angeles for Harry's War and 

from that he's now got a Hollywood 

agent. He's got three or four 

features written and it looks like the 

director Rolf de Heer's going to 

help produce one for him." 

Asked about her own films, Sally 

Riley says, "When I was at Film 

Australia they funded Fly Peewee, 

Fly (in the Sand to Celluloid series). 

Then, through the ABC Indigenous 

Programs Unit, I made a film about 

the novelist and screenwriter Archie 

Weller called In Search of Archie. 

That was a half hour documentary 

about him trying to, I guess, find 

proof of his Aboriginality. A lot of my 

work deals with that issue of being 

of fair complexion and being 

Aboriginal. My latest film, 

Confessions of a Headhunter, 

screened on SBS in June and has 

been nominated for two AFI 

Awards, which is very exciting." 

Rachel Perkins, who made the 

popular feature film Radiance with 

an Indigenous cast from a 

screenplay based on his stage play 

by white playwright Louis Nowra, 

has a new work. "It's called One 

Night The Moon and it's actually a 

music drama for television, a coproduction 

between Opera Australia 

and the ABC (the mdTV 

commissions—four music dramas 

for television). Singer and writer Paul 

Kelly's in it and has written the 

music with Indigenous singersongwriter 

Kev Carmody. It's about 

a black tracker and a little girl who 

goes missing." Riley says that 

Perkins "definitely wants to direct 

features," but notes with irritation 

that, "At the moment there are 

about five major films with 

Indigenous subjects being 

developed by whitefellas. Our 

culture is still being mined for stories 

to bolster the careers of whitefellas." 

Getting up a feature film 

Sally Riley says that these five new 

feature films include white 

Australian filmmakers who have 

worked extensively overseas, Phil 

Noyce directing Beyond the Rabbit 

Proof Fence and Fred Schepsi 

directing Black Magic. When you 

say to producers, 'You've got to 

have an Indigenous director on this 

project', the usual response is, 

'They won't attract the bullion.' I've 

heard that so many times. You look 

at mainstream films in Australia and 

all the recent successes have been 

made by first time directors—Two 

Hands...a whole string of them. And 

let's face it, Phil Noyce didn't 

attract a huge budget at six million 

dollars. He just triggered the money 

people to say yes." 

There is no shortage, says Riley, of 

Indigenous filmmakers with scripts 

ready to go or ripe for development. 

"Ivan Sen has one. Catriona 

McKenzie has a script. Richard 

Frankland has several scripts. Erica 

Glynn has just formed a partnership 

with performance poet and writer 

Romaine Moreton. Rima Tamou and 

Pauline Clague of Core Original are 

developing feature projects. The 

scripts are there but they need 

developing. And that's part of my job 

here. We don't have enough money 

to fully fund a feature but we can 

get them ready to go other places. 

"Filmmakers can come to us with an 

idea, a treatment to start with. We'll 

fund them draft by draft with a script 

editor, with money for research— 

whatever they need. Last year, the 

FTO (New South Wales Film and 

Television Office) ran an Indigenous 

Feature Film Screenwriting course. 

A few scripts have come out of 

that. We funded Steve McGregor 

(from CAAMA, Central Australian 

Aboriginal Media Association) to go 

to that and he has a draft of a 

feature film which is pretty good. At 

the moment we've got about six or 

seven screenplays in early 

development." 

Organisations that help 

A range of organisations provide 

vital support for the development 

and showing of these films. They 

include public broadcasters and 

Indigenous media organisations and 

state funding agencies. Asked about 

the significance of the AFC 

Indigenous Unit partnership with 

SBS Independent, Riley says it 

cannot be understated: "SBS have 

been absolutely crucial in getting all 

these drama initiatives going and 

been the partner in all of them since 

day one of the first Indigenous 

Drama Initiative in 1996. Brigid Ikin 

of SBS Indpendent is a real 

visionary. 

"The ABC through the Indigenous 

Programs Unit has been really good 

as well. They came in on the Sand 

to Celluloid and Crossing Tracks

series, bought a second screening 

of them, and also screen the 

National Indigenous Documentary 

Film series. They've just got their 

Message Stick program going at the 

moment. It's a half hour of stories 

put together and screened on 

Sunday afternoons. David Jowsey 

the Executive Producer has quite a 

stable of Indigenous filmmakers 

making five and ten minute pieces 

for that program which is all good 

experience and it pays well. It's a 

good training ground." 

CAAMA is a unique Indigenous 

media organisation based in Alice 

Springs. It has produced many 

documentaries but is now turning to 

drama as well. Given the importance 

of developing Indigenous expertise 

in all areas of filmmaking, Riley notes 

with pleasure that "nearly all of 

CAAMA's production team have 

been to AFTRS (Australian Film, 

Television & Radio School) now— 

producer Cilla Collins, director 

Steven McGregor is there at the 

moment, Alan Collins who's one of 

our leading directors of photography, 

Warwick Thornton, another director 

and DOP, and Erica Glynn a director 

from Alice (currently making a 

documentary about the Women's 

Council in the Central Desert). So 

CAAMA has put all their crew 

through film school and they're now 

taking that back to Alice Springs 

and working with the communities." 

Another important element, one 

supported by a number of 

organisations, is the National 

Indigenous Documentary Fund, 

now generating its third series of 

films. ATSIC (Aboriginal & Torres 

Strait Islands Commission) is the 

major contributor, granting funds to 

be managed by NIMAA (National 

Indigenous Media Association of 

Australia). ABC TV contributes presale 

finance for each film to gain 

broadcast rights. The Australian 

Film Commission invests in 

development funds and the film 

agencies of the state governments 

contribute as well. CAAMA was 

appointed series producer to 

supervise production. Riley says, 

"It's been fantastic in bringing on 

lots of documentary makers like 

Kootchi Raymond and producing 

successes like Bush Mechanics. 

Because of the NIDF, Indigenous 

documentary is developing quite 

well. The next thing is for them to 

move on to 50 minute 

documentaries which are more 

difficult to get funded. 

"Part of our program at the AFC is 

to fund the development of some of 

those documentaries. What we're 

trying to do here is support the 

entry level film makers and also 

help them to develop any project 

that they have. But I also want to 

support the filmmakers who are at 

the point where they need to make 

a feature or a 50 minute 

documentary to keep them going, 

because it's so hard to survive and 

keep your skills up between films. 

The AFC Indigneous Branch has 

$800,000 a year plus another 

$40,000 for interactive media 

works. It doesn't go very far. You 

can't fund big projects." 

Riley is adamant about the value of 

the mentoring and workshopping 

approaches. "We always do visual 

storytelling workshops with our 

drama initiatives. This was set up 

right at the beginning by Walter 

Saunders who, with the help of 

others, formulated the drama 

initiatives. Most of the filmmakers 

were writer-directors. They were 

attached to a mentor director 

through the six to ten day period. 

They worked together on scripting 

half a day. The other half they 

workshopped their scripts with 

actors. We had a couple of DOPs 

with cameras so they could shoot 

scenes if they wanted to. It's been 

really successful and I think it's 

partly why the shorts have been so 

good. We've really developed them. 

We've set it up so the directors can 

do the workshop and then go away 

and write their script; but they're 

supported through that process 

with money to write and with their 

mentors. Having come through it 

myself, I know how important it is." 

The next initiative 

Riley is about to announce a new 

drama initiative with SBS 

Independent, "another five ten 

minute films as well as two fifty 

minute films. With the ten minute 

films it'll be new people who've 

come through state-based 

organisations like Metro Screen in 

NSW. They had an Indigenous 

Mentorship Scheme last year with 

around $5,000 for each ten minute 

film shot on DVC. Then for the two 

fifty minuters people will have to 

have had a screen credit. Hopefully 

what we can do is develop more 

than two so then the filmmakers 

can look for further funding for 

them." As well, Riley is determined 

to shape schemes to develop 

Indigenous producers and film 

crews, especially assistant directors 

and designers, to support the 

wealth of directing talent. 

