by Matt Poll
Image: Djon Mundine OAM.
The easiest way I could describe the Ambassadors exhibition is that I am using the protocols of an acknowledgement of country as a framework for engaging with both the collection objects and the people who generously gave their time to work with me throughout this new exhibition’s development at the Chau Chak Wing Museum.
The Gadigal welcome to country ‘Ngyini ngalawangun mari budjari Gadigal nurada’ (We meet together on the very beautiful Gadigal Country) is the foundation of the Ambassadors network of display cases and is a codex of singular objects representing Aboriginal nations that were involved in the research and consultation of the Ambassadors exhibition. The exhibitions Gululu dhuwala djalkiri: welcome to the Yolŋu foundations co-curated with Rebecca Conway and Ambassadors, curated by myself are concrete examples of repositioning the sometimes impenetrable story of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island past as it has been represented in museum collections previously.
Many aspects of the interpretation of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island past, as it was promoted in the 20th century in museums and art galleries, were often seen by community members as an inauthentic cultural ‘interpretation’ that was entirely authored by non-Indigenous people. Both these exhibitions are demonstrations of the Aboriginal social and cultural spaces of autonomy that are required to maintain protocols, lore, and cultural identities in modern Australia.
Ambassadors as an exhibition comprises 100 objects on behalf of the nations of 25 different language groups across eight different display cases. The exhibition spaces were co-designed with remote art centres which are often the ‘front door’ to remote Aboriginal communities; they are the spaces where communities choose how, when, and where it is and where it isn’t appropriate to communicate their local history, stories and lore to the outside world. Respectful presentation of the knowledges that communities have preserved over thousands of years provide important opportunities to empower all community members.
The final selection of objects represented in each of the Ambassadors are selections that encompass hundreds of conversations that these museum objects have sparked over many decades, conversations that have shaped the present form of the collection and its disparate and overlapping collection histories. Ambassadors comprises objects from the original Macleay bequest in 1891, such as some bark drawings from the Iwaidja people that were presented to the Linnaean Society of New South Wales as evidence of the aesthetics of the northern parts of Australia. They are today exhibited in Ambassadors as the start of a conversation with descendants of the Iwaidja artist Paddy Compass Namatbara.
Other elements of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island collections are also incorporated into the teaching and research display spaces, accessible and at ready reach for hands-on community consultations as well as for University of Sydney Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and staff to enhance their existing online teaching and digital outreach projects. Within frameworks of cultural safety it has been possible in some cases to rename objects in the languages of the makers, ethically conserving these knowledges, preserving languages and knowledges as intellectual properties and as important and valuable tools for future Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander led research.
Gululu dhuwala djalkiri: welcome to the Yolŋu foundations in some ways charts an alternate pathway to Ambassadors; it explores the rise of Yolgnu art from before its commercial origins and locates its origins in the anthropological context of post-World War II Australia. It explores how the production and touring of assemblages of bark paintings became a diplomatic tool in embassies, galleries and museums around the world. At a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people were rarely if ever travelling independently within Australia, these bark paintings acted as intermediaries and interlocutors for global audiences to ‘see’ and ‘read’ the mythologies and histories of Aboriginal Australia in ways that were far removed from the lived experiences and realities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people at this time.
Gululu dhuwala djalkiri traces a series of interconnected events that brought collections of bark paintings to public notice and the University’s role in this process. It attempts to seek to understand the changing possibilities for Aboriginal artists to self-represent the broader cultural context of the paintings. These exhibitions show how in the self-determination era, Aboriginal curators and artist collectives sought to create a dialogue with the international market for bark painting to communicate the modern relevance of Aboriginal art. But also, it was important for us as curators to show how historical bark paintings retain contemporary salience for Yolngu communities, and how new exhibitions can develop continuing relationships with people and culture into the future.
Separate to Djalkari, the elements of the Ambassadors exhibition are interspersed throughout other exhibitions such as Coastline and Object Art Specimen and Natural Selections. Their positioning was proposed to highlight the intersectional nature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island knowledges today, and how these knowledges are intertwined with the Chau Chak Wing Museum broader collection’s histories of Visual Art, Science and Natural History. Ambassadors also operates as a series of portals, spaces through which to enter alternate pathways into the broader University of Sydney and Chau Chak Wing Museum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections and History.
Non-Indigenous staff and students from the University stood alongside the Freedom Riders of 1965, who volunteered their services to the formation of the Aboriginal Medical Service and Redfern Legal Service in the 1970s. Accumulatively, Ambassadors represents how museum collections are also becoming hybridised in the ways that audiences engage with them. Exploring how collections’ histories can become research tools for artists or become components of touring exhibitions that are establishing new museums in regional centres. This is only a brief demonstration of the tangential nature to which museum objects and collection histories are applied by contemporary community members today in communicating with audiences globally.
As a curator I was fortunate that often artists and community members who were in Sydney would visit the collections, adding their interpretive layers to how these objects are and can be seen today. Additionally, through supportive networks and collaborations with colleagues I was able to attend key events such as the Darwin Art Fair from 2017 – 2019 as well as the annual general meetings association of the Arnhem, Northern and Kimberley Art Centres (ANKA) (2017 – 2019), and volunteer with representative bodies connecting many Art centres associated with both the new exhibitions Ambassadors and Djalkari.
Consultation is not a supply and demand process, the networks of cultural authorities that exist in communities right across Australia are also responsible for shaping the conversations that take place on a national stage such as the voice to parliament outlined in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, put forth from the 2017 National Constitutional Convention. Ambassadors is both an exhibition and a curatorial approach that animates the new Chau Chak Wing Museum, and the University of Sydney’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curatorial research, exhibitions, education, and future events programming. Many of the conversations fashioned from consultations with contemporary representatives of these object makers’ descendants are also permeated with an interpretive layer which uses the object makers’ first language, and even where possible, these language names and intellectual properties regarding the objects manufacture have been recorded to be accessible by future generations of artists and community descendants.
One additional component of each display case is that it incorporates a large-scale reproduction of a photograph from the Museum’s Historic Photography collection. This collection is itself represented by a stereoscopic photograph taken in the lands of the Gandangarra peoples, at Camden Park, Western Sydney by William Hetzer in 1859 and on display in the Gadigal codex. The image depicts what is presumed to be a family of Aboriginal people named as the Bungendore tribe (today, members of the Gandangarra and Dharawal peoples). This is on display in the foyer as you enter the museum as evidence of not what was missing from the story of Sydney’s past, but what is, and always was, the story of Sydney’s local Aboriginal communities’ silent witnessing to the arrivals of visitors to their lands. It took many years for me to understand that the collections I have worked with at the Macleay Museum are incredibly important pieces for very different reasons than I initially thought. These Museum collections are not pieces of the Aboriginal past, they are evidence of people’s connection to their contemporary identities. The Chau Chak Wing Museum is perhaps a new meeting place on an old meeting place.
Matt Poll works as Assistant Curator of Indigenous Heritage collections, at Chau Chak Wing Museum. His new exhibitions Gululu dhuwala djalkiri: welcome to the Yolŋu foundations (co-curated by Rebecca Conway) and Ambassadors, both opened at the new Chau Chak Wing Museum in November 2020. For more than a decade, Matt has also worked as a repatriation project officer at the University of Sydney. Previously Matt worked as Artistic Director of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative Gallery and has published widely on south-east Australian Aboriginal art. Matt is also the chairperson of Orana Arts in mid-western regional NSW and has been a long-term member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Advisory Board for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Photographs from opening Chau Chak Wing Museum – photographs by Michelle Heywood
