Painting Fakes

I don't watch breakfast TV.  I have better things to do with my day.  On the odd occasions I've seen these shows, usually sitting in a waiting room somewhere, they strike me as cheap filler for the time of day when no-one is really watching.  People sitting in a studio talking about stuff, much of it inane; paid product promotion; news updates; stunts.  On the odd occasion a host says something controversial it is tempting to see it as a publicity stunt, a way of creating the illusion that the show has some substance. So I was tempted to leave Kerri-Anne Kennerley's spat with Yumi Stynes alone.  I know little about Kennerley, and had never heard of Stynes before their argument hit the headlines. I was also tempted to leave the issue to the various articulate Aboriginal people who have objected to the comments.  However, I remember that years ago when Pauline Hanson first achieved fame on the back of racist comments, a senior Aboriginal person said to a group of us t

So, today is the 231st anniversary of the first British convict fleet landing in Sydney Cove.  This was the beginning of the British invasion of Australia, but far from the end of it.  In my home town, home of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, and the surrounding country of peoples including the Quandamooka, Kabi Kabi and Mununjali, the invasion did not start in earnest until 1823.  In November of that year the surveyor Lieutenant John Oxley sailed through Quandamooka waters and slowly rowed up the Maiwar River, surveying as he went.  Unaware that the river already had a name, he renamed it the Brisbane River after his boss Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of NSW.  In consequence the surrounding land, originally called Meanjin, also came to be called Brisbane. Among more peaceful encounters with the land's owners was an ugly confrontation which resulted in a young Aboriginal man being shot and possibly killed.   A year later a small party of convicts and soldiers arrived to found a co

One of the prevailing myths of Australian history is that the European invaders who arrived after 1788 were the first to 'settle' the land.  In this story, the country's original inhabitants were nomadic hunter-gatherers, wandering randomly over the countryside plucking its riches without doing anything to create them. It's a myth that dies hard.  Our recent Prime Minister Tony Abbot (now, ironically, the government's 'special envoy on Indigenous affairs') loves to celebrate the wonders created by the arrival of the First Fleet. I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, great southern land. The arrival of the first fleet was the defining moment in the history of this continent. Yet over recent decades, historians have steadily chipped away at this myth.  Most Australians now know that Aboriginal people did not roam randomly, they travelled on a seas

I remember travelling to Petrie as a child to play against the Pine Rivers soccer team.  It seemed like a long way away.  Reading Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland makes it seem even further.   Tom Petrie was born in Scotland in 1831.  In that same year his father Andrew accepted a post as supervisor of works in Sydney, and in 1838 the family transferred to the penal colony in Brisbane, then a ramshackle affair just over a decade old.  When Queensland was opened up to free settlement a few years later and his position was abolished, Petrie senior refused the offered transfer back to Sydney in favour of setting up his own building business in the younger colony, and the Petries became pillars of early Brisbane society. All this meant that Tom had a very unusual childhood.  Brisbane in 1838 was not really a community, it was a prison.  Although there were some women prisoners the population was dominated by male convicts and soldiers.  There were virtually no Europea

Tony Abbott wants to be the Prime Minister for Aboriginal Australia.  Then again he also wants to be the Minister for Women.  When he was asked what he had achieved in this portfolio he said he had abolished the carbon tax.  Perhaps as Prime Minster for Aboriginal Australians his main achievement is stopping the boats.  Only 227 years too late but I guess there's no use crying over spilt milk. Now Abbott has flagged another seminal achievement in Aboriginal affairs by supporting the Western Australian Government's decision to stop providing basic infrastructure to approximately 150 outstations - small Aboriginal communities, often remote, that have been set up by Aboriginal people since the 1960s as overflow from the towns and larger Aboriginal communities.  The Western Australian Government says continuing to provide services to these communities is too expensive, and Abbott says that governments shouldn't pay for the people's "lifestyle choices". &quo

One of the most persistent images in our culture is that of the "primitive" Aborigine, wandering naked across the face of Australia, living off the produce of nature and having little or no impact on the land they lived in.  This is one of the key images behind the convenient concept of terra nullius, Australia as a land which nobody owned. I've known for a long time that this image is misleading.  From my time at Uni I learnt that Aboriginal people have a close connection with their country, that their travels are far from random and that they carefully monitored and husbanded resources.  Historian Geoffrey Blainey's book Triumph of the Nomads, first published in 1975, showed how extensive Aboriginal burning of country was and how big an impact this had on Australia's ecology. In Blainey's depiction this burning is somewhat indiscriminate, a huge impact but not necessarily purposeful in a strategic sense.  Bill Gammage's 2011 book  The Biggest Estat

