Mission & Justice

Vivien Johnson; 19/7/08, The Australian, No Internet Text; Vivien Johnson is professor of new media narrative and theory at the University of NSW, and curator of the exhibition Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert at the Australian Museum in Sydney.

Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World; Benjamin Genocchio; Hardie Grant

Much has changed in the Aboriginal art world since Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines pioneered the genre to which Ben Genocchio’s Dollar Dreaming is the latest addition. Chatwin’s best-selling chronicle of his travels in the Aboriginal art world was written in the more slow-moving mid-1980s. The boom in Aboriginal art sales had barely begun and the first few Aboriginal artists were just starting to throw off the shackles of collective ethnographic identities and emerge as contemporary artists in their own right.

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Rosalie Higson; 2/7/08

A one-off screening of 12 Canoes - a new film by Rolf de Heer and the Northern Territory community of Ramingining, of Ten Canoes fame - has marked a milestone in Australian filmmaking. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia became an autonomous statutory authority yesterday. The film authority Screen Australia was also established, merging the Australian Film Commission, Film Finance Corporation and Film Australia. At the NFSA in Canberra, opening celebrations included the premiere of 12 Canoes, a production from de Heer, web artist Molly Reynolds and elders from Ramingining, including actor David Gulpilil and Anthony Minigululu. De Heer and Gulpilil worked together on the acclaimed Ten Canoes, the first film made wholly in an Australian indigenous language. Made for release on the internet, 12 Canoes comprises a dozen shorts that portray the history, culture and homeland of the Yolngu people of the Arafura Swamp.

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Naomi Fail Simet, 23/6/08

In some parts of Papua New Guinea dance performances play an important role in preserving a society’s oral history. Creation and origin stories which tell of how a particular ethnic group came to be can be traced through a dance performance. The staging of the 4th Mini-Mask festival held in Toare village, Gulf province, last Friday featured various mask dancers accompanied by male and female performers. The eleven cultural groups that participated at the festival were from the Kaipi-Melaripi constituency along the East Kerema coastline. A good number of these performing groups performed dances that were associated with the historic journey of their ancestors.

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Justine Ferrari; 14/5/08

In keeping with the Government’s commitment to ensure the basics are right, the main strategy for halving the gap in school performance between indigenous and non-indigenous students is a $56.4 million program to expand the delivery of intensive literacy and numeracy programs.

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13/5/08

If Aboriginal culture is now to be described as complex and diverse (”Dreamtime over in Aboriginal studies’’, 12/5), what words are left to describe the culture of the European Renaissance, or the court of Harun al Rashid and his astronomer-poet Omar Khayam, or the hundreds of vanished cultures? This politically correct thinking is looking at history through the wrong end of the telescope. Isn’t it beneficial to marvel and wonder that Aboriginal cultures have survived unchanged for so long - far longer than the apparently more sophisticated cultures of Mexico, Egypt, India and China? Howard Dewhirst; Burleigh Heads, Qld

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Justine Ferrari & Lauren Wilson; 12/5/08

Dreamtime is no longer an acceptable term to describe the collection of Aboriginal creation stories, and should be referred to as The Dreaming or The Dreamings. And the structure of traditional Aboriginal society should not be described as primitive - but as complex and diverse, and the term “native” should be replaced by “indigenous groups” or “language groups”.  Advice for teaching indigenous students, which has been prepared by the West Australian and South Australian education departments, contains lists of appropriate words to describe Aboriginal people and culture.  The West Australian document, part of its Aboriginal Perspectives Across the Curriculum project, contains the headings “less appropriate terminology” and “more appropriate terminology”, and sets out unsuitable words and their substitutes.

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Patricia Karvelas; 15/4/08

Indigenous people have suffered the most under welfare reforms that lead to benefits being stopped for eight weeks for people who fail to comply with the regulations imposed by the Howard government. And the Rudd Government has been condemned for not ending the system, despite promising to do so while in Opposition. New figures show that the number of people who have had their payments stopped has more than doubled over the past eight months. Under the regime, recipients who make three mistakes suffer an immediate loss of payment for eight weeks.

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Dennis Shanahan; 9/4/08

The skulls of six Aborigines that have been gathering dust in Scotland since the 19th century will be returned to Australia within weeks. The six skulls were given to National Museums Scotland in the 19th century by collectors and there is little information on the remains apart from the country they came from.

Kevin Rudd welcomed the announcement that the skulls would be sent back to Australia. “Australia applauds the National Museums Scotland for facilitating this return and earlier returns of indigenous remains,” the Prime Minister said in London yesterday.

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