Skip to main content

The 30th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award 2013

Jeremy Eccles
Eyeline 80
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

After thirty years of the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs) in Darwin, it could be that their primary national function today is to provoke discussion and analysis rather than simply to collect the finest Indigenous art of the past year in one place. And once again, it is Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian newspaper who has arisen from his Troppo torpor to kick that debate off and over the dead ball line with not one but a series of three challenging articles that lay out his critique of the whole Indigenous art scene, and then conclude that the 2013 NATSIAAs are proof of all he is alleging.

As Rothwell spends much of the rest of the year offering imaginative and usually positive insights into Aboriginal art and culture, a riposte is required.

For there is more than a hint that the editorial parameters of the Murdoch press during the then-election campaign had uncharacteristically permeated Rothwell’s thinking. The core of his case is that a well-funded bureaucratic (and academic) apparatus is swamping the creativity of what he calls ‘traditional’ artists, taking them away from the origins of that art in ceremony and law in order to produce conformist, large-scale art that mimics the non-Indigenous mainstream. Much of this, he claims is the ALP Government’s fault, having imposed Resale Royalty, a Code of Conduct and ludicrous restrictions on investing in art for superannuation funds on the natural flow of the industry, ‘Three years on, the bureaucrats who brought in the (Resale Royalty) scheme find themselves bestriding the twitching corpse of the Aboriginal art market’, he scorches. Phew!

What a lot of twitching corpses I saw in Darwin in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Mavis Ngallametta, Yalgamunken #3. Ochre and charcoal and acrylic on linen. Courtesy the artist and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Mavis Ngallametta, Yalgamunken #3. Ochre and charcoal and acrylic on linen. Courtesy the artist and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Teho Ropeyarn, Apudthama. Vinyl-cut on paper. Courtesy the artists and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Teho Ropeyarn, Apudthama. Vinyl-cut on paper. Courtesy the artists and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.