THE PROJECT

In Jan 2001 the South Australian Centenary of Federation committee called for expressions of interest from Indigenous and non-Indigenous weavers to a form a two-person team ‘to gather stories from each of the communities along the river to be woven into a cultural map of the river in the centenary year’ (Source to Sea 2001 p2). 

Njarrindjeri elder, Rhonda Agius was the only Indigenous Australian artist who attended the Weaving the Murray information session along with a number of non-Indigenous artists interested in collaborative textiles projects. She was the only Njarrindjeri weaver of the many engaged in the culturally significant craft of weaving interested in becoming involved.  For Rhonda, the project offered an opportunity to keep a key creation story from her culture alive. As she noted in her biographical statement in the Weaving the Murray catalogue;

‘for most Aboriginal people the River Murray is not as significant ….as its Creator.  The various stories of Pondi join the Indigenous people across the country.  It is important to keep the story alive.’(Weaving the Murray 2002, p20)

At the information session it became clear that the huge scope of the project, involving the creation of a work based on community consultation along the 2570 kilometre length of the river would make it virtually impossible for a two-person team to complete in the one year time frame.  In response to this constraint, two small groups of artists who attended the session decided to work together and form a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to submit a proposal for the project.

The final team of three Indigenous and four non-Indigenous artists was drawn together from personal networks.  In Adelaide during the 1990s, Indigenous and non-Indigenous basket-makers and weavers had begun to make contact and develop friendships through participating in workshops, community art projects and exhibitions designed to share cultural knowledge.  One Narrindjeri artist, Ellen Trevorrow, who played a key role in the revival of weaving in her culture was invited to join the project but declined to be involved in events connected to the celebration of Federation for the reasons previously mentioned.

While the seven artists who finally formed the Weaving the Murray team were connected by their gender and their interest in textiles, they differed in their education, class and ethnicity. All the non-Indigenous artists were of Anglo Saxon or Celtic ethnicity, citing English, Irish, Scottish Welsh and German forebears.  Three of the non-Indigenous artists came from middle class backgrounds, while two of the Indigenous artists were working class.  In the catalogue published to accompany the installation of the completed work, the Indigenous artists highlighted their ethnicity and language group affiliations in their biographical statements indicating the importance of ‘race’ to their identity.  But ‘race’ or ethnicity was not mentioned in the biographies of the non-Indigenous artists. Their ‘whiteness’ was taken for granted and ethnicity unexamined.

As the project developed, differences between the artists surfaced in the form of different expectations and different ways of thinking and working that occasionally resulted in situations that had to be negotiated and resolved.  But there were some tensions that were not so easily understood at the time that, on reflection, I can now see arose from the structure of the project devised as an equal collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. This assumption ignored the unequal power relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, an inequality daily evident to Indigenous people but generally invisible to whites. (Moreton-Robinson, 1999, p29)