talking about country: Grenada
Author: stephanieradok
Stephanie Radok lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Her memoir An Opening: Twelve Love Stories about Art was published in 2012. Her artwork is in public collections in Australia.
Speech by Nicholas Jose at the launch of An Opening in 2012 at Greenaway Art Gallery
Many of you will know the artist Peter Tyndall’s long-running series A Person Looks at a Work of Art in which we see line-drawn gallery goers who look like happy families in a children’s story—Famous Five Go to the Art Museum. Stephanie Radok’s new book An opening: twelve love stories about art looks back at that person who looks—mother, father, child—and gives them a filled-in body and a mind, a history, a habitat, a set of memories. And a faithful dog. ‘A Dog Looks at a Work of Art’ the book might have been called. It is the dog that takes us out of the museum into a shared world, blurring distinctions between art and life, giving us a wonderful image for the way artworks leave their traces everywhere, just as exciting smells are left for the dog to discover. Art as fart. Well, not only.
An opening is a memoir wrapped around a discussion of art and a discussion of art wrapped around a memoir in such a way that makes the two indistinguishable. The attentive adult contains the experiencing child, connected by the continuing presence of things, their ‘shapes and colours and forms’, known through the capacity, as Radok writes, for ‘somehow both going inside them and putting them inside me’. An opening is structured as a calendar, a book of hours, month by month from January to December, as the author walks with her dog through her suburban, bush-fringe Adelaide world in changing seasons and environments and at the same time journeys mentally and emotionally to the works of art that have become part of her life, bringing them into her present and reflecting on their meaning for her, which becomes their meaning for us. The private acquires significance through an inquiring intelligence that positions things in the largest possible context. At the same time the work of art moves from rarefied space into the ordinary world. One way Radok does this is by attending to the way we find and carry artworks with us in our lives, in postcards and clippings that become tatty with time. That allows segues like this one:
I have a postcard of an interior painted in 1955 by Grace Cossington Smith stuck to the wall in the laundry above the old square white ceramic trough…. The whole work contains a lot of yellow in broad square panes of paint, like pieces of solid light pouring in to flood the room with radiance and a kind of dissolving energy. The postcard is next to the laundry window that looks out onto two plum trees and an olive tree, but it is the tiny painting that suggests an escape from domesticity which is nevertheless embedded in the domestic, the possibility of glowing visions in a lump of butter or a drop of light like a coin on a window sill. (page 19)
That is art writing of the highest order. Cossington Smith would have understood it. And what makes it so original is the lead in from a discussion of a woodblock print by Hiroshige that was given to Radok’s family at a dinner in Chinatown in New York in 1961 by a Japanese man who worked at the United Nations with U Thant. In those connections and traverses, Radok’s finely tuned global positioning device is always at work.
I did not know Stephanie Radok personally before An opening though I knew her name from the art journalism I’d seen here and there over the years and found sharp, fresh, sometimes provocative. I’d noted her as a kindred spirit and made a point of reading things with her name on them. Adelaide, in particular, is lucky to have such a good art writer, at a time when art writing is generally so dire in this country. She has found her own way of doing it, and her own venues, where she can remain independent and a bit marginal. She’s made those short review pieces into an art form of her own. So when I saw an earlier draft of this book I was truly excited. Reading it in the finished version now I appreciate how layered and subtle it is in selectivity and speculation and its beautifully crafted and situated style. It’s an extraordinary, ambitious work that belies its intentional modesty. Not your typical art book. Radok follows in the footsteps of another Adelaide artist-writer, Barbara Hanrahan, in her first book, The Scent of Eucalyptus, with a book of place and memory that is vibrantly alive to the colours and shapes of the world, as seen and felt by a practicing artist. I’m happy that the author and I like so many of the same things: Simryn Gill, Ah Xian, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Durer, Colin McCahon.
