Weaving Into Country
Ancestorial Teachings and
Aboriginal Sensationalism
10 years ago, I attended Camp Coorong, an “Aboriginal
Camp”, with my rich white school, which involved Aboriginal themed education
from “camp elders”. We participated in walking tours of the Coorong, guides of edible
plants and other bush tucker - including maggot-looking witchetty grubs, and
collected reeds from which we would later weave baskets. My young teenage brain
cared little for learning, immediately fixated on weaving. My basket wasn’t
tight like our teacher’s, but I was overwhelmed with devotion to the craft,
trying to perfect stitches. I left with little more knowledge regarding
indigenous culture than I had before, a conflated ‘single story’ of “Aboriginal-ism”
as depicted through the settler-lens (Adichie, 2009), but I had *learnt*,
rather stolen, a traditional craft. My lacking context, and sensationalised
teaching in this distortion of “Aboriginal” culture rendered it ‘a skeleton
without a soul,’ (Simmons, 2024). My school paid them for was a performance of
“traditional cultural practice”. The commodity was their racial identity as
seen by settler culture whose ‘desired end is to have indigenous product
without indigenous people,’ (Simmons, 2024).
Bradley Dare, my brother, an archaeologist and anthropologist who has spent years working with indigenous communities, gave me insight to an indigenous culture that wasn’t pay-per-view. He said the binary of traditional/modern was a western fabulation, aiding to conflation of all aboriginal people as black, tribalists, dressed in ochre paint, and playing the digeridoo. “Traditional vs modern”, “black vs white”, “us vs them” are binary terms rendered useless in real experience with indigenous communities, not to mention Australia’s diversity in landscape spawning hundreds of distinct languages, cultures and craft practices. There is no succinct united “them” (Dare, 2023). At Camp Coorong I was not learning, nor listening, my school had paid for an acting of these binaries by Aboriginal bodies. We were *cultural tourists*, rather, cultural thieves.
In Dare’s experience, indigenous practice is very much alive, but adapted to post-settler landscapes and industry, i.e., hunting practices may be the same but use guns rather than spears. Post colonisation, modernisation of tools, transportation, and medicine made life easier to lead; a body that didn’t spend everyday hunting, gathering, making, and walking had a much greater life expectancy, and if judging quality of life by quantifiable aspects such as life length, there is no denial of the benefits of some aspects of modernisation/industrialisation had to indigenous communities (Dare, 2023). Though this industrialisation cast a ‘great ochre coloured haze’ over country (Wright, 2023), flattening and sapping the land, followed by the policed dispossession of person from country.
The indigenous body, culture, and birthplace are intrinsically linked, ‘this land is me’, says Barret, removing indigenous person from country is a fate equitable to death, it is a violent mental and physical severing from self, culture, land, practice, understanding, knowledge, and spirituality (Barrett, 2013). The weight of this severing is not something a settler could understand (Tywoniak, 2020). The new land on which indigenous people were placed was constructed surrounding monetary economy, not gift/craft/exchange economy as was known. Land was now a resource, rather than living place, to be extorted for the benefits of person or cooperation. Within this new environment, displaced indigenous people were forced into low-wage slavery and heavily policed by a law that was alien to them, under a state in which indigenous law –which shows respect to country as much as individual - had no standing (Dare, 2023).
To survive within the wage economy, cultural tourism boomed, a great percentage of which is the aboriginal art and craft industry (Cook & Loveday, 1983) (Zeppel, 1998). Art and craft within indigenous practice are different to how craft and art is perceived to a western audience. Indigenous practice is an oral/audible tradition, unlike a sight/visual-centric western culture, making ‘in indigenous culture is not actually about manufacturing something, it's telling a story.’ (Dare, 2023). The land is remembered through stories instead of maps, that might later be translated into artworks, that depict the story and in turn, the land (See figure1, 2 & 5).
f.1 Pakura (2013) collaborative painting by artists of spinifex people
Via British Museum
f.2 ‘Pakura’ Display Plaque at British Museum (2023)
Every basket woven, tree carved, boomerang painted, contains a story, that is what the object really is. As Aboriginal hierarchy is structured around retaining knowledge, Dare said, many stories are gatekept; some only to be heard once a member has ‘graduated’ to higher level in the community. This gatekeeping practice has been a key part of the maintenance of indigenous culture through the transition from art-for-practice to art-for-settler’s-money. Art produced for mass consumption tell the sort of stories you would tell a ‘very, very young child’, the akin to nursery rhymes, they are ‘okay to tell anyone’. The indigenous mass-produced art economy thus contains a massive inside joke, that ‘the consuming world is being almost patronised,’ (Dare, 2023).
