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Seven Thousand Kilometres with the Seven Sisters

Jeremy Eccles
Eyeline 89
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The Sydney Festival in January 2018 had an Indigenous Director and a strong program of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art performances. There was also encouragement to learn an Aboriginal language and a Darug-language song. This, we were told, would ‘reawaken and reforge the songlines of Sydney’.

Oh dear! A pity the Festival’s blurb-writers had not popped up to Canberra, where the National Museum had the show Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, which, amongst other things, was intended to disabuse us of the notion that walking and singing a song makes for a songline; and, more seriously, hoped to undermine the extraordinarily powerful influence of Bruce Chatwin—who popularised the word in his 1987 novel and gave credence to the idea that a songline was basically a Michelin map.

Behind this disruptive intent, the National Museum’s Senior Indigenous Curator, Margo Neale was positively proffering a sea (and earth) change in the way Aboriginal art is presented. Whereas the catchcry amongst institutional curators of late has been ‘It’s contemporary art’, which, by definition, needs no explanation, increasingly there is a demand for meaning. One might look no further than the very serious American collector, Dennis Scholl—who cast aside contemporary trans-Atlantic art a decade ago for the lure of Aboriginal ‘abstraction’. Having just donated two hundred of these works to American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum (New York), he is now recognising that, ‘For these communities, visual arts are a primary means of communication. So that visual language, and the cultural stories being conveyed through the work are an important part of the global conversation’.

Perhaps Australian curators have also read the foolish reviewing of The Australian’s art critic or of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Tjanpi Desert weavers, Seven Sisters are Flying. Photograph Vicki Bosisto.

Tjanpi Desert weavers, Seven Sisters are Flying. Photograph Vicki Bosisto.

Anawari Inpiti Mitchell, Angilyiya Tjapiti Mitchell, Lalla West, Jennifer Nginyaka Mitchell, Eileen Tjayanka Woods, Lesley Laidlaw and Robert Muntantji Woods, Papulankutja Artists, Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015.

Anawari Inpiti Mitchell, Angilyiya Tjapiti Mitchell, Lalla West, Jennifer Nginyaka Mitchell, Eileen Tjayanka Woods, Lesley Laidlaw and Robert Muntantji Woods, Papulankutja Artists, Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015. © The artist / Licensed by Viscopy, 2017. Photograph National Museum of Australia.