'Keeping up the culture': Gunai engagements with tourism.

Kleinert, Sylvia

INTRODUCTION

Here [in] ... cultural representations ...boundaries are set, extended or broken as the politics of identity are worked through for native and non-native alike (Charlotte Townsend-Gault 1997: 158).

Aboriginal involvement in tourism has a long history in south eastern Australia beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century at missions and reserves such as Ramahyuck (Lake Wellington), Coranderrk, and Lake Tyers in Victoria and La Perouse in Sydney where developments in transport allowed ease of access for recreational visitors from nearby cities. Tourism held a range of meanings for both Aborigines and non-Aborigines: for Aborigines tourism represented a means of 'keeping up the culture'; for non-Aborigines it was an encounter with a 'primitive' other. Tourism is therefore a complex and contested arena of cultural practice. While it can be shown that for Aborigines in the south east, tourism was an important means of cultural survival, it is also consistently misrepresented, with the artificiality of the tourist encounter taken as merely evidence of colonial domination. In seeking to reconsider the role of tourism in relation to contemporary debates on cross cultural exchange and the politics of cultural identity this paper intervenes in the 'hidden history' of Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia. I argue that, for Aboriginal people, entangled in the uneven power relationships of a settler society, tourism provides a critical insight into the representation and recognition of Aboriginal identities at a time when assimilation policies sought to render Aborigines invisible. The tensions and contradictions that arise in the process of cultural production serve to highlight the ways in which Aborigines are ambiguously placed in relation to the nation state.

This paper focuses on one particular site of tourist production, Lake Tyers Aboriginal station in Victoria, one of many sites in the southeast where Aborigines chose to engage in tourism, each with its own particular character and distinctive historical trajectory. I use this paper to suggest that tourism fulfils a multiplicity of roles. By choosing to become involved in the tourist industry, Gunai at Lake Tyers negotiated a favourable response from mainstream Australians and they gained a degree of economic autonomy and access to markets from which they were otherwise excluded. Most particularly engagement in tourism articulated a local and national consciousness of Aboriginal identity. It is interesting to consider that whereas in an earlier era, the desire to engage in commercial exchange was squashed by government authorities; today that is precisely what is being demanded of Aboriginal communities.

The research on which this paper is based is interdisciplinary traversing anthropology and art history. This chapter also draws upon the archives of government departments which sought to administer Aborigines' daily lives. In so doing my aim is to recuperate recognition for a dynamic Aboriginal presence in the south east.

MAPPING THE FIELD

Cultural representations are crucial to any consideration of the social relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Until quite recently Aborigines in south eastern Australia were rendered almost invisible by the impact of colonial ideologies. In retrieving recognition for a dynamic Aboriginal presence in the region, there is a need to find ways of reconstructing how Aboriginal people used visual representations to engage in dialogue with colonisers. A key tool in my analysis is Mary Louise Pratt's use of the term 'transcultural' to refer to the way in which ethnic minorities, living in the radically asymetrical power relations of colonial society, consciously incorporate and appropriate the materials of the dominant culture (Pratt 2008: 7; see also Ariss 1988: 133).' Although Pratt is concerned with the study of travel literature, her use of the term 'contact zones' to refer to the space of colonial encounters where 'disparate cultures meet, clash, grapple with each other' is relevant to this paper (Pratt 2008:7). The idea of 'autoethnography' further places the emphasis squarely on those 'instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's terms' (Pratt 2008: 9). Thus an anthropology of the transcultural allows us to move away from earlier concepts of cultures seen as bounded, discrete entities toward a more relational, open-ended approach predicated on the 'entanglement' of colonisers and colonised as they mutually engage in processes of appropriation, collaboration and adjustment (Hinkson and Smith 2005; Thomas 1991).

In order to retrieve recognition for a dynamic Aboriginal presence in the south east I draw upon the writing of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who explores the dialectic and structural relations in which individuals exist within society in relation to the 'field of production' (Bourdieu 1997: 5). Habitus for Bourdieu represents the way in which cultural production operates through 'schools' or given conventions which transmit governing principles for attitudes and ideas (Bourdieu 1990: 75). By emphasising how culture is a resource for invention and improvisation, Bourdieu demonstrates that cultural change is not necessarily destructive. He acknowledges indigenous people as historical actors engaged in 'signifying practices' that can be both positive and negative.

Anthropological and art historical categories of art/artifact, fine art/craft, high art/popular culture have consistently defined Aboriginal cultural practice in European terms (Morphy 2008; Phillips 1998). As Howard Morphy points out, 'Art as a category is deeply entangled in value creation processes. Since the eighteenth century, the category of fine art has been used to exclude recognition for other terms' (Morphy 2008:12). We need to consider the impact of these exclusionary and inclusionary criteria in relation to wider debates on race, representation and civilisation to understand how the desire on the part of settler societies for national identity allows cultural essentialisms to prevail such that Aboriginal art and culture in northern Australia is privileged while the south east remains radically marginalised (Gibson 2008; Thomas 1999: 10). To critically interrogate these assumptions, this paper argues that art making is an essentially collaborative process where meanings are made and remade in the process of cultural production (Wolff 1981).

