White Lies: Myth of the Australian Cultural Cringe

By Ruth Skilbeck

Silencing

The cultural cringe was a myth designed to stop Australians from defining their own identity, expressing themselves, and exploring their past and present conditions in cultural forms of expression and inquiry.

      The idea that Australians are culturally inadequate or cringe in front of dominant cultures is a part of the myth generated, one may surmise or hypothesize, by a dominant administration as a form of controlling stereotype and would-be self fulfilling prophesy - as the media is used …to construct realities through discourses that in Australia tend to support dominant groups.

      This fitted well and was an attempt to enable the necessary silence that was needed to enshroud the policies and practices of the stolen generation including the awful mothers history of rape.

      Instilling shame and guilt are known to psychologically instill silence in the one who feels ashamed, so by making Australians feel ashamed of their lack of cultural nous, was this ipso facto a means of keeping them silent?

      Too afraid to openly make cultural faux pas, in the wider world of cosmopolitan urbane sophisticated culture?

      This was an absolute nonsense of course: all that happened was that it led to another cliché:  the ‘brain drain’. Where the entire forces of the most talented intelligent creative Australians left the country en masse after finishing university so that they could continue their lively fervent confident cultural explorations in the very centres of dominant culture which, the myth would have us believe that as Australians, they should be cringing away from.

The Brain Drain

They left en masse and pursued successful careers in all kinds of fields that would never have been possible if they had stayed in Australia.

I speak from first hand experience as a daughter of parents who did just this (in the 1960s and 70s) and saw my father rise and rise in his career in a way inconceivable for a boy who grew up in Broken Hill, son of a civil engineer and quarry manager - if he’d stayed in his home country (albeit he took his first class Hons BA at the University of Sydney).

      No, Australia, we drove them away, our brightest and best.

      And now ironically perhaps with the changed world of globalization, government subsidies have been put into place to try to lure them back again our bright creative geniuses and talent – from the wider cultural world where they are able to explore their interests with passion and grow and develop surrounded by others. ‘Overseas researcher homecoming incentives’ they are called or something similar.

      There seems to be something a bit pathetic and futile about this policy of trying to lure back the brightest and it doesn’t seem to work well in many cases. (Many marriage break up and family breakdowns seem to follow according to statistics showing the turbulence that this kind of culture shock can bring).

      What appears to be far more promising and a positive sign of change is the proposed new policy of supporting the humanities and arts research – which apparently is about to start next year (Thompson 2012).

Readers may be surprised as I was to discover that (no I was not wrong, I was right all along I was not paranoid it really was as bad as I thought it was…) There has been no support, or very little, for arts and humanities research in Australia. At least by means of grant from the ARC.

      What this meant in practice is that multitude untold numbers of creative socially and culturally valuable projects that would undertake deep meaningful research into who we are, where we come from, and where we are going, and which would last three years and have all kinds of trickle- down effects and influences encouraging others to participate in arts culture and human interest projects, did not happen.

      Aborted, refused, denied. Sent away and buried. Silenced.

      I speak as one whose project on The Female Gaze was not funded four years ago. Since then I have seen versions and variations of my ideas appear here and there in Australian culture... At the 2010 Sydney Biennale where, just as in my conceptualization, a ‘fugal’ Australian contemporary women artist Fiona Foley and Yayoi Kusama were literally positioned next to each other juxtaposed as in my proposed curated show. I only wrote about Foley…and urban Indigenous women artists including Bianca Beetson, Jennifer Herd and Andrea Fisher. (Skilbeck 2011).

      My idea was part of the global wave of what is now called the mother art movement (a form of matricentric feminism), third wave feminism, I was ahead of the trend. (If I’d been able to curate the show last year as I’d wanted and publish my book in it I would have been right at the apex of this new global movement which has huge interest around the world).

      It’s too late to do it now; the time has past.  (Instead I went to a conference organized by a Canadian research institute, MIRCI, that rebadged itself last year in Canada and presented my paper this year). But that would have been a fantastic project for Australia if I’d been able to do it. Last year I would have curated an exhibition that would have brought people from around the world to Australia. As I said in my proposal it would have put Australia on the art world map. Well It would have.

      In the new field of global mother art movements in contemporary art where art is used as research into cultural and social environmental conditions as well as history and psychology as mode of necessary working through and processing, a global movement of postcolonial societies of which Australia is a prime example.

      My idea was silenced.