The future 

The success rate of Indigenous 

films in being selected for festivals 

here and overseas and in winning 

awards is, as Riley proudly points 

out, very high indeed, especially 

those from the Sand to Celluloid 

and subsequent series (see 

filmmaker entries), Asked how she 

would sum up the situation for 

Indigenous filmmakers at present, 

Riley is certain that "We're on the 

verge of doing really big things but 

we need the support of the 

mainstream and of the funding 

bodies to get us there. We can't do 

it all out of the Indigenous Unit. A 

lot of people have said the 

Indigenous shorts have been the 

best short films from the AFC for 

donkeys' years. Now our 

filmmakers are saying well, support 

what you're saying and fund us to 

make bigger stories. 

References 

Reviews and essays on Indigenous 

film and screen culture can be 

found in the following publications 

and websites: 

Brian McFarlane, Geoff Mayer, Ina 

Bertrand eds, The Oxford 

Companion to Australian Film, 

Melbourne 1999 

Metro magazine, a quarterly print 

publication with essay length articles. 

www.cinemedia.net/ATOM/pubs/ 

metro.html 

61 3 9651 1310 fax 03 9651 1311 

Locked bag 9. collins St East, 

Melbourne VIC 8003 

if - independent filmmakers 

A popular monthly print publication 

with a focus on new Australian 

films. www.if.com.au PO Box 222 

Kings Cross NSW 1340 

tel 61 2 9332 2121 

fax 61 2 9332 4306 

info@if.com.au 

RealTime 

www.rtimearts.com/~opencity/ 

Published in print and online bimonthly, 

this national arts magazine 

includes OnScreen with reviews 

and interviews with Australian 

filmmakers. 

NIDF 

abc.net.au/message/nidf1/docos.htm 

A website for the National 

Indigenous Documentary Fund, 

detailing the individual films made 

through the fund. 

Australian Film Institute 

www.cinemedia.net/AFI/ 

The AFI website includes a research 

and information catalogue (including 

monographs and articles on 

Indigenous film), a sales section 

(including most of the films 

mentioned on these pages as well 

as many others) and Biblioz, a 

growing collection of entries on 

films and filmmakers (including a 

filmography and bibliography on 

Tracey Moffat). 

Australian Film Commission 

www.afc.gov.au 

The website for the Australian 

Government's primary development 

agency for the film, television and 

creative multimedia industries 

provides a newsletter and industry 

statistics. 

Screen Network Australia 

www.sna.net.au 

This is an extensive online guide to 

magazines, websites, chat groups 

and organisations. 

Native Title 

43 

Native Title 


A film program curated by Rachel Perkins 

Artistic Director of the Australian program 

for the festival, Rea asked film director 

and producer Rachel Perkins to select a 

film program of contemporary Indigenous 

films. 

Program One: Confessions of a 

Headhunter; Wind; Radiance. 

Program Two: Stolen Generations; Bush 

Mechanics; Box; Dust. 

Program Three: Tears; Payback; My Bed 

Your Bed; Two Bob Mermaid; My Colour 

Your Kind; Round Up. 

Details of these and other contemporary 

Indigenous films appear on the following 

pages.

44 

Wesley Enoch 

Writer/Director 

Grace 

Grace lives a comfortable life, a far 

cry from the dramas of mission life 

she fled years ago. When she 

returns for the funeral of her sister, 

Grace is confronted by the family 

she never met, a past she has long 

forgotten and the spirit of her 

country. 

19 mins. 

Shifing Sands Series,1998; SBSTV 

Richard Frankland 

Writer/Director; Nation: Mara 

No Way to Forget 

Based on the film-maker's 

experiences as a Field Officer 

during the Royal Commission into 

Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. 

10 mins. 

From Sand to Celluloid, 1996; 

SBSTV; Cinema des Antipodes, 

France, 1996; Göteborg Film 

Festival, Sweden, 1997; Best New 

Director, St Kilda Film Festival, 

1996; Official Selection, Un Certain 

Regard, Cannes International Film 

Festival, 1996; Australian Film 

Institute Awards, Best Short Non- 

Feature Fiction and Best Sound in a 

Non-Feature Fiction Film, 1997; 

Nominated Australian Teachers of 

Media (ATOM) Award, 1997.

Harry's War 

A short drama which focuses on 

the life of a young Aboriginal soldier 

who leaves Condah Mission to fight 

for his country in the jungles of 

Papua New Guinea. The film is 

based on the experiences of the 

filmmaker's uncle who fought on 

the beaches of Gona in 1942. 

27 mins. 

Crossing Tracks series, 1999; 

Melbourne International Film 

Festival, 1999; AFI Nomination, 

Best Screenplay; Best Australian 

Short Film Promoting Human 

Values (International Catholic Film 

Organisation), 1999; Best Australian 

Short Film, Flickerfest International 

Short Film Festival 2000; Best 

Short Film, Hollywood Black Film 

Festival, Los Angeles, USA, 2000. 

Erica Glynn 

Writer/Director; Nation: Kaytej 

My Bed, Your Bed 

In an isolated desert community, a 

young man and woman are 

promised under traditional laws of 

marriage. The time has come for 

them to move in together. 

15 mins. 

Shifting Sands series, 1998; 

Nominated AFI Award, Best Short 

Fiction Film, 1998; Dendy Australian 

Short Film Awards, Best Fiction 

Over 15 Minutes, Sydney, 1998; 

Sydney Film Festival, Best Short 

Film, 1998; 8th Festival of Pacific 

Arts, 2000. 

Darlene Johnson 

Writer/Director; Nation: Dunghutti 

Stolen Generations 

In telling three stories of Aboriginal 

people who were removed from 

their families, this documentary 

forms part of the history of 

dispossession of Australia's 

Aboriginal people. 52 mins. 

SBSTV; Nominated Best 

Documentary 2000 AFI Awards; 

8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000. 

Darlene Johnson 

Writer/Director; Nation: Dunghutti 

Two Bob Mermaid 

In the Summer of 1957, a young 

Koori girl "passes for white" at the 

local swimming pool. A story about 

Aboriginal identity, transformation 

and change set in a period of 

cultural conflict and racial tension. 

15 mins. 

From Sand to Celluloid series, 

1996; Window on Images, Venice 

International Film Festival, 1996; 

Cinema des Antipodes, France 

1996; Clermont Ferrand 

International Film Festival, France, 

1997; Winner Best Short Film, 

Australian Film Critics Circle 

Awards; Winner Best Short 

Dramatic Film, 41st Asia Pacific 

Film Festival, 1996; 8th Festival of 

Pacific Arts, 2000. 

45

46 

Catriona McKenzie 

Director 

Road 

Set in inner city Sydney. Two young 

men go on an odyssey from 

Redfern to the beach in the space 

of a single night. 26 mins. 

SBSTV; On Wheels series, 2000; 

Catriona McKenzie's films have 

been screened on ABC TV and at 

festivals internationally including the 

New York International Film Festival. 

Box 

A young man takes the lessons of 

the boxing ring into the rest of his 

life as he tries to raise himself 

above the streets. 16 mins. 

Made for the Festival of the 

Dreaming, 1997; Tokyo and Kyoto 

Film Festivals; Selected for New 

York Film Event, Best of Australian 

Short Films; Gold Award, Houston 

International Film Festival for Best 

Short Drama; AFI Award for Best 

Editing, Short Film; Finalist, New 

York International Film Festival; 8th 

Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000. 

Danielle McLean 

Writer/Director; Nation 

Luritja/Waramungu 

My Colour, Your Kind 

A young girl incarcerated in a 

dormitory, escapes to her rightful 

place in the world. 