ARTEFACTS AND AUTHENTICITY

Aboriginal people in south eastern Australia have long been incorporated within global processes. In their encounters with colonisers Aborigines never ceased to engage in the production of small, often anonymous artifacts such as boomerangs and baskets made for local use and for sale to collectors. However as Nicholas Thomas observes, '[s]ince the serious study of First Nations' material culture began in the late nineteenth century, scholars and connoisseurs have generally paid attention only to pieces they regarded traditional'(Thomas 1999:15). When Aboriginal artists incorporated from colonial genre, styles and techniques in objects made for local use and as tourist souvenirs, their creative efforts were typically denigrated by ethnographers as evidence of cultural decline. By the late nineteenth century the belief of Baldwin Spencer, Honorary Director of Museum Victoria (1889-1928), that there were no surviving traditions in the south east contributed to a growing concern with authenticity (Marrett and Penniman 1932: 140). From the 1920s onwards, Museum Victoria no longer collected artefacts from the south east (McCall 1988). Ruth Phillips identified similar conditions among northeast American Indians, pointing out that, 'The authenticity paradigm marginalises not only the objects but the makers, making of them a ghostly presence in the modern world rather than acknowledging their vigorous interventions in it' (Phillips 1998: x).

There is a considerable record of an under-valued anthropology undertaken in the south east beginning with the work of nineteenth century ethnographers. While these writers inevitably operated under a salvage paradigm they nevertheless provide a record of culture undergoing rapid change. Today, the manuscripts resulting from the research undertaken with Aboriginal informants like that conducted by A.W. Howitt with artist William Barak (c. 1824-1903) play a crucial role in processes of cultural renewal and in the construction of revisionist histories. With the development of Australian anthropology after the 1920s, interest focused primarily on communities in northern Australia which had benefited from the delayed and uneven progress of colonisation resulting in studies of small-scale 'tribal' societies viewed in isolation. In the south east however the 'culture of poverty' approach advocated by social scientists viewed Aborigines in negative terms giving rise to the popular stereotype of 'cultural outcasts' (Langton 1981). In the process, cultural constructions of racial purity differentiated between 'real' Aborigines in northern Australia and Aborigines in south eastern Australia who were perceived to have 'lost their culture' (Gibson 2008).

It is now possible to challenge these constructions of Aboriginality and retrieve recognition for a continuous history of cultural production in the south east. Jean and John Comaroff observe that, ' "culture" is often a matter of argument, a confrontation of signs and practices along the fault lines of power: that it is possible to recover from fragments, discord, and even from silences' (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:18). Anthropological work undertaken by Jeremy Beckett and Marie Reay with Barkindji in far western New South Wales in the 1940s and 1950s provides an insightful picture of Aboriginal people living in very deprived conditions under the impact of assimilation policies. Most particularly Beckett illuminates the historical experiences of Aboriginal men working in the pastoral industry where they gained kudos as 'smart men' noted for their bush skills and knowledge (Beckett 1958: 99). As Beckett makes clear, men such as George Dutton and Gordon Mitchell knew the mythological associations of their country and through their work in the pastoral industry, they retained knowledge of the muras or dreaming tracks as they moved stock from one waterhole to another, singing the country (Beckett 1978: 4-5, 17). Intrinsic to the life worlds of these men are new art forms such as carved stock whips and carved emu eggs produced for exchange that draw upon both Aboriginal and European traditions.

In the 1960s Dianne Barwick's research examined the histories of Aboriginal missions and reserves at Coranderrk and Cummeragunga recording their political struggles to retain traditional land (Barwick 1963, 1972, 1974). Barwick also documented the breaking up of the reserves and dispersal of Aboriginal people into the capital cities. From Barwick's oral history we gain a strong sense of the new alliances forged between Aboriginal communities. Yet Barwick also highlights the dilemmas confronted by Aborigines operating within the constraints of assimilation where processes of commodification and modernity are seen as potentially contaminating forces which threaten authenticity (Barwick 1963: 322-6,339). By contrast James Bell's research at La Perouse illuminates the way in which tourism contributed to cultural maintenance by acting as a catalyst for cultural resurgence (Bell 1958). Aboriginal men at La Perouse actively sought Bell's assistance in sourcing traditional images from the State Library of New South Wales to lend added authenticity to their displays, thus reclaiming their own history (Bell 1958:128-9). During the assimilation era involvement in the tourist industry at reserves such as La Perouse or at Aboriginal Enterprises, the tourist outlet established in Belgrave, Victoria by political activist Bill Onus (1906-1968), was crucial to the cultural survival of Aboriginal people in the south east.

In recent years much has changed through the political struggles of Aboriginal people for equality and recognition. Aboriginal art from across Australia is now critically acclaimed, represented in private and public collections of museums and galleries in Australia and overseas. Yet there is a sense in which the complex and contested history of Aboriginal art in the south east is overlooked. The reasons for this silence are complex and interconnected. In part it is an outcome of the authenticity paradigms governing colonial discourses, and in part due to anti-assimilation attitudes on the part of Aborigines and academics (Cowlishaw 2009; Haebich and Marsh 2008: 298; Kerin 2005). Lorraine Gibson, in her study of Barkindji artists in Wilcannia has drawn attention to ambivalence and ambiguity that surrounds Aboriginal art and culture as it is articulated within the binarisms of 'traditional/remote' and 'urban/settled' (Gibson 2008). It is also the case that contemporary artists, many of whom have trained in universities, look back with ambivalence to the popular hybridity and fragmented histories of an earlier era. In the view of Ruth Phillips, rereading the historical record requires more than a 'fashionably ironic post modern distancing' (Phillips 1998: xiii). What is required, Phillips suggests, is a closer critical analysis of Indigenous cultural practice. This is to acknowledge the many creative interventions by Aboriginal people drawing from within their own resources and selectively implementing processes of adjustments, incorporation and collaboration in response to their colonial experiences.

