Bark paintings as ambassadors, 1948–63, and the circle back to Aboriginal cultural agency

Matt Poll and Amanda Harris

Abstract: In post–Second World War Australia, the production and touring of assemblages of bark paintings became a diplomatic tool in embassies, galleries and museums around the world. At a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were rarely if ever travelling independently within Australia, these bark paintings acted as intermediaries and interlocutors for global audiences to see and read the stories and histories of Aboriginal Australia. In this article, we trace a series of interconnected events that brought collections of bark paintings to public notice and we seek to understand the changing possibilities for Aboriginal artists to self-represent the broader cultural context of the paintings. We then show how, in the self-determination era, Aboriginal curators and artist collectives sought to create a dialogue with the international market for bark painting in order to communicate the modern relevance of Aboriginal art. Finally, we show how historical bark paintings retain contemporary salience for Yolngu communities, and can be brought back into continuing relationships with people and culture.

In the immediate decades after the First World War, when Aboriginal people’s freedom of movement was restricted by Australia’s state and territory native administrations, bark paintings from across Arnhem Land became ambassadors for global audiences to see the cultures and histories of Aboriginal Australia. These assemblages of Aboriginal bark paintings played a diplomatic role in embassies, galleries and museums around the world while Aboriginal artists and their embodied representations of cultural knowledge and practice were unable to travel. A thriving and vibrant industry for Indigenous art grew out of the subsequent era, transformed by the 1967 constitutional referendum and founding of the Aboriginal Arts Board.¹ However, painting was always only one part of Aboriginal cultural practice in Arnhem Land. Historical records show that alongside their production of bark paintings (often on demand) for visiting ethnographic researchers, passing expeditions and travelling amateur collectors, Aboriginal artists continued to keep alive the songs, dances and stories that are expressed through painting, but also embodied in performed cultural practices. The performative aspects of knowledge production were intricately bound into the creation of bark paintings.

In this article, we explore a series of interlinked historical events in which Aboriginal people sought to put both performed culture and paintings into the same historical record, or to bring both to public attention. We consider how Aboriginal artists sent bark paintings to stand for people, culture and politics, wielding paintings as diplomatic tools that capitalised on non-Indigenous consumers’ engagement with disembodied artworks, rather than the living bodies and voices of those who had produced the art and associated performance practices. In the face of limitations on Aboriginal self-representation, paintings stood in for their artists. This thinking is informed by the actions of the artists who created the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions, creating a performative diplomatic envoy to affect political change.² It also builds on the work of scholars such as Howard Morphy, who suggests that Yolngu ‘art is linked to land, history and identity, and in journeying to other places it carries those connotations with it’, and Fred Myers, who suggests that art objects ‘index and put forward a complex, land-based Indigenous personhood into national space and into a cosmopolitan art market’.³

Subsequently, we examine some of the new directions for exhibiting Aboriginal art pursued by Indigenous curators and art collectives that have sought to bring these histories of travelling bark paintings into dialogue with contemporary cultural practitioners. This curatorial leadership imbues historical collections with increased possibilities for interpretation, meaning and cultural continuation, and re-embeds artists in the world of Aboriginal art. As Stephen Gilchrist has recently theorised, Indigenous curatorial practices reveal:

Indigenous registers of value which can be described as presencing the ancestral, surfacing alternative histories, spatialising the deep local and enfolding audiences in invocations of the ceremonial.⁴

The ideas articulated in written form here are also realised in a new permanent exhibition curated by one of this article’s authors, Matt Poll, which places Aboriginal art at the centre of a major Australian institutional collection at the University of Sydney. In this Ambassadors exhibition, a series of display cabinets feature the cultural work of Indigenous people from different parts of the Australian continent throughout the museum so that, whether visitors are viewing ancient Greek artefacts or animal specimens from Asia, the presence of Aboriginal culture is always felt (Figure 1). Ambassadors is a distributed exhibition throughout the entire museum, not enclosed within a singular exhibition space, designed to overturn the enclosure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people and their knowledges within non-Indigenous categorisations (Figure 2). The process of developing the Ambassadors exhibition followed through on a basic curatorial premise, to name objects in Aboriginal languages, to give agency to the intention of object makers and to give an assemblage of objects an autonomy, in distinct spaces that acknowledge other Aboriginal nations’ autonomies. This exhibition makes explicit the way the works of Aboriginal artists have long asserted ongoing Aboriginal presence. The permanent exhibition Ambassadors has also shaped a further exhibition – the inaugural display of an important collection of Yolngu cultural heritage held by the University of Sydney. We return to this Djalkiri exhibition, developed in consultation with elders of three Yolngu art centres, Milingimbi, Yirrkala and Ramingining, later in the article.⁵

