ts
Article
Aboriginalia: Souvenir
Wares and the
‘Aboriginalization’ of
Australian Identity
Tourist Studies
10(3) 195–208
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1468797611407751
tou.sagepub.com
Adrian Franklin
School of Sociology and Social Work, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia
Abstract
In recent years Aboriginalia, defined here as souvenir objects depicting Aboriginal peoples,
symbolism and motifs from the 1940s–1970s and sold largely to tourists in the first instance, has
become highly sought after by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal collectors and has captured
the imagination of Aboriginal artists and cultural commentators. The paper seeks to understand
how and why Aboriginality came to brand Australia and almost every tourist place and centre
at a time when Aboriginal people and culture were subject to policies (particularly the White
Australia Polic(ies)) that effectively removed them from their homelands and sought in various
ways to assimilate them (physiologically and culturally) into mainstream white Australian culture.
In addition the paper suggests that this Aboriginalia had an unintended social life as an object of
tourism and nation. It is argued that the mass-produced presence of many reminders of Aboriginal
culture came to be ‘repositories of recognition’ not only of the presence of Aborigines but also
of their dispossession and repression. As such they emerge today recoded as politically and
culturally charged objects with (potentially) an even more radical role to play in the unfolding of
race relations in Australia.
Keywords
Aboriginal Australia; Aboriginalia; reconciliation; social identity; souvenirs; tourism objects
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely
on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by
vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. (Twain, 1993 [1987]: 650)
Corresponding author:
Adrian Franklin, School of Sociology and Social Work, University of Tasmania, GPO Box 252-17, Hobart,
TAS 7001, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
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At almost all available contemporary tourist sites and places around Australia the travelling
visitor (whether domestic or overseas) wishing to sample what is properly Australian
will be confronted by two dominant representational forms: Australian nature and
Australian Aboriginal culture, art and/or motifs. The online tourist will find the same
semiotic message everywhere: of the 12 representative objects on the front page of
Australiasouvenir.com, for example, five are either Aboriginal objects, for example, boomerangs, or non-Aboriginal objects emblazoned with Aboriginal design (wooden wine
holder, travel bags). Visitors to the popular Queen Victoria Market area of central
Melbourne will find it hard not to see Something Aussie, a shop specializing in souvenirs
of Australia. The shop’s logo is an Aboriginal-inspired ochre-coloured setting sun encapsulating a white boomerang. Inside the shop the unmistakable ‘look’ of the merchandise
is based on Aboriginal design. It has a section of objects that are made by Aboriginal art
and crafts makers, some of which are based on traditional objects and some of which are
European objects mantled with Aboriginal artworks (for example, bandanas, scarves,
pottery vases and bowls). Then there are modern objects such as umbrellas, candleholders, tablecloths and pen sets that are saturated with stylized Aboriginal designs. At other
locations around Australia such objects come complete with the name of the town or
state and in this sense co-opt Aboriginality into their place image. The wholesaler W.W.
Souvenirs (sourced at www.wwsouvenirs.com.au/cart/index.php?c=20&s=1), for example, provides a range of boomerang-shaped key rings with the names of most major
towns and cities printed on them. Actually having encountered Aboriginal people is,
ironically, not important to those who happily souvenir objects as if they had: ‘Boomerangs
line souvenir shops in their thousands, inviting visitors to Australia to take this quirky
piece of the nation home with them as a symbol of both the country they visited and its
original inhabitants – whom they may or may not have met’ (Effington, 2010: 75).
At almost all the major city souvenir sites the connections between the Aboriginal
representation and the people they represent (and their geography) is rarely made explicit
(except where Aboriginal arts and craft makers have taken control, and they have in
many places today). Despite this confused geography, history and anthropology, a generalized sense (and presence) of Aboriginal culture is rendered palpable to tourists across
Australia through a very large range of objects.
The combined effect of this Aboriginal semiotic drenching, or perhaps it can be called
the Aboriginalization of tourist sites and places, gives the impression that Aboriginal culture is a quintessential representation or icon of local and national life with the corollary,
given its suggested primordiality, that it has always been thus. After all, the elements of
Aboriginal culture emphasized on these objects do not represent how most contemporary
Aboriginal people live today (very few adhere to traditional hunting and gathering modes
of production) but reference a pre-white colonial period and the primordiality of the
‘Dreaming’ past. The cultural icons of white settler society, by contrast, feature present-day
culture such as sporting teams, architecture, commercial brands and national achievements. It is at best an extremely confused iconography of nation. Nonetheless, the inference might be made that Aboriginal people, symbols and motifs have always represented
Australia. Muecke’s 1990 essay ‘No Road’ is one of the few serious attempts to understand
travellers in Australia and their engagement with contemporary Aboriginal cultures. This
paper seeks to extend that understanding though it takes a very different road.
