ngargee

Aboriginal art in southeast Australia is dynamic, innovative and powerful. The diverse artworks featured in this book celebrate contemporary artists and their continuation of Ancestral knowledge. With each chapter the result of an intercultural collaboration, this volume speaks to globally resonant themes in First Nations art, storytelling and sovereignty.  Each contribution prioritises learning with and about First Nations artists to support their knowledge systems.     

A guiding theme is the creative practice of internationally renowned artist Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wamba Wamba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung), who is both a co-editor and an inspiration.  

Bringing together thoughtful analysis and lush illustrations, ngargee gives southeast Australian Aboriginal art the long overdue attention that it richly deserves. ngargee will be a welcome addition and an indispensable resource for all Australian museums and galleries, and indeed anyone who wants to learn more about southeast Australia, the richness of its art practices, and the continuity and innovation of First Nations knowledge-transmission and culture-making across time and place.

ngargee means coming together to celebrate in Boonwurrung language, where celebrations are accompanied and demonstrated through the act of making art. Just as art and culture cannot be separated, neither can celebration and art-making.

Production Details

• Paperback
• 276 x 245 mm
• 224 pp
• Released 18 November 2024
• ISBN 978-1-922752-02-4 (pb)

Content

Foreword by Tina Baum
About the contributors
Note to the reader
Map
1) Introduction: Southeast Australian Aboriginal art: a living story activating the past in the present for future generations by Frances Edmonds, Sabra Thorner and Maree Clarke
2) Collapsed histories by Peter Waples-Crowe and megan evans
3) Artists, archives and Ancestral connections: an Aboriginal collection between Australia and Berlin by Anna Weinreich, Vicki Couzens, Eileen Alberts and Titta Secombe
4) Biganga bayiya (singing the possum): reclaiming Indigenous knowledge in the academy by Tiriki Onus, Sally Treloyn, Megan McPherson and Reuben Brown
5) Reconfiguring institutional spaces by privileging Indigenous place by Brian Martin and Charlotte Day
6) Inclusion at The Living Pavilion: institutions making space for Indigenous peoples and other hornets’ nests by Zena Cumpston and Rimi Khan
7) Backyard manifesto: a piece of art in the gallery is only one part of the story to see by Mitch Mahoney and Amélie Ward
8) Twenty years of the Ngukurr News / Nyus: exploring the interconnectivity and influence of a remote Indigenous community through the archive by Kate Senior, Richard Chenhall and Daphne Daniels
9) ‘Walking in the path of those before us’: truth telling through creating, a response to colonial collecting by Julie Gough, Vicki West, Maree Clarke and Frances Edmonds
References
Index
Acknowledgements

About the authors

Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung) is an artist and curator who grew up in Mildura (northwest Victoria), on the banks of the Murray River, and who has been living and working in Melbourne for over 30 years. She has become a pivotal figure in the revitalisation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices. This includes possum skin cloaks, kangaroo teeth necklaces, eel traps, kopi mourning caps and much more – in both traditional materials and contemporary, such as glass and 3D printing. Her practice includes lenticular prints, 3D photographs and photographic holograms, as well as painting, sculpture and video installation. The through line of her work is to facilitate intercultural dialogue and collaboration about the ongoing effects of colonisation, while simultaneously providing space for Aboriginal people and communities to engage with and mourn the impact of dispossession and loss. She is deeply committed to transmitting knowledge to younger generations (and anyone else who is willing to learn). Clarke has exhibited her work widely in Australia and beyond, and her work is held by the Koorie Heritage Trust, Museums Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. In 2021, her work was featured in a major retrospective, Ancestral Memories, at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Frances Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar working mainly in the field of anthropology. Her work is collaborative, participatory and community based. Her research interests include art and wellbeing; decolonising methodologies; the creative use of digital technologies; visual studies; oral history and storytelling; cultural revitalisation and the archival and ethnographic record; and the intersection between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. She was the senior research fellow on the Australian Research Council (ARC) Indigenous Discovery Project, ‘Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge’ (2020–24). Between 2014 and 2017, she worked closely with First Nations young people at Korin Gamadji Institute, Melbourne, supporting collaborative research throughout the ARC Linkage project ‘Aboriginal Young People and Digital Storytelling’.

Sabra Thorner is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Indigenous Australians for more than twenty years, focusing on photography, digital technologies and archiving as forms of cultural activism. In the past few years, her work has increasingly turned towards collaborative and decolonising methodologies in both research/writing and in teaching/learning. She is especially interested in contemporary arts and cultural production, matriarchal forms of knowledge transmission, and storytelling as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty. She’s held fellowships from AIATSIS, Fulbright, Mellon, the Smithsonian and Wenner-Gren, and has published her work in Museum Anthropology, AnthroVision, The Journal of Material Culture, Oceania and Visual Anthropology Review. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.

About the cover

The cover artwork is seeing the invisible (2024) by Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta/ Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung) and Mitch Mahoney (Boonwurrung/Barkindji).

Artwork story by Maree Clarke:

The cover of this book features an original artwork telling a visual story of the rivers that connect us all. This includes past, present, and future generations of my family, the Clarkes. My great-nephew Mitch collaborated with me, creating the outline for the winding waterway. The two red symbols depict men and women, designs I have now handed down to my nieces and nephews to use in their own art practices. The six blue wavy/rectangular shapes along the top represent different generations of our family, and have recently been incorporated and adapted by Mitch in multiple mediums. The pink and yellow backdrop to the blue river is a much enlarged and colour saturated microscopic image of a river reed, one of a series of 297 individual photographs comprising a composite work, now you see me: seeing the invisible #1 (2023). This series revealed an inner beauty and strength of the river reeds, symbolising the resilience and continuation of our connections to Country.