In examining historical practices of collecting, touring and exhibiting bark paintings alongside contemporary assemblages by Indigenous curators, we explore continuities and returns. We suggest that in contemporary curations of Aboriginal art, space has been made for both the cultural and the aesthetic aspects of bark paintings, grappling with a longstanding tension between ‘anthropological’ and ‘fine art’ conceptualisations of Aboriginal painting.⁶ After considering these contemporary efforts, we end by contemplating the circular return of bark paintings to their cultural contexts in reconnections between museum and gallery collections and contemporary communities through the thinking of the late Yolngu elder Dr Joe Gumbula.

Figure 1: Ambassador exhibition display 1, Gadigal Codex, foyer, Chau Chak Wing Museum, 2020.

Source: Photograph by David James; © Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Figure 2: Ambassador exhibition display 8, Dolord, 2020.

Source: Photograph by David James; © Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Historical collecting practices

Bark paintings were collected by non-Indigenous visitors to Australia’s north from the earliest encounters between Aboriginal people and explorers – they took bark sheets found in disused dwellings and dispersed them into national and international collecting institutions.⁷ Nineteenth-century collectors included Foelsche for the Macleay Museum in 1878 and Carrington in 1887. Baldwin Spencer amassed a significant collection in Oenpelli in 1912 and would be supplied with further barks in subsequent years by pastoralist Paddy Cahill.⁸ A range of academic researchers and administrators also collected bark paintings: Norman Tindale in 1922; Lloyd Warner between 1926 and 1929; Reverend Alfred John Dyer between 1920 and 1930; Miss M. Mathews in the 1930s; Fred Gray and Frederick Rose between 1938 and 1945; Donald Thomson in the 1930s and 1940s; and Leonhard Adam in the 1940s.⁹ In 1946–47 Ronald and Catherine Berndt also focused their collecting activities and ethnographic records around bark paintings and their associated stories. These bark paintings were used for teaching anthropology students at the University of Sydney by A. P. Elkin, in touring exhibitions organised by the Department of Anthropology as well as discussed in publications by both Berndts and Elkin.¹⁰

A new category of collectors of bark paintings emerged in the 1950s who regarded the works not just as museum pieces demonstrating cultural practices from around the world, but as collections of artworks. Karel Kupka’s collecting activities in 1951 and 1960 would amass one of the world’s most significant collections of Yolngu bark painting, positioned as art (not as ethnographic cultural object).¹¹ The 1950s also saw bark painting collections by Australians Tony Tuckson, Stuart Scougall and Dorothy Bennett who would go on to place the paintings in galleries rather than museums (more on these collectors below).

With the advent of more portable sound recording technology, it became increasingly common for ethnographic expeditions to collect not only material artworks but also records of ephemeral culture.¹² At the same time as Ronald and Catherine Berndt and A. P. Elkin were collecting both recordings and material culture across Arnhem Land, the highly publicised 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (henceforth Arnhem Land Expedition) amassed a significant collection of bark paintings that was disseminated throughout Australia and the United States, contributing to existing collections of Aboriginal art, and building new ones.¹³ A substantial set of sound recordings was also captured during the nine-month journey, representing a repertoire determined by key singers at two of the expedition’s main campsites at Groote Eylandt and Oenpelli, and at other sites along the way.¹⁴

Paintings were traded and gifted among the institutions whose representatives had participated in the Arnhem Land Expedition: the South Australian Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Anatomy and the Australian Museum, with paintings eventually making their way into long-term collections of the National Museum of Australia, and the art galleries of New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria.¹⁵ Through this process, the paintings were separated from one another, not only along cultural lines but also along institutional ones. Consequently, the links between the paintings and their embodied forms – stories, songs, body painting and dancing – were also fragmented through distribution to museums concerned with material culture. Arguably, it was the expedition itself led by ethnographer C. P. Mountford that fragmented culture in this way, commissioning as it did the series of barks independently of their cultural surrounds.

