The issues I originally wanted to explore were mapped out by the following questions:
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1) Does a didgeridoo that was made and/or painted by any Australian Indigenous person qualify as authentic?
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2) Where does the didgeridoo really come from - which part of Australia if any? Do the Indigenous people of that area have sole custodial and/or intellectual property rights over the didgeridoo compared to Indigenous Australians from other parts of Australia? Why? Why not? Should they enjoy economic benefits from the didgeridoo at the exclusion of other Indigenous Australians?
A great number of responses were received, and the issues were generally well discussed. There were some standard stock answers, however, as well as incorrect responses, which I was a bit disappointed with. Also, the second set of questions was poorly discussed overall, in particular "Should they [traditional custodians of the didgeridoo] enjoy economic benefits from the didgeridoo at the exclusion of other Indigenous Australians?". Perhaps it was a sensitive topic to talk about. Note the following excerpt from a NT government Senate Committee report into "Australia’s indigenous visual arts and craft sector" (proof copy) with witness testimony provided by Tiwi woman and NT Minister for Arts, Marion Scrymgour:
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Without repeating myself from those areas, I would like to make three points to your committee. First, I am aware that you do not have the time to check this out as your timetable is tight, but if you were to walk 700 metres from the site of this hearing you would get a sense of some of the threats to the Aboriginal visual arts and craft industry. Within this radius there are half-a-dozen shops that deal more or less exclusively with Aboriginal art. Two are Aboriginal owned, the Tiwi Art Network outlet in the Air Raid Arcade and the Maningrida Arts and Culture across the road in the Plaza Hotel. By sheer chance these two represent arts centres from my electorate of Arafura. Also within this radius there is a plethora of souvenir shops which sell, as a significant part of their output, arts and souvenir material that is purportedly Aboriginal.
I make no comments about these shops dealing primarily in Aboriginal art; some of them do deal ethically. It is the other shops that are of serious concern. The materials they call Aboriginal art are almost exclusively the work of fakers, forgers and fraudsters. Their work hides behind false descriptions and dubious designs. I made the point last week that the vast majority of purchasers of Aboriginal art are sympathetic to Aboriginal artists and want to buy the real thing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of purchasers are being ripped off. I imagine the rules about unparliamentary language are much the same in the Senate as in our Legislative Assembly so I will allow you to imagine the language I would use to describe the producers of this work.
A particular case in point is the production and sale of didgeridoos. The overwhelming majority of the ones you see in the shops throughout the country, not to mention Darwin, are fakes, pure and simple. There is some anecdotal evidence in Darwin that they have been painted by backpackers working on industrial scale wood production. Needless to say, my department refuses to issue forestry harvesting permits for these carpetbaggers, but they still head out bush and rape our bush.
Many are produced and painted by Aboriginal people in New South Wales and Queensland, and it saddens me to criticise these people but I must. It also saddens the people whose birthright the didgeridoo belongs to, those whose cultures take in an arch from the north-east part of the Kimberley, through Arnhem Land and south to and around the borders of Queensland. Many of them live in my electorate. Their heritage has been stolen through the sale out of Darwin of an estimated 1,000 didgeridoos a week. I make the point here: my people, the Tiwi, reside in that geographic arch I just described, but we would never make didgeridoos. They have never been part of our culture, and we would not steal the culture of countrymen from across the water. I would make an appeal to Aboriginal people elsewhere: dressing up didgeridoos with ripped-off design formula such as crosshatching or, more bizarrely, desert iconography does not make a didgeridoo genuine; it merely hides the origins of our respective colonisations behind a mask of complicity.(my emphases)
The full copy of the transcript can be found at:
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/S9977.pdf
A number of responses pointed out that an accepted definition of
didgeridoo and
authentic were essential in advancing the discussions, and some thought the term
traditional better than
authentic.
As far as I am aware, published definitions of
didgeridoo by musicologists and other experts have yet to include instruments made outside of Australia or, indeed, outside of the 'Top End' of Australia. Therefore, to say that an instrument made from Agave is a didgeridoo is by definition not correct. Just something worth thinking about.
There were some excellent marketing and strategic ideas about how to protect 'authentic' or 'traditional' instruments which I enjoyed reading about, and I'm sure some of these ideas will be used in collective attempts to strengthen the position of traditional custodians when it comes to the international trade of didgeridoos.
Having considered all the responses - and there were many - I have decided that kdidj has made the most significant and thoughtful contributions in discussing the issues at hand. Goodonya Kyle and thanks to everyone who has participated in this Forum. Looking forward to more thought-provoking discussions!
Guan
