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Session R3: Representation in museums, films, and literature

1.Barbara Paulson: Representing urban Indigenous cultures

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Abstract

What do urban Aboriginal and Islander cultures look like? How are they represented in the national identity? What are the social references used to describe this identity and how is this valued? Is the term ‘continuing culture’ a genuine descriptive or simply placating? When the term ‘continuing culture’ was coined did it include the adaptive changes and dynamic evolution that occurs naturally within cultural groups or did it simply describe the ability for a group to remain culturally un-evolving? In this paper I want to discuss some of the issues faced by the National Museum of Australia when representing urban Aboriginal and Islander cultures.

Author bio

Barbara Paulson is a Mununtjali / Gungari woman. Currently a curator in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander program (ATSIP) at the National Museum of Australia. Barbara has worked and lived in many Aboriginal communities around Australia in differing positions such as artists, artsworker, counsellor, youth worker. Knowledge gained and developed while within those communities and positions is the reference point she uses in any role where she is a cultural liaison or educator. The subject of representing urban Indigenous culture is a personal one, with Knowledge attained, in the urban context, from personal experience of contemporary life in Australia – knowledge not found in any text book. She knows because she’s looked.

2. Sam Faulkner: Torres Strait Islander identity and representation through literature

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 145KB

Abstract

From AC Haddon’s account of Murray Islanders to Kaisiana’s journey to the Torres Strait and everything in between, I will present a range of representation of Torres Strait Islanders through a literature analysis. This will cover a wide variety of works from the period of the late 1800s to present day.

I will examine selected writings by both Torres Strait Islanders and non-Torres Strait Islanders. These representations have included the cannibal and savages who worshiped spirit gods to the journey by young children from mainland Australia who return to the homeland of their parents to connect with their family and culture.

How are Torres Strait Islanders viewed and represented by non-Torres Strait Islanders? How do Torres Strait Islanders see themselves and look at non-Torres Strait Islanders? These are just several questions to be considered in the context of the urban, rural and remote experience.

Author bio:

Samantha Faulkner is a Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal woman, from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi peoples of Cape York Peninsula.  She has worked with a number of public service agencies, community controlled health and research organisations across Australia.  She has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on a number of local, state and national boards.  She is the author of Life Blong Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait, published in 2007 by Aboriginal Studies Press and is currently the Academic Coordinator, Jabal Indigenous Higher Education Centre at the Australian National University.

3. Jeanine Leane: What are the dominant portrayals of Aboriginal people in Anglo- western Australian literature? How do such images inform and constrain the inclusions of contemporary urban images by Aboriginal writers in educational settings?

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 48KB

Abstract

In 1857, Frank Fowler wrote in Southern Lights and Shadows that; ‘our fictionists have fallen on the soil of Australia like so many industrious diggers and though merely scratching and fossicking on the surface have turned up much of the precious malleable stuff.’ J.J Healy takes up this reference in his phenomenological study Literature and the Aborigine in Australia (1978) and points out that ‘the Aborigine was part of the malleable stuff’. Since 1788 Aboriginal Australians have been constructed and re-constructed in Anglo-western literary canons from the exotic, the primitive, the noble savage, the innocent, the child-like to the barbaric, the depraved fringe dweller and the tragic ‘half-caste’. From the 1960s onwards Aboriginal writers have endeavoured to represent ourselves in the Australian literary landscape but these constructions are not as prevalent in educational curricula as the Anglo-western constructions. This paper examines the historical trajectory of dominant Anglo-western portrayals and looks at how such representations inform and constrain the use of contemporary urban portrayals of Aboriginality.

Author bio

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman from South West NSW. She is currently the Education Research Fellow at AIATSIS. She was born in Wagga Wagga and educated in Gundagai, Wagga Wagga, Armidale and Canberra. She has a BA in Literature and History from the University of New England, Armidale (1983) and a Graduate Diploma of Education from the University of Canberra (1984). In 2006 she started her PhD (University of Technology, Sydney) investigating The white man’s ‘Aborigine’, but what is the alternative? While deliberately considering the ‘Aborigine’ as a construct of white imagination, the PhD follows the trajectory of Anglo-European representations in literature, with particular emphasis on a number of prominent authors and how their fictional portraits influenced generations of non-Aboriginal learners via school curricula from the 1960s onward. Jeanine is also investigating Aboriginal authors and the way their works are being interpreted in schools. She has three unpublished manuscripts which were short listed for the David Unaipon award in 2006, 2007, and 2008. In 2009 she was short listed for a collection of poetry in the PressPress Chapbook Award.