In 1945, Mountford had already been sent by the Australian Government to the United States to tour his films made in Central Australia including footage of Pitjantjatjara rock art.¹⁶ He subsequently promoted the artworks, stories, song recordings and film footage collected on the Arnhem Land Expedition by collaborating with non-Indigenous performing artists, who would go on to use the collection in the creation of new musical and dance works.¹⁷ The expedition’s collection would be publicly exhibited in subsequent years and Mountford played an active role in the shift towards exhibiting bark paintings in galleries rather than museums.¹⁸

While the art objects collected during the Arnhem Land Expedition enjoyed widespread promotion in the Australian and international arts community, this was not the case for the artists and performers who created them.¹⁹ Nevertheless, several of the painters whose works were collected in 1948, including Narritjin Maymuru, Mawalan Marika and Wandjuk Marika (who also acted as translator to Mountford),²⁰ persisted in sharing their work with non-Indigenous publics. Wandjuk Marika became perhaps the most prominent of this trio, leading the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council and articulating in a biography his approaches to painting as mode of knowledge transmission. In 1973, Wandjuk Marika was able to travel overseas for the first time, a time he regarded as ‘work for the Aboriginal people in the white society’.²¹ Narritjin Maymuru went on to appear as both painter and performer in a milestone event in 1963, to which we now turn.²²

1963 Aboriginal Art Show, Aboriginal Theatre and Melbourne Moomba Festival Exhibition of Aboriginal Art

In 1963, an exhibition at Sydney’s Blaxland Gallery presented a collection of works from the Bennett-Campbell Trust showing a total of 260 bark paintings, 200 pieces of sculpture and 30 baskets and straw mats from Dorothy Bennett’s travels through Tiwi Country, the Daly Region and Arnhem Land (Figure 3).²³ This major exhibition was co-promoted alongside performances of the Aboriginal Theatre, with five of the painter/performers present on opening night (Narritjan, Garmali, Mau, Wadaymu and Djergujergu – all from Yirrkala).²⁴ The artworks on display had been collected by Dorothy Bennett on travels that began only a few years after the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition had passed through many of the same communities. Bennett’s acquaintance with the bark paintings and artworks of Australia’s north began when she worked as secretary to medical doctor Stuart Scougall in the 1950s. While travelling through Central Australia and Arnhem Land, both Scougall and Bennett collected a considerable body of artworks, especially bark paintings. Though Scougall’s later activities focused on his surgical career, the art collection became Bennett’s key focus until her death in 2003. In interviews recorded in 1995, Bennett discussed her own Aboriginal heritage as the basis of her feeling of being ‘at home’ with Aboriginal people.²⁵

Figure 3: Aboriginal art – Miss Dorothy Bennett hangs a bark painting for the exhibition, 1963.

Source: Courtesy National Archives of Australia (NAA A1200, L43362).

The Aboriginal Theatre toured to Sydney and Melbourne with a cast of performers drawn from three Northern Territory communities. A group of 15 performers came from Yirrkala – the north-east Arnhem Land community whose bark paintings had constituted approximately one-third of those obtained in the Arnhem Land Expedition’s 1948 collection.²⁶ The remaining performers travelled from communities in the Tiwi Islands and Daly Region of the Northern Territory.²⁷ The Aboriginal Theatre presented a series of songs and dances, from traditional stories about the moon, thunder, spears and a Tiwi Pukumani burial ceremony, to newly composed and created work, depicting topical themes of the era, such as aeroplanes and cowboys. Each night’s show began with a fire-making performance, in which the audience saw a darkened stage gradually illuminate with sparks and fire and the smell of burning leaves, created by Frank Artu Dumoo, Skipper Anggilidji and Barney Munggin. The performers then presented a series of works devised by each group – bringing a variety of public performance genres from the Tiwi Islands, Arnhem Land and Daly Region into dialogue with one another. The danced performances were alternated with solo didjeridu performances. The show was produced by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s (AETT) Stefan Haag with support from the Welfare Branch of the Northern Territory (NT), especially from Harry Giese and Ted Evans. It was marketed as featuring performances by the ‘oldest Australians’, but also aspiring for a place ‘among the greater innovations in world theatre in 1963’. The Aboriginal Theatre’s sell-out shows attracting glowing critical reviews were remarkable demonstrations of music and dance from Australia’s north, virtually unprecedented in their scale, and in their engagement with modern theatre practices of the major south-eastern cities.²⁸

This was the first time that a major arts body had sponsored a tour presenting the performing arts of Aboriginal people in this way, breaking with practices of non-Indigenous representation of Aboriginal music and dance that had become well established in the assimilation era, especially since the Second World War.²⁹ Bark paintings created by several members of the cast had been hung in major museum collections, and had already been exhibited on a number of occasions. Narritjin Maymuru’s painting of Bolngnor and Wirradilaku (Thunder and Spear) legends, created especially for the Aboriginal Theatre production, featured on the show’s program cover, while Maymuru was a feature performer in the shows. During the performances, screens were also erected above the performers’ heads on which images of bark paintings and carvings from the associated exhibition were projected.³⁰