The significance of Aboriginal involvement in tourism lies in the challenge it presents to western paradigms by illustrating a positive public desire for Aboriginal art of a kind that is not usually highly regarded by scholars in the field. Today there is growing recognition for the vitality and dynamism of Aboriginal art generally. Where earlier tourist studies placed undue emphasis on the consumer, local studies now examine tourism from an indigenous perspective. Bennetta Jules-Rosette argues that as a semiotic sign system tourist art has its own structural integrity 'both triggered by and autonomous of the consumer response' (Jules-Rosette 1984: 5). As Howard Morphy notes the cultural production of Aboriginal people is able to fulfill multiple roles (both internal and external) thereby calling into question western categories that differentiate fine art/craft, art/artifact and high art/popular culture (Morphy 1991:2). In contrast to those who misrepresent tourist art as evidence of colonial domination and cultural commodification I follow writers such Jane Lydon (2005) and Ruth Phillips who argue for the 'strategic and purposeful nature of choices made by' indigenous artists as part of a continuous history of cultural exchange since colonisation (Phillips 1998: 19).

TOURISM AT LAKE TYERS

The Gunai (Kurnai) nation of Gippsland, Victoria came into conjunction with tourism as a result of particular historical circumstances. Such was the pace and pressure at which the colonial invasion proceeded in south eastern Australia that by the 1860s Christian missions were established to provide assistance to the remnant Aboriginal population. The Lake Tyers Church of England mission, for example, was founded by the Reverend John Bulmer in 1861 on land that was of significance to Gunai as an important meeting place. Following Bulmer's retirement in 1907 however, Lake Tyers Mission came under the administration of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines and a decade later, when it became expedient to consolidate the majority of the remaining Victorian 'full-bloods' on a single reserve, Lake Tyers' inaccessibility, situated on a remote arm of the Gippsland Lakes, ideally suited a paternalistic rhetoric of protection. (2)

But the fascination which Aborigines held for mainstream Australians tended to undercut this government legislation aimed at segregating Aborigines from mainstream Australian society. Already during the protectionist policies of the late nineteenth century, the mission was a focus of attention for visitors and by the 1920s this interaction assumed a new dimension when Lake Tyers came into conjunction with an emerging tourist industry at nearby Lakes Entrance. In the late nineteenth century urban visitors who sought to escape the bustling environs of Melbourne travelled to Aboriginal reserves at Coranderrk, Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers (Attwood 1989:115-6; Lydon 2005:182-184). The photographs of Nicholas Caire, who was based in Melbourne between 1876-1900, revealed the beauty of Victoria's rain forests to an urban population. In 1894 Caire wrote that 'there are few spots to equal Lake Tyers for natural beauty' (Caire cited by Lydon 2005:186). In such picturesque settings Aboriginal people could be conflated with the natural landscape. Taking advantage of developments in transport and communications, tourists could travel by train to Bairnsdale, then to Lakes Entrance by steamer and increasingly, many preferred to drive by car, visiting Lakes Entrance en route to Sydney. In effect a settler primitivism unsettled the boundaries through which government authorities sought to divide white and black.

Tourism brought Gunai directly into a contact zone with the majority culture. The distinctive artefacts and staged displays which emerged in response to this interaction represent an innovative set of local manoeuvres which can be attributed to Aborigines' determined exploitation of a tourist presence. At the many guest houses which catered for a diversity of visitors, it was assumed that tourists would be interested in 'the Aborigines.' Visitors could travel by commercially operated coaches or launches to Lake Tyers where the older Aboriginal men acted as guides thereby controlling the movement of visitors within the public domain. At the height of the tourist season during the summer months, visitors witnessed displays of boomerang throwing and fire-lighting, they purchased artifacts such as boomerangs, coiled baskets and brooches, they took photographs and they attended a concert in the hall featuring an array of traditional and contemporary music that included Aboriginal songs from the south east, Afro-American spirituals, popular songs and the distinctive Lake Tyers gum-leaf band.

The tourist art produced by Lake Tyers Aborigines can be interpreted, not simply as self-expression or as commercial opportunism, but also as a form of opposition which countered the hegemony of such government institutions. As far as the Board for the Protection of Aborigines was concerned, Lake Tyers Aborigines were fully provided for: supplied with housing, rations, clothing, blankets, medical and dental care. In return, they were expected to work for the reserve at a minimum wage of 3d an hour or 10/- a month with those fulfilling special duties including butchers, sanitary men, nursing and domestic service paid at a higher rate of 5 [pounds sterling] per month. Within this system Aborigines were expected to relinquish their freedom and independence in exchange for survival within a ration economy that kept them paupers and prevented access to material goods.

During the summer months families supplemented their meager income by leaving the station to undertake seasonal labour moving up and down the coast picking fruit and vegetables and wood-cutting. However the prices that Aborigines received for the artifacts they produced--between 5/- and 10/- for a boomerang or coiled basket made in the evenings--offered Aborigines a means of circumventing both the ration economy of the reserve and the racial inequality of the outside world. This evidence of Aboriginal intransigence accords with the findings of Barry Morris working among Dhan-gadi in northern New South Wales (Morris 1989). Thus Aborigines did not passively acquiesce in the restrictions imposed by the Board.

Officially Aborigines were allowed off the reserve to sell artifacts twice a year: for the Bairnsdale Carnival and for the Agricultural Show. In fact it appears that many moved on and off the station at will, extending their entrepreneurial skills to sell or exchange their wares with the wider community at the townships of Lakes Entrance or Bairnsdale. Hence commodity production brought not just economic gain, a degree of freedom and independence from the restrictions imposed by the Board. Even more importantly, the production and display of artefacts allowed Aborigines to undercut institutional impositions aimed at their integration into wider Australian society. Whilst Bain Attwood emphasises the freedom Aborigines gained away from stations when they lived communally as seasonal labourers, cultural commodity production also fulfilled a significant role (Attwood 1989: 75-77). Unlike the agricultural and domestic work demanded by the manager or the itinerant labouring undertaken away from Lake Tyers, the production of artefacts allowed Aborigines to work collaboratively and draw upon their own cultural heritage. Like Aborigines at La Perouse, Gunai represented a highly integrated social group who actively resisted assimilation by pooling their resources (Bell 1958: 146, 149-50).