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Ironically, the presence of Aboriginal cultures, peoples and motifs on objects
representing the nation, places and travel sites is a relatively new development and this
paper suggests that its introduction, expansion, consumption, display and aestheticisation
can be viewed as an unintended but important process in countering the official and civic
process, whereby Indigenous peoples of Australia were assimilated or ‘forgotten’ (Healy,
2008). This conclusion can be sustained despite the fact that many objects that can be
included under the collective noun ‘Aboriginalia’ are undoubtedly in bad taste, kitsch and
racist. It will be suggested that the earliest forms of these souvenir objects, predominantly
sold to a travelling public between the 1940s and 1980s, have became, collectively, a
repository of memory and a reminder that Aboriginal culture had the first claim on what
it is to be properly Australian. It will also be suggested that in recent times both Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal collectors have been tapping into the latent power of these objects to
tell political and cultural stories and in so doing have recoded them from kitsch to cool
(Cooke, 1995; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998: 274). Modern Aboriginal artists have begun
to deploy these now-cool objects into a new form of politicized art to great effect.
Before considering the more recent social life of these objects, this paper considers
how it was that Aboriginalia came to be so representative of Australia in the first place.
Given that it occurred at a time when Aboriginal culture was being largely removed from
the public sphere of Australia is both ironic and puzzling.
Representing Australia
Cozzolino and Rutherford’s book Symbols of Australia (1987) documents the changing
nature of trade marks in Australia, noting how imperial- and English-themed trademarks
gave way, immediately before and after Federation in 1901 (that is, when the nation of
Australia was proclaimed), to an explicit search for Australian symbols of nation. These
were predominantly natural symbols, particularly animals and floral motifs, since these
were the central subjects of the nation’s new Coat of Arms. Aborigines were not excluded
from these trademarks but they were far less common than natural symbols and were
less positive representations of the new nation – an outcome consistent with their being
subject to the dominant White Australia policy that included strong elements of physical
and cultural assimilation (Hage, 1998; McGregor, 1999). Reflecting on the manner in
which Europeans (and others but not Australians) thought about Australia, Richard
White (1981: 14–5) notes how Aboriginal people and Australian nature continued to
remain an important symbol of Australia long after British invasion into the 19th and
20th century:
As these images jostled with each other the Aborigines lost out. The weird plants and animals
became popular symbols of Australian identity. They were to appear on coats of arms and coins,
and as company trade marks. They were elevated into the conventional neutral symbols of
Australia ... . The Aborigines fared worse. In Europe they remained representative of Australia,
placed besides the plants and the animals as natural objects of curiosity. In Australia, as the idea
of ‘being Australian’ developed among European inhabitants, the Aborigines became less and
less representative of ‘Australia’ until in the end they were quite dispossessed. For most of the
settlers they were pests, sometimes comic, sometimes vicious, but always standing in the way
of a civilized Australian community. Eventually they were to reach the indignity of being ‘Our
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Aborigines’, their image no longer representative of Australia except as garden ornaments in
suburban backyards and ashtrays in souvenir shops.
Although White may have exaggerated the insignificance of modest objects such as
ornaments and ashtrays, he was certainly not exaggerating the extent of anti-Aboriginal
feeling. Writing in the late 1960s, Roman Black (1964: xvii–xx) prefaced his path-breaking book Old Aboriginal and New Aboriginal Art with evidence of what obviously
appeared to him to be a long-standing, offensive and incomprehensible hostility to
Aboriginal people and their cultures. He begins with Trollope’s (1873: 56) observation
that: ‘Of the Australian black man we may certainly say that he has to go. That he should
perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all concerned in the matter.’
Even by 1948 it was possible for Montagu Boyce to write that ‘It is fortunate that the
Tasmanian Black has died out. As a curiosity he was worth preserving. There was no
other justification in the sight of God’ (Boyce, 1948: 28). Later, Boyce (1948: 30) concludes that ‘The savage races must not be elevated to the extent that they can destroy
those who are the true heirs. We of course love the Chinese.’
