What the cat dragged in

Update 1 April 2014 – Ngintaka exhibition off, then on again, and “OMG, I’ve turned into ‘Gym Bore’/‘Kidder’”

Diana James, in a terse reply to Nicolas Rothwell, defends the thorough consultation processes of the Ngintaka “Project Partners”.  But Rothwell  had already conceded that there was an exhaustive such process over recent years – and for all this, for a handful of dissidents at least, still not enough; or perhaps too much.  More interestingly, James details a chain of events, going back four decades, to assert the openness of the Ngintaka  story in general; or in industry-speak, its provenance.

Just as Subhash Kapoor had to invent pre-1972 ex-India provenance for his looted antiquities (from that year, a blanket export ban was imposed by the Indian state), James is aware that there is a time-frame into which her “openness” provenance must not cross.  While the date here is not hard and fast, plainly she can’t go back to the problematic 1948 book.  Neatly, she fixes 1974 as the earliest date in the chain of “good” title – a year by which the Bad Old Days of cultural expropriation by anthropologists and others were implicitly over, and a nascent fine-art industry in Central Australia was giving Indigenous artist-custodians the power and finesse to disclose their stories to whatever degree they chose.   From her 1974 jump-start however, James seems to have to clutch at straws:

This version of the [Ngintaka] story has been used by Anangu to document their artworks in gallery exhibitions since 1974. The story and song have been taught at the [sic] Angatja in the Mann Ranges to tourists and school children since 1988 and is still taught today to Indigenous and non-indigenous children. The Angatja experience is championed as a flagship of reconciliation by Catholic Schools who include the trip in their Leadership for Reconciliation programme.

Thus, many people, mainly schoolchildren, have already seen and heard the story; indeed, it is something of a set-piece.  This should not be taken to mean that the cultural content is relatively trite, although the SA Museum publicity does emphasise that the exhibition is intended primarily for children.  The bigger problem here is the Project Partners’ seemingly reckless presumption of scalability – that a remote community’s in-situ “experience” can be respectfully and meaningfully recreated in a prestigious big-city venue.  The acute danger, of course, is that extra “sizzle” will be needed in the greatly-enlarged version, sizzle of which the SA Museum has plenty in its vaults, including a large number of secret-sacred objects, photos and films that came to it via the “amateur anthropologist”.   

Rothwell’s article made it clear that the SA Museum’s role in the exhibition was mainly as a room for hire, so perhaps there is some consolation in this fact.  Nonetheless, the fact that it is Rothwell, rather than James, making it, speaks volumes.  As do these strong words from a lawyer for the pro-exhibition faction, referring to an unsuccessful last-minute legal challenge# to the exhibition going ahead:

“SA Museum has been accused of ‘caving in’ to the demands of the tribal elders by Graham Harbord, for Johnston Withers lawyers representing Ananguku Arts. Mr Harbord said SA Museum should not even be involved in the dispute”.

-          Tim Lloyd, “SA Museum decides to proceed with opening of Ngintaka dreaming exhibition despite legal threat from some tribal elders”, Advertiser 28 March 2014, 4:35pm

Ah, “caving in” – an English figure of speech that may, I suspect, have an unfortunate (if unintended) set of other meanings in the translation.  But that’s white Australia’s trouble with keeping Indigenous secrets; we feel trapped and suffocated inside that black box.    

Meanwhile, onto Bruce Chatwin’s provenance.   Re-reading Songlines after posting the above (and about 26 years after I first read it), my mind followed a quite different track from my late 1980s self (who would have been on “team Bruce”, all the way). The character of ‘Gym Bore’, or ‘Kidder’ – who Chatwin apparently based on the real-life Phillip Toyne – stood out, and for reasons opposite to the petty-villain role he plays in Chatwin’s book. 

But first, let’s start with Kidder’s rap-sheet:  he’s a rich young man, originally from Sydney – rich enough to have his own plane, the use of which as an (presumably) unpaid taxi to and from remote communities is apparently the only reason that Kidder is tolerated (by white or black) in his job in the Aboriginal land-rights industry.  Kidder’s crass departure from a party at a private house in far south-eastern Alice Springs in February 1983 – in an over-large and new 4WD, shining harsh headlights over all and sundry – is possibly the earliest confirmed appearance of the Yuppie Wanker in a 4WD (in 1983, a species far from the plague proportions they were later to assume).  It may help here to know that Chatwin and “Arkady” had walked the 5km or so from central Alice Springs to the party house, almost in eerie anticipatory negation of Kidder by their most un-Kidder like (and un-Alice in general also, I would suggest) behaviour. 