On the weekend, prominent Aboriginal AFL player Adam Goodes was racially vilified by a 13 year old Collingwood supporter who referred to him as an "ape".  He took immediate action, asking security to remove her from the ground, which they did.  Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, one of Australia's most prominent media figures, was quick to visit Goodes in the dressing room and apologise on behalf of the club. Later on the young girl was very contrite, ringing Goodes to aplogise.  He was forgiving.  Thirteen-year-olds do stupid things.  She needed to be told firmly, then left alone to do better next time.  Hopefully she will. Forty-eight-year-olds do stupid things too, but they are entitled to be cut a lot less slack, especially when they are as prominent and media-savvy as Eddie McGuire.  Because only a few days later, with the vilification incident still echoing around the media, McGuire suggested on morning radio that Goodes could be used in a promotional role for

I've been on holiday in Tasmania for the past week.  While I was there I visited the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and it got me thinking about George Robinson and the fate of the original Tasmanians. We were taught in school that the Tasmanian Aborigines had been wiped out.  The last of them, Truganini (at least that is one variant of her name) died in Hobart in 1876.  Of course this version of history is not quite true.  There are still descendents of the first Tasmanians living now.  I'll get back to them later.  In the meantime, George Augustus Robinson. Robinson was a bricklayer and Methodist lay preacher who moved to Tasmania as a free settler in 1824.  In the 1830s he abandoned his bricklaying business and went on a mission to the remaining Aboriginal people in the eastern part of Tasmania.  His mission was prompted by the state of all-out war that had broken out between the European settlers and the original inhabitants.  For the Europeans, the Aboriginal peop

I'm going to stop banging on about the Kimberley after this, but I didn't want to finish on a down note in case you think that I went off to visit some sort of post-colonial dystopia.  There are some hard aspects to life on the Dampier Peninsula but wonderful people, a great place and a lot to like.  So instead I want to tell you about two things - cups and fishing. First of all, to paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, this is not a cup. THIS is a cup! People in the Dampier Peninsula communities do not drink small cups of tea.  If we stayed in a hotel, my local co-workers would despair because their rooms had thimble-like cups which would only just give you a taste.  Any cup of tea smaller than half a litre is not worth making. And then, of course, no conversation on the Dampier Peninsula is complete without some mention of fishing.  Of course they live by the sea, but more than that, they spend a lot of time on it.  Kids can handle boats before they can walk.  Young men

Here's another snippet from the far north-west, this time about something a little closer to my normal field of knowledge - the Community Development Employment Program or CDEP.  This program was once the jewel in the crown of Aboriginal employment programs.  First trialled in 1977, by the early 2000s the program catered for over 40,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander job seekers. CDEP was basically a "work for the dole" program, introduced on Aboriginal communities at their own request long before there was any such thing in the mainstream social security system.  It allowed communities to convert unemployment benefits into wages and pay unemployed people to work on community projects.  An unemployment benefit is equivalent to a bit under half a full time wage for an unskilled worker, so participants were treated as having a part-time job, 16 hours a week.  It was a creative response to two pressing problems on those communities - extremely limited employment opp

Well I'm back home in the cold country after three weeks on the Dampier Peninsula and surrounds.  Still a lot to think about and sort through, though. One of the things that really became clearer to me over my three weeks was the extent to which the Aboriginal people of the Kimberley are living in two worlds.  On the one hand, they are participating in the modern Western society and economy.  They wear European clothes (with a distinctive Aboriginal style!) and drive cars, they go to school and university or TAFE, hold down jobs, run businesses and manage large complex community organisations.  A lot of them are very successful at doing this.  One of my local co-workers, in his mid-30s, has half a university degree in marine biology, plus tickets in motor mechanics and construction, and has worked on a number of mine sites as well as in more mundane town jobs.  Others struggle - levels of unemployment are high, there's a lot of alcoholism and mental illness, people are crow

On Monday we paid a visit to Beagle Bay .  After doing our business during the morning, we managed to take a moment to visit the Sacred Heart Church. Beagle Bay is an Aboriginal Mission, started by the Catholic Church in the 1890s and run by them until handover to a local community council in the 1970s.  The mission history means many residents, particularly older ones, are still devout Catholics and nothing symbolises this devotion more than the Sacred Heart Church, the town's main tourist attraction, built during the First World War. From the outside it's pretty but not all that special - a whitewashed little chapel in rendered brick.  However, the inside is truly remarkable as you can see from the photos.  Whole pearl shells are inlaid into the window frames, and the altar, stations of the cross and other fittings are intricately ornamented with pearl shell fragments.  The care and effort that's gone into these, not to mention the value of the pearl shells, speaks of