Kay Lawrence
South Australian School of Art, Australia
Listening and talking back: inter-cultural collaboration in ‘Weaving the Murray’
Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in her recent book, Reports from a Wild Country; ethics for decolonisation, notes the legacy of white settler society in Australia.
‘We cannot help knowing that we are here through dispossession and death.’
This is a shocking proposition and an uncomfortable position for white Australians. Yet to ignore this reality is to concede to the continuation of a present violence against Indigenous Australians. This is perhaps not now enacted through dispossession and death, but through another type of violence that sets the past aside and ignores the ‘vulnerability of others.’
Rose suggests an ethical position that ‘would replace (this) violence with responsive attentiveness’, an attentiveness to place and people, located in the here and now, that takes account of the past, and is based on listening to Indigenous Australians talking back ‘in their own terms’.
This paper reflects upon the ideas that underpin this ethical position, as they were played out with varying degrees of success in the inter-cultural project, Weaving the Murray. This project brought together three Indigenous and four non-Indigenous Australian artists in 2001 to design and make the collaborative art work Weaving the Murray to celebrate the Centenary of the Federation of Australia in 1901.
The great public success of the Weaving the Murray installation and exhibition, shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia and exhibited during the 2002 Adelaide Festival, was due to the attentiveness of the artists to place, and to the stories of the people who live along the Murray River, and their linking of the history of the river to present concerns with the river’s decline.
However the success of a collaborative project can also be measured by how the difficulties and tensions that inevitably arise during the designing and making processes are negotiated and resolved. This paper draws on material from interviews with the artists conducted by Kay Lawrence three years after the project was completed, to talk candidly about the success and failure of the collaborative process. The paper concludes, by reflecting on the importance of understanding each other’s terms of reference and listening respectfully, as well as talking, in order to develop an ethical practice of inter-cultural collaboration.