From an Aboriginal viewpoint, the production of artefacts was a sign of this culture. Aileen Mongta and Ted (Chook) Mullett recall with pleasure how they gathered around the person making the boomerang and were shown how to shave the wood with a piece of broken glass and learn the skills in making them fly whilst listening to humorous stories from a past hunter-gatherer way of life. In their view, making boomerangs is not just a skill, it 'reminds you of what you know. It's all related, it's a way of keeping up the culture' (Ted (Chook) Mullett, pers.com. 2 September 1992; Aileen Mongta, pers com. 5 March 1993).

The creative and communal labour entailed in the production of artefacts also enabled engagement in the wider community. Laurie Moffatt, one of several community members involved in political struggles to retain Lake Tyers always carried a bundle of boomerangs in a hessian sack intended as gifts or for sale when he walked to Lakes Entrance (Attwood 2003, 237-240; Brian Hancock, pers com. 4 September 1992). At Lakes Entrance women, who found it more difficult to leave the reserve, bartered directly with shopkeepers to exchange their coiled baskets for clothing and shoes for their families. Women's coiled baskets were highly sought after as presents and many of the women produced on commission. Boomerangs were also presented as gifts. In so doing Aborigines acknowledged friendship and regard for individuals from the wider community. Exchange involved Aborigines in personal relationships of reciprocity. For example Hilda Rule, wife of Len Rule (assistant manager, later manager) and matron and craft teacher at the reserve between 1935 and 1958 received gifts of boomerangs in return for her kindness in nursing the sick or baking a birthday cake. On one occasion her daughter Dot received a boomerang as a birthday present from Lindsay Mobourne, a Gunai classmate at Lake Tyers primary school. In another instance, Aborigines presented a boomerang to Reverend James Stannage especially commissioned in recognition of his assistance as Rector of Bairnsdale (1925-1936) (Tom Stannage, Letter to the author, 11 November 1993). As Ivor Kopytoff points out objects may have a 'cultural biography' where meanings are 'classified and reclassified' in various phases of their life (Kopytoff 1986: 68). Boomerangs feature in the mid-war wedding of Gunai Susie Murray and Wiradjuri George Patten at Melbourne's prestigious Ormond Road Baptist Church. Every aspect of this event is significant as a public performance of Aboriginality from the elaborate wedding gown (complete with a miniature boomerang as a symbol of good luck) to the guard of honour formed by Lake Tyers servicemen and the boomerangs used in lieu of swords to create an arch over the bridal couple (Kleinert 2006). The fact that the painted boomerangs used then were similar to those produced for tourists is further confirmation of their meaningfulness within an Aboriginal milieu.

Maria Nugent in her study of tourism at La Perouse notes that boomerang throwing as a staged 'spectacle of Aboriginality' was a well-established tradition in the south east. Aboriginal people living on reserves at Coranderrk, Lake Tyers and La Perouse who catered for the interest of visitors by providing demonstrations of boomerang throwing and other Indigenous practices, 'performed "being Aboriginal" in quite stylised ways that emphasised the exotic, the primitive and the traditional' (Nugent 2005:76). For Aborigines boomerangs are important as part of their regional heritage: to members of the majority society, returning boomerangs represented a symbol of national identity. In a highly original way, Gunai cultural production mediated between these two apparently opposed realms and in the process negotiated new roles and meanings for Aboriginal artefacts emblematic of Aborigines' changed political, economic and social circumstances. Such interaction began to disinter artefacts from their museological associations with a dead culture to demonstrate a continuing Gunai presence in the modern world.

The painted boomerangs produced at Lake Tyers after the 1930s (replacing earlier techniques where designs were burnt into the wood with a heated wire) operated as a complex sign system expressive of changing constructions of Aboriginality. With each purchase of a boomerang inscribed with 'Best Wishes from Lake Tyers' visitors took away with them an 'oft'-site marker' that resonated with memories of their encounter with Aborigines. Gunai elder Albert Mullett explains that the designs on boomerangs are meaningful as an expression of the connection between a regional domain and kin (Albert Mullett, pers.com. 26 February 1993).

The designs invariably take the form of paired sets of figurative and geometric elements: at the apex, a map of the continent with Victorian and Australian flags or the Australian coat of arms; in the centre of each blade, pairs of birds perched on a leafy twig signifying either the Mullett family totem of the Laughing Kookaburra or the Gippsland moieties; the male moiety Yeerung, the southern Emu Wren, and the female moiety Djeegun, the Superb Fairy Wren and, at the tip of the blade, geometric designs, individual to each artist, similar to those formerly used in carved wooden artifacts, dendroglyphs and possum skin cloaks traditional to the south east. Other subjects included flora and fauna, landscapes and scenes of traditional camp life with hunting and ceremonies. These are all subjects central to a Gunai sensibility. When I asked Aileen Mongta about the painted boomerangs she said, they've 'all got their trademarks and designs. Some go a long way back, some are new. They just come up naturally but they're just as important ... It doesn't matter where the boomerang goes but anyone from this mob would know it like a stamp' (Aileen Mongta, pers com. 5 March 1993).

In his extended work among the Kwaio of Malaita in Solomon Islands, anthropologist Roger Keesing argues that such oppositional logic, where images of flora and fauna are recontextualised alongside heraldic imagery, is inherent in the counter-hegemonic discourses of the colonised. They:

have repeatedly produced mirror-images of the political structures used to dominate them, have invoked conceptual entitles that were convenient fictions of colonial administration, have mimicked and (often unwittingly) parodied the semiology of colonial rule and white supremacy (Keesing 1992: 8).