Chatwin’s basis for calling Kidder a “Gym Bore” is similarly loaded; nowhere in the book does Kidder talk or behave like a vain or body-obsessed man, but we definitely know that any deliberate act of fitness or muscle-building is Not Something That Bruce Would Do.  Chatwin admits to going for a pre-breakfast jog in  Alice Springs once – but he takes care to inform us that this was only because his motel did not start serving breakfast until 8am.  Personally, I would not have forever after condemned Chatwin as “Runner Bore” on the basis of a single instance of a jog, however egregious, but Chatwin has much higher standards than me, obviously.  Such high standards, in fact, that his unnamed motel’s breakfast start time of 8am would make it completely unsuitable for most tourists doing bus-trips out of town (in my experience, which albeit is in recent years and not c.1983, almost all bus-tours will be on the road by 8am).  But no doubt having a breakfast without the clamouring tourist hordes would have been all the better for Bruce’s erudite and considered notebook jottings.  That morning, as Chatwin tucked into his post-jog repast, he may well have thought about how fortunate he was to be naturally lithe – and “Arkady” naturally hunky – in contrast to that horrid, artificially-sculpted colonial, Kidder.  And thus been inspired to write this note for himself:  “Important:  explain that my jog was only because of compulsory late breakfast, and that I normally spend my mornings as languid as Sebastian Flyte”.

Early in the narrative, “Arkady” sums up Kidder as “bad news”.  Unusually for a romanticised “faction” book, there is no later big pay-off to this standard plot device – a single instance of being a Yuppie Wanker in a 4WD is as bad as Kidder ever gets to be.  Other than Kidder’s (possibly drunken) words about Aboriginal intellectual property, that is.  These offend Chatwin to the core, for some genuinely strange reason – they are indeed left-field, and may be impossible to achieve in practice, but their idealism cannot be faulted, I would have thought.  So why does Chatwin so despise Kidder’s idealism, or was it really just what he (Kidder) was wearing (grey marle) that infected his whole persona?

Anyway, I’m going to put up my hand to get me some of Chatwin’s deepest contempt myself, by agreeing with Kidder’s ideas about Aboriginal intellectual property (this may also mean disowning my late 1980s self, but if the grey marle fits . . . ).  The entire corpus of presumptively stolen Aboriginal intellectual property in non-Aboriginal hands, on my guesstimate, could be bought back for a few million dollars (or even better, just donated).  This is small bikkies in comparison to land rights.  This figure does not include physical tjuringas, etc, the repatriation of which are often – for good reason – dealt with under a loose heading of intellectual property.  But there are also meaty issues of proper custodianship to do with any physical property, and, in deference to Chatwin, I prefer to keep the issue here naturally lithe.

Chatwin’s provenance for his best-selling “Central Australian Anthropology for Dummies” is difficult to fault, as befits a man who previously worked in the high-end art trade.  Most of his insights come second-hand, from impeccably credentialled whites like “Arkady”; thus side-stepping the who, why, and for how much issues of the supply of the original story.  Chatwin is no pre-1970s anthropologist, greedily vacuuming up content from the source, and making only token payment for this.  He airily, and in 2014 presciently, takes his content from the “cloud”, and not the cave.        

Further update 2 April 2014

It turns out that earlier media reports that the Ngintaka exhibition opened for business as usual on Friday 28 March were incorrect (or at least my reading of them was).  In fact, due to an injunction, the exhibition opened on a partially-closed basis.  Most of this injunction was lifted yesterday, but “two videos, featuring song and dance” remain off-display, for now.  See Mark Schliebs, “Aboriginal Exhibition to Go Ahead”, Australian, 2 April 2014.

My guess is that these two "videos" are pre-1970s film footage, possibly taken by that ubiquitous “amateur anthropologist”.  The legal proceedings are ongoing, it seems: “Arguments over the consultation process will continue in the Supreme Court tomorrow” (ibid).