written on the body

15 March 2014 - 15 August 2014

Curated by Judy Watson and Diana Young

Curated by Waanyi artist Judy Watson and UQ Anthropology Museum Director Diana Young, written on the body disrupts museum classificatory categories. Anthropology Museum collection things and photographs that were, in the past, inscribed with labels, numbers and other notes have been arranged with kitchen implements.

A film made by Watson explores how people with ties to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artefacts in the Museum’s collection respond to the past in the present.

“Exiled in museum storage spaces, in a suspended animation until they are visited or displayed, objects await to be enlivened. As collected objects they have been hoarded and ordered, labelled and measured and stored away, displaced, as objects of study. Their thing-ness has been diminished through a temporal and spatial slippage and disarticulation. The melancholy of objects thus isolated from the real world of people is what is most palpable in these situations of sensory deprivation. In such out-of-place and out-of-time contexts what impacts us is their disenchantment ... evidenced in their weak calls to us as we enter and switch on the lights. Their potentialities, their enchanting qualities and liveliness ... yet to be realised" (Fuary 2013: 4).

In the past, especially in the early years of the Museum in the mid-20th century, it was usual to write on to collected things, securing their classification and place in the collection.

Artist Judy Watson’s response to these written on Indigenous things - the everyday paraphernalia for living of stone axes, knives, grinding stones, spears, dishes, throwing sticks - is multilayered. In the museum’s gallery these things co-exist amongst used kitchenware, rear- view car mirrors and anthropometric measuring devices creating new sets of relationships.

*King plate, 1880 | Sandcast brass, coloured enamel | Balgroo, Queensland*

The ‘bodies’ in question span the categories of human and non-human. A slideshow, part of the installation, presents not only portraits of Aboriginal men with cicatrices but also a poignant collection of photographs recording scarred trees on a Queensland cattle station property. Trees were worked by Aboriginal people to obtain material for shields, canoes, bowls and other implements, carved for ceremonial bora grounds and used for burial. The stone axe in the exhibition labeled ‘found with bones’ perhaps alludes to this presence of Aboriginal tree burials that persisted in marking out Aboriginal country well into the 20th century.

Watson makes an analogy between the cicatrices on Aboriginal bodies - the raised scars made to show initiation - and the grooved grindstones known as Morah stones from North Queensland, used for food preparation.

View full photo gallery on Flickr: written on the body

Acknowledgements

Curation: Judy Watson and Diana Young
Film, 'found with bones' 2014: Judy Watson, Alex Barnes
Slideshow, 'scar' 2014: Judy Watson, Diana Young, Camella Hardjo
Curatorial assistance: Camella Hardjo, Felix Cehak
Additional curatorial assistance: Jane Willcock, Charla Strelan, Kiri Chan
Project assistant: Kiri Chan
Conservation: Kate Stanway
Photography: Carl Warner

Research assistant: James Jang and Amelia Radke
Additional research: Jane Willcock, Camella Hardjo

With thanks to film participants Lafe Charleton Bianca Beeteson, Uncle Bob Anderson, Kevin O’Brien and Gordon Hookey

Kitchen lenders: Donna Marcus, Carol McGregor, Marlene Carmichael, Keith Kuchenmeister, Deirdre Carmichael, Barbara Carmichael, Helen Jones, Jeannie Baker, Noreen Grahame, Pat and Wyn Faulkner, Helga Erichsen, Peter Carmichael, Hannah Ranson, Lafe Charlton, Aly Alway and Trevor Galbraith, Judy Watson, Diana Young.

More thanks; Tom Archer, Russell Archer, Lindy Allen, Bruce Rigsby, Peter Sutton, Daniel Leo, Lyn Freckleton and Regina James on Palm Island, Diane Hafner, Maureen Fuary, Paul Memmott, Jane Lydon, Michael Aird, Sally Babidge, Tania Schafer and John Oxley Library, Christine Hero, Ron Harrigan, Eric Harrigan, Balkanu Council, Alison Liddy, Mary Durack, Fred Cecak, Margaret Reid and Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Mulitcultural Affairs, Black Image, Lisa Jones, curator, Brisbane Police Museum, University of Queensland Art Museum.