European fascination and interest in Aboriginal culture has its beginnings in the very
first recorded contacts and Effington (2010: 75–83) reminds us that souvenirs and collecting were an important element in the economy of first contact:
From the early encounters both colonial appropriation and Aboriginal agency played roles in
the development of the boomerang as a national symbol. Remarkably soon after the European
arrival in Australia Aboriginal groups began manufacturing implements for the purpose of
trading with the newcomers. In January 1822, Governor Philip Gidley King and his crew
anchored in Oyster Harbour, King George’s Sound, Western Australia, in order to replenish
their supplies. King estimates 20–40 Aboriginal men were soon busy manufacturing spears,
throwing sticks and other implements ‘for the evening’s barter’. By the time King’s party left
they had over 320 individually crafted items.
Despite this, the emerging history of relationships between Aboriginal cultures and white
settler society in Australia can only be described in negative and largely tragic terms.
Across Australia, the predominantly hunter-gatherer societies of Aboriginal people were
removed from almost all lands that could support agriculture and pastoral industries and
cities. By the early 20th century a large number had been removed to specially created
reserves under the control of white Aboriginal Protectors, mostly away from the larger
cities. After Federation, when the new nation of Australia was inaugurated, many states
explicitly designed policies to assimilate the remnants of Aboriginal culture into a white
mainstream Australian national culture. Not only were children widely removed from
their Aboriginal parents but Aboriginal language, ritual, culture and relationships with
the land were discouraged. Even by the 1890s when Mark Twain (1993 [1897]: 57) was
travelling through Australia, their presence had all but disappeared:
We saw birds, but not a kangaroo, not an emu, not an ornithorhynchus, not a lecturer, not a
native. Indeed, the land seemed quite destitute of game. But I have misused the word native. In
Australia it is applied to Australian-born whites only. I should have said that we saw no
Aboriginals – no ‘blackfellows’. And to this day I have never seen one.
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Consistent with the slow process of ethnic cleansing, this precipitous record of race
relations was written out of Australian history in favour of a largely white genealogy that
might be used to garner further ‘confidence’ and investment from other colonizing powers such as the USA, Canada and South Africa. Australia’s official brochure for the 1939
World Fair in New York showcased the brave new modern Australia to a globalizing
world yet there was no mention whatever of Aborigines or their cultural ties to the continent. Worse still, this brochure makes a selling point of the fact that Australia is people
by a ‘White, English speaking population’. As Healy (2008) argues, this derived from
and in part constituted an active program of ‘forgetting Aborigines’.
While this programme was not widely shared among intellectual and artistic circles,
their powers to influence others were limited. As is often the case, they were able to use
art and design as subtle but often effective challenges to mainstream values and practice.
Thus, for example, Aboriginal art and cultural symbolism was embraced enthusiastically
by the Australian arts and crafts movement and later by early 20th century arts generally,
but it remained largely ignored and even disapproved of by the cultural (white) mainstream until much later in the mid-century (Harper and White 2010). It was really only
through the interest expressed by international visitors, keen to distil the truly Australian
from the increasingly homogenized, Western modern culture, that Aboriginal motifs and
culture were promoted alongside Australian wildlife icons. Mark Twain’s travels in the
1890s clearly demonstrate how far that process has proceeded:
Sydney has a population of 400,000. When a stranger from America steps ashore there, the first
thing that strikes him is that the place is eight, or nine times as large as he was expecting it to
be; and the next thing that strikes him is that it is an English city with American trimmings.
Later on, in Melbourne, he will find the American trimmings still more in evidence; there, even
the architecture will often suggest America; a photograph of its stateliest business street might
be passed upon him for a picture of the finest street in a large American city.
As a tourist, Mark Twain was repeatedly frustrated by his host’s apparent need to demonstrate how well Australia had been modernized and how ubiquitous were its creature comforts. What Twain craved however was the opposite: difference, uniqueness and the
quintessentially Australian – and particularly the most blindingly obvious, its people. As he
reported: ‘In the great museums [of Australia] you will find all the other curiosities, but in the
curio of chiefest interest to the stranger all of them are lacking’ (Twain, 1993 [1897]: 147).
Margaret Preston was an artist whose own experience of (and return from) travels
overseas made her see Australia in a different way. As a result, she and a few others felt
the need to develop an Australian modern style (Hylton, 2001: 64–6). The apparent
sources of such a style included the possibility of enrolling Aboriginal design and techniques into a national canon and her 1925 woodcut The Aeroplane (reworked in 1936)
remains something of an archetype and influence in this regard. She was an active proponent of these ideas, particularly through her 1930 article in Art in Australia (Preston,
1930) and this was almost certainly an influence on the emergence of the Australian
Museum’s handbook of Australian Aboriginal decorative art in 1938 (McCarthy, 1941;
Miller, 2008). Miller (2008) agues that Preston’s influences included Gauguin and
Picasso, both of whom drew inspiration from non-western cultures.
