Multicultural, Aboriginal or Just Plain Australian
A great deal of agonising has gone on since the 1988 Bicentenary about the nature of Australian identity and therefore the nature of our distinctive culture.
Making a TV documentary about indigenous people's television in Australia. Photographs on location at Ernabella in the Pitjantjatjara lands of far north west South Australia.
The three storey facility looks incongruous in the ramshackle Aboriginal settlement of Ramingining which crouches along a dirt road in an Arnhem Land eucalypt forest 550 km east of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Photos of people in Ramingining.
If mainstream television is not our main source of accurate images, how do people gain access to programs which reflect our society in realistic and creative ways?
Since the birth of Australian television, non-anglo Australians have suffered from an acute case of foreign accent syndrome. Unfortunately 35 years on they are still suffering, not only from bad accents usually spoken by Anglo actors playing NESBs, but from the dearth of authentic storylines and subsequently the lack of accurate representation of NESBs on our TV and screens.
An exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art 'Aboriginal Art and Spirituality' opened at the High Court of Australia in 1991. The exhibition to tour after its opening in Canberra.....All of the works in the exhibition speak quite overtly about the highly problematic intervention of the missions, the politics of racism and the way in which Aboriginal spirituality will always remain linked to the land.
The Network links NESB, ethnic and arts organisations, sets up cross cultural and other training programs for artists, arts organisations and the media and lobbies governments and other funding bodies to reassess their policies and practices.
One of the leading debates in Cultural Studies around the world deals with the issues of cultural difference or ethnicity in relation to concepts of a national culture.
Written with Joseph Eisenberg. The National Association for the Visual Arts [NAVA] is currently sponsoring a project on 'Multiculturalism and the immigrant artist in Australian visual culture'. Part of the study focuses on the role of public galleries in appreciating, exhibiting, and acquiring the work of Australian artists from non- English speaking backgrounds [NESB].