Collecting and searching

Many of the things in this exhibition come from the energetic collecting by The University of Queensland Anthropology Museum’s founder, medical doctor and keen ‘amateur’ anthropologist Lindsey P. Winterbotham. From the 1930s to 1960, the last decades of his life, Winterbotham employed networks of other collectors, drawing on his professional connections to amass a considerable, high quality and unusual collection. From his written correspondence it seems he felt an imperative to collect. He importuned a regular donor:

“I know that we set you a rather difficult task, but our only chance of preserving from complete loss all the very interesting material that could be gathered concerning the culture – the old culture – of this ancient people, lies now with such people as yourself”.

Anxious to ‘salvage’ Indigenous (and Pacific) cultural items and knowledge in a rapidly changing world, post colonial contact, Winterbotham was also concerned about the lack of professional anthropologists in Queensland. Dr Winterbotham co-founded the Anthropological Society of Queensland (ASQ) and both he and the ASQ committee considered that having an ethnographic collection at the University of Queensland was essential to their aim of establishing a chair in Anthropology here. Both Winterbotham and the other ASQ members, as well as other collectors with whom they exchanged collections, wrote often copious notes directly onto things. Writing a registration number onto collection items in order to catalogue them persists in many institutions today.

In 1950 Winterbotham was offered a set of publications and photographs by Walter E. Roth, annotated by the author. These items were prized by Winterbotham since they provided a reliable source of information about Aboriginal peoples’ lives fifty years earlier.

Roth had performed various government roles as a medical officer and as the Protector of Aborigines in Queensland between 1896 and 1906 and had simultaneously amassed anthropological data; material culture, information about various locales and groups of people, some word lists and anthropometric measurements.

Roth initially appeared in this exhibition through his photographs of ten people - 7 men and 3 women - with labels fixed to their chests. Roth posed them for portraits or ‘busts’ in pairs taking full face and profile pictures of each to accompany their anthropometric measurements. Our research dates these images to 1898.

Here is one of these images, a double portrait showing ‘ Euro’ possibly ‘Hero’ and ‘Tiger’ which was almost certainly taken in 1898 at the Musgrave Native Police camp, Princess Charlotte Bay on eastern Cape York, north Queensland.

The UQ Anthropology Museum is interested in tracing Euro’s descendants. Our research to date from various archival sources has yielded the following:

Euro was born c. 1868. Roth lists him as a Kokowara - Lama Lama man.
He worked as a police tracker and travelled with Roth’s party for a time.
He died before 1914.
His child or children and wife (possibly named Minnie) moved to Palm Island with Charlie Whitefoot a few years after his death.

References:

Fuary, Maureen 2013 Nostalgia and the Call of Things. 'Artefacts of Time: Transoceanic Transactions' Symposium, Cairns Institute.
Dr L.P. Winterbotham to Rev. K. Coaldrake, Forrest River Mission, 13th October 1955, type written letter, UQAM records.

Panel discussion

written on the body curators Judy Watson and Diana Young host the closing event panel discussion to discuss challenges raised by this exhibition. Panellists Michael Aird and Bob Weatherall share their insights.

In the past it was usual to write on to museum things, securing their classification and place inside a collection. To the descendants of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander makers and owners of these things, the act of inscribing onto may be experienced as vandalism - an intention to control by another, dominating culture. written on the body is a response to the labeling of objects within the museum environment. They are placed with used kitchenware, rear-view mirrors and anthropometric measuring devices creating new sets of relationships and a commentary on the role of the past in the present.

written on the body

15 March 2014 - 15 August 2014

Acknowledgements

Collecting and searching

Panel discussion

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written on the body curators' talk