Art for money's sake : the art and craft enterprises on Bathurst Island

Abstract

One of the recurrent themes in Aboriginal policy over the years has been the need to promote Aboriginal self-sufficiency by encouraging avenues of productive activity. Particularly for those groups living in areas that are geographically, socially, economically and politically remote from centres of employment and marketing, the production of art and craft has been seen as one of the few viable enterprises available. One of the main attractions of this activity is that it draws upon traditional practices and skills, which because of their unique have some economic negotiability in the wider Australian community. Exactly how successful such art and craft enterprise has been in fulfilling the desired policy of economic self-sufficiently will be examined in this thesis with particular reference to the art and craft enterprises on Bathurst Island. Here, as in other Aboriginal communities throughout the Northern Territory, the people express themselves through their distinctive artistic products; products which captured the interest of a number of early visitors to the Territory. This resulted in some early collections of material culture being acquired for museums and private interests. However, as it was believed in the early part of the C20th that Aborigines were on the decline, there was no government policy directed towards their economic development. It wsas rather on the missions that commercialized art and craft was fostered to encourage the economic independence of the Aborigines as well as to raise money for the missions (Morphy 1983 : 38) As early as 1953 the Methodists at Yirrkala and Milingimbio and the Church Missionary society missionaries at Oenpelli and Groote Eylandt were encouraging their artists to produce bark paintings and other artifacts for sale (Williams 1976, Carroll 1983). This occurred at their other missions in Arnhem Land also at Elcho and Goulburn Islands and at Roper River and Numbulwah. In Central Australia other missions followed suit, with the Lutherans at Hermannsburg fostering tourist style artifacts and carvings and then watercolour painting for sale in the 1940’s. At Ernabella, just over the NT border in SA, the Presbyterians encouraged artefact carving and introduced wool weaving as a cottage industry in 1948 (Tamura 1985). Show more