12 mins 


Nominated AFI Award, Best 

Screenplay in a Short Film, 1998; 

Gold Award for Flickerfest 99 8th 

International Film Festival, Best 

Cinematography. 8th Festival of 

Pacific Arts, 2000 

Mark Olive 


Passing Through 

A young family on their way to visit 

relatives, pass through an old 

mining town. For Margie, the town 

triggers childhood memories and 

she is drawn to two old Koori men 

who knew her family. 12 mins. 

Rachel Perkins 

Director; Nation: Eastern 

Arrernte/Kalkadoon 

Radiance 

A feature film in which three sisters 

reunite to bury their mother. Stuck 

together in bad weather in their old 

family house, secrets emerge to 

reveal a past that won't stay buried. 

83 mins. 

Best Feature Film, Audience Prize, 

Sydney International Film Festival; 

1998; AFI Award, Best 

Performance, Deborah Mailman; 

Australian Screen Sound Guild, 

Best Achievement in Sound Design 

and FX, 1998; Jury and Audience 

Prizes for Best Full-length Film, 

Festival Internatzionale Cinema 

Delle Donne, Italy; Honourable 

Mention, Hollywood Black Film 

Festival, 2000. 8th Festival of 

Pacific Arts, 2000 

Tracey Moffatt 


Night Cries 

A middle aged Aboriginal woman 

nurses her old white mother. Her 

memories and dreams invade her 

nerve-fraying routine until the old 

woman dies and we share the 

daughter's immense sense of loss. 

Shot entirely in a studio, the power 

of the film lies in the artificially 

created vibrantly coloured 

landscape and carefully constructed 

soundscape. Hailed by Scott 

Murray (Cinema Papers, Australia) 

as "proof of a new Australian 

filmmaking sensibility at work." 

17 mins. 

Jury Prize, Montreal Women's 

International Film Festival, 1990; 

Erwin Rado Award, Best Short Film, 

Melbourne International Film 

Festival, 1990; Special Jury Prize, 

Tampere International Short Film 

Festival, Finland; Canadian Bell 

Prize, La Mondiale De Films Et 

Videos De Femmes, 1991. 

Bedevil 

A feature film trilogy of ghost stories 

that follows characters pestered by 

visions—real, remembered and 

imagined. These contemporary 

tales travel from the sparseness of 

the outback, through the murky, 

rotting swamps of the islands to the 

Brisbane docks. 90 mins. 

Australian Guild of Screen 

Composers, Best Original Music, 

Carl Vine, 1993; 

The Kate Challis Award, Best 

Feature, 1994.

Sally Riley 

Writer/Director; Nation: Wiradjuri 

Fly Peewee, Fly! 

When six year old Robbie takes up 

residence in his favourite tree to be 

with his friend the peewee bird, his 

family is forced to see the world 

from his point of view. 

10 mins. 

From Sand to Celluloid series; 

ANZAC Film Festival, Netherlands, 

1996; Cinema des Antipodes 

Festival, France, 1996; Cine 

Women Screenings, Los Angeles; 

International Short Film/Video- 

Antalya, Turkey, 1996; Nominated 

Australian Writers Guild, AWGIE 

Award, 1996; Nominated Australian 

Teachers of Media (ATOM) Award, 

1997. 

Confessions of a Headhunter 

An exploration of the way in which 

iconic representations of Australia's 

history have masked Indigenous 

realities and glorified injustice. 

33 mins. 

On Wheels series, 1999; 

Nominations AFI Awards, 2000; 


Ivan Sen 

Writer/Director; Nation Gamilaroi 

Tears 

A teenage couple are leaving the 

mission on their way to a new life. 

As they walk to the bus stop they 

discuss their reasons for leaving. 

After choosing separate paths, they 

must confront separate futures. 

15 mins. 


Nominated Best Short Fiction AFI 

Award, 1998; Silver Award, 

Flickerfest 99; Best International 

Short, Cork International Film 

Festival, 1998; Best Short Film, St 

Kilda Film Festival, 1998; 8th 


Wind 

1857 Australia. In the cold, bleak 

terrain of the high country, a young 

black tracker Jess and his elderly 

white sergeant move in on the trail 

of a killer. With every step closer, 

the killer delves into the Jess's mind 

and soul until finally confronting him 

with the choice between his 

ancestral heritage and the only 

world he has every known. 34 

mins. 

Nominated Best Short, 

Cinematography and Sound, AFI 

Awards, 1999. Special 

commendation, Clement Ferrand 

Short Film Festival, France. 8th 


Dust 

Five people come together on a 

dusty, desolate cotton field. Angry 

at the world and each other, it is 

only Leroy's elderly mother Ruby 

who sees the hidden secrets 

beneath the surface of the land. 

The uneasy sky forces the elements 

to merge and a dust storm awakes. 

25 mins. 

On Wheels series, 2000. 8th 

Festival of Pacific Arts, 2000 

47

48 

Rima Tamou 


Round Up 

Two country boys find themselves 

out of place in a big city. 16 mins. 

From Sand to Celluloid; Best Short, 

Asia Pacific Film Festival; 


Saturday Night, Sunday Morning 

A shy, disenfranchised teenager in 

constant conflict with her single dad 

is taken hostage with three young 

men for whom actions have no 

consequences. 

The Australian Collection, ABC, 

1997; Cinema des Antipodes, 

France, 1996; Dendy Ethnic Affairs 

Commission Award, 1996; Best 

Short, Australian Teachers of Media 

(ATOM) Award, 1997; Best Short, 

42nd Asia-Pacific Film Festival 

Award. 

Warwick Thornton 

Writer/Director/DOP; Nation: Kaytej 

Payback 

It is the day of his release from gaol 

and Paddy knows of two laws—a 

white one and a black one. The 

twenty years he has spent doing 

time for the white man's law have 

been in preparation for this one 

day—his payback day. 10 mins. 


1996; Telluride Film Festival, USA 


France, 1996; Clermont Ferrand 

International Film Festival, France, 

1997. 8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 

2000

Mitch Torres 

Writer/Director; Nation 

Yawurru/Goonyandi 

Promise 

As an old woman watches her 

grand-daughter make damper, she 

explains how as a young girl she 

came to be betrothed. 15 mins. 


Nominated Best Short, Bombard 

Film Festival; Nominated Best 

Short, Women on Women (WOW) 

Festival 1998. 

Sam Watson 

Writer/co-producer 

Black Man Down 

A troubled young warrior, alone in a 

cell, is watched by a Dreamtime 

spirit when death comes calling. 

10 mins. 



France, 1996. 

David Batty and Francis 

Jupurulla Kelly 

Bush Mechanics 

The larger than life legend of 

outback Indigenous ingenuity is 

portrayed in this innovative 

documentary. These mechanics, 

without a trade certificate or any 

formal training, traverse the dusty 

tracks of the Australian outback and 

with good humour and 

resourcefulness, make sure the car 

gets back on the road. David Batty 

is from Broome and Francis Kelly is 

a Warlpiri man from Yuendumu. 

27 mins 

This film received rave reviews 

when it screened on ABC TV. It 

received funding from the 

Community Cultural Development 

Fund of the Australia Council and 

Film Australia has since funded 

another four half-hour episodes in 

the spirit of the original, currently 

being produced in association with 

Warlpiri Media Association based in 

Yuendumu. 

ABC TV, 1999; Nominated AFI 

Awards, Best Original Concept, 

2000; 8th Festival of Pacific Arts, 

2000 

49

50 

literature 

Indigenous literature: spreading the word 

Although not yet as internationally 

well-known as Australian 

Indigenous visual arts, literature by 

Aboriginal writers is enjoying 

unprecedented national success, 

not only in novels, non-fiction 

(especially autobiography) and 

poetry, but also through plays and 

published scripts, popular song 

lyrics and public story-telling (as in 

Ochre and Dust, the performance 

in the 8th Pacific Festival of Arts). 