However, the show’s program and surrounding publicity gave no sense that these performances were bringing artists whose fame preceded them to Sydney and Melbourne. Indeed, though all performers were named in the programs, there was no mention of their renown as artists, and though the performers also featured in television and print media in the lead-up to the shows, nothing was made of their history in producing collectable bark paintings that featured in major Australian galleries. This was in spite of the bark paintings exhibited in 1948 being described by Mountford as painted by ‘old masters’.³¹

Not just the artworks of master painters, bark paintings had been produced repeatedly (by Yirrkala artists in particular) to reinforce their knowledges in relation to both Yolngu and non-Yolngu law. Earlier that same year, several of the Aboriginal Theatre performers had been signatories to the Yirrkala bark petitions against bauxite mining incursions on their homelands.³² Other public art produced by members of the same community had included the Yirrkala Church Panels produced in 1962, the Wukiḏi Installation in the NT Supreme Court, and the Saltwater Collection in the Australian National Maritime Museum, works that reinforced the legal social and political authority of Yolngu people. These art practices interwove song making, performance, painting, law, claims to land and ceremonial practices.

Despite the strong legacy of bark paintings produced by the participating performers both in institutional collections and in political advocacy, the performers of the Aboriginal Theatre were promoted simply as ‘45 Arnhem Landers’ (when only around 15 performers came from within the boundaries of Arnhem Land).³³ Likewise, the exhibition was advertised not by naming the artists featured, but as a production of the Bennett-Campbell Trust, Bennett acting as representation for the artists. In May 1962, with Michael Campbell, Bennett had formed the Bennett-Campbell Australian Aborigine Trust, with the aim of profits being used for the ‘advancement and welfare’ of Aboriginal people.³⁴ Bennett insisted on only covering her costs and funnelling any profits back to artists (albeit via the Department of Native Affairs).³⁵ A 10 per cent cut of exhibition sales was also taken by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, whose production had brought audiences to the exhibition. Sending the funds for this contribution, Bennett praised Stefan Haag not only for presenting cultural products to southern audiences but also for creating a forum for appreciation of the Aboriginal artists and performers as living ambassadors for their culture. It had allowed:

the people in Melbourne and Sydney to understand and appreciate the dancing and singing of the aborigines, it afforded them the opportunity of meeting a representative group of fellow human beings who were able to hold their own in our civilization.³⁶

In other words, this unprecedented theatrical show enabled the presentation of Aboriginal cultural practices by the cultural custodians, who, for once, were permitted to accompany their bark paintings and to bring their performances practices back into dialogue with static visual representations of culture. The move towards self-representation through dance and music that the 1963 Aboriginal Theatre represented demonstrates several key functions of the commercial and ethnographic circulation of bark paintings. It points to the operation of bark paintings both as political agents (in the bark petitions) and as interlocutors for embodied cultural practice (in exhibits drawing attention to live music and dance); and reminds us that there were still few possibilities for Aboriginal self-representation in 1963.

This final point is demonstrated by the afterlives of the two co-located expressions of Aboriginal cultural practice in the Aboriginal Theatre and Aboriginal Art Show – namely, that though the artworks made several international tours in the years after their 1963 exhibition, the live performers were repeatedly prevented from travelling to present their performances. For two years from 1964, Arnhem Land paintings toured Japan accompanied by lectures given by Dorothy’s son Lance Bennett, and they were documented in a glossy book publication in 1969.³⁷ By contrast, though the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust made a number of attempts to facilitate national and international tours of the Aboriginal Theatre, only a few further performances resulted in the 1960s: at the Sydney Trade Fair in 1965, at the Darwin Festival in 1966 and the Perth Festival in 1967.³⁸ The ensemble was not fixed for each of these shows, but rather was constituted from different groups of Aboriginal dancers and musicians each time, with the groups determined largely by the NT Administration.³⁹ A proposal to take the 1965 Aboriginal Theatre group on a four-week tour of Canberra and Melbourne was quickly quashed by the NT Welfare Branch, Ted Evans indicating: ‘The boss is not very keen about the tour of Canberra/Melbourne, & possibly New Zealand, mainly because of the time welfare officers would be away from duty’.⁴⁰ A US tour by American promoter Sol Hurok proposed for November–December 1965 did not go ahead out of concern for how the Aboriginal performers would cope with winters in the United States:

Permission for this company to leave Australia must be obtained from the Department of Native Affairs.

