For mine it is but a few short steps from the Buzzfeed treatment of this year's Garma Festival to a neo-romantic and naive view of contemporary Aboriginal society as "noble savages". But Buzzfeed can easily do better than 16 Photos, as we can see in this piece by Simon Crera, 16 Powerful Photos Of The Oldest Living Culture On Earth, which looked at the 2014 Garma Festival.
Landscape is perhaps the most value laden of genres within which to peel back the layers of influence in post-contact Australian history. Landscape in Australian art history and in particular “pastoraphilia” as the leitmotif of Australian nationhood and identity, mitigated the harsh historical realities and made palpable the strange and un-picturesque landscape for European eyes. Landscape is infused with the legacy of (and in this part of the world the ongoing) dispossession of land and wholesale destruction of people and culture.
After 150 years of white development it’s time for environmental justice in the southwest Gulf, for fair treatment and meaningful involvement of Aboriginal people with respect to development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies in their ancestral lands. The goal must be a fair distribution of the environmental benefits and costs.
I want the government and mining companies to know that we are still here. We aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t dead yet. We are still here, feeling the country. Jacky Green, Darwin, August 2017
Intanto alla Vucciria Chips Mackinolty, street artist australiano, realizza “Dolce & Gamberi”, il dipinto di un abito d’“alta moda” con stampa di cannoli e gamberoni. L’ennesimo omaggio ad una Palermo che, per un lungo weekend, sarà davvero internazionale.
Darwin is so far removed from this ideal it is the quintessential post historical frontier town masquerading as a fake city, the ugly city where the overwhelming ethos is one of indifférence, where the spectacle of private opulence thinly camouflages public squalor, squander and neglect.
The Darwin Festival has failed local visual artists. Spending money on a roving class of interstate creatives and acts is capital that gets drained out of the local culture making economy. There is no substantial quota for local engagement, there is no compulsion that local creatives get engaged and employed. The current festival model fails to connect with and engage the local culture makers. Even the influx of DF production crew in August are like carnies - here for the month then off again to fleece another community with their generic arts festival business model.
One of this year’s stand out pieces is the Bombing of Darwin, by Susan Wanji Wanji. Impressive in scale and remarkable in its detail and subject matter, the piece records Wanji Wanji’s recollection of being on the Tiwi Islands when the Bombing of Darwin occurred during the Second World War.
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.― Flannery O'Connor.
The recent call by the Australian Road Crew Association (ARCA)—including this piece on the ABC by Guy Stayner that highlights the appalling suicide rates in the live music industry—gave me pause to reflect on my previous career in music, mainly working as a roadie (doing FoH sound in the main) with rock ‘n roll bands [...]
