I remember being puzzled at the time, as to why she hadn’t expressed her views during the initial discussion, unaware that this could be a strategy of resistance to white ways of working.  My experience working with white communities had led me to believe that consensus could be reached through round table discussion.  This view assumed participants had an equal voice and felt comfortable with stating a view or disagreeing with the prevailing opinion.  It didn’t take into account any disparity in power between members of the group.  A long history of government control over all aspects of Indigenous people’s lives has demonstrated the adverse consequences of disagreeing with those in authority.  This has led to strategies of resistance that involve seeming to agree to a decision but quietly going your own way.

The other issue concerned the priority we accorded to the ‘quality’ of the work. It occurred during the installation of the work and involved a last minute change to the form of Pondi.  While Pondi had been made collaboratively according to Rhonda’s design, just before the form was installed the group decided to improve the proportions of Pondi by inserting a few rows of coiling between the head of the fish and the body.  While Rhonda initially agreed to the changes she was clearly uncomfortable with the decision at the time and later, while the changes were being made, expressed her dissatisfaction.  She felt her cultural ownership of ‘Pondi’ had been overridden and she did not attend the opening of the exhibition.

The rushed decision to ‘improve’ the form of Pondi, and ensure the work was completed in time for the exhibition, forestalled the longer more open-ended process of negotiation practiced by Indigenous communities that takes as much time as necessary to reach consensus.  It also posed a question that bothers me still.  Should we have given priority to Rhonda’s custodial rights and not altered the form of Pondi, rather than the group’s perception of the ‘quality’ of the final work?

CONCLUSION

I first read Moreton-Robinson’s book ‘Talkin' up to the white woman’ in 2001 during the making of Weaving the Murray when I was trying to understand some of the tensions that arose as we developed the work. Reading her critique of whiteness was an uncomfortable experience.  I could suddenly see how I might appear to my Indigenous colleagues, unaware of both the privileges of my position and the realities of their experience.  But it was only three years later, re-reading Moreton-Robinson’s book as I was writing this paper, that I realised that what I thought of as ‘tensions’ at the time could be better described as resistances to ‘normalised’ ways of working and thinking that prioritised white rather than Indigenous values.

The Weaving the Murray project had explicitly endorsed the values of white Australia in its celebration of Federation and its structure as a well funded, collaborative public art project with a ‘museum quality’ outcome. (Source to Sea 2001)  Reflecting on the process reveals a more complex and troubling story than the official purpose of the Federation commission, giving the work an unexpected and painful meaning that resonates with hidden histories of dominance and subjugation. 

The incommensurability of our experience as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians means that we cannot, to answer the question that I posed at the beginning of this paper, speak un-problematically of ‘our’ identity and ‘our’ past.  ‘Owning’ the past for non-Indigenous Australians means recognising and addressing the privileges and power that ‘whiteness’ confers.  This is the subtext of Weaving the Murray.  While these haunting objects evoke Indigenous and settler histories, they are indeed, integrally bound up with the unresolved issues of the present.