As you know they are one of the most primitive people on earth added to which they are used to a year round temperature of 90°F therefore there may be some opposition to their leaving the country for the colder northern climate.⁴¹

Another suggestion for an overseas tour that would bring together the Aboriginal Theatre performers and a group from New Guinea was presented to Paul Hasluck, but ‘Administration officers would not have a bar of such an arrangement’.⁴² In 1965 Rembarrnga, Gunwinggu and Ngalkbun dancers from Beswick settlement were supported by the AETT to perform as the Aboriginal Theatre in the ‘Pageant of Asia’ during the Sydney Trade Fair. In the pageant, a map of the world was painted onto 20,000 square feet of canvas laid out on the Sydney Showground, and dancers brought from 14 countries performed within the section of the map representing their homelands. The show featured several performers who would go on to prominent performing and recording careers in Australia and overseas, including David Blanasi and Djoli Laiwanga.⁴³ But the idea had been criticised in some government quarters. H. Neil Truscott wrote for the Department of External Affairs:

there is a vast gap between the sophisticated songs and dances of the Asian peoples and those of the aborigines and Papuans, which, though of some merit and considerable interest, are primitive by comparison.⁴⁴

The AETT proposed one further major performance for the Aboriginal Theatre for the program of the Commonwealth Festival in London in 1965. However, the government determined that Australia should be showcased through orchestras and theatrical companies, because contributing performances of Aboriginal culture to the festival ‘would tend to suggest that there is no cultural achievement in Australia other than the indigenous one of the aborigines’.⁴⁵

In spite of these reservations, Dorothy Bennett took ‘a comprehensive exhibition of Aboriginal bark paintings and artifacts to the Festival’, the Bennett collection appearing alongside artworks by Russell Drysdale and William Dobell.⁴⁶ Drysdale had been an invited guest at the 1963 Aboriginal Theatre along with John Antill – one of the composers whose music featured in the orchestral programs.⁴⁷ Though the performer/artists had not been allowed to travel with their paintings, it seems the paintings’ ambassadorial role was realised, The Times’s art critic suggesting that the ‘unique combination of elegance and intensity’ possessed by the bark paintings ‘makes us reconsider what we think valuable in other societies’.⁴⁸

Though the Aboriginal Theatre performers were restricted from travel, this was not because of a lack of interest from audiences. On the contrary, reviews of the 1963 Aboriginal Theatre were universally positive.⁴⁹ So much so, that one critic even suggested that the Aboriginal Theatre would be an appropriate touring show to represent Australia overseas:

The success of this whole presentation suggests that in it the Trust may have discovered a dramatic experience that is both uniquely Australian and exportable. It speaks a universal language and has a universal appeal. Since it survived unharmed the drastic move from the scrub of Arnhem Land to the theatre stage of Melbourne and Sydney, what is to prevent its further transplantation to London, Vienna or Paris?⁵⁰

Bennett’s high-profile touring exhibitions focused on art from Australia’s far north (Tiwi Islands, north-east Arnhem Land, and Daly River and Roper River regions). This focus on the north was also apparent in exhibitions staged by pioneering Art Gallery of NSW Deputy Director Tony Tuckson in 1959 and toured to other state galleries over the subsequent two years.⁵¹ These exhibitions explicitly excluded the works of Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg School, and sought to position bark paintings in the category of ‘fine art’.⁵²

But in another 1963 exhibition, this time led by Aboriginal people, bark paintings from Arnhem Land were placed alongside art from southern parts of the country. In the same year as the Bennett-Campbell Trust’s Sydney and Melbourne exhibitions, the Aborigines’ Advancement League (AAL) had presented an exhibition as part of Melbourne’s annual Moomba Festival, drawing on the collection of art dealer Jim Davidson. The show included watercolours from family and clan members of the Central Australian Arrernte painter Albert Namatjira alongside Yolngu bark paintings, including several by Narritjin Maymuru. Works by the painters Biri(d)giji, Mawalan Marika, Wandjuk Marika, Midinari and Nanyin featured in both the 1963 Bennett and AAL exhibitions.