There’s a condition known as Stendhal’s syndrome in which people are overcome, swoon, faint, become feverish, by the intensity of their experience of a work of art. The love in Radok’s subtitle–‘twelve love stories about art’—is different. It is not a pathology. There’s a great moment of realization when the author goes to the Prado in Madrid to see for the first time in actuality a painting she has travelled with for years, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and of course does so in a crowd of other tourists, buying tickets and queuing. She writes: ‘Yet on this recent trip rather than being annoyed by the global nature of cultural tourism in the twenty-first century … I found it alright.’ ‘…our private obsessions belong to many other people as well … Thus the experience was solitary and individual but communal.’ Sharing is part of this love.
An opening is grounded in a longstanding and deep relationship with Aboriginal art, from which perhaps this recognition of the power and necessity of sharing has developed: an embodied and relational way of thinking about art. Her book rests on that understanding, and it’s what makes it radical, a critique and expansion of much else in the art world and its conventional ways.
There are many meanings that open up from the book’s title: An opening. An invitation, a door in the wall, an aperture, a Pandora’s box, a beginning, a hole worn through, an overture, or an opening like this one at which something new is introduced and celebrated. Let me conclude with another passage from the book:
‘The potential in every art exhibition, every artwork, is present at this point of opening, a point of potential expansion of the world, of surprise, celebration, learning and illumination.’ To which she adds in a characteristic startling leap, that her opening also refers to ‘the bright clear light that characterizes Australia which can be seen as potentially leading to an opening of the mind.’ We live in hope.
Read it and perhaps it will happen to you. I congratulate the publishers. I congratulate the author. It’s a very beautiful book. A revelation, a gem. Open to the public.
Collected works of Goethe, 2 vols, plaster and mica
I started making books in plaster as an experiment quite a while ago. Then I found a twelve volume Collected Works of Goethe/ Goethe’s Samtliche Werke (published in Stuttgart in 1885) brought out of Germany by my father’s parents when escaping. The mica is found in the hills of Adelaide.
Rewriting the labels
How long can the majority wait for their story to unfold
They took their life and liberty friend but
they could not buy their soul
Kev Carmody
Indigenous music is flying high, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is on the cover of the April 2011 Rolling Stone, the recent Byron Bay Blues Festival included him, Saltwater Band, the Stiff Gins AND Bob Dylan. At the last BAFF (BigPond Adelaide Film Festival) Indigenous art and film were quietly but spectacularly on the front page with premiers of features Mad Bastards and Here I am, documentaries The Tall Man and murundak: Songs of Freedom, a retrospective program of Indigenous representation in Australian cinema, forums and three major visual arts exhibitions (Stop (the) Gap: Indigenous Art in Motion at the Samstag Museum, Tracey Moffat: Narratives at the Art Gallery of South Australia and tall man by Vernon Ah Kee at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation.
Stop(the)Gap included Warwick Thornton’s first venture into gallery space with Stranded a 3-D moving image of himself on an illuminated glass crucifix turning in the air above a remote Australian landscape, this image was also reproduced on free limited edition boxes of popcorn. Based on Thornton’s memories and drawing of his wish to be like Jesus when he was six years old as well as evoking Noel Counihan’s linocut portrait of a crucified Albert Namatjira, it is a hard work to interpret. It seems to embrace a kitsch cliché image of Aboriginal suffering as well as showing it to be a somehow endless spectacle. Thornton’s Samson and Delilah, a film full of the authority of a gifted filmmaker as well as the grim reality of some Aboriginal lives won the Camera d’ Or at Cannes in 2009 for best first film.
More and more Indigenous stories are being told by Indigenous people with Indigenous voices as well as in collaboration with non-Indigenous peoples. Stories of trouble? Yes. Stories of triumph? Yes.
Indigenous culture is moving out of dedicated spaces and into the mainstream. Ultimately all Indigenous culture is claiming the space for experiences that have not been widely told and this broadens the space for the stories of everyone whose stories are untold. Powerful Indigenous art often comes from places and people that appear to be powerless. This is one reason it is strong, it has a necessity, an urgency about it. For all the irony in some work there is an authenticity factor that is incontrovertible and that may well be the high moral ground asserted by Thornton’s Stranded. Many years ago it was Papunya painter Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri who made the telling remark “the money belongs to the ancestors”, that is to say the wealth of the culture provides for its people.