An alternative interpretation from within a settler colonial context might argue that the deployment of symbols of national identity by Gunai at Lake Tyers--or by Albert Namatjira who was also involved in tourism--signaled an intention to be incorporated within the 'imagined communities' of the modern nation state. However, such incorporation was not capitulation but was on their own terms. In the process, Aborigines began to interweave local associations with their regional domain into wider pan-Aboriginal concerns with colonial dispossession.

ARTEFACTS AND AUTHENTICITY

As we have seen Museum Victoria ceased collecting south eastern artefacts in the 1920s at the same time as Lake Tyers Aborigines began to exploit their conjunction with the tourist industry. Exclusion from institutional collections did not prevent the production of artefacts at Lake Tyers, but it contributed to the obscurity which has continued to surround the history of Aboriginal art in this region. In broader terms, such institutional exclusion expressed and reaffirmed government policies aimed at rendering Aborigines invisible through their consolidation at the remote Lake Tyers reserve.

Underpinning this invisibility and contributing to the contested status of Aboriginal art in the south east is the ambivalence toward tourist art. It is clear that commodification lies at the heart of these debates. As Howard Morphy points out, until the 1980s Aboriginal art was almost invisible: 'squeezed between the exclusivity of the fine art category and the authenticity criteria of the ethnographic museum' and relegated to the realm of 'ethnic and tourist arts' (Morphy 2008: xii). According to earlier essentialising criteria of evaluation, importance has been given to the idea of 'ethnographic purity' an idea that allowed Aboriginal art to be admired as pure exotic other, located back in a pre-colonial past.(Phillips 1998: 7). The idea of 'tourist art' in contrast, invoked the spectre of mass production, inauthenticity and kitsch that was anathema to the world of fine art which placed value upon the unique art object that transcended ordinary everyday life. In fact these discursive constructions around the idea of tourist art point to the radical realignment of social classes brought about by the industrial revolution and the failure of modernity to acknowledge its egalitarian nature (KirschenblattGimblett 1998: 274; Phillips 1998: 6).

Aboriginal artefacts were thus caught in a particular set of ethnographic criteria which associated authenticity with the traditional, and devalued everything else as contaminated. In 1929 the Herald newspaper reported that:

The demand for genuine boomerangs ... is steadily increasing. They have become so scarce, in fact, that the curator of our Museum, who recently tried to purchase two, was unable to secure them at a reasonable price. From 30/- to 2 [pounds sterling] is being asked for them in the secondhand dealer's shops and as much as 10 [pounds sterling] has been demanded for one of the old type of fighting boomerangs ('Boom in Boomerangs' 1929).

For those professionals with specialised knowledge, authentic Aboriginal boomerangs could only be located in the past.

The Melbourne artist Percy Leason was openly critical of the artefacts produced at Lake Tyers. In 1934 Leason had embarked on a project to paint the 'last of the Victorian Aborigines.' Completion of this project had involved the artist in extensive cross cultural exchange with Gunai at Lake Tyers. (3) In the catalogue for the exhibition Leason wrote:

It should be said that the last of the Victorian aborigines offer little material for the student of primitive races. Their old customs have gone. If some of the old crafts are still occasionally practiced, most of these have been considerably modified, or have lost altogether their original technique.

In the making of boomerangs, for example, the modern axe and iron wedges are used to remove the rough block from the tree, and a vice, a saw, glass scrapers and sandpaper are employed to make the finished boomerang. It is usually decorated, sometimes with a sketch of Sydney Harbour Bridge, and half castes often do most of the work in producing those sold at Lake Tyers (Leason 1934: 5).

Leason's veiled contempt invoked terms of racial descent to denigrate the presence and cultural practice of Lake Tyers Aborigines. In so doing he denied the skills and knowledge required to produce returning boomerangs and the status which Aboriginal men gained in the community through their prowess as fine craftsman. Leason's commentary further implies that commodification alienates Aborigines. But the opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1933 was a quintessential sign of Australia's modernity, so that when Aborigines drew upon media images or the influence of kin who travelled between La Perouse in Sydney and Wallaga Lakes on the south coast of New South Wales to incorporate its image into their boomerangs, they secured a position for themselves within the contemporary world.

The critical response to tourism, then and since implies that Aborigines are dominated by the commercial gains to be made, but this supposition is not borne out by local evidence. Within their own regional domains, Aborigines handled their inter-relationships with members of the majority culture in specific ways that preserved their autonomy. Speaking from an American context, Evans-Pritchard argues that from first contact, Indians have responded to whites by parodying their primitivism, hypocrisy, greed and naivety as a means of defending and protecting their group identity (Evans-Pritchard 1989). The manager's wife Hilda Rule, was acutely aware of the disjunction which operated between Aboriginal viewing positions as 'hosts' toward their tourist 'guests.' She made it clear that:

... [Aborigines] whom I worked with ... are not the tribal blacks that the general public [hope to see]. I feel that people look back and let their imagination take over & from this, articles are published which give the wrong impression. If only the visitors [tourists] could have heard themselves being mimicked after they left, their faces would be red. This often happened & we would all have a good laugh, "Those poor white fellers" was, and almost sounded like a pardon (Rule 1993).

Rule's local evidence offers a further insight into the defences which Aborigines implemented as tactics against the primitivist stereotypes which conditioned tourist perceptions. Aborigines were not naive. Rather they realistically differentiated between transient tourists and those members of the majority culture with whom they had formed friendships and with whom they were in daily interaction.

