Obsolete? Artist, Object, Small Museum and historical redress

Indigenous material objects in Kandos Museum are tellingly scant: there are none. Therefore, contemporary contexts and issues are presented under the matter-of-fact theme ‘Kandos Indigenous communities’. The ‘theme’ began with Djon Mundine’s Gibir – Yinaa (A Man – A Woman), a mural on the external wall of the Kandos Museum created in 2015 with descendants of the last full-blood members of the local Dabee tribe of the Wiradjuri People: Jimmy Lambert (c1820–1900) and Peggy Lambert (c1820–1884). More recently, the Wiradjuri Mudgee-Dabee Stories Project and Dabee-Mudgee Stories Traveling Exhibition (Kandos Museum, July 2017) contributed to the theme.

As Aleshia Lonsdale states: “Aboriginal memory and the intangible are ignored, there is no representation of history through time to represent first contact, frontier wars, the stolen generation or other significant issues which are a part of our history through time. There is a need for Aboriginal people to gain control of the narrative and recontextualise their own histories within these collections, to reclaim connection to these objects and back to country for the benefit of all Australians to know the true history of this country. It is not the museum objects, their technology or their histories which I consider to be obsolete but rather the way in which it is presented to the public.”

To assist the creative research by artists and local historians as is organically happening in some small museums and regional art galleries, eminent historian Lyndall Ryan recently launched the Map of frontier massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872 as a significant step and focus on the recognition of the periods of violence in Australia’s history. (See link below.) The map over turns any assumptions that were made for generations that this land wasn’t fought for by the first peoples.

Volunteers in small museums are quietly giving voice to the power of images and objects to tell significant truths of a brutal past. They believe that it is time to correct the errors, call out the murderers and take the final proud steps through reconciliation. The twenty-first century’s most popular museum exhibition is Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects at the British Museum, billed as ‘an exploration of past civilizations as a kaleidoscope of shifting yet interconnected objects’. Obsolete? Artist, Object, Small Museum offers a small contemporary companion exhibition that in brokering and renegotiating relationships heralds an avant-garde of small museums.

About the artists

Nicole Barakat: is a contemporary artist whose practice has been influenced by workshops in communities such as the Pioneer Women’s Hut and Quilt Museum, with Minto public housing tenants, and the collaborative Shadow Places with the Narrandera Textiles Group (for the Sydney Design Festival at MAAS in 2016). Of her work ‘Mediation (Decolonisation)’ made in situ in Kandos Museum for Cementa15, the artist says these reworked embroideries are, “a metaphor for unlearning her colonial education and the need for active listening and relearning.” She proposes an in situ live work, de-threading a collection of Australian souvenir tea-towels. See: Nicole Barakat, Shadow Places with the Narrandera Textiles Group (for the Sydney Design Festival at MAAS in 2016 at https://www.cadfactory.com.au/shadow-places

Aleshia Lonsdale (Tirikee): is a Wiradjuri woman from central west NSW with connections to the Wonnarua and Worimi people. Aleshia Lonsdale began as primarily a painter and weaver and has since expanded her practice to incorporate sculptural and installation work. She fuses traditional and contemporary styles to tell stories about the not- too-distant past, especially the legacy of stolen identity as these Stolen Generations traumas continue to play out for her extended family. In 2015 Aleshia Lonsdale won the UNSW prize at the Parliament House Art Awards and has been prominent in groundbreaking exhibitions Left Field (Dubbo and Alaska Projects Sydney, curated by Jason Wing). See Aleshia Lonsdale http://www.aleshialonsdale.com/about

Fiona MacDonald: is an artist who is the honorary curator of Kandos Museum. Fiona MacDonald has form with taking aesthetic liberties with archives and collections. Her Cyclopaedia, a series of collages of the extensive collection assembled by Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay at Elizabeth Bay House, was the first contemporary exhibition in this historic house. MacDonald has continued on her archive-specific pathway interweaving stories about power relations: communities, dispersals, strikes and struggles. Fiona MacDonald http://www.fiona-macdonald.net/

