School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemStitching spear-grass sinew and skin: crafting new social memories at the Koorie Heritage Trust( 2012)This thesis explores the relationship between the revival of Aboriginal craft practices and the crafting of social memory among artists at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne. ‘Koorie’, or ‘Koori’, is a collective term used to describe the Aboriginal people of south eastern Australia – an area made up of approximately thirty-eight discrete language groups. Although the languages themselves are no longer widely spoken, individuals identify with these bounded groups. Each of the language groups are tied to a specific region or ‘Country’, set of totems, and collection of creation stories, all of which contribute to how individuals identify themselves within the wider Koorie community. Since the mid-Nineteenth century, Koorie cultural practices had been systematically eroded by the pressures of European colonialism. Until the late 1960's and early 1970's, it appeared that the only craft practices surviving were to service tourism and the tastes and whims of white Australians. The 1970's saw the emergence of an Aboriginal cultural, political, and artistic movement which was the beginning of changing perceptions of what made aboriginal art 'authentic'. The Koorie Heritage Trust was established in 1985 in an effort to preserve, protect, and promote Aboriginal culture of south eastern Australia. This began with the establishment of a ‘Keeping Place’, where material culture could be collected, housed, and cared for in culturally appropriate ways. This thesis examines more recent examples of craft revival by Koorie artists, which include possum skin cloaks, kangaroo tooth necklaces, and grass baskets. Each of these items emerged from their creators’ bringing together of information sources through museum and archival records, the artists’ existing understanding of cultural practices, and their innate, intuitive, ‘Ancestral knowledge’. The exploration of these sites and means of cultural production requires the consideration of three central themes: the concept of time, which informs how the artists comprehend their past; knowledge, which is concerned with how these artists come to be proficient in their ‘know-how’; and finally, how this knowledge is understood to be embodied and enacted in the lived in world. This thesis demonstrates how, as these artists engage in the revival of craft practices, notions of time, knowledge and the role of the body transform, and so too does an understanding of social memory.