A case of suspected stolen Central Australian rock art is being investigated by authorities in South Australia.

The Aboriginal art was recently advertised online, then withdrawn once the Department of Premier and Cabinet advised eBay it may be stolen. It has since been found the person listing the item had provided false identification details.

The Aboriginal Art Directory strongly advises buyers not to source Aboriginal art from Ebay, not only could it be stolen, but there is also the possibility of it being fake art. It is always better to go for established, reputable galleries and look for ArtTrade membership.

ROCK ART ON WESTERN AUSTRALIA'S Burrup Peninsula is facing more industrial threats, despite new scientific findings that the ancient Pilbara site is "a masterpiece of human creative genius" worthy of World Heritage status.

Around one million rock engravings, or petroglyphs, are scattered across the Burrup Peninsula and forty islands in the Dampier Archipelago, in northwest WA.

In 2007, the Australian Heritage Council (AHC) awarded heritage protection to Burrup's richly detailed engravings of human figures, water birds, crabs, crayfish, kangaroos, turtles and fish. Also standing in the rocky landscape are mysterious upright monoliths and rows of three or four hundred upright stones.
Five grounds for World Heritage listing

An expert report published in late 2011 by the AHC found that Burrup rock art could qualify for UNESCO World Heritage listing on at least five grounds of 'universal value', far more than the usual one or more criteria required.

The report, authored by archaeologist and rock art expert Dr Jo McDonald, describes the Burrup's engravings - created by Aboriginal peoples around 10,000 years ago - as "masterpieces of human creative genius...produced with superlative technical skill."

She says the pitted, often beautiful patterns form a continuous engraving tradition by hunting-gathering peoples up to European settlement, while monumental stones, man-made quarries and shell middens record how humans adapted to changes in the landscape. Her report describes the Burrup as having "universal significance", with links to the living belief systems of traditional custodians.

Dr Carmen Lawrence, AHC chair, says she will be forwarding the Council's completed advice, including the McDonald report, to Federal Heritage Minister Tony Burke within a few weeks.
Worrying industrial threats

She told Australian Geographic that the AHC was instructed to investigate whether the Australian government should pursue World Heritage nomination for the rock art after a Senate motion last March, when Greens MPs called for an emergency assessment of "the outstanding universal values of the Dampier Archipelago and any threats to the site."

However, The Friends of Australian Rock Art (FARA), a group of rock art experts and heritage supporters, say two worrying threats loom just as this greater global recognition is being mooted.

FARA Chair Judith Hugo says nearly 20 per cent of the rock art precinct has been destroyed or disturbed in recent decades to make way for the Northwest Shelf gas processing plant, a fertiliser plant and other industry activity on the Burrup.
Explosive development

She says more could disappear if Woodside Petroleum cancels its controversial plans to build a gas processing plant in the Kimberley, and brings more gas ashore on the Burrup. This became more likely last week when Woodside announced it was selling its 50% share in the Kimberley project.

A second threat is a proposal to build an explosives plant on the Burrup, announced last month by oil and gas company the Apache Corporation. "Apache has previously stated that it would not go onto the Burrup in light of the Aboriginal heritage values, but somehow their ethical stand has been reversed," says Judith. "Burrup rock art is a universal record of mankind's development."

Apache's spokesman David Parker says the company has a record of sensitivity to heritage, having previously relocated a natural gas plant elsewhere "in recognition of concerns about rock art on the Burrup Peninsula." He says Apache has met with FARA members to discuss their concerns.

In an exciting new presentation, Your Collection has been displayed chronologically and traces art made in the early nineteenth century, locally and around the world, to the art of today. Your Collection 1800 – today brings together an extraordinary group of over 450 Western Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous, national and international art, craft and design from the State Art Collection. An ongoing exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

This year’s exhibition has a total of 27 artworks by 20 artists all in the running for over $50,000 in prizes. The finalists are:

Paola Balla - (two works)
Katen Boy
Sacred Ibis

Trevor Turbo Brown - (two works)
Owl Dreaming
Every Dog Have Their Day

Megan Cadd
The Couch

Teddy Chessels
The Lone Canoe

Jody Croft
Rainbow Energy

Katrina Doolan
Babies Are Our Future

Gwendoline Garoni
Regrowth in my Tribal Country

Daniel King - (two works)
Sports Star
Full-Blooded

Jason B King
Agrotis Infusia

Brian Martin - (two works)
Methexical Countryscape: Wurundjeri #2
Methexical Countryside: Wiradjuri #2

Glenda Nicholls
Ochre Net

Steaphan Paton
My Bullock

Simon Penrose
Eyes Are The Windows To The Soul

Eva Ponting
Turtle Spirit Dreaming

Wayne Qilliam
Guided by Spirits

Reko Rennie
Message Stick (Gold)

Dallas Scott - (two works)
Storyteller Fisherman
Smoke Signal

Lyn Warren
Sunset

Gloria Whalan - (two works)
Guulaangga The Frog
A Night of Remembrance

Naretha Williams - (two works)
Self Portrait 1 – SLIP Series
Self Portrait 3 – SLIP Series

The exhibition runs from 10 – 31 March 2012

Email for more information at viaa@fortyfivedownstairs.com

The 40th anniversary last week of the accidental Aboriginal Embassy on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Canberra was as good an opportunity as any to learn how it came about even before the messy events that accompanied it. For my 'lesson' happened on the eve of Australia/Invasion Day, during a highly partial history of Black Power in Australia – and a few of the illusions associated with it.

