There is a work by Julie Gough on the bottom floor in the room devoted to the early colonial art of Victoria and Lutruwita, The Missing (2024), which films Benjamin Law’s busts of Wurati and Truganini while held in the basements of the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, that makes a similar point (the busts of those Aboriginal figures, of course, stand in for the bones of Indigenous peoples that until recently were also stored there). But in a provocative and, I am sure, deliberate—and perhaps even deliberately unresolved—way, Langton, in speaking of the keeping of bones by the University of Melbourne, raises the question of what exactly is the status of those barks collected by Baldwin Spencer, Donald Thomson, and Leonhard Adam on the same floor. For all of their obvious celebration and all of their standing in for Arnhem Land and Groote Eylandt in the geography of the show, can we draw an absolute distinction between the two activities: the taking of bones and the collecting of barks? (At one point the didactic mentions that Spencer and his buffalo-shooter enabler Paddy Cahill exchanged the paintings for sticks of tobacco.) How has Aboriginal art, in the light of the failure of the referendum, in any way empowered Aboriginal communities? How has it, in the light of recent government decisions to give miners the green light, given them a Voice? Has Aboriginal art led to a different conception of Australia or done anything actually to change Australia?
But undoubtedly the most obvious yet provocative hang in the show is to have Andrew’s Vox: Beyond Tasmania (2013) facing Langton speaking in the same room. It’s obvious, in a good sense, because, as we say, that video of Langton echoes an earlier work by Andrew, which shows her holding skulls. It’s obvious because Andrew now works at the Potter as its Reimagining Museums and Collections Director, which undoubtedly raises similar questions to the repatriation of bones. It’s obvious because Vox: Beyond Tasmania features a series of anthropological records and artefacts (axes, mortars and grinding stones, photographs, boxes of slides) of Aboriginal people placed in a glass vitrine, along with a presumably Aboriginal plastic skeleton, whose skull faces out of an enormous wooden megaphone to make its voice concerning the appropriation of Aboriginal culture by generations of ethnographers, anthropologists, and maybe even art curators, heard. (In a fascinating way, with the two works now facing each other, we cannot decide whether it is the skeleton of Vox: Beyond Tasmania that is speaking to Langton through its megaphone and Langton is passing on what it has told her or whether its megaphone is something of a hearing device and Andrew has effectively listened to what Langton has previously told him and is now making a work about it. Either way, the two works must be understood to be in a profound dialogue or conversation with each other.)
But here is the extraordinary and unexpected twist. When I first saw the work on the top floor of the Colony exhibition in 2018, the skeleton was a real one, but perhaps not an Aboriginal one. As Andrew said in an interview, quoting one of his critics, “It is a real skeleton but its identity has disappeared. It could have been an Aborigine, a convict or a university professor (although its sex is marked in its bones).” Rumour even has it that the NGV, although quite rightly admiring the work, was hesitant about acquiring it in 2014 and then exhibiting it, given that it featured a real skeleton. (It’s actually this version of the work that is reproduced in the big catalogue that accompanies 65,000 Years.)
This certainly would not have been appropriate in a room about the racist and colonial acquisition of Indigenous Australian bones for whatever apparently “good” purpose they were understood to fulfil at the time. (And, again, can we really make such a definitive distinction here between the obviously racist ideas of eugenics and the often-wilful self-indulgence of art and artists? Maybe one day in the future, when the world is going down, people will be rightly critical of artists and the rest of us in the art world for doing absolutely nothing useful while pretending we were.) So the bones had to go, and what we have instead is a transparent plastic skeleton lying quietly on its stomach in the vitrine, a literal skeleton in the cupboard.
So maybe Vox: Beyond Tasmania here, like the advocacy of the Voice, falls short of the standard it wanted to set, is subject to the same critique that it would apply to others. The Aboriginal voice can be accused of hypocrisy, self-contradiction, the failure to get its own procedures and justifications right.
But here’s the thing—and this was the brilliant aspect of the overall hang of the show, for which I am going to thank one of its curators, Judith Ryan. In Ryan’s co-curated Colony exhibition, there were two parts: the first on the bottom floor, Australia 1770–1861, which traced the colonisation of Australia and the colonisers’ depiction of Aboriginal people, ending the year the gallery opened, and with very few works by Aboriginal artists because very few of them have been preserved. But up on the top floor of the gallery, Frontier Wars, there were works by contemporary Aboriginal artists (Michael Cook, Christian Thompson, Marlene Gilson) precisely offering a contemporary retrospective critique of this, an angel’s perspective, as it were.
And we have much the same thing in 65,000 Years, for all of its much-noted, sometimes-criticised, survey-like structure. On the bottom floor, there is the story of the invasion and colonisation of Australia. On the first floor, in some ways the continuation of this with the Melbourne Museum and the University of Melbourne collecting both barks and bones from Aboriginal communities, whether willingly or not. But then on the top level, there are critical political works by urban Indigenous artists (Trevor Nickolls’s Gertrude St Fitzroy (1981), Robert Campbell Jr’s Ripped-Off at the Pictures (1986), and Destiny Deacon’s Teatowel—Dance Little Lady (1993)) but also a divine, higher viewpoint offered by such artists as Jim Pearson and his Titui Poynti (Constellation Dance Machine) (1973), Rusty Peters and his Three Nyawana in Yariny Country (Moon Dreaming) (2016), and Mabel Juli and her Garnkiny Ngarranggarni (Moon Dreaming) (2013).
As I look up at Juli’s Garnkiny Ngarranggarni, which is about the Gija myth concerning the return of the moon every twenty-eight days, not so different for me from Romeo saying of Juliet, “Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven / Having some business, do entreat her eyes / To twinkle in their spheres till they return,” I began to reflect upon for whom and in whose name I could begin to think the various failures of the “voice” in 65,000 Years. Every justice and every referendum and all art will always fall short, but where do I stand in saying this? And then I realise that it is those works on the upper level that allow me—at once something “higher” and something “here.” Yes, in contemporary Australia it is still an Aboriginal voice, the ultimate “floating signifier.” And then I hear them, maybe for the first time, all those actual voices, crossing spaces and the different levels of the show: the chanting of the woven grass Seven Sisters (2020) by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers on the top floor, the singing of the schoolchildren in Ishmael Marika’s Wana Watangumirri Dharuk (2013) near the staircase on the first level.
They’re the actual voices of Aboriginal people in the here and now, but also higher than any actual voice, and by which we are all—and I mean all—judged and all—and I mean all—fall short.