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Under the auspices of the Australian Museum an exhibition entitled Australian Art
and its Application was mounted in 1941 in the auditorium of the David Jones store in
Sydney. It is clear that this was an important launching point for the extension of
Aboriginal design into mainstream Australian culture, first through subsequent travel
advertising and then through a fast expanding market for souvenirs in the 1950s.
Two designers, Douglas Annand and Gert Sellheim, were represented in this exhibition and they were particularly influential in identifying branding themes for Australia in
the postwar expansion of tourism. Annand produced a vibrant totemic animal motif
design for the cover for the 1941 exhibition catalogue and Sellheim exhibited Aboriginal
styled figures for an inlaid floor for the Victorian Government Tourist Bureau. Later, they
both produced important posters for the Australian National Travel Association that
established Aboriginal motifs as key, if not essential, icons for establishing what was
quintessentially Australian.
By 1964, the art historian Roman Black could look back on some 20 years of ‘New
Australian Aboriginal Art’ and report an incredibly vibrant industry. His book showed
works by Margaret Preston alongside a vast ceramic mural by Douglas Annand for the
Orient Liner Orcades, the centrepiece of which was a totemic-styled (so-called x-ray)
kangaroo with abstract Aboriginal hunters. The Orcades was launched in 1948 and
brought huge numbers of tourist class and first class visitors, as well as migrants, to
Australia. Aside from this, from 1950 onwards, a new generation of students reading the
literary journal Meanjin was treated to several of Annand’s Aboriginal-inspired cover
designs, including the first issue. A few pages on, Black showed the Aboriginal art
inspired design for the 1948 two shilling stamp by the Estonian migrant Gert Sellheim.
Sellheim won the design competition for this stamp and thus was among the first to
release an Aboriginal design into mainstream Australian life.
Perhaps even more than Annand, Sellheim successfully championed Aboriginal
design beyond art circles and into the commercial branding of Australia itself. His
designs for murals, posters, book illustrations and trademarks were completed for Qantas
Empire Airways, the Australian National Travel Association, the Railway Department,
Shipping companies and Christmas cards. Roman Black showed how Sellheim’s
Aboriginal designs, inspired by the people of the Northern Territory, were emblazoned
across a wide range of in-flight cabin designs for Qantas, including curtains, tapestries,
information literature, trays, table mats and menu cards.
It seems highly likely that his popular poster entitled Corroboree (1934) for the
Australian National Travel Association provided the inspiration for the popular ballet
production of the same name with choreography by Rex Reid, a score by John Antill and
stage design by William Constable. Originally a 1940s score it was slow to find a willing
choreographer and two passed on the project before Read took it on. It premiered in
Melbourne in 1950 and toured Melbourne, Sydney, Launceston, Hobart, Brisbane, Perth,
Adelaide and Broken Hill in 1951. Again, here was one of a small number of events that
built a new aesthetic appreciation of Aboriginal art and culture beyond the very small
intellectual circles that initiated it. Aside from the dance performance this ballet was very
striking in its rich if not saturating use of Aboriginal design and ritual objects, despite a
disclaimer not to be a literal interpretation of any specific Aboriginal culture. Critically,
perhaps, it was consolidated by a second version by Beth Dean in 1954 and performed
first at a Gala Performance before Queen Elizabeth II during her visit.
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In a later discussion of potteries that began to use Aboriginal designs from the late
1940s onwards, Roman Black (1964) cites interview material with two prominent potteries that identified a critical shift in taste resulting from these events. Norma and
Leonard Flegg, the directors of Martin Boyd Pottery, a Sydney-based ‘studio quality’
company told him that the Australian public never liked Aboriginal art until after the
Queen’s visit. They suggested that as a result of the liberal use of banners rich in
Aboriginal motifs across arches and buildings during her visit ‘the demand for pottery
with Aboriginal designs increased noticeably’ (Black, 1964: 137).
