For love and money

At a glittering event on a cool evening in early October, the National Gallery of Australia opened its eagerly awaited new $108 million wing of Indigenous art galleries. A light-filled entrance now clearly establishes the front door of the gallery, and the Aboriginal Memorial as the first work of art all visitors walk past as they enter the building. These 200 log coffins, made by artists from across Arnhem Land to mark the 200 years of white occupation at 1988, now have a permanent home. They are positioned, quite appropriately, at the foundations of the institution. The expansive new space, comprising eleven rooms, must be the largest area in any Australian gallery dedicated to Indigenous art. This is a moment for celebration, surely, as Indigenous production is accorded such solid and prominent ground at Australian art’s institutional centre. On the opening night the gallery’s director, Ron Radford, emphasised that these new galleries celebrated Indigenous creativity through the lens of art, not anthropology. Fair enough, one might think – this is, after all, a gallery. Yet at the end of the night, having surveyed the displays, this statement stuck with me as I contemplated my disappointment and a deeper unease with some elements of the layout. Radford’s quip – which predictably raised the collective eyebrows of anthropologists in the crowd – was revealing in ways that perhaps he was unaware of.