Melinda Hinkson

Mobility and Modernity in Arnhem Land The Social Universe of Kuninjku Trucks

This article explores the central role played by vehicles in a contradictory set of social processes that have unfolded in western Arnhem Land, north Australia, over the last five decades. Motor vehicles have mediated much of humanitys experience of the world over the past century. Kuninjku peoples interaction with motor vehicles, we argue, provides one revealing lens through which to explore a distinctive and ambiguous experience of modernity. This article explores the role vehicles play in mediating Kuninjku interaction across diverse arenas — their customary lands, an expanding regional social universe occupied by kin, the Australian nation-state, and finally an increasingly globalized world. Briefly exploring the process by which vehicles were introduced into Kuninjku country, we then track key transformations in Kuninjku life through a series of historical phases. The distinctive Kuninjku values that govern use of vehicles are explored. In conclusion the article reflects on the paradoxical nature of Kuninjku experience of late modernity and the fragility of their apparent success in realizing their aspirations.

Australia's Bill Henson scandal: notes on the new cultural attitude to images

In May 2008 police removed a series of artworks by internationally renowned photomedia artist Bill Henson from the walls of a Sydney gallery just hours before his exhibition was due to open. They did so in response to an allegation that the invitation to the opening carried an image of child pornography. This article explores some of the events and public debate that followed. The author suggests that rather than simply replicating an age-old debate over censorship, the recent furore in Australia reveals dimensions of a new cultural attitude to images. She sketches some of the key dimensions of this attitude, with a particular focus on the increasingly dominant visual experiences offered by digitally mediated images. Following scholars writing at the interface between art theory and anthropology, she argues that these experiences configure relationships between persons and images in particular ways. She argues, too, that our mediated engagements with fleeting digital images are influencing the way we apprehend other kinds of pictures, and in turn have implications for our relations with each other. In conclusion she suggests that the Henson case highlights the ethical implications of recognising the qualitative distinctiveness of different kinds of visual experience.

Beyond assimilation and refusal: a Warlpiri perspective on the politics of recognition

ABSTRACT This paper takes up the concept of recognition as an ever-present structuring arrangement in relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Recognition, in both positive and negative guises, is understood here to foreclose the terms of those relations. For Warlpiri people of Central Australia who have achieved positive recognition and the attendant confirmation of legal rights in land and native title, the contradictions and frustrations of recognition continue to be multiple. Looking back across the eight decades since Warlpiri were first recognised in particular ways by settler-colonists, the paper explores a series of encounters where transformation is visible but ultimately undermined. The paper explores these issues by way of the observations of one remarkable cross-cultural innovator and his quest to ‘be free to the world’. In tracing this work of interpretation and its strategic application to the field of intercultural relations the paper argues that what is being pursued should not be mistaken for assimilation, nor the refusal of recognition, but rather a mode of reciprocal engagement that carries with it significant transformative potential.

Back to the Future: Warlpiri Encounters with Drawings, Country and Others in the Digital Age

Since the early 1900s, Warlpiri people living in the central desert region of Australia have experienced an intense process of adaption to the changing circumstances of postcolonial life. From the earliest days, their encounters with kardiya, non-Aboriginal people, have been mediated by diverse visual technologies that have, over time, become integral to the ways Warlpiri orient themselves to each other and their wider world. In this paper I trace the key elements of the complex visual environment that has emerged from this history of mediation. The central part of the paper considers events around the repatriation to Warlpiri communities in 2011 of a collection of drawings made in the 1950s by their forebears. In responses to a medium that once was new but now is old, several points of interest emerge, among them a clear sense of a hierarchy of value Warlpiri apply to modes of visual communication. In the context of the return of the drawings, the significance Warlpiri ascribe to other visual media comes to the fore. I consider some of the ways visual forms are deployed in support of public projections of cultural identity on the one hand and everyday modes of expression and address on the other. The papers central argument is that contemporary Warlpiri attitudes to images – whether they be drawn, painted or broadcast – reveal the complex postcolonial workings of mimetic desire.