International renown may well 

come as a new generation of 

Indigenous novelists led by Kim 

Scott and Alexis Wright reap critical 

acclaim in Australia. 

As with other art forms, Indigenous 

writers have maintained a 

distinctive voice. They draw 

strongly on oral traditions, use 

'Language' (from the remainder of 

what were once hundreds of 

Aboriginal languages), Aboriginal 

English (officially recognised as a 

dialect and displaying many 

regional characteristics) and kriol 

(creole). At the same time they 

experiment with and challenge 

forms, like the novel, inherited from 

other cultures. 

Indigenous writing can seem 

peculiarly adventurous because it is 

often emphatically conversational, 

apparently discursive, linguistically 

distinctive and sometimes entails 

the spiritual and the everyday in the 

same reality. In other words, this is 

writing that embodies customary 

modes of communication and 

belief. Not surprisingly such writing 

is sometimes tagged "magic 

realism", which might be adequate 

to describe its effect on white 

readers, but does not acknowledge 

the cultural complexity being 

expressed. Of course, the huge 

readership for Indigenous literature 

has, over the last forty years, 

increasingly understood this other 

cultural reality. Alexis Wright's 

Plains of Promise (shortlisted for 

the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, 

The Age Book of the Year and the 

NSW Premier's Awards) is a 

powerful example of the integration 

of the real and the spiritual. 

In Kim Scott's Benang, From the 

Heart (winner, Miles Franklin 

Literary Award 2000 and Western 

Australian Premier's Book Award), 

the reader engages with a voice 

that is familiar and yet alien, that of 

a psychologically complex storyteller 

unravelling a terrible history of 

the "breeding out" of half-castes, of 

turning black people white. Scott's 

story-telling feels discursive but is 

in fact frighteningly focussed as the 

past is re-lived over and over, with 

a striking immediacy and subtle 

shiftings of point of view. Benang 

has a rich Indigenous voice and it 

is a major novel deserving an 

international audience. 

The foundation for contemporary 

Indigenous literature on which the 

likes of Scott and Wright have built 

was firmly laid in the 1960s and 

70s by Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath 

Walker, poet), Kevin Gilbert 

(playwright, poet, anthologist), Jack 

Davis (playwright, poet) and 

Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson, 

novelist, poet). These writers 

combined literary acumen and 

adventurousness with distinctive 

Indigenous voices and political 

awareness. They created a new 

literary and communicative space 

for their own people, they spoke 

effectively to a white audience and 

they inspired new generations of 

Indigenous writers. 

A development in the 80s, 90s and 

into the current century has been 

the publishing success of 

Indigenous autobiography, It has 

proven hugely popular with 

Indigenous and non-Indigenous 

readers. The relaxed, 

conversational style typical of these 

works has made the form the most 

accessible way for readers to grasp 

the history of the Aboriginal 

struggle to survive. Sally Morgan's 

My Place (Fremantle Arts Press, 

1987), Ruby Langford Ginibi's 

Don't Take Your Love to Town 

(Penguin, 1988), and Roberta 

Sykes' trilogy, Snake Dreaming, 

beginning with Snake Cradle (Allen 

& Unwin, 1997), are a few of the 

best known works. Also 

enormously popular, as Australians 

grapple with the concept and the 

means of reconciliation between 

black and white cultures, has been 

the 1997 seven hundred page 

Human Rights and Equal 

Opportunity Commission report, 

Bringing Them Home: Report of the 

National enquiry into the Separation 

of Aboriginal and Torres Strait 

Islander Children from their 

Families. Its five hundred verbatim 

reports of separation and its 

personal consequences take us 

back into the living tradition of 

story-telling. 

Other non-fiction has its place too. 

Just as Indigenous filmmakers shift 

with ease between drama and 

documentary and often blend the 

two forms, so do many Indigenous 

writers move between forms and 

genres. Alexis Wright, a member of 

Queensland's Waanyi people, also 

writes non-fiction. She now lives in 

Alice Springs and has written Grog 

War (1997) for the Julalikari Council 

in the Northern Territory. It's a vivid 

account of the traditional 

landowners' attempts to restrict the 

availability of alcohol and has been 

published by Magabala Books, 

Australia's Indigenous literature 

publishers. 

Sadly, there are too many writers to 

acknowledge in a brief introduction 

like this. Some appear in the essay 

on theatre. Others deserve 

mention: Archie Weller, John Muk 

Muk Burke, Melissa Lukashenko, 

Philip McLaren, Glenyse Ward, 

Lionel Fogarty, There are more. It is 

remarkable that in a mere forty 

years an enormous body of 

Indigenous writing has emerged, 

ranging from the literary brilliance of 

Kim Scott's Benang to a personal 

favorite, the poetic story-telling of 

Bill Neidjie's Story About Feeling 

told in his own Aboriginal English: 

If somebody take im your country, 

you'n'me both get sick. 

Because feeling...this country 

where you brought up 

and just like you'n'me mother. 

Somebody else doing it 

wrong...you'n'me feel im. 

Anybody, anyone...you'n'me feel. 

Bill Neidjie, Story About Feeling, 

Keith Taylor ed, Magabala Books, 

Broome. 1989. 

The Editors 

References 

Kevin Gilbert ed, Inside Black 

Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 

1988 

Penny van Toorn, Indigenous texts 

and narratives, Elizabeth Webby 

ed, Cambridge Companion to 

Australian Literature, CUP, 

Melbourne 2000 

Mudrooroo, Milli Milli Wangka, The 

Indigenous Literature of Australia, 

Hyland House, South Melbourne, 

1997 

Indigenous writers are well 

represented in the lists of Australian 

publishers: Fremantle Arts Centre 

Press, University of Queensland 

Press, Allen & Unwin, Currency 

Press, Hyland House and the 

Indigenous publisher Magabala 

Books, based in Broome in northwestern 


Ozlit website. 

www.home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/ 

Lists many Australian Aboriginal 

writers, provides brief biographies 

and links to articles and reviews.

new media 

Indigenous New Media: getting access 

Technology can indeed help 

preserve and disseminate 

traditional oral practices, but it can 

also act as a force for changing the 

content of oral narratives and 

disrupting the customs that 

traditionally regulated direct oral 

transmission. Recognising this 

problem, some communities have 

devised ways of using introduced 

media in accordance with their own 

traditional law. 

Penny van Toorn, Indigenous texts 

and narratives, Cambridge 

Companion to Australian Literature, 

CUP, Melbourne 2000 

The history of Australian Indigenous 

people's engagement with the 

media of writing, print, radio, 

television and now computer-based 

'new media' is not the expected 

one of subordination but, in many 

intriguing ways, of an Aboriginal 

culture adapting western media to 

its own ends. A famous account of 

this is recorded in Eric Michaels' 

For a Cultural Future: Francis 

Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu 

(see references below). 

An important development in this 

phenomenon was the growth of 

community media centres like 

CAAMA (Central Australian 

Aboriginal Media Association), now 

one of many providing radio, 

television and CD production on 

their own terms, in their own 

regions. The results have been 

distinctive and empowering. The 

BRACS (Broadcasting in Remote 

Aboriginal Communities Scheme) 

media centres for communities with 

populations of less than two 

thousand five hundred people 

number over one hundred across 

the country, providing opportunities 

for communication and innovation. 

One example is the work in new 

media emerging from Yuendumu, 

three hundred kilometres north- 

west of Alice Springs and part of 

Warlpiri Media (a BRACS Regional 

Coordinating Unit). Writing about 

Donovan Rice, a young Yuendumu 

artist, Sue Angel comments that 

she sees his work with animation 

and images as "relatively free of 

western cultural values" and 

describes it thus: "His computer 

artwork includes Cyberman images 

of his own face overlaid and 

textured using Photoshop, Media 

paint and other software. The work 

is arresting and disturbing; here we 

have the traditional or stereotyped 

image of the Central Desert man 

overlaid, and distorted by computer 

graphics: the face, like the art, is 

both alien and recognisable..."(Sue 

Angel, Getting Connected, Remote 

area computer art, Artlink, Volume 

20, No 1, 2000). 

