Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery

For one of our tutorials we were asked to go to the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery in Adelaide and look at a variety of different exhibitions and pieces and reflect on them. We were given guiding questions and were asked to think about the answers to them.

1) The museum is layered with stories. Anthropologists collect examples of material culture, take photographs, shoot movies and ask informants to tell them about their cultures and ways of life. Together these are pieced together to tell another story from the anthropologists’ perspective. Curators and exhibition designers later use these artefacts and stories to construct their own narratives.

Unlike the stories told by Aboriginal informants, the stories of anthropologists and museum curators are usually left unspoken. 

What do you think these stories are? 

How does the exhibition make you feel?

Imagine you are asked to tell stories about your culture and way of life to accompany a display of your everyday objects: tools, toys, clothes, adornments.

By collecting the artefacts and art of the Indigenous people, anthropologists almost seem to be taking away from the significance of their meaning. Taking things out of context completely changes their importance and by trying to educate people about this culture, they're actually teaching us half-truths. The things we briefly look over have such a high importance to so many people, it's just like judging a book by it's cover. What looks like mere sticks to us, after reading the information alongside them, you discover that they're really 'storytelling sticks', which to some Indigenous person would be memories. 

In western culture we create baby books, or collect and save items given to us by friends and families, to put it in context of cultural differences, it would be like someone taking a collection of photographs of us and putting them on display in a museum to educate people. I honestly don't think anyone has the right to take things of value away from the people, unless of course, the people made it especially for the museum as a means to educate, which I very much so doubt is the case.

2) Museums and archives tend to freeze life in its tracks. But the objects they contain can still speak to us. Examine the Yuendumu School doors closely. They had a past life too. They opened and closed, people entered and exited through them. The decision to paint them with these designs was revolutionary. Now, off their hinges and on a gallery wall, they tell other stories. What are they?

I spent a lot of time looking at this question before I went to the gallery and couldn't quite figure out what we could possibly expected to write about these doors. Upon seeing them it was quite clear that they weren't the ordinary doors I was expecting, but a collection of doors that had been painted with detailed stories in a huge range of colours and seeing them in a row on the wall took my breath away.

"If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of al the doors one would like to reopen, one would have to tell a story of one's entire life"  Gaston Bachelard, 1958

I came across this quote and it seemed to summarise everything I was thinking about whilst looking at the doors. These doors were placed all throughout a school so even just thinking about how many children would have run through the doors and what their lives could possibly have been like and how different it would have been from our school doors was enough to keep you pondering for hours at a time. I can just imagine what it would have been like to have these stories painted on the doors and to walk through them and to remember, what I assume were lessons, that were told through images. At my old school in Hong Kong we were also able to paint murals which were hung up around the school to add some colour and visual interest, but in comparison they seem rather pathetic. Ours were copies we had done of famous art pieces and not stories that would relate to us in some way.

Putting these doors in a museum however, really seemed to give them a rather eery mood. Knowing that these doors once hung in a school and now they were just hung in a row in a museum was actually rather saddening. Taking something like this out of its context, placed throughout a school, and putting them merely in a row at a museum for people to examine, took away a lot of the meaning for me.

3) Find five other objects or displays that most capture your interest. What attracted you to them? What do they say to you?

The first thing I came across that caught my eye was a 'Kurlama Ceremonial Cap' which was made from paper bark and feathers. The reason I believe this really caught my eye was that it looked very different to the type of hats we tend to wear in our culture. When I attempted to draw the item in my sketchbook so that I'd remember what it looked like, it ended up looking like a flower in a vase. Though this probably says more about my drawing than about the object, the naturalistic element that combined the shapes and our culture really stood out to me.

Shields (image from Museum of Vic)

The next items I looked at were a row of shields. Apparently they were used for more than self defence because they actually also proclaimed the owner's identity. They contained this totemic design which differed amongst different regions but all carried the same essential meaning or message. After reading this information I knew this was going to be one of my five before I even looked around the rest of the museum. It intrigued me to think that they could show their identity through a few shapes or messages on a shield. I couldn't even start to debate what I would put on my shield that would summarise even part of who I am, what I do or what I would like to achieve...

Bark Bucket (image from Museum of WA)

Unlike the shields, the bark buckets didn't seem to have a continuity amongst them. They all had different abstract shapes etc on them and were highly abstract. I read the information next to them and saw that the design refers to the complex relationships between the Tiwi and the dreaming ancestors. In our culture the closest we come to even thinking about our 'dreams' (though I doubt that's what dreaming ancestors are), is that some people have a dream journal. I can't even imagine people trying to put their dreams on buckets in a variety of abstract shapes. The simplicity of their communication is rather beautiful.