Reclaiming the Centre: Art, Technology, and Community in Outback South Australia and the Northern Territory
Friday 19 September
9.00am - 6.00pm
Bradley Forum, UniSA City West campus, Hawke Building level 5, 50-60 North Terrace Adelaide
Launch of the exhibition: 'Waralungku Crossing': cross-generational art from Australia's 'remotest' community will take place in the Kerry Packer Civic Gallery - Hawke Building level 3 - following the Symposium
| Presented by the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, with the support of The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre |  |
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| Sponsored by: |
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Registration is free - bookings essential for catering purposes
(limited numbers)
Bookings: To reserve your place, please RSVP to Laura Fuss,
laura.fuss@unisa.edu.au
or call 8302 4369
This painting is a reproduction of an untitled work by the Kudanji
elder Gordon Landsen (Milindirri), which shows Gordon's ancestral Frog
Dreaming country, near Borroloola in the Northern Territory. It shows Old
Man Frog hiding in the scrub from the devil, which is represented by the
double-lane bitumen highway that cuts a swathe through the Frog Dreaming
country. The road was built for the ore trucks that shuttle between the huge
McArthur River zinc and lead mine and the ships at Bing Bong Port.
Landsen once described his paintings as 'telling about the country'. This and similar phrases are often used by Indigenous artists to characterise their work.
The usual well-meaning whitefella response to such comments also follows a common pattern:
- It is assumed that Aboriginal artists from remote communities are striving to tell other Australians about their homelands. The challenge therefore is seen to be overcoming the 'tyranny of distance' in order to 'shore up' these remote communities and connect them to mainstream Australia.
- This way of thinking translates into efforts to provide infrastructure as a platform for basic wellbeing in remote settlements.
- It is also expressed in initiatives to put remote communities into better communication with the Australian mainstream, by encouraging networking, building local capacities, and underpinning sustainable community enterprises.
These responses have much to commend them. They attempt to counteract negative stereotypes that circulate in the big towns and cities about community remoteness, marginality, dysfunction, and technological ineptness. However there is an undercurrent of anxiety that all these efforts may insulate or cocoon remote communities from social and public policy trends that are undercutting the long-term viability of such communities.
People living in remote Aboriginal settlements across South Australia and the Northern Territory share elements of this whitefella thinking. They express pride in country, and are generous in sharing some of their local storylines with outsiders. They are keen to build sustainable businesses and communities. They are concerned about issues of governance and local democracy in the wake of outside interventions. They strive to provide brighter futures for their children and young people.
But Aboriginal priorities are not dependent upon, nor do they wholly coincide with, whitefella assumptions. For example:
- Their thinking about art and technology has been less concerned with communicating to others and accommodating their activities to others' agendas than with sustaining local culture for their own communities. Their most pressing concerns have to do with local wellbeing and with bridging the generations within their communities.
- This necessary insularity of purpose has increasingly combined with a willingness to apply both art and technology in order to engage with other Aboriginal homelands, and with the wider Australian society, but on their own terms.
- 'On their own terms' does not mean clinging nostalgically to memories of land and culture in the past. It means combining the separateness of customary practices with the connections that other pathways offer to new knowledge, in order to develop better strategies for achieving sustainable futures for desert communities.
Thus current thinking about art and technology attempts to resolve how to respect customary knowledge while devising effective strategies to turn around declining measures of health, education, participation, and wellbeing in remote communities. This one-day symposium provides an opportunity to reappraise the positive associations that exist between culture and technology in desert Australia, to reflect upon the development of these links past and present, to distinguish between dead ends and viable tracks into the future, and most of all to flag strategies that translate into wellbeing and sustainable futures for remote Aboriginal communities. These issues highlight the core of the symposium's programme, with the day's discussions focusing on the central corridor of Aboriginal homelands that run through South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Symposium Program
| 9.00am | Introduction and welcome to country |
| 9.15am | Welcome to the University of South Australia: Professor Peter Høj, Vice Chancellor and President |
| 9.30am | Waralungku Arts (Borroloola, Northern Territory): Allan Baker, Miriam Charlie, Peter Callinan |
| 10.30am | Morning tea |
| 11.00am | Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands: Makinti Minutjukur, Alison Milyka Carroll, Hilary Furlong and Deidre Tedmanson (UniSA) |
| 12.00pm | Regional and remote South Australia: Mary Brennan (Mt Gambier), Regina McKenzie (Hawker/ Port Augusta), and Felicity Wright |
| 1.00pm | Lunch break |
| 2.00pm | Better World Arts: Carolyn Wilson |
| 3.00pm | The Mulka Project (Yirrkala, Northern Territory): Wukun Wanambi and Randin Graves |
| 4.00pm | Afternoon tea - Launch of the Waralungku Crossing exhibition: Kerry Packer Civic Gallery, Hawke Building level 3 |
| 4.30pm | Centre for Appropriate Technology, Alice Springs: Jim Bray, Jenny Kroker and Bruce Walker |
For further information:
For further details or questions contact Alan Mayne,
alan.mayne@unisa.edu.au / 0409
434 220, ResearchSA Chair and Professor of Social History & Public Policy,
Hawke Research Institute, UniSA.
While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public
program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University
of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest
of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of:
strengthening our democracy - valuing our cultural diversity - and building
our future.