Creative Expressions essay - film and arts media provide efficient means of unraveling the stereotypes, history, and truths of Aboriginal people.

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The Eyes of the Beholder

        Through various means of arts media, Langton asserts that “how the audience responds that creates the debate” (1993).  In other words, audience perception or interpretation of a particular medium shapes how society understands the topic at hand, whether via history or imagination.  The depiction of Indigenous people and cultures influences audience perception in a mixture of extremes; Aboriginal people were either portrayed as victims of the white society, unable to pull themselves up, or as minorities who have made it successful, receiving status on a pedestal.  With these media ranging from painting to film to music, numerous perspectives of Indigenous people are pooled together, impacting notions of Aboriginality and its surrounding issues: identity, authenticity, and representation.

        Since the beginning of colonisation, Indigenous people experienced inequality and justice as well as suffered a loss of identity – victims of racism.  Still today, Aboriginal individuals fight for equity, especially through land rights and native title.  In Julie Dowling’s Yalgoo (2002) painting, she focuses on the issue of native title for Indigenous people.  With a claim to the native title, Indigenous people are able to practice freely on their lands, participate in decisions regarding their lands, and negotiate benefits for their communities (Yunupingu, 1997).  As seen in Yalgoo, Dowling emphasizes the connections back to land and country (Snell, 2004).  Specifically, she illuminates the theme of injustice and sorrowfulness felt by Aboriginal people without the acknowledgement of native title claims, which features her Great Uncle George and Nana Molly.  Both lost most of their family, language, and culture due to oppression from the white society. Thus, Julie Dowling depicts Uncle George and Nana Molly holding hands across Yalgoo, a place of endearment whilst suffering injustice, as a gesture of hope that one day they both will come back to where they belong.  In order to do so, though, native title must be claimed. In this sense, Julie Dowling highlights the issue of identity and allows her audience to interpret and extract the emotional hardships Indigenous people underwent through colonisation in Yalgoo.

        Moreover, Aboriginal people were not only depicted as victims of domination but also as “primitive” creatures of the wild, especially men.  Much of history has it that upon colonisation, Aboriginal people seemed different and “primitive.”  As in Chauvel’s Jedda (1995), the plot surrounds the idea of corruption existing within Aboriginal society, in which Indigenous people were viewed as uncivilised, “primitive” people (Langton, 1993).  The story has it that Jedda, a young, civilised Aboriginal woman, gave into her “instinctive, native weakness” via the lust of Marbuk, a “wild” Aboriginal man of witchcraft.  In the end, Marbuk was condemned to death by his own community when Jedda fell for her “genuinely wild,” “mysterious,” and “unknowable” King Kong (Langton, 1993).  In essence, Marbuk represents the conventional Aboriginal male – unwilling to assimilate and seemingly wild, beastly, and uncontrollable: “His is the lust of a “real primitive.” He is an outlaw.  He refuses to submit to civilisation” (Langton, 1993).  Thus, this led to his destruction, which symbolises the notion that if Aboriginal people refuse to concede, they will not survive – a paternalistic view from the white society. More so, most of the diction used in Jedda represented Aboriginal people, namely men, in a very negative light, as if they were aliens.

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        However, Aboriginal men were not the only victims in arts media.  In Destiny Deacon’s photographic essay Black Like Mi series (1992), representations of black women were perceived to attract colonial lust, demeaning the value of Indigenous females and their identity: “lascivious white male gaze on Aboriginal woman is a mediated sexual experience” (Langton, 1993).  To further demonstrate the hostility that Aboriginal women suffered, the song “Lyrebird” by Alesa Lajana cries for justice.  It tells of a frontier man’s desire to have sexual intercourse with an Aboriginal woman by force.  If she rebels or hides, he hunts her down and tortures her ...

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