The art in this Artlink ranges from art made many years ago in the Torres Strait, in Tasmania, in Arnhem Land, in Queensland, in Western Australia to art being made today in Mackay, in Cairns, in Arnhem Land, in Elcho Island, in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and other places. The articles from writers all over Australia and the world deal with how to talk about the wide range of work, how to place it in history and in many cases how to rewrite history to incorporate different perspectives and diverse qualities both in Australia and increasingly in Europe.
Art as education, art as bearer of information, wisdom and stories, of belonging, as statement of longevity in that place, art as celebration of home, of land, of courage, of tragedy, of connection, of stories that acknowledge the complexities and difficulties of life as well as its wonders and gifts. Art by trained and untrained artists, by iconoclasts, by people with passion and agendas.
Ernst Gombrich wrote in his book The Story of Art (1950), which features a photo of an Aboriginal artist painting a Possum Dreaming on a rock that we must always remember that images precede writing, and thus implicitly that images are a kind of writing. Art is about politics and history but also empathy and communication. Art materials and art methods like painting, drawing and printmaking find new life in the hands of Indigenous artists with stories to tell.
Many articles in this Artlink speak of a dichotomy between art galleries and museums, between aesthetics and ethnography, between an idea of art as something disinterested and disengaged, and the study of culture as meaning one culture’s examination of other cultures. Yet all stuff in museums has always had aesthetic dimensions and all stuff in galleries has always had ethnographic dimensions. You just have to rewrite the labels.
Real art is never disinterested and disengaged, living cultures always exceed and overwhelm the boundaries placed around them. And this is what we are seeing in Australia and in this Artlink, a living culture.
At the last Cairns Indigenous Art Fair Richard Bell spoke about his experience of New York and said that he noticed there that it was not the black man who was at the bottom of the pecking order but women. Bell was going to create A Blackfella’s Guide to New York City for Artlink but it didn’t happen. Maybe next time.
Last year Artlink celebrated its thirtieth birthday as a unique magazine covering contemporary art in Australia as a forum of ideas, acts of courage and commitment. This June 2011 issue Beauty and Terror is the fourth time Artlink has focused an entire issue on Australian Indigenous art but the first of a new series called Artlink Indigenous to be published each June as a bumper issue – more pages, more art, more words, more debates – focusing on a multifaceted art that is ever-evolving and has a deep history.
Stephanie Radok
Editorial for Artlink Indigenous, Beauty and Terror, 2011
Chinese Whispers (detail)
acrylic on cardboard
From the Dreaming: Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art
Imagine you live under the stars in Central Australia. Your family has lived there for thousands of years. You know the names of every geological feature, animal and plant that surrounds you and how they were made. You are related to everything and everyone. The pathways that the creator ancestors and your family travel upon are one and the same. Then someone comes along with their animals, their laws and their religion, claims the land for themselves, and you are marginalised, an exile in your own land.
The shocking experience of deracination suffered by Central Australian Aboriginal people did not mean the end of their culture though who knew that it would eventually open a new chapter in Australian art. Is it a new chapter though or the re-opening of a very old one?
Three years in the making Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art curated by Judith Ryan, Senior Curator at the NGV, and Philip Batty, Senior Curator at the Museum of Victoria, is the newest exhibition to examine the astonishing phenomena that is Western Desert painting.
This is perhaps the most studied art movement in Australia. It continues to create waves and surprises both in Central Australia and in places far away from it. Tjukurrtjanu is a coming together of art gallery and museum approaches to exhibiting, white walls and corroborating artefacts from the past, minimal labels and ethnographic documents. In these ways it exemplifies the debates, the balancing acts, between ethnography and aesthetics that has characterised the reception of this art over the years.
It is easy to rave about the exhibition, about the beauty, delicacy and power of the 200 paintings made in 1971 and 1972 by twenty of the thirty-five original Papunya Tula artists on show. As you walk around, and one visit is certainly not enough to truly look at even half the show, you are very conscious that the paintings are not on canvas but are on boards, hard sometimes irregular-shaped surfaces, and you get a clear sense of them as diagrams, maps, demonstrations, teaching aids, signs of magic and manifestations of ancestral power. In some cases their clear instructive role is further emphasised as they literally resemble blackboards with paintings on them, optically mesmerising blackboards that pulse and vibrate, their veiled depths drawing you in to speculate about their meanings which are not necessarily available to you but very clear in their intensity.
