Footnotes

• PROVENANCE
  Sherman Galleries in association with Jirrawun Arts, Sydney
  Private collection, Sydney
  
  EXHIBITED
  Beyond the Frontier, Sherman Galleries in association with Jirrawun Arts, Sydney, 7 - 30 April 2005, cat. 12
  Rusty Peters: Recent Paintings, William Mora Gallery in association with Jirrawun Arts, Melbourne, 7 Match - 1 April 2006 (illus. on invitation)
  
  LITERATURE
  Beyond the Frontier, Sherman Galleries in association with Jirrawun Arts, Sydney, no pagination (illus.)
  Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, p. 136
  Graeme Farnell (ed.), Inspiring Action: Museums and Social Change, Museums, England, 2009, pp. 188-209
  
  
  In his article addressing the museum as a site where objects are transformed through display and association, Chris Healy speaks specifically of Rusty Peters engaging with this mode through the painting Gamerre – What's this Museum?:
  
  Over the past three decades, relationships between museums and indigenous peoples have been debated and contested and renegotiated in significant ways. We can see this particularly in relation to the ownership of cultural property, the procedures through which museums work with indigenous people and things, and the techniques used in the display of indigenous cultures. Indigenous desires for repatriation of collections have been and remain a powerful motivation. Some museums have responded to these pressures by reconsidering their policies and procedures in relation to indigenous peoples, sometimes developing innovative and distinctive processes to deal with such difficult issues. Other responses have focused more on creating new ways of representing indigenous people, and of indigenous people representing themselves, in specific exhibitions. On the face of it, museums would seem to be outstanding examples of memorial institutions. Museums could be thought of as working through the complex issues which result from collections and institutional practices deriving from a colonial world that now exist in a postcolonial world where indigenous people have recognised rights as citizens and cultural custodians. They seem to have made the transition from being memory machines for a postcolonial future. In other words, museums, as sites of memory, seem to be doing what they should be doing, remembering for us.
  
  A diverse range of scholarship now emerging seeks to account for museums not as texts but as cultural institutions or, what sociologist Tony Bennett calls 'cultural assemblages'. Bennett argues that if we consider museums as assemblages of 'texts, rules, bodies, objects, architecture etc', we provide a stronger basis on which to think about how objects work in the museum. He draws our attention to how, in the museum, objects acquire certain qualities, how various kinds of knowledge produce new kinds of relationships between objects, and how people are placed and moved around in distinctive ways. In this chapter, I follow in his footsteps by analyzing a particular kind of museum object, Aboriginal breastplates, and the place produced for indigenous people in the design of two new museums in Australia, the National Museum of Australia and the Melbourne Museum. But before I do that, I want to supplement Bennett's perspective on the museum by considering another theorist of the museum, the Gija artist Rusty Peter.
  
  Gamerre – What's this Museum? by Rusty Peters appears, at first glance, to be representing a hard contrast between indigenous and non-indigenous culture. The left-aide element of the triptych, the gamerre side, is strongly black and formally similar to many of Peter's 'dreaming' paintings. The two right-side elements seem, like the white borders that surround the six small inserts, to ask the question 'What's this museum?' As Victoria Lynn writes, 'These smaller images are presented against a white background as if they are paintings hanging in a museum.' And the gallery notes on the painting reinforce this impression:
  
  This work is a result of the artist's time spent crossing the gulf between two worlds, the world of his own country and that of his parents and grandparents, and the world of Europeans, including visits to cities and museums. He has often told Tony Oliver: 'We don't have museums. We have rock paintings and the country itself.'
  
  To see the painting in these ways is to think about it as a text representing two cultural worlds. So the image stands in for the dichotomous relationships between white and black worlds: the whole and integrated world of black country and cosmology; the fragmented and alienated world of white institutions and knowledge. Through particular aesthetic strategies, the painting makes a white world amendable to critique. But what if, for both Rusty Peters and some viewers, this painting is not a representation? What is this painting is making present the actual things that Peters has painted? What if this work, like those of the Central Desert artists discussed by anthropologist Jennifer Biddle, 'do not have to represent the past because they enact it... literally bring to life country, Ancestors, people... by literally enlivening us, the spectator'?
  
  If we look again at the image and at some of Peter's words, Gamerre – What's this Museum? seems less like a contrast between two radically different worlds and more like a comparison or a transaction between different worlds. Peters says explicitly that both the left element of the triptych and the lower right element are gamerre: 'the earth where we all live'. Then in response to a question from Frances Kofod, 'For all humans? Or just your family?', Peters says, 'For everybody in this place white, black, everybody, no matter what colour.' Also, the significant objects in the painting – spears, stone axe, boomerangs and so on – clearly have a place in both the world of gamerre (as rock paintings) and in the world of the museum (as canvas paintings):
  
  When they put them painting in the museum, not for sale. All the tourists go in inside and have a look, and not for sale only see the painting there. Well that's the way this rock painting, we have a look that country, rock painting in that hill. Well that painting there remind man, this one there forever. You can't pull that thing, just like a museum they got them painting. Like a gamerre that place. The rock painting round the gamerre he there forever for everybody. We can't pull em out painting from rock.
  
  Both the domains of gamerre and the museum value and enable preservation, respect and learning. In this light, Gamerre – What's this Museum? speaks 'not just of charming dreamtime figures and their ceremonial landscapes' but as an explicit challenge to a non-indigenous spectator based not on an ideological reading of white people and their museums but on Peter's analysis of museum practice. His analysis might be restated in the following way. You put important things in the museum in a respectful and proper fashion; those things are not for sale but are there for everybody to learn from mimetically. The problem is that you don't treat country in the same way. Things, like rock paintings, in gamerre are not for sale, they are there forever and for everybody. Gamerre needs to be treated with the respect that you reserve for objects in the museum because that is, in part, how we sustain life, by reproducing appropriate relations between bodies, objects and knowledge in the world.