Equally, Gordon and Joan Dunstan, the owners of Essexware Pottery at Leura in the
Blue Mountains, told Black that ‘the popularity of pottery decorated with Aboriginal
designs increased since the staging of the magnificent Corroboree ballet’ (Black, 1964:
137). Both comments of course identify something of a turning point in 1954. Up until
then, these small pottery companies reported that Aboriginal designed pieces only made
up about 10 percent of their output and most of that was sold ‘abroad, chiefly in the
United States of America’ (Black, 1965: 152). This may be why so much of this pottery
is sourced by contemporary collectors from the USA (conversation with Ross Waterman).
It is also the case that almost all of these potteries were in Sydney, or close by, and the
aestheticisation of Aboriginal design seems to have expanded through the Ceramic Art
and Fine Ware Association of New South Wales, particularly through their large exhibition in 1953. The architect Robin Boyd (cited in Miller, 2008: 35) made the claim that
Victorian artists were also becoming enthusiasts but added that this new aesthetic had a
specific geography in Australia:
Ironically the Aboriginal art form is more likely to become popular in Victoria where there are
few aborigines [sic], than in the north; just as in the USA, in reversal about the equator, it is in
the north where the Negroes are entertained. In Queensland there is disenfranchisement, Jim
Crow laws and sporadic brutality for the Aborigine and scant interest in his culture. But in
Victoria many whites who have never seen an aborigine [sic] are interested in borrowing his
techniques in the cause of a national art form.
This seems to have been true for the many migrants who made up a large proportion of
the potteries who took to producing Aboriginalia (Cockington, 2008). These include
Takacs Studio (founded by Hungarian potter Alex Takacs), Gunda (founded by Latvian
Gundars Lusis), Studio Anna (established by Czech potter Karl Jungvirt), Essexware
(co-established by English potter Joan Dunstan) and Darbyshire Pottery (founded by
English potters Jean and Bob Darbyshire).
Reproducing Aboriginal designs was always controversial. Studio Anna’s first exhibition in 1955 was closed down by police because some of the designs featuring naked
people were deemed ‘pornographic’. Later, Studio Anna’s owner, Toni Jungvert, was
criticized for appropriating important ritual property – from which point he no longer
used copies of Aboriginal motifs but used their style of art creatively in his own designs
(Johnston, 2002).
The history of Gunda pottery, only recently revealed by Ross Waterman (2009), is
very instructive here. Gundars Lusis, the man behind this ‘one-man pottery’ was born in
Latvia in 1928 and arrived in Australia in 1949. Studying pottery at a Melbourne
Technical College soon after arrival, he was influenced not by the dominant Australian
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Arts and Crafts Movement, as exemplified by the pottery of the Boyd family or the Asian
influenced stoneware tradition masterminded by Bernard Leach, but by newly arrived
young artists from Europe. Judging from his early work and later transitions, it is clear
that he fell under the influence of his fellow Latvian artists in Melbourne who expounded
the open-minded abstract modernism that they brought with them from Europe. Through
exhibitions and semi-formal groups such as the Blue Brush Group, they were an influential new artistic force in Australia changing attitudes to graphic design as well as fine art
(Waterman, 2009).
Gundars Lusis’ first works were made from 1956 onwards at a studio in his parent’s
backyard in Camberwell, Melbourne. Called Brownware, this body of early work shows
influences from Germany, Sweden and Italy, but also from the Australian-based designers borrowing Aboriginal themes. This is most evident in the dots and wavy lines seen on
Design 17 but especially on Designs 1 and 6 that were made for tourists visiting the 1956
Melbourne Olympics. These had Aboriginal-styled kangaroos and lizards as well as dots,
abstract spatial references and boomerang shapes, but after this, like Toni Jungvert, Lusis
appears to have abandoned direct borrowing or depiction in favour of being inspired by
Aboriginal styles of abstraction. Hence, in his later Blackwares (1957–1963), we can see
an increasingly confident use of coloured stylized Aboriginal dot trails, line trails and
abstract patterns and fish but rendered into a hybrid form using abstract elements inspired
from Europe.
Considering that he made and decorated everything himself, his attention to marketing
and its considerable reach into major retailing businesses (Myer and David Jones
Department stores among them) as well as giftware stores in tourism centres around the
states of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia was remarkable.
According to Waterman (2009), as a result of his penetration into remote and small
tourist sites such as The Knobbies on Phillip Island in Victoria and Woomera in northern South Australia, ‘Gunda would have been on display in more houses than any other
single potter in the history of Australian ceramics.’ Subtly, then, Gunda pottery inserted
a fusion of modern and Aboriginal abstract cultural forms into places of tourism where
Aboriginal culture had been made to disappear and into homes of people, many of
whom had no experience of Aboriginal people directly. Nonetheless, it ironically
planted in their minds the association of Aboriginal culture as an integral part of
Australian life and culture and it stayed there owing to its status as receptacle of memory
and family biography.
