Speakers
Alison Anderson | Wayne Buckley | Veronica Perrule Dobson | Josie Douglas | Harold Furber | Dianna Isgar | Jungala Kriss | Vincent Lamberti | Djambawa Marawili | Howard Morphy | Leonie Murrungun | Liesl Rockchild | Anja Tait | Margaret Kemarre Turner | Tamara Winikoff
The Honourable Alison Anderson, MLA
Abstract
What is the intersection between arts, education and policy?
Before moving to the intersection (and signposting the suggested direction) Minister Anderson will look back down the bush tracks of Indigenous art in the Centre.
Minister Anderson will:
- Revisit the early days in a powerful land – in which it was law not to reveal the sacredness and the secrets. And the people drew strength from this law
- Examine how as a society we don’t own the art works or the stories behind them – just like we don’t own the stars in the universe. Yet the stories determine who we are in the same way that the stars guide our direction
- Outline how the interaction of indigenous art with the non-indigenous world has been like the peeling of an onion. At first only the skin was revealed – now there is real concern and real loss as each layer is being removed over time.
At the intersection, Minister Anderson will:
- Look at how people should become educated about the essence of Indigenous art – including learning to accept not knowing everything about the origin of Indigenous art
- Overview the crisis in Indigenous education and how it manifests in crushing dependency for Indigenous people – including Indigenous artists
- Look to a policy future where Indigenous artists are the masters of their own destiny. This will include making their own decisions about ‘what’ and ‘how’ they paint, based on the ancient law. It will involve artists freely choosing ‘who’ they do business with. And it will involve policies that dismantle dependency and promote real long-term viability in an industry that builds the wealth of Indigenous artists and their families.
Biography
Alison Anderson was born in Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) in the Northern Territory, growing up in a number of communities including Hermannsburg and Papunya. She completed her schooling at Alice Springs High School and as a boarder at St Phillips College.
Alison was an ATSIC Commissioner before being elected the Member for Macdonnell at the 2005 Northern Territory election.
In the 2008 Northern Territory election Alison was elected unopposed.
Wayne Buckley
Abstract
The Barunga Sports & Cultural Festival is in its 24th year of operation. It is the longest running Indigenous festival. The Festival achieved national recognition in 1988 when the then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke accepted the Barunga Statement – a treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. To this day Barunga Sports & Cultural Festival remains strong in culture, politics and history.
The Barunga Sports & Cultural Festival is a series of events that happen each year over the Queen’s Birthday weekend. It provides Indigenous people from across the region an opportunity for regional connectedness. It also provides an opportunity for non-Indigenous Australians to participate and gain a great understanding of Indigenous Australians.
In this symposium Wayne Buckley will explore how the Barunga Sports and Cultural Festival contributes to social cohesion and cultural maintenance and cross-cultural exchange. He will also set out what “we” think success means for Festival and explore achievements in striving to maintain the integrity and cultural connectedness.
Biography
Wayne Buckley is currently Regional Coordinator for employment and training with the newly established Roper Gulf Shire Council. He was Barunga Spots & Cultural Festival Director in 2007 and continues to play a role in the economic development opportunities associated with Festival.
Wayne has been the CEO of a remote Indigenous community and is currently Chair of Katherine Regional Arts.
Veronica Perrule Dobson
Biography
Veronica Perrule Dobson is a senior Eastern Arrernte woman who is highly respected for her cultural and language knowledge, and greatly appreciated by the many people with whom she has generously shared her knowledge through her teaching, her authorship and her friendship.
Over the years, Veronica has been an educator, often using the natural world as her classroom to share her vast knowledge of plants and their uses. She has been associated with the Olive Pink Botanical Gardens and the Desert Park in Alice Springs, and was a pioneer in the development of language curriculum materials at Yipirinya School.
Veronica is co-author of the Eastern and Central Arrernte to English Dictionary. Her 2007 publication, Arelhe-kenhe Merrethene - Arrernte Traditional Healing, was also published by IAD Press.
Josie Douglas
Biography
Josie Douglas is an Indigenous Research Fellow with Charles Darwin University based in Alice Springs.
Josie is descended from the Wardaman people of south-west Katherine. She is particularly interested in the social and cultural aspects of regional and remote education, community based micro-enterprises and natural and cultural resource management.
Josie has a background in Aboriginal publishing and literature and has extensive experience working for community-controlled Aboriginal organisations. She is currently a member of the Northern Territory Arts Grants Board.
Harold Furber
Biography
Harold Furber was born in Alice Springs in 1952. He first attended school at the Croker Island Methodist Mission in western Arnhem Land. He also went to school in Darwin and Adelaide.
Harold has worked in both the private and the public sector, most recently completing ten years as a senior officer at the Central Land Council in Alice Springs. He is a board member for the Central Australian Stolen Generations Corporation and has extensive experience with indigenous people overseas.
Harold has been involved with Central Australian organisations for the last thirty years, including most recently the desert knowledge movement. A member of numerous steering committees associated with development of key partners in desert knowledge including the Cooperative Research Centre and Desert Knowledge Australia, he is also a member of the Desert Knowledge Precinct planning committee.