Yet there seems some uneasy ambivalence in this show towards its audience. As an art historical and museological exercise urgently asserting the ancient continuity of the art more than its currency as an art experience, the exhibition is sometimes in danger of wearing out its audience, of being too didactic, of not letting the work be. The short film of a fire ceremony and the slides of decorated dancers throw the viewer into the position of an anthropologist. The excerpts of unpublished film footage by Geoff Bardon on the other hand call up the place called Papunya, the Honey Ant Dreaming hills reflected in the pools of heavy rain that fell at the time, the faded Kodachrome yellows and blues evoking the potential poetry of everyone’s mystic and mythic past.
There is no question that you need to pour over the catalogue. Then go and read Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists by Vivien Johnson; and Geoffrey Bardon’s Papunya: A place made after the story, the beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement.
Then imagine the stars in Central Australia.
Stephanie Radok
National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, 30 September 2011 – 12 February 2012. Tjukurrtjanu travelled to Paris and was shown at the musée du quai Branly from 9 October 2012 to 27 January 2013.
First published in The Melbourne Review, Dec 2011- Jan 2012.
Photography as history
Do we look at photographs in a different way from other artforms? Or to put the question another way are there things that photography does that are special to it as a medium?
One feature of photography in spite of all the photo-shopping, set-ups and fakery that we know are possible is that it often has a relationship to reality that sets it in time and place with a truth factor that has a strong appeal. It means that photographs include details that the photographer didn’t control, that show us slices of life with a certain familiarity so that we recognise and trust that the understandings we receive from them have a basis in fact. Photographs are witnesses, records, proofs.
It is said that people who have never seen photographs take a while to see them as more than flat marks on paper suggesting photography is culturally specific but what about the experience of the camera obscura in which a simple hole projects the world in fine grained detail though admittedly upside down? Humans may have invented cameras but the process that cameras use is embedded in the world, in the mechanics of the eye and the nature of light. That is why we recognise the truth of photographs, we don’t invent them, we take them.
Many photographs achieve an iconic status almost from when we first see them. In the two important national touring exhibitions of photographs Robert McFarlane: Received Moments at the Flinders University City Gallery and Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land at Tandanya there are many photographs which have become icons for example McFarlane’s image of Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins on his way to Sydney University. The fact that the 1965 Freedom Ride through western New South Wales with which Perkins is associated involved travel on a bus is somehow present in this image of a thoughtful man who fought discrimination and made history.
Adelaide-born McFarlane was also one of the photographers taking images for the 1988 publication After 200 years: photographic essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia today. The engrossing image Cherbourg Wedding from this book shows three generations of an Aboriginal family watched over by a framed photograph of Winston Churchill. Time capsule seems a good word for McFarlane’s exhibition in general where many images show an Australia that is now gone in small black and white images that evoke newspapers and newsreels. By “received moments” McFarlane, also a well-known writer on photography, refers to a kind of gift or grace that the photographer looks out for and then if he or she is ready with camera in hand can harvest.
Tasmanian-born descendant of the Big River and Ben Lomond people Ricky Maynard was also a photographer for the After 200 years project in 1988. All of Maynard’s photographic project is deliberately a recording of indigenous life and history. He sees photography as necessarily collaboration. In his words: “Standard photographic technique is essentially an act of subjugation, in which people are invariably reduced to objects for the use of the photographer… To build an alternative practice, a convivial photography, we need to abolish this oppressive relationship. Co-authorship must be established beforehand. It is impossible to fight oppression by reproducing it.”
Maynard’s portraits show us direct gazes and long histories in the faces of people into whose eyes we may not have looked so deeply before. They ask us to empathise, to reflect and to recognise a common humanity. Portrait of a Distant Land features more than 60 photographs drawn from six iconic bodies of work – The Moonbird People (1985-88), No More Than What You See (1993), Urban Diary (1997), In The Footsteps of Others (2003), Returning To Places That Name Us (2000) and Portrait of a Distant Land (2005- ).