In fact, Waterman became a serious collector of Gunda pottery as a result of seeing it
in his grandmother’s house and becoming curious about its origins and maker.
Remarkably, a photo survives of two pieces of Gunda pottery at either end of a mantelpiece as a backcloth to a family birthday tea.
The social and political impact of Aboriginalia
The aim of this paper is not only to account for the emergence of Aboriginalia but also to
consider the social life of Aboriginalia (Appadurai, 1986; Miller, 1998, 2001) and particularly the impact it may have had on those people who bought it, were given it as gifts
and who displayed it in their homes. To repeat, Aboriginalia is defined in this article as
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decorative objects depicting Aboriginal peoples and/or culture and motifs that were predominantly designed for, sold to and produced by non-Aboriginal Australians. Often
embodied in home-wares such as ceramic and pottery items, wall hangings or plaques
and tea towels, Aboriginalia spans everything from the grotesque to ‘body-beautiful’
Aborigines cast as noble savages, and includes representations from a wide range of
Aboriginal material cultures (boomerangs, didgeridoos, art, fabric design, and so on). Its
defining feature is that, from Federation onwards, it was sold to travellers and tourists
alike as ‘the look’ and the truly authenticating expression of what was properly Australian.
In this respect we can at the very least speculate that these objects became ‘repositories
of recognition of what was often entirely absent, denied or undermined in the everyday
political and policy spheres. The significance cannot be underestimated as a powerful
semiotic presence in Australian cultural and social life because as mass produced giftwares, souvenirs or as decorative art, these objects found their way into the heart of most
Australian homes from the 1920s to the 1970s (Miller, 2008; Waterman, 2009). As
Danny Miller (2008) argued recently, the choice and display of objects in domestic interiors is an important but neglected site of our engagement with material objects since
these are highly selected and often indicate issues of particular emotional and political
significance. This significance is underscored by the ironic observation that while
Aboriginalia merged into the Australian quotidian, the people and cultures so represented
became increasingly marginalized. While the social impact of collecting and displaying
these objects must remain an empirical question it seems that some inferences and
hypotheses can be advanced here.
First, it is possible to say with some confidence that those potteries who stopped borrowing Aboriginal art and symbolism (for example, Studio Anna) and/or representing
Aboriginal cultural life (for example, Gunda) but who were evidently inspired by
Aboriginal traditions of painting were clearly attempting to include Aboriginal culture in
the modern sense of Australia as a new multi-cultural society. Their change of practice
showed a reflexive thinking that recognized Aboriginal claims to property and a sensitivity to people whose views mattered to them – their art having been a conduit towards
making such a connection and a better collaborative understanding of their culture. Their
hybrid works were thus inclusive rather than exclusive and multi-ethnic (that is, postcolonial) rather than assimilationist (that is, colonial). The impact of this work, and it
includes those poster, theatre set and commercial livery designers discussed above, confirmed a continuing place of Aboriginal culture in Australia regardless of the current
condition and standing of Aboriginal people themselves. Generally speaking (see comment 10 below), the period from the Second World War until the beginning of Aboriginal
liberation politics in the 1960s was a very bleak for Aboriginal people and this ironic
efflorescence of their culture kept alive their place and presence in the still-emerging
sense of an Australian nation.
While it seems clear that much of Aboriginalia appears to lock an authentic understanding of Aboriginal people into a primitive and Stone Age past (rather than a contemporary Australian culture), this may not have been inevitably perceived in a negative
sense. Almost all of the representations emphasize either the ‘noble savage’ or dignified
hunter-gatherer rather than the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’, and this could as easily signify
what was lost including human dignity, independence, land, lifestyle and culture. This
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could be the only conclusion one might draw from the everyday life depictions of
Aboriginal cultures as modelled by Darbyshire Pottery (especially their figures) or from
the landscapes on Martin Boyd chargers. These convey a palpable sense of sadness
derived from, or mirroring perhaps, those colonial paintings by Tom Roberts (www.abc.
net.au/arts/drysdale/themes/essay2.htm) as well as colonial writings that depicted ‘dying
race’ scenes, because these were very much Aboriginal people as perceived and represented by a colonizing settler society (McGregor, 1997). Hence, such pieces possess an
already-imprinted historical and moral context stamped in their very look and this was
set in the period just prior to their loss of independence and the imposition of control by
state bureaucratic agencies. Even the most kitsch forms of velvet paintings by Martinus
convey sadness, the most poignant being his Crying Girl. Most velvet paintings are
semi-silhouettes or head portraits that bear some genre resemblances to those colonial
artists wishing to record the Aboriginal people before they were lost. Again, Tom Roberts’
portraits are examples of this but they were (also) done in a dignified manner since he
painted white settlers on the same side – profile-style being associated with a high-class
fascination with silhouette-taking.