Currently Chairman of the Desert Peoples Centre (a joint Bachelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education-Centre for Appropriate Technology venture), Harold is also Deputy Chair of Desert Knowledge Australia and a board member of the Desert Knowledge Co-operative Research Centre.
Harold holds a Bachelor of Arts (Public Administration) from the University of Canberra and a Diploma in Community Development and Social Work from SAIT (now the University of South Australia).
Dianna Isgar
Abstract
Dianna Isgar says in her experience the people who live in the community to do not think about community. They think about family. At Blackstone there is a group of families that happen to live near each other. Engaging people in communal interests as apposed to immediate and extended family interest can be difficult.
The art centre brings people from all family groups together and has the capacity to ask its members to think and work for the common good. Most families get great benefit from the art centre which in turn gives the centre a special place in the community.
Biography
Dianna Isgar is the Manager of Papulankutja Artists at Blackstone Community, on Ngaanyatjarra Lands, in Western Australia.
Until the mid 1990s, Dianna was self-employed in small businesses which included managing community stores and working as community advisor or community manager in remote communities in the Kimberley, Central and Western Desert regions.
In April of 2003 she was employed by Blackstone Community to work in the women’s centre, which included the Home and Community Care Program and the children’s day care program. In June of that year the women requested the development of an art centre which saw the incorporation, in August ‘04, of Papulankutja Artists. From that time Dianna has been solely employed by the artists at Papulankutja.
Dianna’s main interest is in empowering the artists of Papulankutja, giving them an understanding of their business and the tools they need to make informed decisions.
Jungala Kriss
Biography
Jungala Enterprises was created by Jungala Kriss: "Jungala", his name, "Enterprises", because Jungala had so many ideas to be incorporated into his business plan, including paintings, t-shirts and postcards, workshops, cultural tours and consultancy work.
Jungala believes that Aboriginal people now have the ability and know-how to profit, as non-Indigenous people have, out of Aboriginal culture, whether through the art industry or tourism industry.
He believes now is the time for Aboriginal people to take control of their destiny and create economic development using their own culture as a means to create economics and sustainability; to do what comes naturally and learn to become competitive in these industries.
Vincent Lamberti
Abstract
The establishment of the town-camp media enterprise, Apmere Ayeye (Camp Stories), was based on a collaborative skills-transfer model that generates income and employment opportunities for town-campers.
The idea behind Apmere Ayeye is to make films and music that empower individuals to take control of the storytelling process. Mainstream media attention on town camps tends toward the sensational and the negative.
Learning the skills necessary to tell stories on film, town campers gain the capacity to decide how their culture, identity and ideas are presented throughout the media landscape. Interest in these films continues to grow, screening around Australia and being licensed for broadcast on NITV.
Biography
Vincent Lamberti is a filmmaker and composer. Originally from Melbourne he grew up bi-culturally and bi-lingually, his home life characterised by his southern Italian roots while learning to be an ‘Australian’ at school.
Since 2005 Vincent has been living in Alice Springs, and though his vocation takes him around Australia, he focuses primarily on his work with Town Camp communities. He also collaborates with filmmaker David Vadiveloo as a member of the Community Prophets team, last year working in Aurukun, Cape York.
As a director he has recently completed documentary films exploring the impacts of the 2007 Intervention and the legacy of the 1967 Referendum, both projects in collaboration with a research team made up of town camp residents.
Djambawa Marawili
Biography
Djambawa is a visual artist, sculptor, administrator and leader of the Madarrpa clan. As leader of the Madarrpa clan, Djambawa is a caretaker for the spiritual wellbeing of his own and related clans and his art is closely related to his role as leader.
Djambawa's homeland, Baniyala (Yilpara), is the largest homeland centre serviced by Buku- Larrnggay Mulka.
Djambawa is also a committee and board member of numerous organisations including chairperson of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre from 1994-2000 and appointed board member of the Australia Council, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts board from 2004 to 2007. He is currently the chairman of the Association of Northern and Kimberley Aboriginal Artists Association (ANKAAA).
Djambawa’s art is closely related to his role as leader and he draws on the sacred foundation of his people to represent the power of Yolngu and educate others in the justice of his people’s struggle for recognition. His multi-figurative sculptures and bark paintings are represented in most major Australian collections and several important overseas public and private collections. In 1996 Djambawa won the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for the Best Bark Painting.
In 2003 Djambawa was a recipient of an Australia Council, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts fellowship. The fellowship enabled Djambawa to fulfil three major roles: as ceremonial leader, as an artist and as an Indigenous advocate by doing workshops, cultural projects and having an exhibition in 2005 at Annandale Galleries in Sydney.
Howard Morphy
Abstract
Over the last 30 years Indigenous arts have achieved extraordinary success in terms of the multimillion dollar industry it has grown. But it is the role it has, and will continue to play, in building social cohesion in Indigenous Australia which is of most value.
As a form of action, art can influence the world in innumerable ways. It both requires a community and helps build a community.
Indigenous art, as a contemporary practice, is an undercurrent to the creation of Indigenous communities and a means of achieving wider community objectives.