Rea, an artist experienced in 

working with new media and a 

former member of the New Media 

Arts Fund of the Australia Council, 

comments that Indigenous artists 

most attracted to using digital tools 

are those who work with 

photography and video. Digital 

manipulation of found or family 

photographs with their own 

photography involves collage, 

superimposition, heightened 

colouring and play with text. It's 

not surprising then to see this kind 

of work figure in the first cyber 

Tribe exhibition, eyesee (cyber Tribe 

is a recent addition to the online 

fineArtforum Gallery). In a mix of 

local and international Indigenous 

works curated by Jenny Fraser, 

photographic-based work from 

Brenda L Croft, Rea, Brook 

Andrews, Jonathon Bottrell and 

Tina Baum features strongly 

(www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/2000 

/eyesee/eyesee.html). 

When asked which Indigenous 

artists are creating interactive 

works online, Rea says that they 

are emerging. In 1999 she was a 

tutor at NISMA—National 

Indigenous School for New Media 

Art, organised by ANAT (Australian 

Network for Arts and Technology) 

in partnership with the School of 

Fine Arts, Northern Territory 

University, Darwin. Fourteen artists 

from across urban and regional 

Australia were selected to 

participate in the project: Kathleen 

Arbon, Sandy Carter, Jason 

Davidson, Jenny Fraser, Fiona 

Giles, Lindsay Haji Ali, Joanne 

Hamilton, Gordon Hookey, Clara 

Inkamala, Keith Munro, Carol 

Panangka Rontji, John Smith 

Gumbula, Karl Telfer and Christian 

B Thompson. The concept for the 

school was developed in 

collaboration with the New Media 

Arts Fund and the Aboriginal and 

Torres Strait Islander Arts Fund of 

the Australia Council. Brenda L 

Croft, curator of Indigenous Art at 

the Art Gallery of Western Australia 

was appointed by ANAT to project 

manage NISNMA. The tutors were 

Rea and Cameron Gould, an artist 

and musician who runs Indiginet, 

an Aboriginal web design company. 

A special guest was Skawennati 

Tricia Fragnito (Mohawk First 

Nations, Canada), an artist and 

curator who has developed web 

projects for Nation-to-Nation, a 

First Nations Artists collective, and 

specialised in developing innovative 

multiuser online environments. 

ANAT's report explains the need for 

the project: "Indigenous artists with 

an interest in new media 

technologies often feel locked out 

of this developing area. This is in 

part due to the difficulties (both 

perceived and real) of either 

accessing or obtaining the 

equipment required to learn these 

new skills. This initiative expands 

opportunities for Indigenous artists 

in the area of art and technology, 

by providing access to appropriate 

training, computer equipment and 

software for the development of 

digital arts practice." 

The web can be used in functional 

ways, for example to market and 

sell Indigenous art internationally. 

But as with other kinds of 

community broadcasting it can also 

be used for social ends. The Next 

Wave Festival for and by young 

people in Melbourne in 2000, 

brought to national attention 

through its webworks program the 

artworks of young Indigenous 

offenders held in Darwin and Alice 

Springs detention centres 

(www.ourmessage.org.au or 

through webworks on 

www.nextwave.org.au). The site's 

title is "ending offending: our 

message." Each work is presented 

online with an accompanying text 

explaining its genesis and, often, 

some aspect of the life of the artist. 

The project was developed by 

Northern Territory Correctional 

Services. Using the web, the 

program aimed to speak across 

language groups, to put 

communities and offenders in 

touch with each other, and to teach 

visual arts and other skills. 

Sue Angel reports from Yuendumu, 

"The (ODN) Outback Digital 

Network, operating through the 

Yuendumu-based Tanami Network 

will soon link communities in the 

region into a high speed digital 

signal enabling internet and 

computer use in every community." 

Given opportunities of access, the 

support of funding bodies and 

organisations like ANAT, more 

Indigenous artists, whether in cities 

or regional Australia, will emerge in 

new media, doubtless creating 

surprising and innovative works. 

The Editors 

References 

Sue Angel, Getting Connected, 

Remote area computer art, Artlink, 

Volume 20, No 1, Reconciliation? 

Indigenous art for the 21st century. 

2000 

Eric Michaels, For a Cultural Future: 

Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at 

Yuendumu, Artspace, Sydney 

1987, reproduced in E Michaels, 

Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media 

and Technological Horizons, 

Minneapolis, University of 

Minnesota Press, 1994. 

ANAT (Australian Network for Art 

and Technology) www.anat.org.au 

Koori Net: Indigenous Australian 

WWW Resource Directory 

http://www.koori.usyd.edu.au/regis 

ter.html 

51

52 

Company/Artist Artform Work Artistic Director Contact/Representation Tel 61+ Fax 61+ email website post 

Ian Abdulla Visual Arts Impressing the Girls - Greenaway Art Gallery 8 8362 6354 8 8362 0890 greg@camtech.net.au www.adelaide.net.au/~gag/ 39 Rundle Street, Kent Town SA 5067 

Brook Andrew Visual Arts/New Media Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr - Artist - 2 9130 4800 badboy@optusnet.com.au www.culture.com.au/boomalli/blakkweer PO Box 471 Darlinghurst NSW 1300 

(I see you) /index.html 

Christine Anu Music - - Robert Barnham Management 2 6684 7820 2 6684 7830 rbm@mpx.com.au - 432 Tyagarah Road Myocum NSW 2481 

Mark Atkins Music - - Marguerite Pepper Productions 2 9699 2111 29699 9405 info@mpproductions.com.au www.mpproductions.com.au 9 Telopea Street Redfern NSW 2016 

Bangarra Dance Theatre Dance Theatre Skin Stephen Page Andrew Booth 2 9251 5333 2 9251 5266 bangarra@ozemail.com.auwww.bangarra.com.au Pier 4/5 Hickson Road Walsh Bay NSW 2000 

David Batty & Film Bush Mechanics - Tom Kantor 8 8956 4024 8 8956 4024 warlpiri@topend.com.au - CMB, Yuendumu via Alice Springs NT 0872 

Francis Jupurulla Kelly Warlpiri Media Association 

Black Swan Theatre 

Company 

Theatre Bidenjarreb Pinjarra Andrew Ross Lynne Loganathan 8 93889388 8 93889389 marketing@bstc.com.au- 6 Hamersley Road Subiaco WA 6003 

Mark Blackman Visual Arts Blackboard Series - Artist 8 8152 0776 8 8152 0776 - - 47 Gervois Street Torrensville SA 5031 

Raymond Blanco Dance Opening Ceremony 


- Macdonnell Promotions 2 9310 3716 29699 9099 macprom@tradeserv.com.auwww.nmn.org.au/theatre.htm 9 Telopea Street Redfern NSW 2016 

Troy Cassar-Daley Music - - Doug Trevor Management 2 9948 9111 2 9948 9733 doug.trevor@quickcut.com.au - 124 Rickard Road Narrabeen NSW 2101 

Deborah Cheetham Music Theatre White Baptist ABBA Fan - Performing LInes 2 9319 0066 2 9318 2186 perfline@ozemail.com.au www.performinglines.org.au 6/245 Chalmers Street Redfern NSW 2016 

Coloured Stone Music - Bunna Lawrie Coloured Stone 7 40330462 - colouredstone@hotmail.com - PO Box 95W Westcourt, Cairns QLD 4870 

Brenda L Croft Visual Arts From: In My Father's House - Stills Gallery 2 9331 7775 2 9331 1648 photoart@stillsgallery.com.au www.stillsgallery.com.au 26 Gosbell Street Paddington NSW 2021 

