Cairns Indigenous Art Fair
As recently as fifty years ago, Australia was pursuing a policy that actively sought to remove Aboriginal people from their traditional lands, separate family groups and thereby prevent the inheritance of cultural knowledge, rites, language and religion. The incremental reversal of this policy has been a long time coming and events like the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair aim to encourage and facilitate the passing down of culture and tradition in story, song, dance and art.
At the opening of the Djumbunji Press earlier this year, Seith Fourmile of the Idindji people – traditional land owners in the Cairns area – urged people to remember that “even though buildings might sit on top of country, that country is still the same underneath, and those stories are still the same, they never die. The thing is to… keep those stories and culture strong.”
As one of the last remaining cultures in the world to retain a spiritual conception of man’s relationship to the environment, it is appropriate now more than ever that we protect this alternative philosophy as a counterpoint to the industrial and anthropocentric philosophy of the West that seems to have set us on a one-way course to environmental disaster and climate-crisis.
According to Ian J. McNiven, author of Saltwater People: spiritscapes, maritime rituals and the archaeology of Australian indigenous seascapes, Aboriginal people experience more of an ontological than a technological relationship with the land and ‘seascapes are imbued with spiritual forces that can be engaged ritually.’ At a time when the globe is largely homogenizing its culture and politics, exporting this concept of cultural and spiritual sensitivity to land and ocean is perhaps not as naïve and idealistic as one might at first think.
The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair is one of the primary features in the Queensland Government’s multifaceted plan to support Indigenous art that only two years ago saw the injection of ten million dollars into the industry to support art centre networks and hubs, develop dance and music programs and art workshops and establish the Djumbunji Press for fine art printmaking. Art centres themselves are not new – with a centre having been in operation in the Aurukun region for over fifty years – but only in the last ten years have centres begun seeking a commercial market for their art.
Given the seven figure price tags on some of the central desert works to have recently gone under the hammer, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation, it is no wonder that government and private galleries alike are crashing the party. Combine this groundswell in domestic interest with the establishment in 2003 of the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (see aAR issue 18) and a picture emerges of a young industry experiencing exponential growth.
The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair took place across a number of venues, including the Tanks Arts Centre (a converted WW II fuel storage warehouse for the Royal Australian Navy) and featured several artists who have been making waves on the international scene recently. Sally Gabori, a Kaiadilt woman in her eighties who first put paint to canvas just four years ago during a visit to Mornington Island Arts and Craft Centre, has already had her work Ninjilki acquired by the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris.
She was joined by Dennis Nona whose work, with the aid of the Australian Art Print Network, has been exhibited with fellow Torres Strait Islander artist Alick Tipoti’s around Australia and at leading commercial galleries overseas, including in Manhattan’s fashionable Chelsea arts precinct.
Ben Garrard
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