In this talk Howard Morphy will focus on two complementary examples: the ways in which Yolngu people have used art to mediate the impact of European colonisation since the 1930s and the role of Boomalli (established 1987) in the development of a networked community of artists in south east Australia.
Biography
Howard Morphy (BSc, MPhil London, PhD ANU, FASSA, FAAH, CIHA) is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University.
Howard has previously held the positions of Chair in Anthropology, University College London, and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
An anthropologist of art and visual anthropology, Howard has co-edited two of the main source books in these fields: The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (2006, Blackwell’s, with Morgan Perkins) and Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997, Yale University Press, with Marcus Banks).
He has written extensively on Australian Aboriginal art with a monograph of Yolngu art, Ancestral Connections (Chicago 1991), a general survey, Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998) and more recently Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Berg, 2007). He has also produced a pioneering multimedia biography The Art of Narritjin Maymuru with Pip Deveson and Katie Hayne (ANU epress 2005).
Howard’s involvement in e-research and in the development of museum exhibitions reflects his determination to make humanities research as accessible as possible to the wider community and to close the distance between research process and research outcomes.
In 2008 Howard was on the organising committee of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (ICHA) in Melbourne, Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence.
Leonie Murrungun
Biography
Leonie Murrungun is a senior literacy worker and Indigenous language teacher at Numbulwar Community Education Centre. She is an active musician and composer of songs and chants for young children in the Wubuy language.
Leonie’s songs are about the land, and how people are connected to the land and related in a traditional way. She is committed to working with young children in building strong language and culture.
Leonie has undertaken education studies at Batchelor Institute for Indigenous Tertiary Education, and theological studies at Nungalinya College, Darwin. She has presented ArtStories in local, national and international forums, most recently at the Indigenous Languages Institute, University of Sydney, in July 2008. She is co-author for a forthcoming book chapter about music education in Indigenous communities.
Liesl Rockchild
Abstract
Tangentyere Artists is an Aboriginal owned and directed art centre situated in Alice Springs. Specialising in paintings and local seed jewellery, the centre provides art support and marketing services to over 380 artists from the 19 Alice Springs Town Camps.
The centres' artist’s stylistic diversity reflects the wide range of cultural groups it represents, which includes 20 different central Australian languages. Tangentyere Artists is strongly committed to cultural maintenance and improving social justice, through its arts enterprise.
Biography
Liesl Rockchild was employed by Tangentyere Council in 2005 to set up Tangentyere Artists and has guided the Art Centre’s growth over the past three years.
She brings skills in business acumen and artistic practice to her current position as Tangentyere Artists Art Coordinator, gained from 15 years experience in Indigenous art centre management and as a small business owner/operator.
Liesl has a Diploma of Applied Art and 10 years experience as an art director/designer in advertising agencies and design studios.
In her current role she ensures Aboriginal staff are trained and employed in key positions in Tangentyere Artists. She is currently working towards establishing an Art Centre building for Tangentyere Artists, which has significantly outgrown its tiny office space.
Anja Tait
Biography
Anja Tait is a registered music therapist, music educator, and researcher, working in palliative and bereavement care, maternal and child health, and education.
At the 12th World Congress of Music Therapy (Buenos Aires, 2008) Anja presented ArtStories: Indigenous language revitalisation and cultural maintenance in a remote Australian community, and participated in an international panel: The Colour of Us - music with young children around the world. She was keynote speaker for the 11th World Congress (Brisbane, 2005), presenting case studies of Indigenous community engagement through the arts.
In 2004 Anja received a national award for her contribution to improving literacy and numeracy in the community. She contributed case study material to Australian Arts Education at the National Level (2006), The Wow Factor: Global Research Compendium on the Impact of the Arts in Education (2006), and Educating the Creative Workforce: Rethinking Arts and Education (2007).
Anja has forthcoming book chapters with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Springer, and Routledge.
Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM
Biography
Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM is a respected Eastern Arrernte elder, cultural adviser, teacher, author and artist, who received her Order of Australia Medal for her services to reconciliation.
Margaret’s book, Bushfoods, and poster guide to her Arrernte culture and spirituality, Everything comes from the Land, both appeared in 2005. In 2008 IAD Press is again working with Margaret to develop her latest generous gift in Iwenhe Tyerrtye - What it means to be an Aboriginal person.
Margaret is actively involved in the Irrkerlantye Art Centre in Alice Springs, the Irrkelantye Catholic Chapel project, and other Alice Springs arts projects – all in the service of keeping Arrernte country, language and culture strong. She is also a current director of the Apmeraltye Ingkerreke project and has recently assisted a Central Australian community in the development of a protocol to protect their intellectual property in native plants.
Margaret is the proud mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of a large family.
Tamara Winikoff
Biography
Tamara Winikoff is well known in Australia as a cultural advocate and commentator. She has spoken, written and published extensively about arts and design issues and has worked as a senior arts manager and academic in England and Australia for over twenty five years.
Tamara is currently the Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA). NAVA is the peak body representing the professional interests of the Australian visual arts, craft and design sector, and has been very successful in securing important policy and legislative changes.
For her work Tamara was awarded the Australia Council’s Visual Arts and Craft Emeritus Medal in 2004.