Nicole Cumpston & Photography Nakkondi/Look - Nicole Cumpston 8 8240 2315 8 8240 0786 nicicumpston@hotmail.com 23 Leslie Place Port Adelaide SA 5015 

Andrew Dunbar Andrew Dunbar 8 8231 4930 8 8231 4920 andrew@dunbar.com www.adunbar.com 16 Grattan Street Adelaide SA 5000 

Doonooch Aboriginal Traditional Culture - Robert McLeod 2 4443 6124 - - PO Box 825 Nowra NSW 2541 

Dancers Group Ron Ragel 2 9543 1079 2 9543 1079 ron@globalnetwork.com.auwww.globalnet.com.au PO Box 169 Sutherland NSW 1499 

Destiny Deacon Visual Arts From: It shows no fear - Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi 3 9654 2944 3 96507087 gabrielle@gabriellepizzi.com.au www.gabrielpizzi.com.au141 Flinders Lane Melbourne 3000 

Matthew Doyle Music - - 2 93117548 2 9311 7548 wuruniri@optusnet.com.au - 24 Lone Pine Parade Matraville NSW 2036 

Wesley Enoch Film Grace - Australian Film Institute 

Sales & Distribution 

3 9696 1844 3 9696 7972 info@afi.org.au www.afi.org.au 49 Eastern Road South Melbourne VIC 3205 

Fiona Foley Visual Arts Native Blood 1994 - Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 2 9331 1919 2 9331 5609 oxley9@roslynoxley9.com.au - Soudan Lane (off 27 Hampden Street) Paddington NSW 2021 

Richard Frankland Film No Way to Forget - Australian Film Institute 



Fresh Dance - Marilyn Miller Macdonnell Promotions 2 9310 3716 2 9699 9099 maprom@tradeserv.com.auwww.nmn.org.au/theatre.htm 9 Telopea Street Redfern NSW 2016 

Erica Glynn Film My Bed, Your Bed - Australian Film Institute 



Julie Gough Visual Arts Driving Black Home - Artist 3 6233 3097 - - jgough@dpiwe.tas.gov.au c/o School of Art PO Box 252-257 Hobart Tas 7001 

Ruby Hunter Music - - Julie Hickson 3 9387 3725 3 9387 3725 julie.hickson@fmgroup.com.au www.mushroom.com.au 

/mushroom/ruby/index.htm 

25 Overend Street Brunswick VIC 3056 

Ilbijerri Aboriginal & Theatre Stolen - Jan Chandler 3 9329 9097 3 9329 9105 ilbjerri@vicnet.net.auwww.ilbijerri.org.au North Melbourne Town Hall 

Torres Strait Islander Cnr Errol & Queensbury Streets 

Theatre Co-operative Ltd North Melbourne VIC 3051 

Darlene Johnson Film Two Bob Mermaid - Australian Film Institute 



John Patrick Kelantumama Visual Arts/Craft Ceramic poles (father and son) - Anna McLeod Tiwi Designs 8 8978 3982 8 8978 3832 tiwides@octa4.net.au www.tiwiarts.com PMB 59 Winnellie NT 0821 

Kooemba Jdarra 

Indigenous Performing 

Arts Company 

Performance Goin' to the Island Nadine McDonald Vera Ding 7 3221 1660 7 3229 1191 kooemba@thehub.com www.kooembajdarra.com.au 109 Edward Street Brisbane QLD 4000 

Yvonne Koolmatrie Visual Art - Craft Eel Trap Fish Trap Yabbie Trap - Artist 7 41683835 - - - 35a Watt Street Murgon QLD 4605 

Roger Knox Music - Artist 2 6761 8794 - - - 19 Ford Street Oxley Vale NSW 2340 

Tom E Lewis & Handspan 

Visual Theatre 

Theatre Lift 'Em Up Socks David Bell Fleur Parry 3 9645 5331 3 9645 5332 handspan@optusnet.com.au - Level 1 57 Miles Street Southbank VIC 3006 

Jimmy Little Music - - Buzz Management 2 9712 3300 29712 3884 buzzmanagement@ozemail.com.au www.festivalrecords.com.au/artists/ PO Box 3153 Asquith NSW 2077 

Naminapu Maymuru-White Visual Art Yingapungapu; Milngiyawuy - Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre 8 8987 1701 8 89872701 yirrkala-arts@octa4.net.au www.aboriginalart.org/buku Yirrkala NT 0880 

Catriona Mackenzie Film Road - Australian Film Institute 



Danielle McLean Film My Colour, Your Kind - Australian Film Institute 



Mangkaja Arts Visual Arts - - Karen Dayman 8 9191 5272 8 9191 5279 Mangkaja_Arts@bigpond.com www.users.bigpond.com PO Box 117 Fitzroy Crossing WA 6765 

Resource Agency /Mangkaja_Arts/webpage 

The Marrugeku Company Performance Crying Baby - Macdonnell Promotions 2 9310 3716 2 9699 9099 macprom@tradesrv.com.auwww.nmn.org.au/theatre.htm 9 Telopea Street Redfern NSW 2016 

Mornington Island Dancers Dance - Woomera Aboriginal Peter Cleary 7 4771 4699 7 4771 2110 woomera@ultra.net.au www.ultra.net.au/~woomera c/o Post Office Gununa Mornington Island QLD 4871 

of the Lardil People Corporation 

Marilyn Miller Dance Opening Ceremony - Macdonnell Promotions 2 9310 3716 29699 9099 macprom@tradeserv.com.auwww.nmn.org.au/theatre.htm 9 Telopea Street Redfern NSW 2016 

Tracey Moffatt Visual Art/Film Scarred for Life: - Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 2 9331 1919 2 9331 5609 oxley9@roslynoxley9.com.au - Soudan Lane (off 27 Hampden Street) 

Birth Certificate 1962 Paddington NSW 2021

Company/Artist Artform Work Artistic Director Contact/Representation Tel 61+ Fax 61+ email website post 

Nabarlek Band Music - - Mark Grose 8 8985 4204 8 8985 4204 mtgrose@octa4.net.au www.skinnyfishmusic.com.au c/o Skinny Fish Music 

PO Box 36873 Winnellie NT 0821 

Rosella Namok Visual Arts Kungkay Lockhart River Aboriginal 7 4060 7341 7 4060 7341 - - c/o Post Office, Lockhart River, 

Arts and Culture Centre Far North Queensland 4871 

Dorothy Napangardi Visual Art Women Dancing at Mina Mina - Gondwana Fine Art Gallery 8 8953 1577 8 8953 2441 fineart@gallerygondwana.com.au www.gallerygondwana.com.auPO Box 3770 Alice Springs NT 0871 

Mark Olive Film Passing Through - Australian Film Institute 



Rachel Perkins Film Radiance - Blackfella Films 2 9380 4071 2 9380 4070 rachelp@mira.net PO Box 301 Rose Bay NSW 2029 

Leah Purcell Performance Box the Pony - Harry M Miller Agency 2 9357 3077 2 9356 2880 hmm@harrymmiller.com - PO Box 313 Kings Cross NSW 1340 

Queensland College of Art Visual Art Points of Contact Lise MacDermott 

Fiona Fraser 

Lise McDermott 7 3398 1250 7 3875 3199 liseforce@yahoo.com 65 Henderson Street Camp Hill 4152 

Queensland Theatre Co. Music Theatre The Sunshine Club Michael Gow Sue Hunt 7 3840 7000 7 3840 7040 mail@qldtheatreco.com.au PO Box 3310 South Brisbane 4101 

Rea Visual Arts/ Don't shoot till you see - Artist/Boomalli Aboriginal 2 9552 2865 2 9552 2865 rea@optusnet.com.au www.culture.com.au/boomalli/blakkweer PO Box 645 Glebe NSW 2037 