Maynard often uses oral history in extended titles. The accompanying words for The Healing Garden, Wybalenna, Flinders Island, Tasmania 2005 are from Aunty Ida West in 1995: “It’s pretty important you know, the land, it doesn’t matter how small, it’s something, just a little sacred site, that’s Wybalenna. There was a massacre there, sad things there, but we try not to go over that. Where the bad was we can always make it good.”
When we look at the photograph The Healing Garden and see these trees surrounded by a low fence we can imagine the feeling of sanctuary they contain as well as the sound of the wind in them and the scent of their shade. We know we don’t know what happened there but we sense a presence as in a cemetery. Maynard says: “These pictures will live on in history, showing the moment to itself, showing what needs to be changed and hoping some day we can look back and see how far we have progressed as a society.”
Stephanie Radok
Robert McFarlane: received moments: Photography 1961-2009
Flinders University City Gallery
29 October – 1 December 2011
Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land
Tandanya
24 November 2011 – 12 February 2012
South of my days
South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country…
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.
Judith Wright (1915 – 2000)
While strongly connecting to the Southern Hemisphere the idea of South goes beyond geography and includes all who seek to extend the intellectual, social and geographic boundaries of contemporary art through dialogue, collaboration and exchange.
The first time I remember thinking about South as an encompassing term was when I read the 1980 Brandt Report by the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, the report was also called North South: A Program for Survival. In the report South is synonymous with poverty. The Commission advocated a large scale transfer of resources from the wealthy North to the South and a restructuring of the global economy.
The film Bamako (2006) by Abderrahmane Sissako (France/Mali) shown at the 2007 Adelaide Film Festival took up these issues in an allegory in which the North in the form of the IMF and the World Bank is on trial by the South. Bamako is the capital of Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. The film counterposes the courtroom with daily life. Both take place in the open-air courtyard of a house, a place also used for eating, washing and dying great skeins of cloth. The bringing together of daily life and work with the court has the effect of both humanising and humorising the message of the film and the serious issues of inhumanity it addresses.
My subsequent early thinking about South was connected to Bernard Smith’s great book European Vision and the South Pacific and its descriptions of cultural dialogues between north and south, old worlds and new worlds. In preparing the South Issue of Artlink I interviewed the ninety-year old Smith in Melbourne and found out how he came to write the book, the title of which I like so much because, in my interpretation anyway, vision means both what we see and what we dream. Over a cup of tea and a Spanish biscuit the spry Smith pronounced, in reference to the names of the influential art publishers Thames & Hudson, that there are other rivers in the world, and that we are all the other.
The South Project, initially devised as an alternative to a Melbourne International Biennale, has been managed by Craft Victoria as a four year journey; it organizes forums, residencies, exhibitions and acts as a catalyst for bringing people together. One recurrent feature of the South Project is paying attention to Indigenous peoples’ cultures, their ideas and ways of being. One of the incentives for me to attend the first South Project Forum in Melbourne in 2004 was because there were people attending from one of the strangest and most faraway places in the world Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and speaking in their own language! The question of translation is another recurring feature of the South Project, not simply translation to understand what someone is saying but to multiply ideas and to widen the potential range of possible meanings. That first forum was followed by the 2005 South Project Forum in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2006 I went to Santiago in Chile for the third South Project Forum; the fourth is to be in October 2007 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Many of the people I met or heard about in Santiago are present in this Artlink in articles and images. Some were not able to be included. Like artist Francisco Brugnoli the lively director of the Museo Art Contemporaneo in Santiago, a building he brought back from ruin to the magnificent contemporary art museum it is today. He spoke eloquently about being in exile at home. Then there was artist Jesus Macarena, a co-founder in 1996 of POLVO an artist-run space in Chicago working with the Immigrant Rights Movement. While the South Forum was on in Santiago new legislation came through in Paraguay protecting the cultural rights of indigenous people there. Ticio Escobar who has been working with those people for thirty years spoke about the Museo del Barro (Museum of Mud) which includes Indigenous art, contemporary art and popular art. He spoke about culture as a tool for survival for each of us.