In the program of the AAL exhibition, the Yolngu works were differentiated from the Arrernte works, the former characterised as ‘the literature of a stone age people’ and the latter painted in the ‘white man’s style’ – but by a ‘fully initiated Aranda tribesman with a deep insight into the ancient art of his tribe’.⁵³ The program also drew explicit attention to the embeddedness of Aboriginal art in contemporary political struggles, highlighting the threat to bark painting traditions of the push for bauxite mining on Yolngu country. The AAL’s inclusion in their exhibition of Namatjira family watercolours, as well as works by Nyungar artist Revel Cooper, painted while in prison, also positioned that exhibition in a context in which assimilation exerted its pressures differentially on Aboriginal people in towns and missions and those in remote areas.⁵⁴ Unlike Bennett’s exhibition that emphasised ‘artists living away from settlements and the missions, painting in the seclusion of the bush the ancient myths handed down from their forefathers’, the AAL presented Aboriginal artists as both connected to a long, traditional artistic heritage and in dialogue with contemporary Australian culture.⁵⁵ This inclusion of old and continuing Aboriginal art and new emerging art also reflected the experiences of the AAL leaders as urban-dwelling Victorian Aboriginal people. The visibility of living Aboriginal people and their culture in this exhibition was further highlighted by the program’s offer that ‘corroboree music may be heard on request’.⁵⁶

In spite of the efforts by Aboriginal people to demonstrate their contemporary responses to the art world and capacity for adaptation and change, self-representation outside of Australia was almost unheard of until the 1967 referendum for constitutional change brought the laws applied to Aboriginal people in line with those for the rest of the population. In the meantime, the performers’ paintings acted in the stead of their physical presence at these events, as ambassadors for Aboriginal culture overseas, foreshadowing the post-referendum period of self-determination when organisations like the Aboriginal Theatre Foundation (founded 1969) and Aboriginal Artists’ Agency (founded 1981) would provide a forum for the flourishing of performance careers for specialists in music and dance.⁵⁷

Self-determination, master painters and new Indigenous curatorial visions

The consequences of these limits on Aboriginal self-representation were seen in international perceptions of Aboriginal art, as articulated in a 1990 paper by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss:

we continued to see the Australian Aborigine through the documentary sources – already a century or half-century old … as if frozen in a past which we were unsure whether to take as ended or whether – but to what extent and in what form – to view as continuing into the present.⁵⁸

Indeed, until the 1970s, international audiences had very little opportunity to understand Aboriginal art through the eyes of the living artists who continued to produce it for the market, meaning that it continued to be mediated through documentary sources and anthropological accounts. Permanent bark painting collections were held in museums and exhibited in galleries, and other bark paintings were used as diplomatic tools in embassies all around the world.⁵⁹ The exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Paris and New York among many other significant art centres from the 1980s onwards reinforced the profound interest in First Nations Australian culture among international audiences.⁶⁰

Over the decades since 1970, Aboriginal art shifted from the museum to the art gallery as collectors presented audiences not only with Levi-Strauss’s frozen past but also with art that continued to be produced – art that influenced modernists and was itself modern. As Ian McLean writes: ‘today some Indigenous art has been promoted from the museum of ethnography to that of fine art; that is, from the museum of the other to that of the same’.⁶¹ This shift saw artists come into view, as ambassador paintings made way for a new focus on master painters. These new possibilities for self-representation by Aboriginal artists are demonstrated in the exhibiting of Yolngu artist John Mawurndjul’s early work Rainbow Serpent (1979) acquired by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and included in an ambassadorial exhibition, Aboriginal Art: Past and Present, that toured across 11 venues throughout Australia and South-East Asia from 1980 until 1986.⁶² A decade later, Mawurndjul’s mastery of the Rarrk technique became internationally recognised in the 1989 landmark Centre Pompidou exhibition Magiciens de la Terre that aimed to decentre Western art from the story of art history. Mawurndjul was one of seven artists whose work was architecturally installed into the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2006. More recently, his 2019 solo exhibition at the Australian Museum of Contemporary Art – I am the old and the new – brought his paintings’ representation of his ancestral lands full circle.

Alongside a new focus on master painters, the impact of the visions of Indigenous curators has increasingly been felt. Yamatji curator Stephen Gilchrist has pointed to the conceptual shifts in reception of Aboriginal art that have been made through the work of Indigenous curators, working both within major art institutions and independent of them. He views the ‘curatorial statements’ of Djon Mundine, Brenda Croft and Hetti Perkins as ‘templates for others to follow’. Gilchrist analyses major exhibitions by these curators ‘as a form of social and cultural practice, art historical re-imagining and political activism’ and asserts that the ‘reconstitution of the field by Indigenous curators’ restores Indigenous people to ‘the power of determining the present’.⁶³ Bark paintings have continued to form a link between histories, ancestral ties and reimaginings of art practice, now mediated in new ways through the work of Indigenous curators.