New Media the whites of their eyes Artists' Cooperative /index.html 

REM Theatre Music Theatre ToteMMusic Roger Rynd Marguerite Pepper Productions 2 9699 2111 29699 9405 info@mpproductions.com.au www.mpproductions.com.au9 Telopea Street Redfern 2016 

Michael Riley Visual Arts/ Cloud series - Boomalli Aboriginal Artists 2 9560 2541 2 9560 2566 boomalli@optusnet.com.au www.culture.com.au/boomalli/ PO Box 176 Westgate NSW 2048 

Film & Video Co-operative 

Sally Riley Film Fly Peewee, Fly! - Australian Film Institute 



Archie Roach Music - - Julie Hickson 3 9387 3725 3 9387 3725 julie.hickson@fmgroup.com.au www.mushroom.com.au/mushroom/ 

roach/index.htm 

25 Overend Street Brunswick VIC 3056 

George Rrurrumbu Music - - Tony Collins 8 89482425 www.warumpiband.com.au/ 11 Cunjevoi Crescent Nightcliff NT 0810 

(formerly with 

Warumpi Band) 

0416 273 055 

Elaine Russell Visual Arts Memories of Mission Life - Artist 2 9564 1139 - - - 1 Yabsley Avenue Marrickville NSW 2204 

Saltwater Band Music - - Mark Grose 8 8985 4204 8 8985 4204 mtgrose@octa4.net.au www.skinnyfishmusic.com.au c/o Skinny Fish Music PO Box 36873 Winnellie NT 0821 

Ivan Sen Film Tears; Wind; Dust - Australian Film Institute 



Darren Siwes Visual Arts Stand - Artist 8 8390 3904 

0412 900 693 

dagwoodsiwes@hotmail.com - PO Box 313 Summertown SA 5141 

Stiff Gins Music - - Bree Delian 2 9386 1296 2 9386 1296 zabreeze@yahoo.com www.stiffgins.com (from November) 5/16 Flood Street Bondi NSW 2026 

Tal-Kin-Jeri Dance Group Traditional Culture Major Sumner Major Sumner 8 8223 4204 8 8232 6685 tal_kin_jeri@hotmail.com members.tripod.com/talkinjeri/2001 182-190 Wakefield Street Adelaide SA 5000 

Rita Tamou Film Roundup; Saturday Night, - Australian Film Institute 3 9696 1844 3 9696 7972 info@afi.org.au www.afi.org.au 49 Eastern Road South Melbourne VIC 3205 

Sunday Morning Sales & Distribution 

Christian B Thompson Visual Arts BIGIYI (Dream to Dream) - Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi; 3 9654 2944; 3 96507087; gabrielle@gabriellepizzi.com.au; www.gabriellepizzi.com.au141 Flinders Lane Melbourne 3000 

Boomalli Aboriginal Artists 

Co-operative 

2 9560 2541 2 9560 2566 boomalli@optusnet.com.au www.culture.com.au/boomalli/ PO Box 176 Westgate NSW 2048 

Warwick Thornton Film Payback - Australian Film Institute 



Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri Visual Arts Yala (Sweet Potato) Dreaming Papunya Tula Artists 8 8952 4731 8 8953 2509 art@papunyatula.com papunyatula.com 78 Todd Street Alice Springs NT 0870 

Mitch Torres Film Promise - Australian Film Institute 



Torres Strait Island Traditional Culture Frank Sam Cook Frank Sam Cook 7 4069 0412 7 4069 2045 Frank_cook@health.qld.gov.au - PO Box 624 Thursday Island QLD 4875 

Cultural Group 7 4090 3454 

Tracks Inc Dance Theatre Outside the Camp Tim Newth & Tim Newth & 8 89244414 8 89415639 trax@darwin.topend.com.au - GPO Box 823 Darwin NT 0801 

David McMicken David McMicken 

Various Performance/Installation Ochre & Dust Aku Kadogo Marguerite Pepper Productions 2 9699 2111 29699 9405 info@mpproductions.com.au www.mpproductions.com.au 9 Telopea Street Redfern 2016 

Richard Walley Music - - Aboriginal Productions & 8 9354 9540 8 9354 9540 aboprodpr@iinet.net.au - 13 Tivella Court Willetton WA 6155 

Promotions 0419 919888 

Bernadette Walong Dance Savage Burn - Artist 2 9852 5537 2 9852 5534 b.walong@uws.edu.au 119 Angel Street Newtown 2042 

Sam Watson Film Black Man Down - Australian Film Institute 



White Cockatoo Traditional Culture - - Geoff Toll 8 8924 4183 8 8924 4182 godess@alphalink.com.au www.whitecockatoo.com/ PO Box 220 Bulleen VIC 3105 

Performing Group Denise Officer 

Sheena Wilfred Visual Art Dilly Bags, Tools and Weapons; - Karen Brown Gallery 8 8981 9985 8 8981 9649 karenbrown@octa4.net.au - PO Box 430 Darwin NT 0801 

Andrew Williams Visual Arts On the Lugger - Artist 7 4042 2557 - - - 1/21 Creedy Street Westcourt QLD 4870 

Ebony Williams Music - - Heidi Pasqual Mother Tongues 2 9267 8860 2 9267 8862 heidi@cvibes.com - Creative Vibes 8/40 Victoria Street Potts Point NSW 2011 

Joyce Winsley Visual Art Lizzard - Artist 8 9881 3825 - - 4/120 Ensign Street Narrogin WA 6312 

Mary Silverman Town of Narrogin 8 9881 1944 8 9881 3092 

Yirra Yaakin Theatre Solid David Millroy Paul Macphail 8 9202 1966 8 9202 1885 yy@yirrayaakin.asn.au - GPO Box S1598 Perth WA 6845 

Noongar Theatre Aliwa 

Yothu Yindi Music - - Artists 8 8941 2900 8 8941 1088 yothuyindi@yothuyindi.com www.yothuyindi.com GPO Box 2727 Darwin NT 0801 

53

54 

Organisations 

ATSIC (Aboriginal & Torres Strait 

Islander Commission) 

John Roe 

National Media & Marketing 

Tel 61 2 6121 4963 

Fax 61 2 6282 2854 

john.roe@atsic.gov.au 

www.atsic.gov.au 

PO Box 17 Woden ACT 2606 


Arts Fund 

Australia Council for the Arts 

Tel 61 2 9215 9000 

Fax 61 2 9215 9111 



PO Box 788 


Australian Broadcasting Corporation 

(Indigenous Programs Unit) 

Kelrick Martin, Manager Programs 

Tel 61 2 9950 4014 

Fax 61 2 99504019 

ipu@yourabc.net.au 

www.abc.net.au/message 

GPO Box 9994 Sydney NSW 2001 

Australian Film Commission 

(Indigenous Branch) 

Sally Riley, Director 

Tel 61 2 9321 6444 

Fax 61 2 9357 3737 

info@afc.gov.au 

www.afc.gov.au 

GPO Box 3984 Sydney NSW 2001 

Australian Institute of 

Aboriginal & TSI Studies 

Tel 61 2 6246 1111 

Fax 61 2 6249 7310 

recept@aiatsis.gov.au 

www.aiatsis.gov.au 

GPO Box 553 Canberra ACT 2601 

Boomalli Aboriginal Artists 

Co-operative 

PO Box 176 

Westgate NSW 2048 

Tel: 61 2 9560 2541 

Fax: 61 2 9560 2566 

boomalli@optusnet.com.au 

www.culture.com.au/boomalli/ 

CAAMA (Central Australian 

Aboriginal Media Association) 