Image-Encounters with the Techno-Mediated Other: regarding post-election iran on youtube

The 2009 post-election violence on the streets of Tehran was brought to world attention by the image production and distribution activities of Iranian citizens. This paper considers the communicative potential of these images as they are encountered by distant observers. Beginning with George Herbert Mead’s concept of a generalised other that establishes the ground for intersubjective person formation and the moral basis of self–other relations, I build a critical framework for considering the limits and potentiality of self–other encounters in mediated contexts. Arguing that communication presupposes a shared cultural attitude to images, I explore the distinctive cultural frame and image-encounters that the Internet establishes for its users, before turning attention to the activity occurring on the other side of the screen. Setrag Manoukian has observed that in the 2009 Iranian situation the once distinct categories of action and mediation collapsed together; “everyone was acting and reporting” simultaneously. I shall examine the claims for a new reflexivity associated with this situation. Turning again to the perspective of the distant observer, I explore some of the constraints on the functioning of the Iranian images as communicative acts. In conclusion I briefly consider what work is required on the part of the viewer to build a context for empathetic regard.

At the edges of the visual culture of exile: a glimpse from South Australia

This paper draws on research with Aboriginal women of the Central Australian desert who are living in the metropolitan centre of Adelaide 2000 km south of their homelands. It explores the complex conjunction of trauma and pleasure in situations of exile and hones in on the vital role of digital visual mediation in the creative work of making oneself at home in foreign circumstances. In exile, memory and digitisation of images, sounds and interactions enable distinctive socialities and ways of relating to places to be stretched across space. Yet other images are encountered as sites of contested identification and coercive governance. Separation from kin and country is intensely felt but also made bearable when their images are held in close company. In exploring these unsettling circumstances the paper reflects upon the uneven terrain of visual culture and the evolving place of the digital visual in research concerned with transformations in what it is to be human.

Pictures for our time and place: reflections on painting in a digital age

Social theorist Zygmunt Bauman puts forward the proposition that ‘life is a work of art’. The statement appears glib without Bauman’s further qualification: ‘Being an individual’, he suggests, ‘(that is, being responsible for your choice of life, your choice among choices, and the consequences of the choices you chose) is not a matter of choice, but a decree of fate’. Identity, Bauman tells us, needs to be created, just as works of art are created.1 In the present we are, he suggests, all artists of life. Bauman’s reflections on the art of identity-making— which point to certain generalised processes at work in our society more than art creation per se—are confirmed in the observations of other social theorists. Arjun Appadurai argues that with the rise of technological mediation imagination is transformed—it ‘has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people’; it ‘has become a collective social fact’.2 Sociologist John Thompson writes of the defining ontological challenge that confronts us in the present: to coherently integrate two registers in which we experience othersIn December 2008, Australia celebrated the opening of a new national cultural institution. A striking new building in Canberra’s parliamentary triangle declared portraiture to have achieved a rare political outcome: a

Coercive reconciliation : stabilise, normalise, exit aboriginal Australia

76 million building cemented the genre’s status in our national consciousness. The process leading to the opening of this building had commenced a decade and a half earlier with the advocacy of arts philanthropists Gordon and Marilyn Darling and the mounting of a travelling exhibition, Uncommon Australians: Towards an Australian national portrait gallery, which opened at the National Gallery of Victoria and then toured to Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. Funding was subsequently allocated to enable the establishment of a fledgling national portrait gallery in three rooms of Old Parliament House. In 1997, then Prime Minister John Howard declared his enthusiasm for a freestanding institution dedicated to portraiture and allocated the funds required to plan and erect the new building.1 Portraiture was the art form that seemed to speak most compellingly to the cultural moment; in terms of the public politics fostered by Howard, the actions and achievements of individual ‘great Australians’, whether past prime ministers, cricket players, entrepreneurs or neighbourhood heroes, were to be lauded over ‘lofty ideas’ or ‘culture’. In this context it was observed that the new institution enjoyed a dream run of political support and public acclaim.2