      The myth of the cultural cringe was a discourse that operated like an edict or a silencing order.

      Ye shall cringe away from expressing your self and views, making cultural productions or even thinking about what is going on in Australian culture. Anywhere else it’s ok.

      And if you’re the intelligent curious creative type who is likely to think about life and examine existence, especially if you like to examine the conditions of your own existence, then it’s better that you leave now, on a long overseas voyage. Preferably for the rest of your life.  Bye Bye!

      This has been borne out in my own experience here in the mother art movement. Extending from my failed bid at funding for my Female Gaze project I went on and continued my research.

      This resulted this year in my becoming involved as curator and media coordinator with a new mother hood art movement in Sydney, that co generated this movement. But this was in collusion with an international mother art movement based in North America.

 Refreshing change in ARC arts and humanities funding policies

So I read with some hope (although not unbridled joy as change does not come overnight) about the proposed changes to ARC research funding policy to include the arts and humanities, outlined in the National Research Priorities: 2012 Process to Refresh the Priorities Consultation Paper, Feb 2012.

     Hopefully this will come to show that times have changed and the reverse is now coming in (supported by new research policies): as it is imperative that we (want to) find out more about ourselves, our past, our identities, who we are, where we came from, so we can develop more self-knowledge and cultural understanding; a culture and stories we can share with the world, and be able to take more creative care over where we are going, including protecting and sustaining our environments for future life and new generations.

      We could hardly do any more damage to the overall environment than has been done over the past 200 years (short of a nuclear disaster)

~

The ideas of the myth, the discourse, were internalized and as with discourse achieved its own social construct, a form of ‘reality’.

So that that’s what people believe now, they continue to propagate and uphold the myth.

      Even those who think they are breaking away.

      Yet there has always been a tradition in Australia since the 1970s of change coming from with out – and Australian development of contemporary art in Australia only occurred in the process and as a result of active ongoing dialogue with art world centres (Skilbeck 2001)… as the result of very determined action by individuals acting alone and in groups; I am thinking of the pioneering curators who started up and kept the Biennale going Leo Paroissein, Bill Wright, Nick Waterlow, the latter two who came from England and re-linked to their connections there (Skilbeck 2003).

      Similarly with the women’s art and indigenous art movements in Australia, we have developed ‘out ‘ identity and in relation to communication with international art and cultural movements.

And from the start this was an intrinsic part of the Biennale content and focus.

      So that when Mary Kelly said to me when she first came to Australia it was for the 1981 Biennale. She was in the MCA gift shop, and was chatting about the 1981 Biennale, “and someone said that was the women’s Biennale and some else said it no was the Indigenous Biennale…” she laughed.  I was talking with her, interviewing her and her son Kelly Barry, at the 2008 Biennale where they had a collaborative video artwork in installation exhibition.

      Australians came to define themselves, their identity, in relation to international  art movements, that was a trend that continues as my ongoing experiences in the international Mother Art movement show and continue to show…

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Skilbeck, Ruth, Mary Kelly and Kelly Barry (2011). 'Ruth Skilbeck in Conversation with Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie', Chapter 1 in Real Mothers in Contemporary Art. Demeter Press, York University, Toronto. 46-52


Skilbeck, Ruth (2011) 'Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art', International Journal of the Arts in Society. Vol.5, Issue 6: 261-276



Skilbeck, Ruth (2010). 'Re-viewing Feminist Influences in Transnational Art: A Multimodal, Fugal Analysis of Mary Kelly’s Texts of ‘Maternal Desire’'. International Journal of the Arts in Society, Vol. 4, Issue 5 2010, 15-28

Skilbeck, Ruth (2003) ‘Contemporary Australian Art Comes of Age’, 4- feature series, Australian Art Collector. Issue 25. 75-89.

Thompson, Matthew (2012) ‘Top cited academics honoured (but where’s the humanity?) The Conversation.edu.au

https://theconversation.edu.au/top-cited-academics-honoured-but-wheres-the-humanity-7348

Australian Research Council (2012). National Research Priorities: 2012 Process to Refresh the Priorities . Consultation Paper, Feb 2012.

http://www.innovation.gov.au/Research/Documents/2012RefreshingtheNRPs.pdf

Surrogacy of Silence?

