Presentation Topic: Protecting heritage - export issues

ABSTRACT:

So successful has Sotheby's been in its marketing of the early Papunya "boards" that almost any pre-1973 painting produced at Papunya is now well beyond the Indigenous art purchasing budgets of Australian public collecting institutions. Perhaps it was this realisation that in July 1999 moved the Australian Parliament to amend the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act (1986) to include "the early Papunya boards and more generally works produced in Papunya during the 1970s". Yet the artists and their descendants, or other cultural authorities within their communities, have not been consulted as to the disposal of their patrimony at the hands of the auction houses. What is the Aboriginal art community's view of these developments?

BIONOTE:

Dr Vivien Johnson is a senior lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and an internationally recognised authority on contemporary Aboriginal art. She is also the author of The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Michael Jagamara Nelson, both published by Craftsman House.