Art and craft practices manifest indigenous culture, pre colonisation, industrialisation, and modernisation, ‘you had to make everything, that meant literally everything you made was a story. So, the cultural connection was much deeper because … it was unavoidable in everything you did,’ (Dare, 2023). Dare said this past is longed for, but colonisation was non-consensual. Adaptation to modernised, mass-produced materials was accommodated, often eventually finding their place in standard cultural practices. Within the communities he’d visited, all objects are considered *natural* as they come from country, and once their function is reached, their remnants should return to country (Dare, 2023). I asked Dare if he’d witnessed an underlying ecology within the indigenous communities he’d spent time with, to which he said no. Everyone, and every culture can be wasteful, and connection to country does not suspend this. Aboriginal faith is with country, country’s ability to regenerate, overcome, grow, and change, as well as their great ancestral lines and knowledge which had seen their people survive for millennia (Wright, 2023, p.1-8).
Anything that comes from country should return to country, whether that be biodegradable or non-biodegradable materials. “Aboriginal” does not equate to “ecological”, especially in country that has been flattened by colonialism, whose infrastructure rarely supports humans who have not assimilated into settler culture, and where the mass of available materials through which to engage with traditional practice are not gathered from country directly, but rather made immediately available through the processed, plasticised mechanisms of industrialisation (Dare, 2023). All material still from country (or Gaia), inherently natural in their birth from the land, but cruel to this land in return and extraction.
Note Dare’s recounts are one settler’s perspective from time spent in various communities throughout Australia and Melanesia on anthropology expeditions organised by local people. His insight into various indigenous customs is contextually removed, filtered through his biases, and reduced by tendency for information to be simplified in language and metaphor a settler mind can understand.
At the British Museum I looked for baskets like those I remember weaving. The baskets, rendered “artefacts”, sat in a glass case dedicated to the conflation aboriginal cultures. The placard reads ‘weaving ancestral knowledge … ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants’, and their knowledge maintained and passed down through the properties of plants and action of traditional crafting (Living and Dying, 2023). The placard preaches the making of baskets as ‘a weaving of self with country’, an active acknowledgement of interconnected lifecycles outside of life-death, person-nature, culture-material binaries. That ancestorial blood remains in these reads, between fingertips, embedded within the craft, they continue to teach from beyond flesh, and the act of weaving is praise to ancient knowledge, the abundant gifts from country (Living and Dying, 2023). Yet the “artefacts” were lifeless, incapable of decay, nor teaching. They were rendered objects, incapable of being heard through the confines of thick glass. They’d died in their dispossession from purpose, embalmed, placed in a permanent open casket, for aliens to glance at in passing. The same could be said for those woven for us, in “cultural performance”, whose soul was lost in a translation to English, and intention lost in racialised tourism.
f.3 Jug (2011) Tjunkiya Tapa f.4 Basket (2010) Jenny Mye
f.5,6 Sculpture of a camp dog (2011) Lena Yarinkura
Bradley Dare, my brother, an archaeologist and anthropologist who has spent years working with indigenous communities, gave me insight to an indigenous culture that wasn’t pay-per-view. He said the binary of traditional/modern was a western fabulation, aiding to conflation of all aboriginal people as black, tribalists, dressed in ochre paint, and playing the digeridoo. “Traditional vs modern”, “black vs white”, “us vs them” are binary terms rendered useless in real experience with indigenous communities, not to mention Australia’s diversity in landscape spawning hundreds of distinct languages, cultures and craft practices. There is no succinct united “them” (Dare, 2023). At Camp Coorong I was not learning, nor listening, my school had paid for an acting of these binaries by Aboriginal bodies. We were *cultural tourists*, rather, cultural thieves.
In Dare’s experience, indigenous practice is very much alive, but adapted to post-settler landscapes and industry, i.e., hunting practices may be the same but use guns rather than spears. Post colonisation, modernisation of tools, transportation, and medicine made life easier to lead; a body that didn’t spend everyday hunting, gathering, making, and walking had a much greater life expectancy, and if judging quality of life by quantifiable aspects such as life length, there is no denial of the benefits of some aspects of modernisation/industrialisation had to indigenous communities (Dare, 2023). Though this industrialisation cast a ‘great ochre coloured haze’ over country (Wright, 2023), flattening and sapping the land, followed by the policed dispossession of person from country.
The indigenous body, culture, and birthplace are intrinsically linked, ‘this land is me’, says Barret, removing indigenous person from country is a fate equitable to death, it is a violent mental and physical severing from self, culture, land, practice, understanding, knowledge, and spirituality (Barrett, 2013). The weight of this severing is not something a settler could understand (Tywoniak, 2020). The new land on which indigenous people were placed was constructed surrounding monetary economy, not gift/craft/exchange economy as was known. Land was now a resource, rather than living place, to be extorted for the benefits of person or cooperation. Within this new environment, displaced indigenous people were forced into low-wage slavery and heavily policed by a law that was alien to them, under a state in which indigenous law –which shows respect to country as much as individual - had no standing (Dare, 2023).