By Ruth Skilbeck

It comes as no surprise in a macho culture such as Australia (where historically mothers have been routinely excluded and devalued)  that it should – after a little debate in the upper house, be deemed acceptable and ‘legal’ that the ‘surrogate’ mother’s name be excluded from the birth certificate of the child of two male parents in a gay marriage (Two Dad's and a Surrogate Create Legal Landmark,'  Daily Telegraph, June 1, 2012).  


The motherhood issue is complex as it involves not only the vexed and contentious issue – and concept - of the ‘surrogate’ mother; it also involves the issue of gay marriage. Here my interest is on the motherhood issue and the concept and cultural practice of excluding motherhood and hiding mothers which was equally considered by Australian federal government to be acceptable and was practiced as policy throughout many decades of the twentieth century, that have since come to  be known as the stolen generations – as an allusion to the trauma this caused children, mothers and families.

The increase of  ‘surrogate’ mothers- who are often women who are already mothers who need to raise money to support their own children (and are therefore being used for their reproductive facilities)  should be very carefully examined and monitored, so that  women/mothers are not being used as disposable reproductive receptacles for men’s use: as this ultimately could lead to forms of subjugation of mothers every bit as painful and traumatic for children, and mothers, and society overall (including potentially the adoptive gay parents) as the policies and practices of the stolen generations turned out to be.

In all cases of surrogate parenting, including sperm donation, the names of the parents (“donors”) should be included on the birth certificate. The child has a right to know where they come from, their genetic origins and to make contact with their human reproductive parents. This does not undervalue adoptive or foster parents or the role they play in parenting, as mothers; yes, gay men can be mothers, mother is not necessarily a biological category (as poststructutralist matricentric feminism explains)  but to exclude the human reproductive mother and deny her existence, on a birth certificate,  is a mistake that leads to deep problems of identity.


 Excluding a mother's name from a birth certificate is a very strong message and official statement that the mother does not matter. Not only that she doesn't matter - but that she does not even exist. No child will ever really believe this- after all they have been nurtured into life in the matrix of her womb; and if they do come to believe that this means nothing - what does that say about how our society is being controlled?

Furthermore there is a larger social issue to do with social engineering and the increasingly controlled practices of reproduction where mother is being appropriated and subjugated, surrogate mothers follow in the line of ‘wet nurses’ and prostitutes, where women’s biological sexual and reproductive organs are being bought and used, very often by men supported by a patriarchal state agenda. If this sounds alarmist, look at history. 

Look at the Stolen Generation in Australia.  A history of white lies and cover ups. I have nothing against gay marriage - or gay parenting as such. I have everything against excluding and hiding mothers from the official records and from active participation in family and social  life.

I have been writing about the pain of  a hidden grandmother in my own family for the past year of my Blog, the Skilbeck Scrolls.  The suppression and hiding of mothers is a wrong that does not disappear,  hidden mothers do not vanish. The pain and trauma of the hidden mother lasts for generations. We should not forget this. 

 In gay and surrogate parenting all the parents, including the reproductive mother should be included in the family circle, and acknowledged in official records. If that seems too hard, or unacceptable, we need to change our way of thinking to become more inclusive, more diverse in our understanding of the meaning and reality of family, to develop new forms of extended family and family circles, rather than seeking to reproduce the nuclear family (and its 'white lies' and cover-ups) in differently gendered form.

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

O'Reilly, Andrea, ed. (2011) Maternal Theory- Essential Readings. Demeter Press, Toronto, Canada

Dale, Amy (2012) 'Two Dads and a Surrogate Create Legal Landmark', The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, June 1, 2012.

After MIRCI Mothers and History conference, Toronto

By Ruth Skilbeck

Silence

Silence ran in my family like a dark underground river.

If I can symbolise this silence as a river, it would be the river Lethe that, in Greek mythology, is the river of forgetting. But perhaps this would be too kind, too distant, and too academic.  Qualities that also run in my family

The silence was personal, it affected me personally, it ran through my family; but it was also cultural and historical, the silence was a tributary of the river of cultural amnesia that ran through the colonial culture of Australia, as it runs through the cultures of colonies around the world, and their metropolitan centres.

Recently I have been writing about the experience of finding out about my secret hidden grandmother and the affects of the impacts of discovering her after several decades on this planet, that I was never told about my real family history.

As I am writing this I am flying at 32, 000 feet in an Air Canada jet flying back to Sydney from the international conference on mothers and history: histories of motherhood, that I attended as a delegate, in Toronto.

I gave a paper* on this very experience.