And then there were those people I never met but have found on the internet like Australian filmmaker Tiger Brown in New York who sent me his DVD Los Chamacocos Bravos, a film about Paraguayan Indigenous people that he made with Aristide Escobar, brother of Ticio. One of the most inspiring art projects that I came across and was not able to include is New York-based artist Pablo Helguera’s School of Panamerican Unrest, a 2006 public art project in which he took a large installation in the form of a schoolhouse to thirty cities from one end of America to the other, Anchorage in Alaska to Ushuiaia in Patagonia, meeting people and talking about what connects nationality and culture. He wrote:
‘Art has an enormous potential to be relevant outside the art world, but for that to happen, we need to use the tools of art to create understanding instead of simply promoting the understanding of art.’
Another significant film shown at the Adelaide Film Festival this year was Darratt (Dry Season) by Mahamat Saleh Haroun (Chad), one of Peter Sellars’ commissioned New Crowned Hope films. The complexity of revenge and of justice is brought home in the film and as with viewing Bamako it is seeing the most ordinary aspects of daily life in another country which bring home the humanity of those sometimes called the ‘others’.
While the great art markets, the fairs and the gatekeepers, the power to write history and to determine still tend to be based in the Northern Hemisphere, there are many other rivers, purposes, histories and agendas of and for art and there is success that is not measured in money.
Stephanie Radok, Editorial, THE SOUTH ISSUE: NEW HORIZONS, Artlink, June 2007.
what we bring with us
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea the narrator repeatedly listens to an American jazz record – Some of these days you’ll miss me honey – and finds it an exemplar of both transience and immortality. A record is a memory. Un ricordo. It goes round and round, its crackly revolutions bringing back what has been forgotten or ghosting what is lost beyond recall. Rescued from a cellar, a shed or a vinyl dealer, a record is a survivor. Latin rhythms, folk wistfulness, the classics, 33 loops per minute for the long players, bowling the past up, full circle, the record’s surface shines, reflecting the viewer’s curiosity. Yet its fine incisions absorb the light of the present in matte black oblivion. The label splits like the moon, dark side and light.
On this unlikely surface Stephanie Radok has painted vessels, their colorful curves intersecting with the record’s grooves to suggest a different kind of remembering. The pots and jugs and vases are household objects brought with her peripatetic family on journeys between Australia and Europe and America. The vessels, like the family, are survivors. They have borne packing and transport, relocation and changing use. Yet their bright aesthetic is testimony to an ample holding capacity. Bold paintstrokes celebrate routine domesticity. Yet layered on black vinyl – the sheen of home entertainment in that lost new world of the 1950s and 1960s – the brushwork of those cherished memories becomes streaked and transparent. What we bring with us are not just things but cultures, customs, bonds. And they are newly lived, in unsettled conjunctions, according to time and place. What remains, when we look back quizzically, are intense, enigmatic, stubborn disruptions of colour and shape. Empty vessels that carry our lives in more complex ways than we knew.
The World-tree series, paintings on loose canvas made by Radok in 2002 for an exhibition called The Immigrant’s Garden, showed a magical tree that a child might draw, branching and curving up with arms outstretched. What we bring with us gives a similar sense of uplift, only now to a syncopated beat, bolder and more shadowed. The artist follows the bouncing ball that keeps getting away, spinning, turning, backwards and forwards in time, in and out of highly charged personal space.
As companion works Radok shows plaster casts of books, delicately coloured fossils. Books are another form of record, containers of cultural knowledge. Rendered in plaster they evoke the elusive and suggestive spaces of memory. What we bring with us is personal, familial, wittily including elements of playful consumption and self-invention. Is this art of losing or finding? Of reducing life to minimal necessities or amplifying it to ever more resonant forms and sensations?
Nicholas Jose
June 2006
what we bring with us: Stephanie Radok, Watson Place Gallery, Melbourne, July, 2006.
Knowing the place for the first time
As Australians become more aware of the micro-environments in which they live as well as more integrated into a world economy and culture their concern with place falls between the extremes of absolute specificity and total placelessness. Each of us is familiar with places such the internet, airports, chain restaurants and shops, that make it possible for us to move around the world yet seem to stay in the same place, or to stay in one place and seem to move around the world.
