Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how museums contexualise Aboriginal artwork through gallery text, and how they articulate issues around landscape, environmental responsibility and race relations.

Paper long abstract:

Australian Aboriginal painting came to prominence in the 1980s and was quickly celebrated and became widely collected, partly because it used western art practice to represent the Aboriginal spiritual knowledge of 'Dreamtime/Dreamings' (Myers,2002; Caruna,2012). Australian Aboriginal art is unusual because it is held by ethnographic museums and contemporary art museums. Similar language is often used to describe work in both contexts, emphasising sacred knowledge and traditions and placing the art as part of the relationship between indigenous people, their ancestors and the land (Andrews,2018; Tavendale,2019).

The catastrophic climate emergency in Australia, and heightened debates about deforestation and mining, have involved cultural and heritage organisations in discussions about environmental responsibility. However, traditional museums often present aboriginal art in a manner suggesting that the relationship with the land is primarily historical or mythological when aboriginal artwork also portrays a continuing, contemporary relationship with the land—including traditional land management methods such as controlled burning (Gosford,2015). Work can also allude to white Australian destruction of landscape, dispossession, encroachment on native settlements and acts of racism (Myers,2013).

This paper considers how museums contexualise Aboriginal artwork through gallery text, and how they articulate issues around landscape and race relations. It questions the language that museum displays employ to distance the work from the contemporary issues. This language also tends to diminish the complex spirituality expressed by the paintings, partly because Western languages do not have the vocabulary or cultural access to translate the richness of meaning.