Image – Music – Text: An Interdisciplinary Symposium Exploring Media in Indigenous Histories
20 March 2015
Old Darlington School, Darlington campus, University of Sydney
Abstracts and Bios
The Flight of Discovery: Following the Contrail of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition – Martin Thomas (Australian National University)
A contrail is the line of vapour left by the engine of an aircraft. It is an image that has often come to mind when researching the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948. The seven-month expedition was for the most part transported by the Royal Australian Air Force. In its comings and goings, it left plenty of contrails, literal and metaphorical. In this paper, I will be dealing with the latter. My purpose is to review journeys made by the expedition, and to give account of some journeys it inspired. All are in some way connected with the desire to better understand historic media, whether it be film, sound recordings or still photography. Five years of close engagement with the 1948 expedition have given me cause to reflect on the role of media in shaping the legacy of historic research ventures. The contrails left by historic media provide new perspectives on intercultural research (in the past and in the present). They also provide new insight into the purpose and constitution of expeditions themselves.
Martin Thomas is Associate Professor in the School of History at the Australian National University and an honorary associate in PARADISEC within the Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. He was awarded a Future Fellowship to study the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, resulting in a number of publications including (as co-editor) Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (2011) and (as editor) Expedition into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World (2015). He is the author of The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In search of an Australian anthropologist (2011), winner of the National Biography Award of Australia.
The Pulse of Imperial Networks: Photography, digitisation, return - Jane Lydon (University of Western Australia)
Visual technologies have always provided diverse and mutable conduits for transmitting images around the globe: for example, Australia’s first 1840s photographs of Aboriginal people were daguerreotypes, singular metal mirrors that could not be shared unless transformed into engravings and printed by a press into a publication. Scholars such as Elizabeth Edwards have argued that we should explore the materiality of images and the diverse forms they assume, attending to the ways their form and vitality shape us, as much as we imbue them with meaning. Digitisation constitutes a major transformation of photographs’ historical accumulation of materiality. It also creates new social relations, and in the case of my current research project, ‘Globalisation, Photography and Race’, enables the return of historical archives from European museums to Indigenous relatives in Australia. In this paper I explore the new relations and narratives that emerge from this process, focusing on their Indigenous significance. I do this through the example of a slightly enigmatic cardboard panel held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on which are mounted thirteen photographs. With curator Christopher Morton, a Partner Investigator on this project, I have puzzled over its individual and collective history for about six years now. For Indigenous descendants of the people recorded in these photographs, their physical form is less important than the way they embody missing relatives, lost through invasion and assimilation. This process is slow and often awkward, but the rewards are great, in challenging foundational national histories, re-connecting family networks, and telling the truth of Indigenous experience.
Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present, seeking to understand how images have shaped ideas and debates about rights, identity and culture. Her most recent book The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights (NewSouth, 2012) won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ History Book Award. She currently leads the ARC project Globalization, Photography, and Race: the Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photographs in Europe in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden.
Pan-Indigenous encounter in the 1950s: “Ethnic Dancer” Beth Dean - Amanda Harris (University of Sydney)
Between 1950 and 1965, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Maori and Australian Aboriginal culture for a number of years. Until 1953, her experience of Aboriginal dance was limited to photographs and descriptions in the books of anthropologists, and to viewing films recorded by C. P. Mountford. Later, carrying out field research for periods of months in locations she keenly promoted as remote and “unaffected by white contact”, and then performing secret/sacred Australian Aboriginal dances in far-flung public settings, she boasted that restrictions on the viewing of men’s ceremonial dances by women meant that she was probably the only woman in the world who could dance them. Inventing herself as a pseudo-ethnologist and expert on “primitive” dances of many continents, Dean created a highly mobile, transnational career (as Victoria Haskins has shown). This paper will investigate the Adult Education circuit where Dean earned her regular income in between more prestigious public performances. I will explore the turn to the education of the Australian public following World War II, and middle-class curiosity about Aboriginal cultures amongst students for whom education was a form of holiday recreation. Dean framed her performances as opportunities for encounter with Indigenous cultures by emphasising the authenticity of her renditions and repeatedly citing anthropologists Mountford, A. P. Elkin and T. G. H. Strehlow.
Amanda Harris is Research Associate on the project Intercultural inquiry in a trans-national context: Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Amanda obtained a PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2009 with a historical thesis on German, French and English women composers and feminism in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Her recent work focuses on Australian History, exploring themes of cross-cultural exchange and gender and her edited book Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media was published in 2014. Other publications have appeared in the journals Women & Music, Life Writing, Women’s History Review, History and Anthropology, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal and Musicology Australia.
PANEL: Mediating the Present: Contemporary Perspectives on the Archive
Paul Arthur, Melinda Hinkson, Harold Short, Julia Torpey
Paul Arthur is Professor and inaugural Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Western Sydney. He was previously Deputy Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies, a joint-funded special initiative of the European Commission and the Australian National University. From 2010-13 he was Deputy Director of the National Centre of Biography, ANU, and Deputy General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has published widely in fields of cultural studies, communication, history, literature and media, and has held visiting appointments in Europe, North America and Australasia.
Melinda Hinkson is a social anthropologist with wide ranging interests in visual culture and currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. She has published widely on Warlpiri engagements with visual media, on the lifework of Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner, on the contested cultural politics of the Northern Territory Intervention, and on the broader field of contemporary cultural attitudes to images. Her most recent publications are the book Remembering the Future: Warlpiri Life through the Prism of Drawing (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014), and an associated exhibition Warlpiri Drawings: Remembering the Future, on display at the National Museum of Australia, August 1014 - May 2015.
