As a first time visitor to the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) I was taken right back to one of the great Aboriginal Cultural Foundation dance festivals on Groote Eyelandt, which fate had sent me to back in 1985. This prompt was stimulated by a comment about CIAF from an unnamed Yidinji Traditional Owner quoted in the Fair’s 2010 Annual Report, ‘[The Fair is] like a corroboree and bora ground—we all come together … to practice our culture on this country, and we are also exposing our culture to other communities’.
In 1985, I had seen cultures from Cape York to Broome and from the Tiwi Islands to Uluru showing off their ceremonies to each other—in awe of the strong Pitjantjatjara women mocking their Borroloola counterparts’ love magic—but most of all, ensuring that their offspring became aware that the culture in all its complexity really existed. So, in Cairns in 2011, a powerful moment for me was the opening ceremony where Seith Fourmile, probably the Traditional Owner quoted above, had set a bunch of Yidinji kids dancing while he chanted with an ineffable look of pride on his face.
The difference between the two experiences was that, unlike remote Groote, tourist-town Cairns is as non-indigenous as they come. But both the local culture and the more remote cultures from the Cape and the Torres Strait Islands (TSI) seem to be able to maintain their connectedness to ancient traditions and many of their languages in the face of so many distractions. This was clearly seen in the Fair and surrounding events.
Take Badu Islander, Alick Tipoti’s new exhibition of Sorcerers’ Masks—transformed into art by their individuality, their production from fibreglass rather