Exhibition Review: Josie Starrs, Margaret Worth, Fay Poole and Barbara Zerbini
Experimental Art Foundation
Adelaide South Australia
June 1990 and touring to regional galleries.
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?
The Broome Mix is useful to bear in mind when thinking on all things multicultural - cultural diversity. In Broome that's culture - a mix of Aboriginal, Asian and European.
Above all we need new myths to suit the new Australian culture which is part of the Asia Pacific region. We can't live by Aboriginal myths alone, as some have suggested, in a land so changed by our coming. The unpacking of cultural baggage by writers of all cultural groups, old and new, has to continue until it gives rise to a myth which we all recognise as fitting the Australia to which we have contributed. Wrote David Malouf.
This is a new notion for me. I'm sure it is a term familiar to most readers. However, just in case, this is my version of what it means. To understand it you need to appreciate that there is an hierarchical order of metals determined by their 'nobility'. A sacrifical anode is less a noble metal which is used to attract impurities away from more noble metals that you do not wish to be eroded. Thus if you wish to avoid erosion in your copper boiler, you can put a sacrificial anode in the water which will attract the impurities in the water and keep them away from your noble boiler. The link between multicultural artworkers and sacrificial anodes is entirely my own!
It is the responsibility of Australian Collections to preserve this material - correspondence and manuscripts as well as printed texts - in many languages, not as exotic flowers of 'accented' literature, but as integral parts of the history and literature of multicultural Australia.