Ulli Beier, the Aboriginal Arts Board and Aboriginal Self-Determination

Abstract

‘The dawn is at hand’, declared Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). This declaration served as the title of a poem and of her book of poems published in 1966. The dawn at hand was her dream of a postcolonial Australia. In the mid-1960s, her poems struck such a chord with the Australian public that they helped make her Australia’s bestselling poet. More extraordinarily, an Aboriginal person was articulating a rising Australian consciousness—a groundswell of hope that united many Australians around the idea that amends could be made for the nation’s original sin against the country’s Indigenous peoples. This groundswell culminated in the ninety-one per cent vote for constitutional change in the 1967 Referendum, which had been called by the Holt Liberal government. By including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the population of the nation, the passing of the referendum gave them the legal rights of other Australians to self-determination. Preparation for Australia’s journey of national deliverance began immediately after the referendum and was put into full swing with the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972. The Whitlam government launched a veritable cultural revolution, of which the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB), which is the subject of this essay, was just one small aspect of its path to delivering Indigenous self-determination and also a new Australian cultural consciousness. Translating constitutional change into social practice, however, was an altogether more difficult task. If the ideal of self-determination provided a clear and noble vision, its practical realisation inadvertently created numerous new problems. There were many reasons for this. Because the nation had been founded on the exclusion, if not extermination or extinction, of the Indigenous population, a racist mindset penetrated the deepest recesses of its psyche, social habits, and ideological practices. As the Aboriginal activist Gary Foley discovered, government departmental regulations honed by years of institutional racism and