Bundjalung curator Djon Mundine was one of the earliest Aboriginal curators to engage with Yolngu artists outside of the largely anthropological framework for collection and consumption of Aboriginal art that dominated twentieth-century representations to international audiences. Over several decades, Mundine has described his curatorial work as activism, noting that Aboriginal art has been ‘a decisive political tool’.⁶⁴ His role in remote art centres such as Bula Bula arts also inspired many other Aboriginal artist collectives across the country:

In the 70s any politically activated Aboriginal person attempted some art practice; played didj, danced, painted or acted, wrote poetry. In a sense, what could be called ‘performing identity’. We struggled to reconstruct a society of previous times – we knew we were different – we were changed, and we didn’t quite know what we would end up being, but we just had to be active and creative in some way. We were always drawn to what we thought was ‘the source’.⁶⁵

The ambassadorial role of bark paintings was transformative in this process of reclaiming art practices and developing new aesthetic languages. Badtjala artist Dr Fiona Foley drew a link between the contemporary efforts of the founding members of Sydney’s Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative to define new possibilities for Aboriginal artists and the historic interest in bark painting – as used in the initial acronym of the organisation:

The group chose the name Boomalli, a Wiradjuri word meaning to strike, and spelt Co-operative with a K to complete the anagram BAARK (Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Residents Ko-operative) as in the bark sheets traditionally used to paint on, a practice much more widespread than it is today. The K found its place in making Boomalli cool to the local Koori community, while the names Boomalli and BAARK ensured that the art world noticed the group as well.⁶⁶

Over more than 30 years, Boomalli used a participatory and activist curatorial approach towards providing a platform for the diaspora of Aboriginal people from across Australia who live in New South Wales. Boomalli’s first exhibitions in collaboration with the emerging northern Australian remote art centres collective were geared towards shifting the narrative of the Australian art historical landscape. They drew attention to the structural inequities and institutionalised racism that underpinned the Australian commercial art market’s reliance on forms of Aboriginal history authored through an anthropological lens, providing new platforms for Aboriginal people to not only speak their own artistic language to Australia, but also to connect their worldview with international conversations among First Nations artists.

Boomalli’s inaugural exhibition, Boomalli Au Go Go, was opened in 1987 by Ngugi man John Newfong:

they are presenting their own works and curating it, and that’s very significant, not only because Aboriginal artists have been for so long exploited but because Aboriginal people been defined by others for too long.⁶⁷

In 1988 the exhibition ANCAAA and Boomalli: Artworks produced and managed by Aboriginal people was hosted by Boomalli.⁶⁸ It featured a remarkable Koori–Yolngu dialogue about overturning the anthropologically authored and authorised version of Aboriginal culture that was so pervasive in the commercial market for Aboriginal art at the time.⁶⁹ Organisations such as Boomalli and ANCAAA drove change at the intersection of Indigenous self-determination, at a time of growing international awareness of issues of authority and authenticity in contemporary artistic representations of Indigenous communities. Central to these movements has been the return of ownership over Aboriginal cultural production to the artists themselves. As Fran Edmonds has written:

These spaces assert Aboriginal ‘ways of knowing’, in contrast to the historical hierarchy associated with ethnographic and fine art museums … By infiltrating these spaces today, Aboriginal people are using the colonisers’ institutions to reframe, reconstruct and reclaim their culture in new ways, reconceptualising ‘hybridity’ as a positive assertion of identity in the twenty-first century.⁷⁰

Exhibitions of Arnhem Land art at major art galleries in the 1990s and 2000s also centred the artists as creators of the paintings tied to a longer history of artworks in the public domain. Hetti Perkins’s 2000 exhibit Crossing Country – the alchemy of western Arnhem Land art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales aimed to both highlight the vigour of Aboriginal contemporary art, but also show its genealogy back to the early twentieth century. McLean links the historical focus of Perkins’s Crossing Country to that of the historical positioning of bark painting in the 1997 exhibition The Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story 1937–1997 curated by Wally Caruana, Djon Mundine and Nigel Lendon for the National Gallery of Australia.⁷¹ The consultation between curators and Yolngu Elders in 1997 became not only a process of diplomatic negotiation on showing the public dimension (paintings) of larger secret-sacred ceremonial enactments, but also triggered singing of the painted stories, emphasising the already performative aspects of exhibiting bark paintings for a Balanda (non-Indigenous) public.⁷²

Figure 4: Gululu dhuwala djalkiri exhibition, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney 2020.

Source: Photograph by David James; © Chau Chak Wing Museum.