At the same time as these non-specific places become more available to us, increased understanding of ecology, indigeneity and a self-preserving instinct for home assert the value of intimate knowledge of place built up over decades and generations if not centuries. Yet longevity in a place is not a choice available to a lot of people, whether through migration, dispossession, the diasporas brought about by the events of world history, or personal quests for prosperity, in the pursuit of careers, dreams or even love.
Environmental historian Peter Read, in his two recent books Returning to Nothing: lost places (1996) and Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (2000) seeks, in his own words, to shape an imprecise but certain knowledge. His research emphasizes in particular the historical moment at which Australia and Australians have arrived, a time for the telling, affirming and elaboration in a new way of the belonging to Australia of non-Indigenous Australians.
General knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prior ownership and culture is now irrevocably widespread and entrenched both legally and conceptually in Australian history. This can be clearly seen in the stories that museums are now telling and in educational material for schools. Black armband/white blindfold – the truth surely lies somewhere in-between but it is certain that many Indigenous concepts such as ‘dreaming’, ‘country’, ‘sacred site’, ‘women’s business’ have firmly entered the Australian vernacular. This is evident even in the title of the recent volume Words for country: landscape and language in Australia (2002) edited by Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths, a series of essays by different authors on specific places, many of which concern mingled Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories.
Closer understanding of Australia’s human past goes hand in hand with an awareness of its unique flora, fauna, landforms, climate and so on. Yet much of the current energy and vitality of understanding Australia right now lies in the fresh valuing and recognition of the hybridity of non-Indigenous peoples and their stories, both those originating here and those brought here from scores of other places. No cultural group has a monopoly on the notion of attachment to place. The cross-cultural links, the translations of languages and meanings that can be drawn across such common feelings are useful for acknowledging similarities between different peoples.
Could it be that a unique type of polyculture is possible in Australia, where recognition of the Indigenous need not be used to cause non-Indigenes to cringe because of their relatively recent arrival on this soil but the Indigenous can be seen as a proud predecessor and exemplar of the rich possibilities of endemic or highly adapted development to place, alongside a usefully increased awareness and taking into account of the global as well as of the local? We are certainly all indigenous to the earth.
Local understanding of climate, vernacular and geography, the beauty and depth of an intimate knowledge of a place is something that Aboriginal art expresses effortlessly. Art that is made by non-Aboriginal artists whether they are from European, Asian, Middle Eastern, South or North American backgrounds also relates to Australia as a place as well as connecting to complex global issues. Local knowledge of the land cannot be acquired quickly. It involves duration, it takes account of the seasons of the earth, the passage of the sun across the sky, the angle of light, the passing of time, cycles and rhythms both circadian and annual.
Yet place is not only about land, it is also about habitation (living) and habitations (homes), about cities and suburbs, cultures and civilizations, thoughts, ideas and philosophies, objects, scents, dreams, memories, words. The taste of a certain food may call up associations that evoke another place and another time. You can be reading a book and return to where you are sitting and know that you have been to another place.
Taking a broad view of the idea of place enables this issue of Artlink to reflect the multiplicity of places now present in Australia. Place evokes common ground rather than difference even as it marks that common ground by its valuing of the validity and significance of individual experience. Place transcends such terms as regionalism and provincialism as it emphasizes the universality of the need to belong. Connecting threads tug and pull across the work of the writers and artists. in this issue of Artlink. Many articles are linked to websites that expand the material present in the magazine. Each piece of work here alerts us to place as something both familiar and strange, as something within us as much as it is outside us.
There are about 150 different ethnic groups in Australia, there are around 8,000 world-wide. In the face of the current intermingling of cultures around the world it has been claimed that it is no longer possible to understand each other culture we may encounter and to thus base civic behaviour and rules on rationality. Rather it has been suggested that the new civic values should be tolerance, love, trust and mildness which, at this moment of ongoing world crises, is definitely worth taking to heart in order that we enter the future with a sense of possibility and awakening.
Stephanie Radok, Editorial for PLACE issue of Artlink
Stephanie Radok 