They both came, appropriately from Gary Foley who, borrowing freely he admitted from Winston Churchill's dictum that “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”, has a one man show in the Sydney Festival that shouldn't be missed by Noel Pearson, Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, Tony Abbott, or anyone who wants to be cheerfully insulted by this ebullient man; or missed by anyone who wants to understand the deep, but under-examined divide between urban/Blak Aborigines and the remote mob up North.

First the Embassy. As Foley tells it, four fall-guys were sent up to Canberra from the teeming Redfern precinct because Billy McMahon's Australia Day speech in 1972 felt like the final nail in the coffin of hopes which had been falling ever since Harold Holt drowned without implementing his post-Referendum promises regarding Land Rights. The four expected to be arrested. But the gentle ACT Police – unlike their hated NSW equivalents – read the rule book and discovered that it would take 12 tents on the Parliamentary lawns before a crime had been committed. Foley rushed up there with another ten – and a revolutionary precedent had been politely established.

Later that year, Whitlam promised so much after visiting the Tent Embassy and changing ALP policy to disavow its then-current assimilation policies. As Foley imagined it, they were going to get real Land Rights – freehold land handed over from old reserve and unused Crown lands – which would give his mob an economic base from which to achieve self-determination. Something, perhaps, like the controversial Gandangara project on Heathcote Ridge which Elizabeth Farrelly was writing about in the [i]SMH [/i]
last week? But, in Foley's Fabulous view of events, Whitlam let them down even more than Holt – failing to outface Messers Bjelke-Peterson and Court in the States, and coming up with a namby-pamby thing called Native Title. And worse, it was only on offer to that lot up in the Northern Territory.

“Native Title is not Land Rights” - Foley is crystal clear. And the reason for this distinction emerged in his disavowal of that thing most have us have thought fundamental to Aboriginal belief systems – their relationship with land or country. That's just “airy-fairy nonsense” for the “ooga-boogas” up North.

Now where have I heard that distasteful description – ooga-boogas - of the 40/50,000 people who live remote in the NT, WA, SA and Queensland before – people who may not have the sophistication to entertain a White audience for 120 minutes like Foley, but who cling to a complexity of culture built up over 40,000 years and who, according to Prof Jaynie Anderson in the new[i] 'Cambridge Companion to Australian Art' [/i]
have found ways of communicating elements of that on canvas to produce “the only (Australian) art that has found a substantial international audience”? Why, those same 'ooga-boogas' appeared in Blak artist Richard Bell's [i]'Bell's Theorem'[/i]
, the text necessary to explain the painting that won the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Ironically, he managed to attain this artistic peak while denying he was an 'Aboriginal artist', while wearing that T-shirt declaring 'White Girls Can't Hump' to offend Chief Minister Claire Martin, and while mockingly claiming that the Dreaming had now descended on him in Brisbane.

Foley disavows the Dreaming too. His spiritual authorities are Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X; and, though he's acted (unforgettably in[i] 'Dogs in Space[/i]
') and administered the arts as Director of the Aboriginal Arts Board, I'm sure that Foley's canvases (if he painted) would colourfully reflect his political views rather than the airy-fairy aspects of his Gumbyngger inheritance. That, after all, is what ooga-boogas try to do.

Incidentally, at the Australia Council – unmentioned in his theatrical show – Foley did his best to disrupt ceremonial activities in the North by defunding organisations like the Aboriginal Cultural Foundation which had the temerity to employ White functionaries to assist in organising traditional events like the Groote Eylandt dance festivals that brought tribal groups up from the APY Lands, across from the far Kimberley and over the water from the Cape to maintain and share culture with each other. No wonder the Intervention – and all it's doing to deny self-determination to remote Aborigines – received scant mention in the show.

But '[i]Foley[/i]
' is an important show in its nakedness towards this hot-potato subject-matter – even Bell and his proppaNOW mob in Brisbane are shy and retiring by comparison. For surely only Foley could coin an indignity like “Noel Pearson makes Neville Bonner look like Che Guevara!”, and deliver it with such insouciant charm. But from as one-eyed a viewpoint as Foley himself, I'm grateful to Gary for dissociating his urban mob from tribal Australia – something I've often thought should also happen to the two unrelated art forms that are both called 'Aboriginal', allowing each to stand on its own two feet. As Nino Culotta might have put it, “They're a different mob”.