Aboriginal oral histories offer further evidence of the way Aborigines negotiated their interchange with tourists on terms advantageous to themselves. Historian Bain Attwood relays a story from the 1920s:

[Ellen (Kitty) Johnson (1849-1939)] was the oldest on the station and the white people always wanted to see her. She made a lot of money for her grand-children from the tourists ... One Christmas I was out there when the tourists were all about taking photographs of the Aborigines on the station. Old Granny Johnson always wore a scarf over her head and smoked a clay pipe: well ... some of the tourists [were taken] to see this real old lady--she knew the language--well, when they got to her house there she was sittin' out the front with her head covered with a possum-skin rug, and she wouldn't pull her head out of it. She sat there listening to the tourists askin' her to let 'era see her so they could get a photo, but she just sat there. After a good bit of coaxing all of a sudden she shoved 'er hand out and stuck a mug on the ground in front of her and waited till she reckoned there was enough coins dropped in, then she pulled the rug off and sat there, grinnin' away, smokin' her pipe for the tourists to photograph her. The whites often gave her tobacco and before they left she'd bring out some boomerangs and some baskets she had made herself ... and she got ten shillings [each] for them (Attwood 1989: 141-2; see also Pepper and Araugo 1989: 80.)

This narrative suggests the way Lake Tyers Aborigines 'commodified' their culture through interaction with tourists on terms advantageous to themselves, without losing their sense of control and authority. In this story it is clear that Johnson was exploiting the desire for her ethnicity as a sign of difference: language, clothing and lifestyle had become markers of authenticity. Tourists were ultimately allowed to take a photograph of her as a souvenir of their visit, but in the process, she has ridiculed their desire, maintained her dignity and gained economically.

During the 1930s and 1940s many Aborigines chose to leave Lake Tyers Aboriginal station. Despite their deep attachment to country they refused to accept further arbitrary restrictions and the forcible removal of children. Others were excluded from entry or forced to leave for having contravened regulations. While some chose to live in the nearby 'fringe camp' at Toorloo Arm or Jackson's Track (the forest camp near Drouin established by Daryl Tonkin and his wife Euphemia Mullett), many moved temporarily or permanently to Melbourne (Tonkin and Landon 1999: 181-82). In the post war period when Aborigines resumed their interaction with tourists, similar tactics prevailed. The Mullett and Mongta families for example staged displays of boomerang throwing for tourists travelling on the Princes Highway past Bairnsdale. For many years the Mongta family produced artifacts at Cann River trading under the name Far East Gippsland Aboriginal Corporation. Bidawal Aileen Mongta told me that:

a lot of the kids would hide [behind the bushes] and laugh because there'd be people who got hit on the head and legs. [Tourists] wanted to see the boomerangs being thrown but they didn't want to know about the culture and didn't listen to what Dad and Uncle Albert [Mullett] were saying (Aileen Mongta, pers.com, 5 March 1993).

From Aileen Mongta's perspective debates about authenticity and exploitation are irrelevant and merely represent further attempts to:

restrict and retard Aborigines ... After all they've done to us, do you think it would worry us to be sitting at the side of road selling boomerangs? ... Every time I see a stall or something and its public, it just reminds people that Aboriginal culture is still alive (Aileen Mongta, pers. corn, 5 March 1993).

Mongta's comments encapsulate the interconnection between production, display and exchange of artefacts and the multiple meanings generated in the process of cultural production between Aborigines and a range of consumers. These insights give us back information about the processes by which cross cultural artistic expressions emerge into the public domain and they retrieve recognition for the interest and patronage of ordinary Australians. Nevertheless we should not lose sight of the fact that competing interpretations of dispossession and degradation, loss and lack, vie with her narratives for legitimacy in the public realm. In the wider socio-political context Aborigines have seldom been able to determine the way they are represented, simultaneously admired and denigrated within existing discourses of Aboriginality (Povinelli 2002; Thomas 1999).

When discussions of tourist art emphasise the 'staged authenticity' of indigenous spectacles, this implies indigenous subordination and exploitation by tourists and a mutual complicity between producers and consumers that devalues contemporary cultural practice (MacCannell 1976:8-9.18-20, 27-31). In contrast, the evidence from Lake Tyers reveals that tourists accepted diverse representations of Aboriginality. Although various levels of primitivist ideas and concepts are apparent in the responses of mainstream Australian society, tourists have always accepted the different ways Aborigines represented themselves through the production of artefacts, staged displays and concerts. By contrast the emphasis which specialised art professionals and academics placed upon tradition and authenticity resulted in the exclusion of south eastern artefacts from collections and the criticism of both Aborigines and tourists. It was these elite responses that denied legitimacy to contemporary cultural developments in the south east and thus to a dynamic, newly emerging cultural arena. Here we have Bourdieu's 'return of the repressed' (Bourdieu 2000: 5). Despite the 'collective denial' of curators and academics, then and since--expressed in terms of various aesthetic and structural categories--it is possible to 'know and make known' the many strategic interventions implemented by Aborigines engaged in the effort of mediation, contestation and reformulation of relations between black and white in relation to their social reality and historical conditions of production. (Bourdieu 2000:5).

THE POLITICS OF TOURISM

The conflicting responses which tourist art elicited from managers and the public lend support for these more constructive interpretations. In reality Aborigines chose whether they wished to be involved in tourism although the Quarterly Reports which managers submitted to the Board, continually emphasized the problems which the industry raised from their perspective. When Aborigines gave priority to making artefacts and staging displays and concerts, work on the reserve remained incomplete. One manager stated his grievance thus: ... during the tourist season even aged men and women and cripples can earn a good deal of money by making and selling baskets and boomerangs ... the leaf band has been the great attraction to visitors, and together with the boomerang throwers and fire makers they have earned a good deal of money entertaining tourists (NAA: B356/53).