Harold Short has an educational background in the Humanities and in Mathematics, Computing and Systems. Following 11 years at the BBC, he has worked at King's College London since 1988. Professor Short was Director and Head of the Department of Digital Humanities (formerly Centre for Computing in the Humanities) until his retirement in September 2010. Professor Short was Involved in the development of three MA programmes in the Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities, Digital Culture and Society (formerly Digital Culture and Technology) and Digital Asset Management. He worked with Willard McCarty and other colleagues in developing the world's first PhD programme in Digital Humanities. He is currently Visiting Professor with the Digital Humanities Research Group at UWS.
Julia Torpey is an Aboriginal writer, playwright, director and historian. Her mother's Aboriginal family is from New South Wales and their experience as a family is of separation and continuing to reconnect with history. Julia is currently completing her PhD in History at the University of Sydney and is also a member of the ARC Linkage Project Deepening Histories of Place: Exploring Indigenous Landscapes of National and International Significance, directing and authoring an enhanced e-book entitled At the Heart of it... Place stories across Darug and Gundungurra Lands: A downloadable history.
Trouble in the Archive– Ian McLean (University of Wollongong)
The archival turn that characterised Western art and thinking in the last two decades of the twentieth century is also a feature of Indigenous urban art. However the archive served different purposes for different artists. For some it was a source of lost knowledge, for other a colonial fantasy that needed to be deconstructed. In discussing how several artists used the archive – including Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft, Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt and Brook Andrew – this paper focuses on the patterns of difference and fault lines that exist between their approaches.
Ian McLean is Senior Research Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia. He has published extensively on Australian art and particularly Aboriginal art within a contemporary context. His books include Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous art, How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, White Aborigines Identity Politics in Australian Art, and Art of Gordon Bennett (with a chapter by Gordon Bennett). He is a former advisory board member of Third Text, and is currently on the advisory boards of World Art and National Identities.
Curating the musical record - Reuben Brown & Linda Barwick (SCM, University of Sydney)
For over sixty years, archival photos, film footage and recordings of songs of Aboriginal people from western Arnhem Land—the discarded ‘out-takes’ from the work of anthropologists and journalists working in the 1940s and 1950s—were stored in various institutions in America and Australia, separated from the community and culture that helped generate them. Beginning in 2011, University of Sydney PhD student Reuben Brown, with assistance from research collaborators Linda Barwick, Amanda Harris and Martin Thomas, returned these records to Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), one of the communities visited by the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. This presentation draws on the findings of Brown’s PhD thesis, which describes the how community reception of these intangible, fragmentary records allowed them once again to be made tangible; grounded in the time, place and social sphere in which they belong.
For Simpson and Giles’ 1948 recordings of public didjeridu-accompanied song, originally recorded as local colour for an ABC radio documentary about the Expedition, elders and songmen consulted by Brown were able to provide a rich historical and cultural context. Identification of languages, songsets, likely sites of recording, performers and their contemporary descendants, song text translations and their references allowed Brown’s consultants to re-embed these fragmentary documents in the context of ongoing contemporary performance practice at Gunbalanya (also documented by Brown during fieldwork for the thesis). From this analysis, we suggest that the corpus of public genre songs presented for recording by the visitors was carefully chosen and curated by the singers that helped produce them.
Reflecting on the layers of curation underlying and surrounding these archival objects, the presentation will consider implications for contemporary archival practice including repatriation, and suggest that institutional curatorial approaches to archival collections can be enriched by drawing on repatriation experiences to make sense of the historical record.
Reuben Brown is a PhD candidate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music who has worked with Bininj (Aboriginal people from western Arnhem Land) in the communities of Warruwi (Goulburn Island) and Gunbalanya, Northern Territory. His research examines the performance of kun-borrk dance-accompanied songs in contemporary and historical settings and their impact on the social, emotional and cultural lives of people living in western Arnhem Land.
Linda Barwick is a musicologist, specialising in the study of Australian Indigenous and immigrant musics and in the digital humanities (particularly archiving and repatriation of ethnographic field recordings as a site of interaction between researchers and cultural heritage communities). She has studied community music practices through fieldwork in Australia, Italy and the Philippines. Themes of her research include analysis of musical action in place, the language of song, and the aesthetics of cross-cultural musical practice. She also publishes on theoretical issues, including analysis of non-Western music, and research implications of digital technologies
PANEL: Repatriation in the digital age: a panel on use and reuse of images, music and text
Clint Bracknell is a Senior Lecturer for the Division of Architecture and Creative Arts, based at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Arts Music Unit, University of Sydney. His major research focus centres on Aboriginal Australian music and languages, exploring the links between emerging technologies and Indigenous creative futures. A musician, composer and educator, he was nominated for ‘Best Original Score’ in the 2012 Helpmann Awards and has received secondary and tertiary teaching awards. His Nyungar cultural elders from the south coast of Western Australia use the term ‘Wirlomin’ to refer to their clan.
Genevieve Campbell has worked for twenty years as a professional French Horn player. In 2007 she instigated Ngarukuruwala: We sing songs, a collaborative music project between a group of Tiwi strong women and jazz musicians from Sydney. Her professional interest in Tiwi music in the context of contemporary performance and the desire to be part of the rediscovery and preservation of old Tiwi songs led her to complete a PhD at the University of Sydney in 2014.
Sally Treloyn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne, having received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Sydney in 2007. Her current research is focused on developing strategies to support Indigenous stakeholders and organisations in their efforts to sustain musical practices and associated knowledge systems into the future. She currently leads two Linkage projects funded by the Australian Research Council in partnership with peak Aboriginal organisations in the Kimberley. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sydney (PARADISEC: the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) and is Secretary to the Steering Committee of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: http://www.aboriginalartists.com.au/NRP.htm.
About Us | Privacy Policy (ANU) | Contact Us | © 2005 PARADISEC | Last Modified: 26/2/15