News and ViewsSource: Feminist Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 212-217Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178504 .

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NEWS AND VIEWS

Inspired largely by Diane Bell's anthropological study of Indigenous Australian women artist (published in this issue), I have asked Chris- tine Nicholls, a writer, curator, and senior lecturer in Australian stud- ies and the head of cultural studies at Flinders University, to submit a report on the detrimental effects that current Australian copyright law has placed on Aboriginal artists and, in turn, on Aboriginal com- munities. Nicholls has extensive knowledge in this area. She has pub- lished more than a hundred articles about Indigenous Australian art and languages and has recently published a biography of Eastern Anmatyerr artist Kathleen Petyarre. Prior to working at Flinders Uni- versity, she worked at Lajamanu, a remote Aboriginal settlement in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory of Australia, first as a linguist and then as the principal of the local Warlpiri Lajamanu school. She subsequently held the position of Principal Education Officer with responsibility for the Northern Territory's bilingual edu- cation programs in Indigenous languages and English. Following Nicholls's report, I have included two updates from Sippi Azerbaijani- Moghadam and Nasrine Gross, both of whom contributed to the pre- vious "News and Views" report on women activists' responses to the crisis in Afghanistan.- Sharon Groves

Indigenous Australian Art: The Case for Law Reform Australian Aboriginal art has become big business in Australia and internationally. Aboriginal artists make up at least twenty-five percent and possibly more than fifty percent of the total number of visual artists currently working in Australia. As well, they contribute more than half the total value of Australian visual art sales and dominate the Australian export market in the visual arts. Indigenous Australian art, now thought to be worth at least $200 million per annum to the Australian economy, has also increased the self-esteem of its practitioners and has become a quasi-national symbol for all Australians.

While no reliable statistics exist, largely because Indigenous Austra- lian art is for the most part created in remote, regional locations of the Australian outback, it is probable that more than half, and possibly up to three quarters, of the practitioners are women. Many, but by no means all, of these women artists work at the craft end of the great divide that

Feminist Studies 28, no. 1 (spring 2002). @ 2002 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 212

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has historically existed between art and craft and which also exists between high art and decorative art in the European context.

In recent years the value of Aboriginal art has taken off exponentially and has enjoyed global recognition. As a consequence, it has been a vital symbolic and economic commodity to Australia, and Australia's export dollars have become dependent on it. Given this situation, it is time to examine the ethnocentrism and indeed Eurocentrism, inherent in Aus- tralian copyright laws and to urge the Australian government to move toward law reform in this area. Advocacy on this issue has been some- what fragmentary, and a more organized approach is clearly needed if real change is to occur.

Traditional Centralian and Western Desert Indigenous Law (not lore) stipulates that all ownership of Dreamings, and therefore authorship of artistic works, is by definition based on a principle of complementarity and is accordingly vested in a group rather than in an individual. In almost every case, two complementary groups of people have proprietal rights over every Dreaming and by extension over every visual represen- tation of that Dreaming.

Ownership is never an individual matter, as it is in the dominant cul- ture, but always subsists in these two groups. Furthermore, there is no requirement for these owners to have physically worked on the creation of a piece in order to assert ownership of it, so long as they retain control over the process. Within this system, women are "bosses" equally often as men, although they are to this day still often subject to erroneous assumptions about Indigenous women's subordination to men, making them more vulnerable to charges of malpractice than men.

Currently, Indigenous forms of copyright are not sanctioned by the dominant Australian legal system. Several aspects of Indigenous artistic copyright differentiates its rules from those applying to Western art. It is strictly forbidden even for other Aboriginal people of different kinship groups from the same language group or members of other Aboriginal groups who do not have rights to a particular Dreaming to paint, create, or otherwise represent or reproduce the specific combination of visual images associated with that Dreaming.

This is not so much a moral or ethical issue in the Western sense, but it is a legal issue for Indigenous Australians. So, for example, in the cases of prominent Indigenous Australian artist Kathleen Petyarre and the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, despite the fact that both are Eastern Anma- tyerr women, any painting of the other woman's subject matter is strictly forbidden. Kathleen Petyarre's major Dreaming subject is the Mountain Devil, although she is also permitted to paint the related Bush Seeds and Green Pea Dreamings. Under Anmatyerr Law, She is not permitted to paint or otherwise render the Yam Dreaming, over which Emily Kame Kngwarreye and others held custodial rights. This is not a secular matter.

Kathleen Petyarre summarizes her custodial rights in the following

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terms: "A Mountain Devil (Arnkerrth), Bush Seeds (Ntang), and Green Pea-you know, the one we call Antweth in language-are my true Dreamings. No whitefella can paint [those] Dreamings under Anmatyerr Law-there's no problem if I tell them to put some dots on Mountain Devil, Bush Seeds, or Pea Dreaming, but only dots and only when I tell them. I'm not allowed to paint other [Anmatyerr] people's Dreaming either-I've just got to do my own Dreaming. Otherwise big trouble-our Law says, 'Not allowed!' Doing wrong Dreaming (someone else's Dreaming)-that would make big trouble for me, big problem" (interview with author, 19 Feb. 2000).

The 1968 Copyright Act (Commonwealth of Australia) does not recog- nize communal ownership as a concept. Although the Act does recognize joint ownership, it contemplates that joint authors of an art work may become joint owners of the copyright in the work only if the authors in question are responsible for putting the work into material form, that is, only if they have a hand in physically creating the work. In traditional Aboriginal society this is not necessarily the case.

A number of "scandals" have occurred in recent years, driven by the Australian media, around the question of communal ownership of artis- tic copyright, which is widely regarded as a dodgy practice by compari- son with Western norms. In 1997 for example, Kathleen Petyarre's ex- common-law husband, Ray Beamish, a non-Indigenous man, made the claim that he had artistically "created" a Dreaming narrative copyrighted by Kathleen, whereas in fact he had contributed some dots to her work, under her direction. There was a huge media "beat-up" and allegations were made on the front page of the national newspaper, The Australian, along with a photograph of Kathleen Petyarre. Later a "confession" was published, an acknowledgement by Petyarre that she had been assisted by Beamish.

The allegations made in this case were largely the result of miscon- ceptions about the communal nature of Indigenous art production. The man's assertion of having actually created the work, which has subse- quently been proved to be untrue by a formal investigation, plunged Petyarre into a deep depression and at one point she felt that she never wished to paint again. The harm extended beyond Petyarre as many other Anmatyerr people found these allegations deeply disturbing.

The gender of the artist was a significant factor in this affair as well, which to date has not been adequately explored, but is beyond the scope of this report. It seems that the general public are more readily disposed to accept male Indigenous artists being assisted in creating art works by the women in their family (for example their wives and daughters) than they are to accept Indigenous women artists being helped by their hus- bands or partners. When the partner also happens to be white, this adds another level of complexity to how such practices are received.

Media and academic heavyweights also weighed in on the matter, re-

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News and Views 215

gardless of whether their fields of intellectual or other endeavor equipped them to make informed comment. People felt qualified to comment on and to offer an opinion about the finer points of Indigenous art produc- tion generally, and the Beamish affair in particular, and were seemingly unconstrained and unembarrassed by speaking on issues totally outside their bailiwick. For example, not long after this, even Germaine Greer made a number of ill-informed, but nevertheless glibly self-confident, pronouncements on the state of play of Indigenous Australian art.

There is clearly a need in contemporary Australia for law reform in this area. Indigenous people, feminists, and activists generally are cur- rently agitating for the creation of a new, different legislative framework that has the capacity to reflect Indigenous ways of owning and differing concepts of authorship in order to circumvent the cultural specificity of the 1968 Copyright Act. As prominent law professors Andrew Stewart and Jill McKeough note, "[If Indigenous] spiritual and cultural interests are to be appropriately accommodated, a different legislative framework altogether would seem to be needed." If we are not prepared to embark on the process of law reform very soon, the entire-and lucrative-Ab- original art industry could become dangerously destabilized.

To date there is no single organization that is engaged solely with this issue and thus websites are not as useful as they might be. There are, however, two organizations that on occasion have material of use on this issue or of related concern. One organization, the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd (NAVA), is an advocacy body which sometimes looks at such issues but not by any means consistently, being weighted towards non-Aboriginal art. Their web site is: <http://www.visualarts. net.au>. Another organization, the National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association (NIAAA), is a non-profit organization dedicated to protect- ing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights, culture, cultur- al respect, protocols, and values through the promotion and protection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and crafts. Although they are not yet actively involved in agitating for Law Reform they are a use- ful resource for information on Aboriginal art. Their web site is: <http:// www. niaaa.com.au>. -Christine Nicholls

Update: Women in Afghanistan

Sippi Azerbaijani-Moghaddam, who was the technical advisor on gen- der for the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, when she reported on Afghan women's NGOs in our fall 2001 issue, is now an independent consultant. She writes to us from Kabul about the reintegration of women into government affairs.

The post-September 11th period in Afghanistan has seen the installation of the Interim Administration and the creation of the Ministry of Wom-

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en's Affairs. There have been welcome changes for professional women both within aid agencies and in the civil service. Women are back in some offices and the burquas are slowly coming off. Women are looking for ways to refresh and update their skills. This is all being done with the blessing of the current authorities, but scratching the surface shows that gender inequities are buried so deep that a gargantuan, coordinated effort is needed to root them out. Women in one international NGO ex- plained that they are glad to be back in the main office, openly contribut- ing to the work at hand, but that male colleagues are still reluctant to give up adequate office space and to share equipment such as computers. This has been said by women in many agencies. It is interesting that for repatriated refugees there are careful considerations related to reintegra- tion but that for the countless professional women who have been out of offices for years and who were forced to relinquish the entire profession- al arena to male colleagues there is no special reintegration process or dialogue with the "boys' clubs" which they now have to reenter.

There has been much talk of the elevated positions which women had reached prior to the upheavals caused by the war and the domination of successive conservative Islamic factions, but a look at some of the statis- tics tells another story. In the education sector, for instance, the number of female teachers was always well below that for male teachers and although there have been changes, discrepancies remain. In the Ministry of Education, women hold only four percent of managerial posts. In many ministries women were either non-existent or held secretarial posts. The Ministry of Women has a responsibility to bring such glaring signs of gender discrimination to the notice of the other ministers and to develop ways to address such inequities with the ministries concerned.

Although there has been so much talk on gender inequities, it is hard to find quantitative goals related to women and girls' welfare. Statistics are notoriously flawed in the Afghan context but there have not even been attempts to come up with goals related to girls' enrollment in schools and universities boosting the number of female teachers or female civil servants at different levels in the ministries.

It would seem that the majority of actors (and actresses) are tied up in publicity stunts and superficialities, set in the circus that is Kabul at pre- sent. International Women's Day was celebrated while Pushtun women in the north are still being subjected to rape by rival ethnic groups and while in some remote pockets communities are quietly starving to death. The substantive issues which affect the majority of Afghan women are not being taken up and discussed in a comprehensive manner. There are not even any such targets set for reducing nationwide maternal mortali- ty as yet. Upper-class Afghan women, even those recently returned from exile, scramble to take as many high positions as they can nationwide. This is creating rifts among women's groups even as they form.

In such an environment the message to the parade of international

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actors and Afghan politicians is not only to talk the gender talk but to walk the gender walk. This means doing their homework, coming up with the figures, committing to address the inequities by setting realistic targets, and putting their money where their mouth is. The message to Afghan women should be that unless they can lay aside their differences and act in a united and coordinated manner then the war on gender inequity is already lost since patriarchy has consistently presented a united front in the Afghan context. -SippiAzerbaijani-Moghaddam

Nasrine Gross at Kabul University Nasrine Gross, the U.S. representative for Negar-Support of Women of Afghanistan, is at Kabul University teaching the first women's studies course ever taught at the University. The course is offered through the sociology department and is mandatory for all students. Gross will have women and men taking the course and most probably more of them men than women. She faces numerous challenges in the development of this course. One challenge is to find material that is uniquely Afghan, an- other is to find material that is translated into Dari/Persian, the lan- guage of instruction at Kabul University, another is to find enough visual material (videos, pictorials) that are suitable for an introductory course. The biggest hurdle is to secure funding both for this course and future women studies courses. Gross is working on a number of other projects as well, most important of which is her continued effort to push for the signing of the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women. (See previous "News and Views" or the web site <http://users.erols. com/kabultec> for more information on the Declaration.

-report prepared by Sharon Groves

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