Tel 61 8 8952 9205 

61 8 8952 9202 

Fax 61 8 8952 9212 

caama2@ozemail.com.au 

www.ozemail.com.au/~caama1 

PO Box 2608 

Alice Springs NT 0871 

Indigenous Screen Australia 

Tel 61 2 9380 4071 

Fax 61 2 9380 4070 

PO Box 301 Rose Bay 2029 

National Aboriginal Dance Council 

of Australia 

Christine Donnelly, Director 

Tel 61 2 9699 2171 

61 2 9699 3765 

Fax 61 2 9310 2643 

adtr@viper.net.au 

PO Box 1093 


National Aboriginal & Islander Skills 

Development Association 

Tel 61 2 9252 0199 

Fax 61 2 9251 9161 

naisda@ozemail.com.au 

PO Box 15 Millers Point NSW 2000 

National Aboriginal & TSI 

Playwrights Conference 

c/o Australia Council 

Tel 61 2 9215 9000 

Fax 61 2 9215 9111 



PO Box 788 


National Indigenous Arts Advocacy 

Association Inc (NIAAA) 

Tel 61 2 9241 3533 

Fax 61 2 9241 7070 

advocacy@niaaa.com.au 

www.niaaa.com.au 

PO Box 235 

Darlinghurst NSW 1300 

National Indigenous Media 

Association of Australia 

Tel 61 7 3252 1588 

Fax 61 7 3252 1588 

admin@nimaa.org.au 

www.nimaa.org.au 

PO Box 109 

Fortitude Valley QLD 4006 

Songlines Music Aboriginal 

Corporation 

Tel 61 3 9696 2022 

Fax 61 3 9696 2183 

songline@vicnet.net.au 

PO Box 574 

Port Melbourne VIC 3207 

SBSTV (Special Broadcasting 

Service) Indigenous Unit 

Tel 61 2 9430 3058 

Fax 61 2 9438 1590 

icam@sbs.com.au 

www.sbs.com.au 

Locked Bag 028 

Crows Nest NSW 1585 

Warlpiri Media Association 

Tel 61 8 8956 4024 0418381050 

Fax 61 8 8956 4024 

warlpiri@topend.com.au 

CMB, Yuendumu 

via Alice Springs NT 0872 

For access to a range of 

Indigenous arts organisations: 

Koori Net: Indigenous Australian 

WWW Resource Directory 

www.koori.usyd.edu.au/register.html 

Black Book Directory 2000 

Rachel Perkins, Editor 

Blackfella Films, 2000 

Tel 61 2 9380 4071 

Fax 61 2 9380 4070 

rachelp@mira.net 

PO Box 301 Rose Bay NSW 2029 

8 e Festival des Arts du Pacifique 

Rue des Accords de 

Matignon BP 378 

98 845 Noumea cedex 

New Caledonia 

Tel 687 41 4570 

Fax 687 41 45 4571 

cofap@canl.nc 

www.Festival-Pacific-Arts.org

Photography 

Page Artist/Company Photographer 

Covers John Patrick Kelantumama Lucio Nigro 

7 Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre Lauren Fitzsimmon 

8 Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre Kevin O'Brien 

9 Kooemba Jdarra Rob MacColl 

9 Ilbijerri Aboriginal & TSI Theatre courtesy Rochelle Patten 

10 Ochre & Dust Heidrun Löhr 

10 7 Stages of Grieving Tracey Schramm 

11 REM Theatre Miki-nobu Komatsu 

11 Queensland Theatre Company Rob MacColl 

11 Black Swan Theatre Company Tracey Schramm 

12 The Marrugeku Company David Hancock 

12 Leah Purcell Heidrun Löhr 

13 Deborah Cheetham Tracey Schramm 

13 Tom E Lewis Jeff Busby 

15 Bangarra Dance Theatre Greg Barrett 

16 Marilyn Miller Sally Kater 

16 Marilyn Miller Tim Webster 

17 Torres Strait Island Cultural Group Anthony Wallis 

18 Mornington Island Dancers Glen Campbell 

18 Tracks Inc Elka Kerkhofs 

21 Christine Anu Ross Honeysett 

22 Kev Carmody Andrzej Liguz 

22 Matthew Doyle Dennis Lane 

22 Coloured Stone Karen Faure 

23 Ruby Hunter Liana Rose 

24 Jimmy Little Paul Proben/doublepr 

25 Archie Roach Stuart Spence 

25 Stiff Gins Tony Mott 

26 Warumpi Band Janice Barkla/ 

Photo Mark Manion 

26 Richard Walley Patrick Riviere 

27 Yothu Yindi Anthony Geernaert 

28 Fiona Foley Sandy Edwards 

30 Ian Abdulla M Bradley 

40 Mangkaja Arts courtesy Mangkaja Arts 

44-48 Film stills AFI Distribution 

46 Radiance Heidrun Löhr 

Funding, Production & 

Management 

Australian Indigenous Program for 

the 8th Festival of Pacific Arts - an 

initiative of the Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Islander Arts Fund (ATSIAB) of 

the Australia Council. 

Visual Artists participating in the 

Biennale d'art de contemporain, 

are funded by the Australia Council 

through its Aboriginal and Torres 

Strait Islander Arts Fund. 

Bangarra Dance Theatre - Australia 

Council, NSW Ministry for the Arts, 

Ozemail; Doonooch Dancers - NSW 

Ministry for the Arts; Tracks Inc - 

Australia Council, Northern Territory 

Department of Arts and Museums; 

Mornington Island Dancers - 

Australia Council, Arts Queensland, 

Mornington Shire Council; 

Bernadette Walong - Australia 

Council. Nakkondi/Look - original 

concept and project support 

provided by the State Library of 

South Australia, also Adelaide 

Festival 2000, Kodak and Ilford; 

Deborah Cheetham - Olympics Arts 

Festivals & Events commission, 

Australia Council, Performing Lines; 

Ilbijerri Aboriginal and TSI Theatre 

Co-op Ltd & Playbox Theatre - 

Australia Council, Arts Victoria, City 

of Melbourne, Aboriginal Affairs 

Victoria, ATSIC; Kooemba Jdarra 

Indigenous Performing Arts 

Company - ATSIC, Arts 

Queensland, Australia Council; Tom 

E Lewis & Handspan Visual Theatre 

- Australia Council, Arts Victoria; 

The Marrugeku Company - 

Australia Council and 

Commonwealth Major Festivals 

Initiative, Macdonnell Promotions; 

Ochre & Dust - Australia Council 

through the Commonwealth Major 

Festivals Initiative, Marguerite 

Pepper Productions; Leah Purcell - 

Olympic Arts Festivals & Events 

commission, Australia Council; REM 

Theatre - Australia Council, NSW 

Ministry for the Arts, Marguerite 

Pepper Productions; Yirra Yaakin 

Noongar Theatre - Australia 

Council, Arts WA, Healthway, 

ATSIC; Black Swan Theatre - 

Australia Council, Arts WA, 

Hammersley Iron, Woodside 

Petroleum, Heitsbury Pty Ltd; Sand 

to Celluloid film series - Indigenous 

Unit, Australian Film Commission, 

SBS Independent, Australian Film 

Institute, Film Australia; Shifting 

Sands - Indigenous Unit AFC, 

Pacific Film & TV Commission; SBS 

Independent, Screen West, AFI; 

Crossing Tracks - Indigenous Unit, 

AFC, SBS Independent, Film 

Victoria, NSW Film & TV Office, 

Australian Broadcasting 

Corporation, AFI; On Wheels - SBS 

Independent, Indigenous Unit, AFC, 

FTO (NSW Film and Television 

Office), Pacific Film & TV 

Commission, Film West, AFI; 

Radiance - FTO, AFC, Showtime, 

SBS and private Investment; Bush 

Mechanics - National Indigenous 

Documentary Fund, Indigenous 

Unit, AFC, FTO. 

55

56 

Australia's innovative arts bi-monthly 

www.rtimearts.com/~opencity/ www.ozco.gov.au

Entire document - Australia Council for the Arts

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