Kandos Museum: was resurrected after the local council moved to shut down the museum in 2013, two years after the cement works closed. Today volunteers work on collection documentation, archives, digitisation and conservation — material things that may increase in value or need to be discarded. They hope to build a new traffic in information and images and a new narrative for a small town as a ‘post-industrial’ interdisciplinary site. At Kandos Museum http://www.kandosmuseum.org.au/

Cementa: The museum’s companion art endeavor is the biennial Cementa exhibition, an event that plays with the fact that the curators of big biennales often overlook the art world’s inequalities and rarely select customary or grassroots/local art forms. At http://cementa.com.au/

About the speakers

Matt Poll is Assistant Curator, Indigenous Museum Collections and Repatriation Program, Macleay Museum, Sydney University where he presented No Stone Unturned — Aboriginal Scientific Knowledge in 2015.

Lyndall Ryan is Conjoint Professor of History in the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle. Her current  research focuses on frontier violence across  the British Empire. Her books include Tasmanian Aborigines A History since 1803 (first published in 1981 and reprinted in 1996 and swept into a national election campaign and the politically charged History Wars) and Theatres of Violence edited with Philip G. Dwyer (2012).  On 5 July 2017 she published the first stage of the online Map of colonial frontier massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872.

Lyndall Ryan became an academic in 1977 after working with the first Sydney Women’s Liberation Group. As an academic she and has held positions in Australian Studies and Women’s Studies at Griffith and Flinders Universities and in Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle. As a feminist she was a founding collective member of feminist publications ‘Mejane’ 1971, ‘Refractory Girl’, 1972 and Leichhardt Women’s Heath Centre.

Links

This is brilliant. Here is Ceridwen Dovey’s article in the New Yorker on the work done by artist Judy Watson and historian Lyndall Ryan to map Australian frontier massacres. The article is now up online at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres

Interviews with Lyndall Ryan and Aleshia Lonsdale took place after Lyndall’s presentation for the exhibition Obsolete? Artist, Object, Small Museum. Nicole Barakat, Aleshia Lonsdale and Fiona MacDonald. The exhibition and speakers are touring to Western Plains Cultural Centre in Dubbo and Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, mid-2018.

References

Neil MacGregor, The History of the World in 100 Objects, 2012, London.
Museums Change Lives, The Museum Association’s Vision of the Impact of Museums, 2013, London. Accessed: http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-change-lives
Djon Mundine, ‘On 21 years of Aboriginal art’, Radio National, AWAYE!, 13 August 2013 accessed at www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/djon-mundine-21-years-of- aboriginal-art/4881588

Raymond Evans and Robert Orsted: (2014). ‘I Cannot Say the Numbers that Were Killed’: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier. This work shows how high were the figures for Qld. After 1860 Qld apparently outstripped other locations in deaths because changes in repeater rifles, changed frontier ideology towards ‘natives’ and reduced military oversight so free-for-all for colonists.

Ruth B Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 2011, Montreal: McGill-Queens’s University Press.
Matt Poll, ‘Arts and Aboriginal Australia: De-colonisation or Reconciliation?’ Sydney Ideas, Sydney University, June 2017 http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2017/reconciliation_week_arts_aboriginal_australia_forum.shtml

Matt Poll, No Stone Unturned — Aboriginal Scientific Knowledge, Macleay Museum, Sydney University, 2015, At https://medium.com/@mattpoll2/no-stone-unturned-182b99cbfc05 and https://sydneyscience.com.au/2015/event/no-stone-unturned-aboriginal-scientific-knowledge-in-an-aboriginal-landscape/ and > Download as pdf

Lyndall Ryan, Massacre Map, 2017. New online map shows massacres of Aboriginal people during the Frontier Wars. The tool records the massacre site locations, details of the massacres and sources corroborating evidence of more than 150 of the massacres. Developed by Newcastle University historian Conjoint Professor Lyndall Ryan. The map is available at https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres

Matt Poll, Written in Stone, 2016, exhibition catalogue, Macleay Museum, Sydney University. > Download as pdf

Ben Quilty, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 August 2017, http://www.smh.com.au/comment/its-time-we-acknowledged-our-colonial-terrorism-20170827-gy53b1.html

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