The Protestant work ethic which the station hoped to inculcate in Aborigines was structured around the concept of regular routine labour. This was before the era when Aboriginal enterprise was valorised as a way of achieving economic independence. Imposition of these values divided the community spatially and temporally in ways that were anathema to an Aboriginal sociality. And Gunai found that they could earn more money engaged in the production of artifacts than the meagre wages paid by the station. When Major Glen informed the Board in 1932 that Aborigines made more money from 'selling boomerangs than they would by legitimate labour,' he recognised the extent to which their commodity production circumvented the proscribed boundaries of work called for by a protectionist regime (NAA: B 356, Item 103). Finally Glen banned concerts altogether because, in his opinion, they allowed Aborigines to make money too easily.

As tourism flourished, managers continually requested a reduction in the hours that tourists were allowed to visit the station. Initially in 1918, visitors were permitted between 10 a.m.-7 p.m. every day; by 1921 these hours were reduced to 4 p.m.-6 p.m. and by the 1930s, these hours were further restricted to Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and public holidays (NAA: B356, Item 53). Indeed managers wanted to close the station entirely except to authorised persons, but, they complained, 'the station has become a recognised Tourist resort and if it were now closed against the T[ourist]s there would be a public outcry'(NAA: B356, Item 53). Bowing to commercial pressure managers suggested that tourists 'be requested to buy nothing direct from the Aboriginals and ... refrain from any remarks which would tend to make the Aboriginals discontented' (NAA: B356, Item 53). In the 1950s, managers' wishes were realised and tourists were excluded altogether. This enforced isolation drastically reduced Aborigines' economic independence and their additional income and the opportunity for dialogue with the mainstream community.

Board Reports reveal that the underlying reason why managers insisted on the exclusion of tourists from Lake Tyers was that interaction between Aborigines and tourists was seen as potentially subversive. Major Glen for example, specifically attributed 'the hostile attitude so recently displayed by our charges' to the bad influence of tourists: Visitors exercise a demoralising effect on natives, who become fawning mendicants when strange whites are on the station & refuse work because money from boomerangs manufactured surreptitiously in working hours is too easily come by (NAA: B356, Item 54).

Glen's report to the Board represented Aborigines as immoral and helpless, victims of their own base desires. And by re-attributing Indigenous resistance to external forces, Glen denied historical agency to Gunai. Far from protecting Aborigines from exploitation, we see that the Board's isolationist policies represent an institutionalised racism aimed at stopping all Aboriginal interaction with the public in order to quash potential rebellion and even self-expression, let alone striving for their own betterment. Exploitation was a highly emotive charge which incriminated tourists and elevated the Board's role as moral guardian. In tact tourists offered a form of liberation from the constraints of the reserve regime, both financially and in terms of cultural affirmation.

Off the reserve the Board continued to intervene in the interaction between Aborigines and tourists. In the post war period Freddie Harrison approached Reverend Richard Gilsenan (formerly of Lake Condah mission), his son Gordon and granddaughter Cora Gilsenan, a local pastoral family, which had 'employed, defended and sheltered' Gunai people over many years with a suggestion that the concert party be revived (Broome 2005:234). (4) Over a period of fifteen years from 1945 to 1960 the Gilsenan's staged Sunday evening concerts during the summer months in their Tea Rooms at Bancroft Bay, Metung against persistent interference from the Board who demanded that the concerts cease (Cora Gilsenan, 4 March 1993, taped interview). Aware they could be accused of exploiting Aborigines, no admission was charged. Instead Aborigines pooled the donations collected during the concert. On concert nights, those Aborigines still residing at Lake Tyers, would leave the reserve illegally and stay overnight whilst others came from Aboriginal camps at Toorloo Arm and Jackson's Track. This well-established concert tradition from Lake Tyers and other reserves such as Cummeragunga provided the background for theatrical performances in Melbourne such as Corroboreee Season 1949 and An Aboriginal Moomba in 1951 that contributed to a contemporary resurgence of Aboriginal culture in the south east (Kleinert 1999, 2006).

This evidence contradicts prevalent interpretations of tourism which have consistently denigrated tourists as uninformed and unsupportive of indigenous people. The assumption that tourists were motivated by a primitivism which required representations of a stereotyped traditional way of life in response to their demand for authenticity requires qualification. Differing practices and responses to various missions and reserves suggest that some tourist viewpoints responded to Aborigines' changing political circumstances. In certain circumstances then, tourism offered an 'alternative base for political action' which could undercut government infrastructures aimed at maintaining the social barriers erected against interaction by racist laws and practices (MacCannell 1976: 12). The interested and appreciative response of tourists can be contrasted with that of government authorities who tried to prevent interaction between Aborigines and tourists and to limit participation in the world beyond the reserve.

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

This paper intervenes in the contested history of Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia. It becomes clear that, for Aboriginal people in south eastern Australia, tourism played a vital role in their cultural survival. On and off the Lake Tyers reserve Gunai actively sought markets for their cultural products and in the process gained a degree of autonomy. For Aborigines engaged in 'keeping up the culture,' the production of tourist souvenirs and other artifacts contributed to cultural maintenance which resisted assimilation. Gunai art operated as a sign system expressive of Aborigines' changed circumstances consciously implementing adjustments, incorporations and collaborations as part of their political struggles for equality and recognition. Whilst curators, anthropologists and the wider art world overlooked these initiatives, tourists sought and purchased diverse representations of Aboriginality. Their support undercut restrictive legislation implemented through the Board for the Protection of Aborigines.