To survive within the wage economy, cultural tourism boomed, a great percentage of which is the aboriginal art and craft industry (Cook & Loveday, 1983) (Zeppel, 1998). Art and craft within indigenous practice are different to how craft and art is perceived to a western audience. Indigenous practice is an oral/audible tradition, unlike a sight/visual-centric western culture, making ‘in indigenous culture is not actually about manufacturing something, it's telling a story.’ (Dare, 2023). The land is remembered through stories instead of maps, that might later be translated into artworks, that depict the story and in turn, the land (See figure1, 2 & 5).
f.1 Pakura (2013) collaborative painting by artists of spinifex people
Via British Museum
f.2 ‘Pakura’ Display Plaque at British Museum (2023)
Every basket woven, tree carved, boomerang painted, contains a story, that is what the object really is. As Aboriginal hierarchy is structured around retaining knowledge, Dare said, many stories are gatekept; some only to be heard once a member has ‘graduated’ to higher level in the community. This gatekeeping practice has been a key part of the maintenance of indigenous culture through the transition from art-for-practice to art-for-settler’s-money. Art produced for mass consumption tell the sort of stories you would tell a ‘very, very young child’, the akin to nursery rhymes, they are ‘okay to tell anyone’. The indigenous mass-produced art economy thus contains a massive inside joke, that ‘the consuming world is being almost patronised,’ (Dare, 2023).
Art and craft practices manifest indigenous culture, pre colonisation, industrialisation, and modernisation, ‘you had to make everything, that meant literally everything you made was a story. So, the cultural connection was much deeper because … it was unavoidable in everything you did,’ (Dare, 2023). Dare said this past is longed for, but colonisation was non-consensual. Adaptation to modernised, mass-produced materials was accommodated, often eventually finding their place in standard cultural practices. Within the communities he’d visited, all objects are considered *natural* as they come from country, and once their function is reached, their remnants should return to country (Dare, 2023). I asked Dare if he’d witnessed an underlying ecology within the indigenous communities he’d spent time with, to which he said no. Everyone, and every culture can be wasteful, and connection to country does not suspend this. Aboriginal faith is with country, country’s ability to regenerate, overcome, grow, and change, as well as their great ancestral lines and knowledge which had seen their people survive for millennia (Wright, 2023, p.1-8).
Anything that comes from country should return to country, whether that be biodegradable or non-biodegradable materials. “Aboriginal” does not equate to “ecological”, especially in country that has been flattened by colonialism, whose infrastructure rarely supports humans who have not assimilated into settler culture, and where the mass of available materials through which to engage with traditional practice are not gathered from country directly, but rather made immediately available through the processed, plasticised mechanisms of industrialisation (Dare, 2023). All material still from country (or Gaia), inherently natural in their birth from the land, but cruel to this land in return and extraction.
Note Dare’s recounts are one settler’s perspective from time spent in various communities throughout Australia and Melanesia on anthropology expeditions organised by local people. His insight into various indigenous customs is contextually removed, filtered through his biases, and reduced by tendency for information to be simplified in language and metaphor a settler mind can understand.
At the British Museum I looked for baskets like those I remember weaving. The baskets, rendered “artefacts”, sat in a glass case dedicated to the conflation aboriginal cultures. The placard reads ‘weaving ancestral knowledge … ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants’, and their knowledge maintained and passed down through the properties of plants and action of traditional crafting (Living and Dying, 2023). The placard preaches the making of baskets as ‘a weaving of self with country’, an active acknowledgement of interconnected lifecycles outside of life-death, person-nature, culture-material binaries. That ancestorial blood remains in these reads, between fingertips, embedded within the craft, they continue to teach from beyond flesh, and the act of weaving is praise to ancient knowledge, the abundant gifts from country (Living and Dying, 2023). Yet the “artefacts” were lifeless, incapable of decay, nor teaching. They were rendered objects, incapable of being heard through the confines of thick glass. They’d died in their dispossession from purpose, embalmed, placed in a permanent open casket, for aliens to glance at in passing. The same could be said for those woven for us, in “cultural performance”, whose soul was lost in a translation to English, and intention lost in racialised tourism.
f.3 Jug (2011) Tjunkiya Tapa f.4 Basket (2010) Jenny Mye
f.5,6 Sculpture of a camp dog (2011) Lena Yarinkura