AustLit

In 1982 Ros Langford, on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, demanded Indigenous control of Indigenous cultural heritage at the Australian Archaeological Association’s annual meeting. Following the difficult repatriation of Truganini’s remains and the heated debate over Aboriginal heritage during the Franklin River campaign, this statement linked the campaigns for land rights and treaty with the ownership and self-representation of cultural heritage. Langford’s statement transformed archaeological practice by demanding recognition of Aboriginal cultures as living while reflecting the political shift at the time from assimilation to self-determination. This shift is also often cited as political background to the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art and the establishment of Papunya Tula and other remote art centres in the 1970s. The model of cultural revitalisation of country, with the promise of economic independence, was utopian. Paintings of Dreaming stories fed a blossoming international art market, but disillusionment followed, with charges of exploitation and cultural subordination. Four decades on, many in the cultural sector still aspire to Langford’s vision, as evidenced in parts of the recent publications Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art and Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment. The subtitles of each book suggest a rise-and-fall narrative to explain the phenomenon of Aboriginal art. While each volume describes the hopeful beginnings of contemporary Aboriginal art, neither suggests that the movement has failed to bring emancipation and empowerment. Rather, these subtitles point to the discursive tensions that have shaped the interpretation and reception of Aboriginal art to foreground the complicated but significant place it has come to hold in national culture.' (Introduction)