As this paper demonstrates Aboriginal engagement with tourism was often carried out in the face of opposition from the Board for the Protection of Aborigines. This resistance to incorporation within mainstream Australian society together with a very flexible cultural practice provided the basis for a resurgence of Aboriginal cultural expression in the south east especially in the realm of art. As Hetti Perkins and Margo Neale have shown, in the 1970s and 1980s a new generation of city-based artists emerged into the public eye (Neale 2000; Perkins 1994). Grounded in political struggles for self-determination and land rights, they pioneered a contemporary individual artistic expression. (5) As a proud assertion of their Aboriginality these artists claimed the names Koorie, Mufti, Nunga and Nyoongah to distinguish themselves from 'the Aborigines' of mainstream culture--despite the persistent questioning of identity by assimilation mechanisms (Foley 2000:47; Neale 2000; Perkins 1994).

Recognition for contemporary Aboriginal art brings the cultural production of Aboriginal people into conjunction with the general history of western art. Howard Morphy has written about the way in which world art discourse has gradually shifted toward a more inclusive conception for art that enables art from very different cultural traditions to be included within its discourse (Morphy 2008: 2). In theory the category of contemporary Aboriginal art intervenes in the binarisms of traditional/remote and urban/settled. But, as Gibson has shown, Aborigines may find themselves equally marginalised by the need to validate a traditional culture and the need to be contemporary (Gibson 2008: 308). It is also the case that contemporary Aboriginal fine art will be understood (and gain unprecedented value in the market place) in relation to the artworld's fetish for avant gardism and innovation and its celebration of hybridity. The upshot is that the distinctive regional trajectories and histories of cultural practice that in reality underpin a 'Blak City Culture,' remain bracketed off and relegated to the realm of craft and tourist kitsch (Kleinert 2010: 190; Perkins 1994: 5). In response to these complexities and contradictions, there is a need for a more reflexive transcultural approach that potentially enables Koorie art to be understood in broader, more inclusive terms in relation to its wider socio-political context and historical conditions of production as part of a continuous history of cultural practice giving voice to colonised subjects (Phillips 1998: xiii, 265).

When Michel de Certeau observes that 'Other regions give us back what our culture has excluded from its discourse' (de Certeau 1984: 50) he is referring to the 'tactics of every day life' at work in the regionally distinctive cultural practices of Aboriginal communities in the rural south east. Although they may live a different lifestyle to city-dwellers, Gunai are also part of the new political movement which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s impacting on many areas including health, education and native title (National Native Title Tribunal 2010). Aboriginal tourism is today part of a globalised industry and an important means of representing identity within the cultural essentialisms sought by (mainly international visitors) and the discourses of Aboriginality valorised by the nation state, in which Aboriginal art and culture is marketed and understood as a unique symbol of national identity (Gibson 2008; Povinelli 2002 and see Monaghan this collection).

Aboriginal tourism in Gippsland is today structured around the Bataluk Cultural Trail designed to respond to the interest of tourists by relaying stories of the Gunai people, events of colonial history (including massacres) and the impact of missions and reserves (Bataluk Cultural Trail 2011). Participating in the Bataluk Cultural Trail tourists may visit historical sites and the Aboriginal-owned Krowathunkoolong Keeping Place in Bairnsdale where they can view traditional artefacts (loaned by Museum Victoria), learn about cultural heritage of the Gunai people and purchase contemporary artwork. In considering the processes of articulation and transformation which have taken place and the ongoing location of Aboriginal people within the uneven power relations of a settler state, it becomes clear that for Gunai, their considered engagement with tourism has offered both an expression of a distinctive regional identity and a means of engaging in dialogue with the wider community.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ethnographic research of this nature could not be undertaken without the assistance and interest of participants. I wish to thank Gunai in the Gippsland region of Victoria for their contribution to this research. In particular I wish to acknowledge: Albert Mullett, Ted (Chook) Mullett, Aileen Mongta, Fred Bull and Mary Harrison. Non-Aboriginal people who assisted with my research also deserve mention including Cora Gilsenan, Brian Hancock and Hilda Rule. This research has been conducted as a mix of informal and taped interviews.

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NOTES

(1.) The idea of transcuhuration was first developed ill the 1940s by the sociologist Fernando Ortiz to refute current ideas of acculturation (Ortiz cited by Phillips 1998: 16).

(2.) Boards for the Protection of Aborigines existed in most Australian States. Their function was to 'protect' and regulate the lives of Aboriginal Australians. The Victoria Aboriginal Protection Board, established in 1869 maintained control over many aspects of peoples' lives including residence, employment, marriage and social life. The Board also administered the Half Caste Act of 1888 which allowed "full blood' Aborigines to remain on the reserve but excluded "half castes." Board's powers extended to control the interaction between black and white including visits by non-Aboriginal people to stations and Aboriginal participation in cultural peformances and exhibitions off the station.

(3.) Leason exhibited the portraits during the 1934 Victorian centenary (Leason 1934). The portraits, once framed within a primitivist paradigm, have since been reclaimed for their political, cultural and social significance. Research reveals that, in their interaction with Leason, Gunai controlled precisely whether they would participate and how they would be represented (Kleinert 1999-2000).

(4.) Cora Gilsenan was active on behalf of Aborigines from the 1930s onwards both in Gippsland and in Melbourne Her support for the Aboriginal cause can be seen in relation to broader humanitarian initiatives by white supporters (Broome 1989, 2005).

(5.) The successful struggle which returned Lake Tyers to the traditional owners in 1971, involved local Gunai and Aboriginal political organisations together with non-Aboriginal supporters (Attwood 2003: Taffe 2010).

Sylvia Kleinert

The Australian National University