A more recent example of this reconstruction of institutional collections has strongly informed the thinking we present in this paper. In 2020, the first major exhibition of the 1946–47 bark paintings acquired by Ronald and Catherine Berndt was presented at the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s inaugural exhibition of its Aboriginal art collections.⁷³ Through a collaborative curatorial process between Curator Matt Poll and descendants of the main families involved in producing many of the original bark paintings, Yirrkala representative Wanyubi Marika (Dhuwa) and Yalpi Yunupingu (Yirritja) provided the framework for assembling the bark paintings in configurations that are brought forth from the relationships of the artists themselves and the land that they have cultural obligations to maintain. The final presentation of the bark paintings in the exhibition space, displayed on a horizontal plane according to artists’ relationship to each other rather than hung on walls, was a direct translation of this consultation process (Figure 4). The assemblages in the new museum were not curatorially defined by an external agency but, as Poll explains, were presented to:

shift the voice of authority and knowledge away from a museum ownership of the objects and back onto those who have nurtured and maintained their cultures over millennia. The exhibition recognises each display as an ambassador of Country, a diplomatic mediator that encourages audiences to understand that these paintings are not depictions of the land they are actual cultural authority.

In the process of consulting on the objects to be displayed in the museum, cultural owners of some of the materials have become aware for the first time of the presence of the diversity of their heritage in Sydney museums, not just bark paintings, but photographs, sound recordings, film and archival materials that challenge the idea of a lack of documentary evidence of the Yolngu engagement with people of south-east Australia. The exhibition is conceived as ‘a dynamic project that is ongoing’ and that enables the possibility of the cultural objects travelling back to their originating communities for on-Country exhibitions that facilitate opportunities for community members to become curators, artists and teachers, and to assert ownership over the materials.⁷⁴ ANKA chairperson Djambawa Marawilli outlines how art has always come from the land itself:

I am a shadow of you mob, art comes from the land, the song comes from the waterhole – see that pattern now? See, that is our footprint. Every government, they change, but we never change, we are the people, we are always here. Balanda Government always come and go but we (Yolngu) are always here.⁷⁵

Circling back: The return of paintings back to community practice

Yolngu scholar Joe Neparrŋa Gumbula has provided a framework for thinking about the way paintings come from ancestors, can travel in the world, and still return into their cultural context by being reunited with song, dance, stories and, importantly, the people to whom they belong. Gumbula’s 2009 Makkar Garma exhibition held at the University of Sydney’s Macleay Museum incorporated several of the bark paintings collected in 1946–47 and was instrumental in providing a first footstep towards the presentation of the 2020 Gululu dhuwala Djalkiri exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. As Jessica De Largy Healy has summarised (based on interviews with the late Dr Gumbula):

The idea of a ‘circle’ suggests a continuous flow; in this case, the continuous flow of Yolŋu knowledge through time and space. Its movement starts with ancestral beings, the creators who, in a distant past on the cusp of linear time, instigated Yolŋu knowledge through their foundational deeds in naming and shaping country. The circulation of Yolŋu knowledge continued over countless generations of men and women through its expression in traditional media such as song, dance and painting, and later, in new media such as film. Through trade, sale and various forms of exchange with missionaries, anthropologists, filmmakers, collectors and other visitors, material expressions of this knowledge travelled to collecting institutions all over the world, where they have been kept to this day.⁷⁶

But the existence of paintings in distant locations does not dilute their relevance to people and culture at home, indeed their return can awaken performances and engagements with ancestors, the present, and future cultural transmission. Discussing the return from foreign archives of even digital reproductions of paintings (in lieu of the paintings themselves), Gumbula articulated the extent to which those objects take on a life of performance once they are in company of people:

Because we make things around us, we make them feel free … and we perform them and they perform us … Something of value has been taken away. So, if that value comes back to the place where it belongs, then we have a ceremony and that makes people happy and joyful. It talks again, we talk to that object again, you know. We make him feel free, make him feel not locked up in a small box, or in a dark room. And that is very important. See what we do in our everyday life, if we perform something that was done 70 years ago, we are there, we witness our own affairs, our own identity, our own respect to the object and we are practical, we do it every day, it is part of us, it is part of us, we work together.⁷⁷

Gumbula’s framework for the circular motion of Yolngu knowledge points to the embeddedness of cultural products in their communities of practice. Bark paintings that worked as ambassadors to communicate the value of Aboriginal culture to the world remain valuable to and embedded within their originating communities. Paintings played a role in cultural diplomacy at a time when Aboriginal people were prevented from representing their own culture. They acted not only as representational tools interpreted through anthropological and subsequently contemporary art lenses, but they also circle back to play a role in the continuation of living culture.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for comments that have shaped this article from Linda Barwick, anonymous reviewers and editors Ben Silverstein and Crystal McKinnon.

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