As other theorists have demonstrated, travel and objects of travel are indicators of
belonging to a wider culture and are important for being able to navigate and understand
the contemporary world (Barthes, 1979; Haldrup, 2009; Lury, 1997). Recent applications of relational materialism in tourism theory suggest that through its objects (souvenirs of all kinds are important here) tourism has had a more profound ordering of the
social relations of modernity than was hitherto imagined when tourism research confined
itself mostly to tourist sites. The experience and memories of tourism linger for far longer
than had been imagined or theorized by Urry’s Tourist Gaze (1991) as ‘restless’ and
‘fleeting’ and site-specific. Morgan and Pritchard (2005: 46) point out, ‘[o]nce transformed into household objects … [souvenirs] are simultaneously emblematic of both the
self and the other and retain the power to temporarily detach an individual from the
present through memory and metaphor’.
These experiences and memories make possible new stances and repertoires of
connection, new values and challenges to former assumptions. Aside from ordering
effects such as aestheticisation and consumerism, Franklin (2008) also identifies
other orderings such as translation, place-making, cosmopolitanism and tolerance.
The ubiquity of Aboriginalia in Australian popular culture, its long-term display in
people’s homes, its association with familiarization with place, geography and nation
means that it is intricately implicated in these ordering processes. A recent PhD thesis on Aboriginal tourism by Galliford (2009) suggests that tourism can have a
positive and lasting transversal impact on relationships between Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal people.
The tourism industry also embraced, and still does, if not in the same format,
Aboriginal images as a central strategy in the branding of Australia and its regions and
places. This seems to have emerged on the back of the arrival of Aboriginalia rather than
being a precondition for it. As Effington (2010: 78, my emphasis) points out:
The first comprehensive study of the Australian tourist industry, completed by the American
consultants Harris, Kerr, Forster and Company in 1965 saw ‘The Aborigines of Australia’ as an
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opportunity to promote ‘a unique primitive civilization of great interest to the world’.
‘Traditional’ Aboriginal culture was the best cultural resource Australia could exploit, and its
exhibition would ‘be influential in convincing everyone of the dignity and achievements of the
Aboriginal Australians before the days of white settlement.’
Thus, the notion that Aboriginal people are culturally central in the social history and
cultural representation of Australia is rendered self-evident by becoming emblazoned on
almost every souvenir associated with places that can be visited. At the same time, the
basis for this incorporation reveals, in an unresolved manner, as the American consultants admit, something of a sad and tragic nature. These objects contain an unresolved
tension: something beautiful was lost (dignity and achievements) in the arrival of modern Australia but not completely.
The claim to social and cultural Australian centrality is further enhanced by dint of
their purchase as valued souvenirs by non-Indigenous Australians (for themselves or as
gifts to others) and displayed in high status positions in the home. While these objects
might be dismissed as (sometimes) cheap, fake and trivial, this may be to miss an important point. As Miller (2001, 1998, 1987; also Muecke, 2008) argues, material culture can
reveal much about the relationship between people and goods. Everyday objects reflect
not only personal tastes and attributes but also the moral principles and social ideals of
the people who buy the objects and those who produce them. While many merchandized
Aboriginalia objects were and are (self evidently) racist and commercially exploitative
of Aboriginal culture, it is precisely because so much of it has shock value – containing
the tensions referred to above, illustrating and affirming the categorical racism of the
20th century Australian everyday as much as the colonial days of sadness – that these
objects derive their particularly potent political and cultural charge. Even the more
respectfully executed decorative arts objects that deployed Aboriginal images and motifs
are disruptive through their evocation of, and admiration for, traditional Aboriginal tribal
cultures in this ‘lost noble savage’ tradition. But while awkward and unsettling, perhaps
these objects also form a starting point for all Australians. Now that they have the patina
of a previous shared era, they describe and invoke a rather rare social space of dialogue
‘for contiguity is one of the ways humans organise their relationships with things’
(Muecke, 2008: 37). Aboriginalia’s presence in the nation’s homes also perhaps suggests
the potential for a new understanding in non-Indigenous/Indigenous ‘race and cultural
relations and an understated unifying unique sense of Australianness’. While these
objects can, and often should, be seen as offensive and racist, they do give positive
expression to some things that were not expressed in other ways. Aboriginal people were
left out of official symbols of the Australian nation, yet recognized in these everyday
objects that were displayed, sometimes shrine-like, in people’s homes. This spectre of
hope may be one reason why they are currently so avidly collected by both Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal people and why their national significance is being recognized
(Russell and Winkworth, 2009).
