The broad approach I have started the literature review with begins by outlining aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples contemporary connections to invasion and subjugation. Lester-Irabinna Rigney (2006) presents two incontestable points regarding Indigenous Australia, firstly that prior to colonization Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia was ‘composed of multicultural and multilingual societies’ (p. 384); and secondly ‘it is beyond argument that Australia was invaded’ (p. 384). Foley (2006) hypothesizes that it was the destruction and subjugation of Aboriginal Australia that has eradicated whole generations and obliterated educational processes permanently damaging complex Indigenous social networks. However, despite aspects of these indelible means mentioned by Foley and as discussed
throughout the research project, there are intergenerational reclamation practices that are broadly becoming recognized for their reinvigorations of Indigenous knowledge and cultural systems.
In Sarah Maddison’s (2009) extensive Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander political national coverage Black Politics:Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political
Culture, she warrants the continuing unresolved traumas of colonisation that included ‘massacres, rape, starvation and introduced disease, through to policies that justified the removal of Aboriginal children’ (p. 227). Aboriginal people have also according to Maddison (2009) ‘experienced the denigration and destruction of their traditional ceremonial processes for healing from trauma’ (p. 213). Sylvia Kleinert (2010) indicated in “Clothing the Post Colonial Body: Art, Artifacts and Action in South Eastern Australia” that South East Australian Aboriginal peoples had been ‘subject to unrelenting colonisation, devastated by disease and violence, dispossessed from traditional lands and relegated to remote missions and reserves’ (p. 4). Despite these seemingly irrevocable circumstances, what becomes evident throughout the literature are the current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reclamation and actively present practices being conducted by Indigenous festivals, artists and communities.
The metropolitan setting is related through Gillian Cowlishaw’s (2009) informed accounts in The City’s Outback regarding urban Aboriginal identity based in Sydney’s outer Western Suburbs. Cowlishaw (2009) refers to the challenging and reshaping of urban Aboriginal identities as dynamic, labile or adaptive and created through
‘matters of contestation and assertion’ (p. 31). Fred Myers and Faye Ginsburg (2006) state that ‘by the 1980s urban Aboriginal people felt themselves denied legitimacy as Aboriginal, lacking what was taken from them by dispossession’ (p. 36). Within their article, Myers and Ginsburg (2006) map a modern history of the Aboriginal struggle and how Aboriginal cultural activists ‘cracked the distorted mirror’ (p. 29) of cultural dissonance which had been held up to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples since colonisation. Aboriginal cultural activists achieved this, according to Myers and Ginsburg (2006), through using various media forms and mobilizations in addressing issues such as land rights, civil rights and the Stolen Generations.
Edward Said (2003) in Orientalism, relates to those reflections of cultural dissonance mentioned by Myers and Ginsburg, to be the supposed authentic realities presented by a dominant social institutions truism’s as an ‘exteriority of representations’ (p. 21). Langton (1993) views these exteriorities of representations as prominent and distorted reflections of Aboriginal people’s realities manifested in Australia’s histories by
dominant colonial cultural assumptions and accounts of constructed Aboriginal identities. One of the central problem’s according to Langton (1993) is
the need to develop a body of knowledge on representation of Aboriginal people and their concerns in art, film, television and other media and a critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics, drawing from Aboriginal world views, from Western traditions and from history. (p. 28)
Ian Anderson (1997) approaches what he terms as socio-historical connections and transformations of black and white ancestors as people ‘who are both like and unlike ourselves’ (p. 12). What Anderson (1997) regards as the analysis of historical
Aboriginal identity continuities is in effect to investigate the qualities of socio- historical connection between contemporary Aboriginal people and their ancestors. The context is according to Anderson (1997), the historical connection and coherent maintenance of tradition that is based in socio-historical transformation.
The socio-historical transformations and ancestral continuities that Anderson
comments on, are relational to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and cultural practices. Regionally the historical background and the challenging reinvigorations of South East Australian Aboriginal artists has been discussed by Fran Edmonds with Maree Clarke (2009), in Sort of Like Reading A Map: A Community Report On The Survival of South-East Australian Art Since 1834. The disruptions of colonisation to original meanings and designs are according to Edmonds with Clarke (2009) ‘being reclaimed in new ways that reflect the multiple experiences of Aboriginal people in the region’ (p. 47). Edmonds with Clarke (2009) state that ‘Aboriginal artists and art curators today, like their ancestors, do not see a disconnection between art and
culture, which remain entwined in the process of the everyday life’ (p. 47). In an ABC Radio interview between Awaye program presenter Daniel Browning (2011) and Wesley Enoch (of Murri decent, IndigeLab 2010 facilitator and Queensland Theatre Company director), Enoch states in relation to arts and cultural practice that
what makes us who we are is not our disadvantage, not how educated we are or where we live, in terms of housing, or the jobs we have. It's actually about this cultural work. And so I think that our generation has to go through and
make sure that culturally we're keeping hold of the things that we think are important for the future, both in content but also in form.