Letters: Authentic Art and the Disgrace of Wilgie Mia

Authentic Art and Wilgie Mia

Madam: For almost fifty years, my wife and I have holidayed through northern Western Australia and the Northern Territory, occasionally buying Aboriginal art. In the 1970s, we rarely saw dot paintings for sale, with weapons and animals beautifully carved from local timbers being most common. We found all these art objects to be authentic, with little or no influence or input from non-Aboriginal people.

By the 1980s, dot and other paintings predominated, but again they all seemed to be authentic, in our view faithfully showing the mostly abstract scenes imagined by their talented artists.

Fast forward to the last twenty or so years and, as suggested by Henry Ergas’s article “Authenticity and Indigenous Art” (March 2024), the influence of white artistic advisers had become noticeable. At the Martumili Art Gallery in Newman, Western Australia, a European-style landscape scene showing hills, valleys and gum trees was dismissed by the non-Aboriginal employee as “naive” but she explained this was to be expected as the artist had begun painting in prison and had not yet learned to paint in a traditional manner. Our most recent visit to the same gallery showed that most art works for sale, most of them dot paintings, were amateurish with little artistic merit. Objects made from local timbers were absent.

In response to Marc Hendrickx’s article “Locked Out of Our National Parks” (also March 2024), other land use categories are now closed to non-Aboriginal people. Over the years, my wife and I have twice visited Wilgie Mia, an Aboriginal ochre mine north of Mt Magnet. Claimed to be the oldest mine in Australia, dating back some 30,000 years, it produced iron oxide ochres of various colours which were widely traded throughout Western Australia before European settlement. It was later subjected to small-scale mining by non-Aboriginal people and, using my experience as a geologist, I estimated some 17,000 tonnes of material had been removed.

Last year, in an attempt to revisit the site, my wife and I drove in along the only access road to the mine. Two signs warned us we were approaching a restricted area and to go back—the second sign was quite threatening—but we found it difficult to turn around due to the risk of staking a tyre on dead vegetation, so we continued on to the campsite used by the mine’s traditional owners. The camp area was disgraceful: the site was littered with dilapidated caravans, old car bodies, broken pieces of plastic piping and much general rubbish.

The Australian government has placed the Wilgie Mia ochre mine on the National Heritage list. Based upon the lack of management of the camping area, it is not unreasonable to believe that the Aboriginal owners place a low value on the mine’s heritage value. In the longer term, damage to this heritage site either deliberately or by neglect is likely.

Bernie Masters

The Stamp of God

Madam: I enjoyed reading Barry Gillard’s “Hamlet, Bullshit and Wittgenstein” (July-August 2024) and would like to throw some further light on Wittgenstein’s “boundary of language”. We all have the stamp of God on our soul and, from this foundation, there rises a strong, but vague impulse, in a multitude of different guises, to search for God. This urge has to express itself in the concepts necessary for thought and language, but, in the process, we often become tangled up, frustrated, and can go no further. This is the point described by Wittgenstein as “the boundary of language … We don’t get to the bottom of things.”

Henri de Lubac, who was made a cardinal by John Paul II, notes in The Discovery of God that, nevertheless, the original impulse “continues to be the centre of thought, tenuous perhaps, but tenacious”. It challenges the intelligence to continue. If we accept the challenge, the stamp of God acts again, in concert with the original impulse, but this new action is of a different order from reason: it simply allows the search for God to proceed within a tranquil mindset. It is “the privilege of that personal intimacy and concrete intuition which belongs to all religious knowledge”. It is spiritual, extra-scientific, and beyond the reach of psychology. In this way, a situation which seemed inextricable at first may be unravelled without effort.

Richard Forrest

Correction

Madam: We write seeking a correction to an article by former prime minister Tony Abbott in the July-August issue, “When the Rule of Law Becomes the Rule of Lawyers”.

While we could take issue with numerous aspects of Mr Abbott’s article, we write simply to correct a matter of fact contained in this paragraph:

Both these cases were brought with the support of the Environmental Defenders Office, an activist legal NGO, which the current government has just funded to the tune of $10 million a year. Hence taxpayers are funding court cases that will make their own burdens heavier, because they end up frustrating fossil-fuel developments that would add to employment and revenue.

The federal government did not allocate “$10 million a year” to the Environmental Defenders Office in the 2022-23 budget. The original allocation was for two public interest environmental legal firms—the Environmental Defenders Office and Environmental Justice Australia—and the allocation was over four years. So, at most there was an allocation of roughly $2.5 million a year for four years for both organisations combined.

James Tremain
(Environmental Defenders Office)

Germany’s Alternative

Madam: The article in the July-August edition “The Importance of Being Germany” was the best article about my country of birth I have read in a long time. Great knowledge of geography and tribal and political history. Describing how this “Germans and Germany” is an ever flowing, evolutionary affair, and yet there seems to be some substance that holds it all together. No judgment, just curiosity trying to put the finger on it.

However, there was a mistake in the very first sentence. “AfD” is short for “Alternative für Deutschland”, not “Allianz”. There is no alliance with anyone in this party, however there is a concerted effort between all the other mainstream parties, going all out to destroy this unwelcome AfD, principally for airing unwelcome truths. The Greens, dominating the agenda in government, are greener than any other greens in the world and are on a mission: to sacrifice their own country to save the world. (You could be sarcastic and say this is a German trait!) So, “Alternative” is the raison d’être for the AfD, the only opposition in the Bundestag, and “Allianz” might describe the block of the “Ampel”, a coalition government, with not much difference in policies among its parties.

Heidi Kath

The Unprotected Church

Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.

Churchgoing Catholics regard the clergy as their leaders, but the priests do not contest the opponents of religion. They sit passively.

First, the top church priests must explain exactly and at length why they consider that they are right, and second, they must attack their opponents’ arguments.

The Universal Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is not Australian and the Ruddock Commission report delivered in May 2018 should have been a red light.

Catholic schools have long had 40 per cent of teachers who do not believe in God, and only 45 per cent of Catholic children now attend Catholic schools.

The bishops seem to rely on known and unknown bureaucrats to protect the church, which they have not done.

K. de Courtenay