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Category Archives: Culture
Video Culture / Museum Culture
A pair of new exhibitions opened this past week at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum. One extends established queries about the nature of objects stored in museums and their relationships to the people they purport to represent. The other makes … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art, Communities, Culture, Film
Tagged Gapuwiyak, Jennifer Deger, Judy Watson, Miyarrka Media, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Yolngu
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Music of the Spinifex Country
A few weeks ago, thanks to my friends Deb and Matt, I had the chance to view Mick Angus’s 2006 film from Marcom Projects, Ooldea. It tells the story of a collaboration between composer Iain Grandage and a group of … Continue reading
Gapuwiyak Calling
Save the date! On Friday, March 14, 2014 a pair of exhibitions opens at the Anthropology Museum at the University of Queensland. Written on the Body is curated by Waanyi artist Judy Watson and Diana Young. But what I’m really … Continue reading
Posted in Art, Communities, Culture, Film
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The Dilemma of “Dreaming”
Christine Nicholls, researcher and curator at Flinders University, recently published a trio of articles on the website The Conversation (whose tagline is “academic rigor, journalistic flair”; I like that) concerning the problematic nature of the terms “the Dreaming” and “the … Continue reading
A Dance with Bangarra
My first reaction when I opened the new volume about Bangarra Dance Theatre, Clan by choreographer Stephen Page and collaborating photographer Greg Barrett (Allen & Unwin, 2013), was surprise at the sheer beauty of what I saw. My second reaction was to … Continue reading
There’s an App for That
I bought my iPad about two and a half years ago, not long before my last trip to Australia. It was the perfect solution to hauling half a dozen cheap paperbacks across the globe and discarding them in a series … Continue reading
Posted in Art, Books, Culture
Tagged Canning Stock Route, Exhibitions, Fiction, Games, iPad, iPhone, Language, National Museum of Australia, Yugambeh
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Bush Medicine
Over the past six months, I’ve been a little surprised and very pleased to have encountered a number of books in which much of the prose has been authored by Aboriginal people (and then well translated into English). The common complaint … Continue reading
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Basket
A few months ago I posted a review of a documentary film, Tjanpi Nyawa (Look at the Grass)!, directed by the ANU’s Christine Keller, which offered a glimpse into the manner in which women from the NPY Lands collect grass (tjanpi) and … Continue reading
Inside and Outside: an essay
Several weeks ago I wrote about a panel discussion at the Toledo Museum of Art in which the topic of restricted knowledge in Aboriginal painting—what Stephen Gilchrist referred to as “registers of knowledge”—created a degree of consternation among some members … Continue reading
The Lake Where Cultures Meet
A desert lake. Paruku. Lake Gregory. This is the place where the ancestral hero, Kiki, came down from the east, a falling star. Landed in the water and created seeds, grapes, bandicoot, and blue-tongued lizard. This is the place where … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Art, Books, Culture
Tagged Ecology, John Carty, Lake Gregory, Paruku
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Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye 