Open for Inspection: Problems in Representing a Humanised Wilderness

Open for Inspection: Problems in Representing a Humanised Wilderness

Dianne Lancashire Sociology, Politics and Anthropology, La Trobe University

I listorically. a large percentage of non-indigenous Australians have obtained knowledge of Aboriginal people through channels which provoke an aesthetic response (paintings, film, literature, etc.). More recently, inhabited national parks, such as Kakadu and Uluru, have offered a supposedly more direct engagement with contcmporary Aboriginal life, yet this engagement is also filtcrcd through a number of aesthetic discourses. The necessity for any social group to construct representations of itself arises out of the complexities and contingencies of the political landscape. Although such representations can and do reflect a number of political perspectives, Aboriginal people occasionally have the opportunity to convey their own view of the social and historical circumstances which continue to impinge upon their lives. Although national park boards of management often encourage this indigenous voice, I argue that the resulting aesthetic representations tend to elide and suppress the untidy moments which gave rise to them. This, I further suggest, presents problems for any attempt to represent the contemporary social and cultural reality of a particular group of people.

lb” have on1.v to speak o f a n object to think that we are being objective. But hecaitse w’e chose it i n the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it (Bachelard 1964:l)

National Parks and aesthetics The emergence of inhabited national parks in Australia occurred within a set of political

and historical circumstances which continue to evolve. Although important, complex and interesting, these circumstances are not the main subject of this paper. Instead, I intend to look at the related question of how inhabited national parks promote the value and conservation of natural resources while simultaneously inviting visitors to appreciate the land’s value for, and the rights of, the Aboriginal people who live there. There are several inhabited national parks in Australia. Some, such as Uluru and Kakadu, have World Heritage listing on the basis of their cultural and geographical attributes. This paper concentrates on tourist destinations in Kakadu, but the argument is a wider one and is applicable to other situations. Although some visitors stay for a prolonged period in

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Kakadu, the average visit is very short, and the most common means of disseminating information about the land and its inhabitants to tourists is through interpretive displays and information signs at sites of significance to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Thus the prime means of engagement with the National Park are along channels which most people would agree are aesthetic. There are brochures, displays of Aboriginal paintings and craft, and sign systems which guide visitors through walks in the bush or rock art sites.

An Aboriginal Cultural Centre opened in Kakadu in 1995. One half of the Centre is devoted to a display intended to convey details about the history and contemporary life of Aboriginal people who live within the boundaries of the Park. Aboriginal people from the Park were responsible for the information included in the Centre and were involved in the production and construction of the display at all levels. This included the collection of animals and plants from which models were made; the production of videos shown in the display; the control of the language in the text; the construction of artefacts, such as baskets and tools; and the final placement of items in the display cases. The Centre serves as an important source of information for visitors to the Park.

The existence of information resources in national parks, such as interpretive walks and displays, helps to protect the privacy of the inhabitants. The intrusion of visitors in large numbers affects all people who live in tourist destinations, but this intrusion is potentially even more profound for a group of people whose existence is promoted as a major reason for a destination’s value and continued protection. Brought into being in 1979, the Park constitutes a reconciliation of the competing interests of mining, conservation and Aboriginal land rights (Fox et al. 1977; Press et al. 1995). Thus, at a fundamental level, the Park itself is an artefact, a synthesis, and Aboriginal people themselves are one of the most important elements contributing to its form. The various roles Aboriginal people have to play in a place which is both home and museum-in a space which is at the same time public and private-require a tolerance and sensitivity to visitors that is not demanded of most people elsewhere.

In this paper I use some experiences of people who visit a national park to examine certain theoretical issues regularly raised in studies broadly concerned with ‘the anthropology of art’, particularly with debates about the nature and definition of art and aesthetics. In the last decade or more there has been a substantial shift in cross-cultural studies of art and aesthetics-away from art in favour of aesthetics. A simple example of this move is the changing title of a textbook written by Richard L. Anderson used to teach the anthropology of art. It was first published in 1979 as Art in Primitive Societies; in 1989 it became Art in Small-scale Societies; while the latest edition (1990) has a substantial reworking of the content and is subtitled A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art.‘ The changes in the title show more than a theoretical shift in anthropology’s appropriation of art theory: they also point to the more critical post-colonial understanding of anthropology’s objects. A closer examination of the presumptions underlying the West’s representation of others has revealed the ethnocentrism of much theory and methodology. Objects selected for study more often than not have reflected criteria used in western definitions of ‘art’ and ‘artworks’, and societies which, through a lack of enduring objects, have appeared to have no ‘art’ at all have presented a particular problem.

1 . The full title of this edition is Calliope s Sisters: a Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art.

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The turn towards aesthetics was an attempt to remedy these problems. Aesthetics, it has been argued, need not necessarily be associated with ‘art’ and allows for culturally determined notions of beauty expressed through means which might not necessarily correspond to Western notions (Anderson 1990; Coote 1992). Evidence of aesthetics could thus be sought in transitory and ephemeral forms, such as songs or painting on bark or bodies. While the word ‘art’ connotes the ‘art-world’ of the West or the ‘art’ of Chinese or Egyptian ‘civilisations’, the term ‘aesthetics’ implies the existence of an aesthetic sensibility prior to the production of artworks per se (Gel1 1995).

But although the category of potential subject matter which might belong to any discussion of ‘art’ has been enlarged by this move, methodological problems persist, because most studies in the area still focus predominantly on objects and no real distinction between aesthetics and art is conceived. This is not to say that certain kinds of objects or activities might not be the appropriate place for seeking evidence of an aesthetic2 Rather, it means that, when certain objects and the activities which produce them are selected as a starting point in any study of aesthetics, other kinds are excluded, so that the domain of art and art production is immediately circumscribed. Artists are then necessarily those who have produced the work and the aesthetic is defined (or rather confined) to a domain which is largely limited by the culturally determined assumptions about art held by the ethnographer. This means that, even if anthropologists and ethnographers pay considerable attention to the process of production, to the act of performance, or to the sociological processes involved in authentication of objects as ‘art’, their concern is always with people who make objects or engage in acts pre-determined as aesthetic. There is something profoundly tautological in this.

Several anthropologists have recognised the problems associated with an object-centred anthropology of art and have advocated a more phenomenological approach.’ But there remains an uncomfortable feeling that, without an ‘object’, we cannot investigate aesthetics. Part of the problem, I would argue, stems from the act of aesthetic apprehension itself, which, as a creative act, constitutes an objectification of experience. All philosophical aesthetics use the language of integration, harmony, order, balance and unity in difference. With aesthetic satisfaction taken to be an activity concerned with the confrontation between the sensory world and the mind’s capacity for creating order, works of art are seen to function as the illusory reconciliation of the contradictions, confusions and conflicts that are part of daily e ~ i s t e n c e . ~ Disparate and chaotic elements of experience

I agree with Gel1 that ‘Aesthetics is the form of discursive thought which intervenes to turn mere objects into artworks. It is for this reason that it is senseless to find aesthetic thought anywhere other than in the creation and reception of artworks’ (l995:27). However, the problem remains that those features of a society which are selected as material for an aesthetic analysis are usually those which bear some resemblance to the ‘art’ of the ethnographer’s own culture.

Weiner ( 1 995), for example, uses Heidegger to advocate a more dialectical understanding of art and aesthetics: ‘Once the subject is put at the centre of the world, then the artwork becomes a species of the aesthetic’ (1995:43). Obviously, defining the aesthetic is not a simple matter, but this definition conforms to that of several philosophers and anthropologists. For Kant, for example, aesthetic judgement is found in the way ‘we might take satisfaction in the relation between . . . an array of sensory material which confronted the mind and . . . the mind’s own ordering procedures’ (Podro 1982:9). Or, ‘The “primrose by the water’s brim” is beautiful because we are aware


are reorganised through reflection to give an impression of wholeness and completeness, of orderliness and boundedness. Out of the continuous flow and flux of life emerge numerous ‘experiences’. Even though the reflective consciousness is the author of these experiences, it is able to confront such an experience as something objective, or outside itself, ‘which makes demands in terms of its own inner structure and its own logic’ (Adorno 1992:184). Object making is thus central to its operation. Art objects are a material objectification of this experience, or might function to provoke a further aesthetic response, but aesthetic satisfaction itself resides in the experience self-consciously extracted and contained, which I would argue is no less aesthetic for the lack of a permanent material referent.

The argument in this paper is directed to some of these theoretical issues and is intended as a contribution towards a broader, more inclusive, definition of aesthetics which begins by understanding it primarily as ‘a mode of discursive thought’ (Gel1 1995:27). However, beyond theoretical considerations the argument has implications for the means by which people engage with new and potentially complex information. The interpretive mode of the national park experience highlights the function of the aesthetic as a mode of discourse in an environment which, unlike that of a museum, purports to offer through first-hand experience a way of recognising the value of Australia’s ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage.’

I initially argue for the value of seeking the aesthetic in mundane, everyday activities, by showing that objects used in these activities are in their nature fundamentaffy aesthetic, regardless of whether they are identified as ‘art’ (like the numerous paintings on rock which are found in Kakadu) or as objects of instrumental value (such as dilly-bags, digging sticks or grinding stones), or as ‘things’ which do not appear to conform to the world of tangible objects at all.

Second, because it is the nature of the aesthetic to bring out of the chaos and fluidity of everyday social life the illusion of unity, order and harmony, I argue that it is a very poor means for depicting ‘everyday social life’. ‘Delusion is art’s condition of existence’, said Adorno (1 984:324). The calm exterior of an aesthetic object always belies the dynamic, debated, negotiated space out of which it emerges. In the context of the national park, this means that, for the visitor, the everyday lives of Aboriginal people are in a fundamental way aestheticised without the need to search for so-called art objects as evidence of this. The nature of Kakadu itself as an aesthetic object, and the fact that most information about the Park and its inhabitants is interpreted to visitors, mean that it is difficult for outsiders to gain any idea of the social reality of Aborigines living there. It cannot ensure a recognition of the difficulties Aboriginal people have had in keeping some claim to their land in the past, just as it fails to convey the negotiated nature of the space they continue to occupy.

that the combination of differences which constitutes its appearance could only be achieved by information processing, ie, by thought’ (Bateson 1972:465). I am not making any judgements about the work of Aboriginal or nowAboriginal people who live in the Park; nor am I evaluating the success of the interpretation of one national park compared with others. My personal opinion is that interpretive displays in Kakadu are of a very high standard and that Aboriginal involvement in decision-making at all levels is crucial to their success.

5 .


Views from Ubirr

Emotion that is distinctively esthetic . . . is not a form of sentiment that exists independently from the outset. It is an emotion induced by material that is expressive, and because it is evoked by and attached to this material it consists of natural emotions that have been transformed. Natural objects, landscapes, for example, induce it. But they do so only because when they are matter of an experience they too, have undergone a change similar to that which the painter or poet effects in converting the immediate scene into the matter of an act that expresses the value of what is seen. (Dewey 1934:77)

I first visited Kakadu in December 1992 in order to undertake research for an Aboriginal cultural centre at Cooinda. The project took a couple of years to complete and I made several trips of varying length, but the first trip was a short one. Like most visitors, I was encouraged to visit Ubirr at sunset. Ubirr is a place on the Amhem Land escarpment, open to tourists. It is about forty minutes drive from Jabiru, the town in the middle of the Park which was set up to service employees of Ranger Uranium Mine and their families. With a population of some 2,000, Jabiru has a school, a supermarket, a newsagency-cum-post- office and the well-known Crocodile Hotel, owned and managed by the Gagadju Association. As the average stay in the almost 20,000 square kilometre Park is only two or three days, visitors generally have highly organised schedules designed to give them a small taste of what Kakadu has to offer. As one of its major attractions is the remarkable and extensive rock art, a guided tour in Kakadu always includes a visit to one or two art sites. Ubirr is a popular choice partly because it has a number of large rock shelters, the walls of which are covered in paintings. But it is also popular because of its geographical location. Tourists are taken on an interpretive walk through the giant shelters up to relatively high ground. From there they have a quite spectacular view to the west over floodplains and the remnant rainforest lining the East Alligator River.

At the height of the tourist season it is not unusual to see several large buses pull up in the car-park at Ubirr just before sunset. One often finds more than a hundred people waiting up on top, most turned towards the west with cameras ready to capture the red ball of the sun before it sinks below the horizon. But on my first visit, outside the tourist season, there were few people and I made the last part of the climb on my own. When I reached the top I sat alone on the rocky ground. The air was heavy with the humidity which cast a haze over the plain. The haze and the humidity and the heaviness are always there. The greens below are warm and glowing. The sky is a soft blue-grey, with an occasional cloud. The feeling of space is unlike anything else I had experienced. Behind, to the east, the escarpment sprawls out. There are no peaks, only worn-down rocky outcrops continuing for as far as the eye can see. One might think that one was ‘on top of the world’ there, but it is not a pinnacle-it is too rounded and solid for that. The weight is predominant. To the west lies Cannon Hill-Bill Niedjie’s country,6 so the signs tell the visitor. Cannon Hill has a busy history which seems to contradict the stillness which pervades the view. As the sun moves closer to the horizon, the smoke of fires enhances its

6. Bill Neidjie is a well known and highly respected traditional owner in Kakadu. His knowledge and opinions are sought in relation to all important issues in the area and he has been the subject of many books and films. A book of his poetry has been published (Neidjie 1989).


glow. The smoke is the only hint of people in an otherwise seemingly empty land. A few magpie geese can sometimes be seen; but they are always heard.

People have said that Ubirr is a spiritual place. Certainly Aboriginal people say it is. I do not know if there is a tangible quality to spirituality, but the place felt peopled even though I was quite alone. I thought immediately of Asia-of a temple in Bangli on the island of Bali, to be accurate. Maybe, I thought, humidity and crowds are synonymous for me. The difference was that here I felt at home, and in Asia I never did. Even though the scene was unlike anything I had encountered, the sense of comfort and belonging was intense.

I have since been to Ubirr many times, but I am ever grateful that my first experience of it was uninterrupted by the comments of the thousands of people who regularly flock there. I am also intrigued, as a one-time photographer, by the way people use the tiny flash on their camera hoping to light up a view which extends over several thousand kilometres. On one occasion, after the sun had set and everyone was making a hurried retreat to the car park-attempting to avoid being bitten by the swarms of mosquitoes which always arrive on cue (as if they had been polite enough to wait until the photographic session had finished)-I heard a man say gruffly as he packed away his camera: ‘It was alright but the smoke spoiled it a bit-I’ve seen better ones at home’.

But the smoke helps, I thought. It is the one bit of evidence that supports an otherwise unaccountable feeling of a lived-in landscape. What was he looking for? What exactly was he hoping to find? These questions had me wondering. He was not at all happy with the experience. It was as if, on this occasion, the landscape had put in a very poor performance-certainly not up to his expectations.

It is quite likely, of course, that having bought a bit of the wilderness of Kakadu along with his air ticket from Melbourne, he had felt conned. Wilderness is emptiness. Wilderness is sunset, and magpie geese. Wilderness, by a stretch of the imagination, could even include paintings on rock, as long as they were executed at least 40,000 years ago. But wilderness does not generally mean people and campfires. And even if the tourist brochures had not referred specifically to wilderness-and certainly national park agencies are now more careful in their use of the term-a national park is invariably promoted as a place whose continued survival is inversely related to the number of people who move through it. It is seen as a place in need of protection from human beings-a place where people cannot expect the luxury of home comforts, but, by the same token, where they can expect not to be burdened by domesticity. The national park package therefore includes the promise of a space in which there are few reminders of work and home. I would argue that the disgruntled tourist had come to see a sunset in a wilderness, but what he was offered contained an unpleasant reminder of the habitation and domesticity he had hoped to leave behind. And like the receiver of a gift that had been tampered with, this visitor seems to have felt the thin whispers of smoke as evidence of a prior claim. The object that he had come to claim-to capture and make permanent through a photograph-was instead marked or spoiled by human interference. Dissatisfied with the product, unhappy with the performance, in other circumstances he might have asked for his money back. Surrounded by a hundred other people, the clicking of camera shutters and the burring of video cameras, and looking at land clearly inhabited, he nevertheless clung to a rapidly evaporating belief that only his human presence was legitimate.

His mastery of the view might have been tempered further had he overheard a conversation which took place some months later. Having been out to a meeting with


some people who lived at Cannon Hill, I was returning to Jabiru with a local Aboriginal man. We were driving along a road which cuts right through the view that everyone seizes as their own when they stand on the top of Ubirr. The road wanders through pandanus and fruiting trees, and at one point my companion slowed the car right down and pointed east to the high rocky outcrop, saying, with a wry smile on his face, that it was worth coming out around here at sunset to take a look at that view. For the few seconds that it takes for the sun to set, he said, the whole hilltop is alight with the sparkle of camera flashes.

Clearly the exercise of power and control in reducing actors to subjects does not, in certain circumstances, preclude a reversal of this relationship. Thus, somewhat ironically, ‘Ubirr at Sunset’, essential to the visitor’s experience of Kakadu, becomes for the local inhabitants an image which also signifies the role of the tourist in the landscape.

Different views, different lives The man who made this comment is a member of the group of people who are owners

and custodians of the land around Cannon Hill. His father, in his youth, caught and skinned buffalo on the floodplains there. He went to the school which was a part of the mission established by the Church of England at Oenpelli in 1925, only a few kilometres away. He left the area for a while when he joined the army during the war. He spent some time working as a gardener in Darwin, lived for a while on Croker Island and worked as a forester on the Cobourg Peninsula. Finally, he returned to live at Cannon Hill, on his mother’s country. The story of his life is not an unusual one for Aboriginal people who live (or have lived) in the country that is now Kakadu National Park. Many people worked in the buffalo industry, or for pastoralists on cattle stations. They had relationships of exchange and employment with Europeans and Chinese who were fossicking for gold and tin in the area. Further back in the past, people from the Alligator Rivers region had contact with European explorers such as Leichardt and McKinley, and regularly travelled several hundred kilometres to the coast where trade had taken place with Maccassans and others at least since the late seventeenth century.

So the land which looks like ‘wild’ to the visitor, is, for its Aboriginal inhabitants, heir to all kinds of human endeavour. Historical documentation by Aboriginal people and others suggests that human contact here was not of the violent nature it was in other parts of Australia. But if the degradation of the people was not great, there are many who argue that the land itself was severely degraded as a result of human enterprise. Water buffalo in particular wrought considerable damage on the floodplains and in the first ten years of the Park’s life considerable effort was dedicated to their removal. Paintings, as beautiful and rare as those at Ubirr, have all but been removed by the continual rubbing of animals scratching their backs on the surface of low-lying rocky protrusions. Weeds, such as mimosa, are more prevalent at sites disturbed by buffalo. Pigs, feral cats and European honey bees are still considered a problem.

This is not to suggest that the land today is not abundant with fish, turtle and waterlilies. All are regularly sought and eaten by Aboriginal people living there. But although considerable time is devoted to collecting this kind of food, it is only a part of a fairly busy schedule for most people. Most children go to school, taken and collected by bus or by parents and relatives. Meanwhile their parents go to work in the town or, as rangers in the Park, regularly spend several hours a day travelling some distance to work. Many sit on various boards and are required to attend what seems like an endless stream of


meetings-Gagadju Association meetings, meetings about mining, meetings about Park management issues such as weed control or fire-burning regimes. They sit on interviewing committees, and on training or recommendation committees. In other words Aboriginal people in Kakadu are kept fairly busy doing the kind of things which occupy most of us, most of the time.

People who live and work there are aware of the perception of Aboriginal people that most visitors bring with them. (The Australian Conservation Foundation’s 1997 calendar, for instance, puts Kakadu at the top of its list of the ‘wild places’ of Australia). Hence they have made a considerable effort to convey the message that Kakadu is managed jointly by Aboriginal people and the Australian Nature Conservation Agency. Interpretive signs and informative displays at the Information Centre, ranger stations and most sites visited by tourists tell of Aboriginal history and of the continuous and contemporary relevance of ancestral sites and ‘dreaming’ stories. At Ubirr, for example, visitors are told that they are on Aboriginal land-that as far as they can see is Aboriginal land-that the paintings on the rock are evidence of a long period of occupation by people who show a deep understanding of their environment. They read that the environment is, and has been for a long time, a ‘managed’ environment. Signs explain how, at the time of contact with Europeans, Aboriginal people painted images of them on rock. Drawings and paintings of boats point to a history of travel to the coast and trade with people beyond. One can see there, on the rock, men smoking pipes or holding guns and riding horses. How is it, then, that in the face of an abundance of evidence to the contrary people continue to expect a ‘wilderness’?

I would argue that the visitor’s response to a smoky sunset that I observed at Ubirr does not merely show the singular, idiosyncratic response of one grumpy tourist, but hints at more complex issues. In part, as I have said above, it points to a clash between an Aboriginal aesthetic and a non-Aboriginal aesthetic. Trails of smoke in the bush, let alone a wilderness, are more often than not an unwelcome sight to non-Aboriginal eyes. Whether the smoke signifies danger or domesticity, neither are considered too desirable in a national park. Kakadu Park management is currently making a conscientious attempt to replicate burning patterns used in the past and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is also undertaking a major study into burning regimes in the area. Smoke in the distance and flaming scrubland by the roadside are therefore not rare in the area. But fire nevertheless remains a highly contentious issue in national parks; couched in scientific terms, it also points to different aesthetics. Associated with death and devastation, especially in a hot climate, rangers are accustomed to receiving reports of burning grassland from panic-stricken visitors. Aware of the visitors’ responses to fire, it was standard public relations practice in the foyer of the Crocodile Hotel to provide information regarding fire management to guests. On the other hand, Aboriginal people hold a quite different view. To Aboriginal people in Kakadu and elsewhere untouched country is not aesthetically pleasing and fire is a tool used as a means of ‘cleaning up the country’. As a means of bringing ‘the wild’ under control, the Aboriginal use of fire is ‘like mowing your lawn’, someone said.’ And people respond more positively to a cared- for environment. In a shared domestic space, a sign of human activity is not only

7. Rowse (1993) calls this a ‘practical aesthetics of country’. The phrase ‘cleaning up the country’ is often used by Aboriginal people. As Rowse notes, this has been remarked on in anthropological literature since the late 1970s.


unexceptional, but also often desirable. By a similar set of associations, smoke can signify a visit from friends or relatives.

But while the images and expectations people bring with them (of home, Aborigines and national parks) are firmly entrenched and sometimes validated in the promotion of the place, I remain intrigued by the resistance people appear to have to the absorption of new and conflicting information. A woman formerly employed as a ranger recently told me that for several months during her time in the Park she had worked as a guide at Ubirr. People would often say to her that they had never seen any ‘real’ Aboriginal people in Kakadu and that, in any case, they had heard that the real ones were living over in Arnhem Land. She said that the Aboriginal people they did see, taking their kids to school, or shopping in the supermarket, somehow were not recognised as Aboriginal people. The information given by rangers and interpretive displays or signs appeared to do little to change their perception of the Park as an uninhabited wilderness.

Eliding history

Expression is the clarification of turbid emotion; our appetites know themselves when they are reflected in the mirror of art, and as they know themselves they are transfigured. Emotion that is distinctively esthetic then occurs. (Dewey 1934:77)

In acting out its inner dialectic, a work of art cannot help but portray that dialectic as being reconciled. (Adorno 1984:251)

Just beyond the turn-off to Ubirr the road meets the East Alligator River which marks the boundary between Kakadu National Park and Arnhem Land. The crossing regularly floods and, apart from having to gain knowledge of the tides, visitors are required to obtain a permit from the office of the Northern Land Council in Jabiru before they can cross. They must state their reasons for wanting to visit and provide information regarding their vehicle, number of passengers and so on. It is usually not difficult to obtain a permit, provided the purpose of the visit is confined to visiting lnjulak Arts and Crafts at Gunbalyana. At the same place a guided tour of the nearby rock art can be negotiated directly with local Aboriginal people, if they are available. Although the granting of a permit is fairly straightforward given these considerations, a visit into Arnhem Land is not (or was not when I was there) something which is a taken for granted feature of every tour of Kakadu National Park. It requires time to organise and, more importantly, a recognition that there is a chance that Aboriginal people will refuse to allow you access to their country.

If a permit is obtained and visitors find themselves on the top of Injulak Hill overlooking a valley scattered with numerous wild brumbies (not kangaroos and wallabies like those on the walls of the rock shelters they might have climbed past), their experience will be strikingly different from that of their visit to Ubirr. There are no interpretive signs and the information that may be offered by the Aboriginal guide would not be easy to understand, due to differences in native language. The walls of paintings accumulated over thousands of years are not protected by bars and barriers. But just as the visitor has an expectation of a guest’s behaviour in his or her own home, damaging property or intruding uninvited into areas is unlikely to happen in the company of the owners who implicitly demand some respect due to the privilege they have allowed their guests.

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Packs of wild brumbies seem oddly out of place in an environment where the odd wallaby or kangaroo might be expected, but there is no explanation offered for their existence. The rest of the town is out of bounds to visitors and often there is nobody available to take them to see the rock art. Local people may even appear quite indifferent to tourists. On the one hand, some Aboriginal people seem inclined to welcome visitors as a potential market for their art; yet, on the other hand, no reasons may be given for the unexpected closure of the local art gallery. Hence, visitors regularly leave with unanswered questions and unresolved contradictions. Still, while they may leave a little unsure, confused and even frustrated, there is at least no doubt in their mind about the existence of ‘real’ Aborigines in Arnhem Land.

Despite the existence of Cahill’s Crossing as the point at which visitors to Kakadu must negotiate entry, the boundaries between Kakadu and other parts of the Northern Territory are somewhat arbitrary with regard to the movement of Aboriginal people, whose relatives have lived there for generations. They move across them in much the same way as they have always done. Boundaries and restrictions, ownership and rights, are determined by the ongoing recognition of relationships to country and ancestors, through the membership of groups or clans. This movement is undoubtedly affected by the existence of the Park and its expansion through three stages of development. But the lives of Aboriginal people here, as everywhere else, have been affected by contact with other groups, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, for as long as people can remember. Tourists do impose restrictions on people’s daily lives, but in the past it was buffalo hunters, pastoralists, miners and European explorers. In 1886 John McKinley’s fifteen men, forty-five horses, sixty sheep and seven dogs met the first of two groups of Aboriginal people encountered on his journey at Jim Jim Falls, now a popular destination for visitors during the dry season (Chaloupka 1993). Diverse patterns of migration developed in response to the activities of gold-mining in the 1870s and again when uranium was discovered in the 1950s. Sites of non-Aboriginal enterprises offered opportunities for employment and changed long established patterns of seasonal movement due to the provision of food during wet season scarcity. Many people were moved out of the area during the Second World War or were gathered in groups to protect them from (or prevent them helping) the Japanese (Levitus 1982).

If Aborigines inside and outside the boundaries of the National Park share a similar social and cultural history, why is there a perceived difference between the Aboriginal realities of Arnhem Land and Kakadu National Park? Undoubtedly there are several contributing factors, but one of these has to do with a confrontation with Aboriginal society that is mediated or of a second order. An interpretation of Aboriginal life and history, even constructed by Aboriginal people themselves, does not offer the challenges to preconceptions and prejudices that might present in moments of direct engagement.’

Just as a photograph of the family group standing in front of a decorated rock shelter on Injulak Hill fails to convey any of the discomfort, confusion and tension (or for that matter the awe, inspiration and gratitude) felt by the visitor to Arnhem Land, so the feelings

8. This is not to deny the validity of Taylor’s argument that Aboriginal art is a subversive means of ‘slipping Aboriginal values past an otherwise staunch opposition to mainstream Aboriginal culture’ (1988:89). The value and recognition of Aboriginal art within the international art world is an important achievement and has undoubtedly had a major influence on large numbers of nowAboriginal people.


aroused in people at the time the aforementioned historical incidents took place are really a matter of conjecture. Perhaps they, too, felt surprise or curiosity, bafflement or confusion. At times they must have been terrified, hurt or grief stricken. Although it is impossible to know what people felt, it seems clear that the new experiences and new ideas were partly expressed through painting, boat-building, tool making and storytelling. Woven fish-traps, steel axes and dugout canoes, as well as paintings on rock and bark, were representations of ‘a historically changing constellation of moments’ (Adorno 1984:3) The addition of ‘blu’ to the colour palette of white, black and red ochres, for example, and its appearance in the rock paintings of the area, were the result of the availability of laundry or ‘dolly blue’ brought into the area by missionaries (Chaloupka 1993). A less benign response to the rapid decline in the Aboriginal population in this area at the turn of the century (due mainly to introduced diseases) was a dramatic increase in sorcery paintings (Chaloupka 1993:207). ‘What was mere shock becomes an invitation’, writes Dewey (1934:25). But while it is a fact that remaining items of material culture provide evidence of these historical events, it is also the case that such representations, as transformations of the original experience, belie the energy of their making. A basket on display cannot convey the history of its constituent parts. Its form emerges from a distinctive combination of technique, materials and human imagination, all of which have their own paths of historical development. In the same way, a painting on a rock shelter of European explorers on horseback is unable to arouse the tension and conflict initially provoked by their appearance. It cannot convey the associated emotions because, as an act of expression, it has transformed them.

As novel feats of human ingenuity and creative solutions to human predicaments these representations of history evoke admiration. The system of knowledge which links together Aboriginal observations of plant and animal life, rights and obligations to land, ceremonial life and much else, is made up of an infinite number of such solutions. As acts of expression, all of these in their own way temporarily provide the illusion of a harmonious relationship between their potentially conflicting parts, and, by reversing the relationship between the actor and that which is acted upon, they also offer the illusion of control over the essentially uncontrollable. Furthermore, because their emergence is at the cost of the removal of all the contingencies that social action involves, once they are extracted from their role in everyday life they appear fixed, solid and removed of vitality.

Conclusion

For anyone who is close to works of art, they are no more objects of delight than is his own breathing. Rather he lives among them like a modern inhabitant of a medieval town who replies with a peremptory ‘yes yes’, when a visitor remarks on the beauty of the buildings, but who knows every comer and portal. But it is only when the distance necessary for enjoyment to be possible is established between the observer and works of art that the question of their continuing vitality can arise. (Adorno 1992:179)

The premise which places art and aesthetics within the objectified material world rather than within the realm of experience is the starting point for much writing about art in anthropology. Hence, art is invariably seen as a reflection, an expression, a communication, or an endorsement of a society’s values-a means of understanding those values, but rarely a determinant of them. But aesthetics operates at a more fundamental level than that. It is a particular way of expressing and communicating, but its products are


not once removed from itself, pointing at something else, such as social values or cultural beliefs. Instead, to a considerable extent, those products constitute the values and beliefs.

The restoration of an aesthetic capacity to the everyday and the recognition of its operation outside the production of material objects require more than its removal from the esoteric realm of ‘absolute spirit’ or a refusal to observe it only in a world of tangible human products. It requires an acknowledgment of the aesthetic as it operates in the field of the mundane and the pragmatic. In one of his Boyer lectures of 1968 (none of which was particularly concerned with ‘art’) Stanner attempted to demystify and explain the commitment of Aboriginal people to Aboriginal ‘law’, commonly referred to then as ‘going walkabout’ and often denigrated as the expression of some overpowering instinctual urge. This behaviour, he argued, is aesthetic. The pattern of mobility and rhythm in the movement of Aboriginal people over their country was in the first place a necessary ecological adaptation into which was worked the ordinary activities of life. Meeting friends and relatives, conducting ceremonies and so forth became part of a ‘mobile-rhythmical mode’, and took on, in his words, ‘a premial emotional and aesthetic appeal’. It seems, he says, to have been ‘a law of aboriginal life to embroider the unavoidable’ (1991:31). Such a view of the aesthetic is claimed by others to be more universal. Dewey wrote that the

. . . distinguishing contribution of man is consciousness of the relations found in nature. Through consciousness, he converts the relations of cause and effect that are found in nature into relations of means and consequence . . . The existence of art is the concrete proof that . . . man uses the materials and energies of nature with intent to expand his own life. (1934:25)

But this expansion which gives meaning does so partly because it simultaneously suppresses the uncertainty and chaos which gave rise to it and out of which it emerged. ‘Uncertainty and chaos’ are the raw materials out of which aesthetic form springs.

This can be illustrated by the way in which Aboriginal people in Kakadu gave serious consideration to the inclusion of ‘stories’ in their cultural centre. The stories were invariably complex and never existed in a form readily translated into a text. In the case of stories about animal species, features of importance included the precise identification of all species involved, the relationship between them, the direction of their travel and the identification of places they visited. None of these had any necessary relationship to animals of interest to conservationists, to points of interest to tourists, or to Park boundaries. Most important of all was whether the accuracy of the stories had been discussed with the appropriate people-that is with the people who had the right and authority to tell them. Stories are social and political statements that have a direct relationship to practical and instrumental knowledge about the land. Their form emerges out of prolonged negotiation and is a part of the constitution and establishment of identity in the face of competing interests. As a part of Aboriginal ‘law’, stories remain a vital component of contemporary Aboriginal life and are often offered as a means by which people express and explain the profound, historical and necessary relationship between people and their land. As such, they belong to the category of the aesthetic as much as paintings on rock walls and woven dilly bags. However, unlike paintings and dilly bags,


they do not have singular or enduring forms and they are continually transformed. As long as people are alive to tell them, their form is never fixed or finite.’

Interpreted outside of this context, however, as representations of social life, the values which make for a ‘good story’ or the ‘right story’, which determine its form, are elided. Their importance as frames around which social life can continue to be constructed is radically diminished. They are no longer the vital components of social life that they were. To the non-indigenous spectator, for whom ‘stories’ historically have a radically different meaning, the form is obscure; details sometimes look irrelevant, events superficial and the actions of characters ambiguous. The profound and extensive knowledge of the social and physical environment required in their making and telling is absent.

It is their character as aesthetic objects which allows for their ready transportation into other domains and entry into different kinds of discourse where value may be debated with vastly different terms of reference. Inherently aesthetic, they have been consigned to the world of artefacts, where they may or may not be ‘elevated’ to the world of ‘art’. Whether they are depends on a complex interplay of social, historical and political forces. But what is certain is that their making would not be embedded within a natural hierarchy of value that could be used to discriminate between them and other artefacts. A similar process takes place in the weaving of a story as in the weaving of a basket. A painting or a story is as much a product of negotiation between competing interests as the spatial and legislative artefact that is Kakadu National Park. What makes one the subject of ‘art’ and the other not is defined by the particular discourse or field in which they are debated or talked about.

The aesthetic is located in ordinary everyday social activities, in a central or pivotal way. In this setting, its force is an integrating one, where unity, balance, order and proportion have as much to do with attempts to deal with social reality as with formal elements of design. Paradoxically, it is the aesthetic’s power to suppress the contingencies of this reality which makes the former a poor means of conveying the latter.

Representations of Aboriginality provoke an aesthetic response, whether the representations take the form of paintings, dances and dramatic plays or ‘informative’ brochures, national parks and cultural centres. That the representations belong to a category of artefacts produced by the process of colonisation is indisputable, and the need for indigenous Australians to be engaged in representations of themselves is likely to continue as long as their land and livelihood continue to be threatened. But, as representations, they should not be judged merely by reference to their final form, as are so many works of ‘art’. The process by which they are created deserves interest. Although this process is a part of the larger colonising one, it need not reproduce the power relations between indigenous and non-indigenous people that have historically prevailed.

The production of the cultural centre in Kakadu had a strong Aboriginal voice. Aboriginal people from the Park were responsible for the site and form of the building, the final shape and form of the display. They controlled the information gathering process and

9. This is not only the case for stories collected in the present and in a part of the country which has been subjected to a prolonged history of non-Aboriginal contact. There is evidence that stories elsewhere were and are of a contested nature. Keen (1994:41) writes: ‘On the face of it Yolngu myths . . . were established forms, more or less reproduced from generation to generation, but while their content was obviously less transient than stories of everyday happenings, this stability was only relative. In reproducing myths people transformed them’.


the selection and management of consultants. They produced and manufactured objects and structures for the display. They controlled all text and intellectual information. Although a number of non-indigenous people were involved in the production of the centre, to the extent that Aboriginal protocol was observed, and culturally appropriate ways of gathering information and decision-making processes implemented, there was some pressure put upon non-indigenous ‘experts’ and bureaucratic systems. The end product was the result of many prolonged and demanding negotiations among indigenous people themselves and among non-indigenous people, as well as the resolution of conflicts and agreements which arose between both groups. Like all representations, the final product does not tell the history of its making, but the process of its production did have the chance to make history.

References Adorno, T.W. 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by C. Lenhardt, G. Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann.

Adorno, T.W. 1992. Prisms. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Anderson, R. 1979. Art in Primitive Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Anderson, R . 1989. Art in Small-scale Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Anderson, R. 1990. Calliope’s Sisters: a Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art. Englewood

Bachelard, G. 1964. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press. Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Chaloupka, G. 1993. Journey in Time. Chatswood, NSW: William Heinemannn. Coote, J. 1992. ‘Marvels of everyday vision’: the anthropology of aesthetics and the cattle-keeping

Nilotes. In J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Dewey, J. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books. Fox, R.W., G.G. Kelleher and C.B. Kerr. 1977. Ranger Environmental Inquiry: Second Report.

Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Cell, A. 1995. On Coote’s marvels of everyday vision. Social Analysis 38:18-3 I . Keen, 1. 1994. Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levitus, R. 1982. Everybody Bin all Day Work: a Report to the Australian National Parks and

Wildlife Service on the Social History of the Alligator Rivers Region of the Northern Territory, 1869-1973. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Neidjie, B. 1989. Story about Feeling. Broome: Magabala Books. Podro, M. 1982. The Critical Historians ofArt. New Haven: Yale University Press. Press, T., D. Lea, A. Webb and A. Graham (eds). 1995. Kakadu: Natural and Cultural Heritage and

Management. Darwin: Australian Nature Conservation Agency and North Australia Research Unit.

Rowse, T. 1993. Afer Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Stanner, W.E.H. 1991. Afer the Dreaming. Crow’s Nest, NSW: Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Taylor, L. 1989. Seeing the inside: Kunwinjku paintings and the symbol of the divided body. In H. Morphy (ed.), Animals into Art. London: Unwin Hyman.

Weiner, J. 1995. Technology and techne in Trobriand and Yolngu art. Social Analysis 38:32-46.

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Open for Inspection: Problems in Representing a Humanised Wilderness

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