In addition, at a time when the Australian establishment still has great difficulty in
expressing a clear and categorical relationship to Aboriginal Australians, the open and
free expression of racial politics on items of Aboriginalia provides much material evidence for what (mostly) does not appear in public records and public debate. This is
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surely why some of the more prominent young Aboriginal artists find this material so
interesting and useful to work with.
In different ways, Tony Albert and Destiny Deacon have both tapped into this
shocking evidence in order to recode Aboriginal kitsch objects into cool, yet sharp,
political messages. None do it better perhaps than Albert’s collection of shabby and
battered Aboriginalia collaged into the giant letters SORRY, now part of the permanent display exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Art. It is also why major
Australian Museums have begun to point up its significance, most recently for example in the Powerhouse Museum’s major exhibition Modern Times: Modernism in
Australia. As Tony Albert argued in an ABC interview, over time Aboriginalia had
become caught up in the public imagination and people were now putting a new positive spin on it. He said that collectors and artists can give these objects ‘a new voice’
(Albert, 2009).
Conclusion
This paper has argued that the arrival of Aboriginalia as symbols of Australia was a relatively new phenomenon dating to the late 1940s and early 1950s and was successfully
pressed into widespread use largely by a European arts, crafts and design community. By
the 1960s, the Australian tourism industry was advised to extend this process into the
very branding of Australia, particularly to overseas tourists, but in so doing it converged
with large numbers of arts and crafts companies who had already begun to identify
Aboriginal people, motifs and designs with most tourist sites and centres around
Australia. They had also already begun to enrol many elements of Aboriginal art and
design into widespread areas of Australian design and decorative styles. As a result, a
range of Aboriginal-themed souvenirs (both high and low cultural forms) were bought
back by domestic tourists as souvenirs and gifts and thus Aboriginal culture found an
ironic entry point into Australian popular culture at important social locations: those
occupied during important holiday periods, and in the display areas of Australian domestic interiors. This paper, then, considers how the presence of these objects may have
disturbed previous perceptions of Aboriginal people.
Several likely interventions were suggested. First, their enduring presence in the very
heart and hearth of domestic interiors acted very simply as ‘repositories of recognition’:
while not high on the political or cultural agenda, nor yet identified as a subject for reform or
apology, they nevertheless countered all suggestions that Aboriginality was dying, disappearing, assimilated or extinguished. Here it was at the heart of an enthusiasm, an aesthetic
passion and art movement and along with it came a more focused interest in their presence.
Second, the fact that it was artists and designers who had expressed a new curiosity
and desire for this hitherto disregarded tradition of design and expression meant that
economic, religious and cultural ‘rights’ and ownership became apparent, and this recognition was no small form of cultural recognition, since it had much wider economic, legal
and commercial ramifications. The art world did respond positively to a contemporary
Aboriginal people intimately connected to the aesthetic tradition they wished to tap into.
Gunda and Studio Anna, for example, modified their art practice in line with this recognition and learning.
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Third, the narrative and compositional content of so much Aboriginalia, while apparently fixed in the past, also references in subtle but powerful ways Aboriginal dispossession and their generally perceived loss of dignity, place and position. It registers not only
themes of sadness and loss but at the same time the moral and ethical contexts in which
it took place, and in this sense these objects are rare examples of something that is both
Aboriginal and settler: they are shared experiences of Australia. This may be why they
have such a powerful appeal to so many, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and why
they are avidly collected by both.
Fourth, precisely because these objects speak of things that are typically denied, hidden or ignored in civil society, they possess a powerful emotional honesty that can be
recoded into a new life as political and protest objects, often with the help of Aboriginal
artists and other cultural commentators and educators. Hence, what was once considered
kitsch, worthless and in bad taste can reappear as cool and meaningful whose values,
monetary and cultural values and potential are rising quickly.
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