Buku Larrnggay Mulka and Boomalli both represent communities of artists and artists who come from communities. In both cases, they facilitate cohesion at the local level and enable people to act in relation to common interests. The Yirrkala artists are from a community in place. Art has been integral to the continuity of their society and it has been an instrument of their engagement with the world outside. Buku Larrnggay Mulka as a community art centre has a board of Yolngu artists, which manages it according to Yolngu customary law and is concerned with the continuity of cultural practices. While Yolngu art is highly innovative, the governing board emphasises working in traditional media such as bark and the use of Indigenous pigments. Yolngu artists work to maintain the relative autonomy of their society and to communicate their values to outsiders.

Boomalli’s objectives are different and yet overlapping. Boomalli includes artists from a wider region. Although Sydney based, it includes among its listed members artists such as Arone Meeks from Cairns, Fiona Foley, who is a Badtjala from southern Queensland, and Christine Christopherson, who is Iwatja from western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Its original purpose was to support ‘urban Indigenous artists finding it difficult to have their own work shown as authentic Aboriginal art in the mainstream’. It established a ‘[c]o-operative to provide a platform for Aboriginal and Torres Straight [sic] Islander artists to exhibit and promote urban Indigenous art on their own terms’.^[30] As such, Boomalli needed to encompass a diversity of artists from very different backgrounds—and to strike a balance between the common concerns of the artists and their different histories and identities. The initial emphasis on urban art reflected the need to challenge the view that the only authentic Aboriginal art was that produced in remote communities in continuity with ‘traditional’ practices.^[31] As Boomalli developed, however, in Croft’s words, ‘it became increasingly apparent that the restrictive and inaccurate categorisation of work by urban and rural Indigenous artists was no longer tenable’.^[32] Artists associated with Boomalli were themselves connected to places and to local communities. The members of Boomalli began to emphasise their local identity and the diversity of Indigenous art practice, opposing the categorising of people under gross labels.^[33] At the same time, artists from communities in Arnhem Land and Central Australia became an increasing presence in the urban environments of southern Australia. Exhibitions of Aboriginal art and general books about the subject began to reflect the diversity of the Indigenous population. For example, Aratjara, the major international exhibition that toured Europe, was not premised on the basis of a dualistic division between traditional and urban art.^[34] The result was that organisations such as Boomalli, rather than being opposed to ones such as Buku Larrnggay Mulka, became complementary.

In their different ways, both Buku Larrnggay Mulka and Boomalli have played positive roles in building and maintaining communities. And, as communities of different kinds, they have intersected and complemented each other. Together, they exemplify the diversity of Indigenous society—a diversity that has had a significant impact in the domain of Australian public culture. Buku Larrnggay Mulka has maintained the relatively autonomous traditions of Yolngu artists yet collaborated with other art centres through peak bodies such as ANKAAA and desArt in areas of mutual interest, such as Indigenous copyright and lobbying for government funding of support staff, training and development. Boomalli, as well as supporting its own members, provided a venue for the exhibition of Indigenous art in Sydney and a springboard for collaboration across cultural boundaries. The intersection of such community organisations has introduced the complexities of Indigenous art to a wider public. The simplistic dualistic division of Aboriginal art into categories such as tribal or rural in opposition to contemporary or urban has been successfully challenged. The idea that creativity is the product of either individual genius or cultural inheritance has been problematised since some Indigenous artists will emphasise their individuality while others emphasise collective rights.

Some of the changes that have occurred in art production have certainly been influenced by the colonial structure of settlements, opportunities created by the market and government instrumentalities. The process of incorporation within the wider Australian polity, however, has not been passive in nature. Indigenous groups have often been able to utilise these new institutions to achieve their own objectives and they have also been able to change government policy and have some impact on the institutional structures and practices of the encapsulating society. Indigenous Australians in turn have had an impact on Australia’s cultural institutions and policies, often giving greater agency to the artists in the ways in which works of art are exhibited. Often the issues that Indigenous Australians are concerned with are ones that affect artists more generally—issues of moral rights and resale royalties being examples. The increasingly important position that Indigenous artists are gaining in the arts community as a whole has the potential to mediate the concerns of local communities at the national level and provide effective channels of communication through art.

Social cohesion can be achieved at a national level only by facilitating the building of social cohesion at the local level, by creating the environment in which people feel that they are able to act as members of communities to improve the worlds in which they live. In Australia, the institutional structures that have been created in the arenas of art, culture and heritage have played a significant role in enabling Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to act through art to create some positive changes in their lives and in the lives of their communities.

The concept of community in social theory has always been in dialogue with that of society. The concept as I have used it involves the recognition of diversity at the local and the national level. It envisages an Australian society in which diversity is recognised and is transparent at the level of public culture. At the local level, communities enhance social cohesion in effect by emphasising difference; communities comprise people who share common interests and values that often differentiate them from others. At the level of society, social cohesion requires that local interests are encompassed and accommodated in the public domain. This involves a shift from holding a particular set of values in common to valuing a framework, and an institutional structure, that allows for differences to be expressed and that is opened up to processes of persuasion. Within a nation-state, the public sphere is going to be influenced by the diversity of communities it contains. And within Australia, social cohesion at the national level requires the accommodation of Indigenous Australian interests in discourse in the public sphere. In the long term, this has the potential to affect the character of the society.