And my mind and body are full of the dialogues and conversations and impressions and powerful thoughts and words and actions of that conference, most affective of all the stories of the (Canadian) Aboriginal women and their oppression, subjugation and struggle for identity against the official policies of assimilation. That astounded me as so similar to Australian stories. I had not even known that indigenous women people in Canada refer to themselves and are referred to as Aboriginal (as if that were only an Australian term). This alone showed me the shared connectivity of the struggles of indigenous aboriginal people across the world, aboriginal women struggling for their identity and sense of self, against the ‘dominant patriarchal culture’ that has subordinated and subjugated them as historically and none more so than mothers, especially ‘illegitimate’ mothers, mothers who have children as a result of the underground strategies of ‘assimilation’; there was in some cases secret love, but sadly there was more often rape.

But Identity and the struggle – for mothers- to regain a sense of self against loss of awareness of identity through trauma and circumstances was a major theme that I detected and picked up on in the conference,

In Art, in reports on health, activism, and in matricentirc feminist theory; the focus in ‘third wave’ feminism and matricentric feminism is on diversity,  the majority of papers I heard were from diverse voices of indigenous  mothers, immigrant women, women who are doing the hard work of cultural  and psychological healing in their art,  working through  losses and traumas of childhood experiences of  contexts of ‘illegitimacy’, the  so-called ‘absent mother’.

Juxtapositions or points of comparison

Listening to the stories and research findings of the women at the conference, made me realize that in some ways we are better off in Australia – and in other ways worse off. How we are better off is to do with the  -seemingly- more egalitarian, less rigidly class segregated society in Australia, and the health system which allows poorer citizens subsidized access to health care.

Why I say seemingly is that scratch the surface and the egalitarianism falls away. There is nothing egalitarian about the ongoing Northern Territory Intervention. The Racial Discrimination Act had to be suspended to put this racially prejudice act into being, and keep it there years later. And who is racially discriminated against? Aboriginal people, the First Australians. In the Northern Territory traditional homelands, which after a century of assimilation policies, or rape and breeding out a sense of identity has –hardly surprisingly to a rational human mind- created massive personal and social problems of shattered identity. In this way the assimilation polices have sickeningly ‘worked’. Now what? We all have a huge problem to deal with- of curing the diseases caused by these policies – they were not there before white people landed in Australia.

Yet the river of forgetting is far more pleasurable and easier to bathe in than seeking to tackle the apparently insurmountable problems of Aboriginal disadvantage and destruction.

Here the way forward is to be positive and to see what Australia does have in its favour, over other colonial countries That is that at least in Australia aboriginal mother are not blamed overtly in the media and society for the behavior of their children.

However they are punished by the policies that suspend their centrelink payments if their children don’t go to school.

What is perhaps, thankfully, lacking in Australia is a harsh media voice that points the finger of blame at Aboriginal mothers.

But in the Australia way of the river of silence, this is done silently, covertly, by the withholding of benefits and punishment, by silencing.

As if by not drawing too much attention to “the problem”, it will just go away.

And as if what’s implied these people –US – are not worth writing much about in terms of identity.

That strategy of silencing and denial has not worked; it has got us to where we are now, a situation of unacknowledged apartheid.

We who live in Australia and ‘call Australia home’ have to all take responsibility for this situation, we have to all take it upon ourselves to become aware and conscious of the appalling life situation, facing OUR aboriginal people in OUR culture and society, and start to activate, actively do all we can to help those who are not only our fellow citizens but who are in far more families than will admit this, are also our (too long hidden relatives), our family. And welcome each other as all part of the human family, as mothers and sisters and daughters and fathers and brothers and sons and grandparents going way back,  in the human race.

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

 I will post  passages and images from my paper and the trip, on The Skilbeck Scrolls in the near future.

Call Out for Australia’s Forgotten Mothers

When I return from Canada I realize that I must do it.  I must make a memorial for Australia’s Forgotten Mothers. I must actualize the idea that came to me in a rite of empassioned writing on my mother and my forbidden unknown grandmother

        

whose presence came to me through the mists of absence and forgetting

I must make a plinth and cover it with the names of Australia’s forgotten mothers, erased and lost from official records.

 I will call out for people to send the names of mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers who were lost and hidden and eradicated from official records in the 20th century decades of the stolen generations.

The decades that the returned and fallen soldiers from the world wars were memorialized and remembered, and returned, over and over again.

This will be my research project for the next 3 years, culminating in 2015, the hundred-year anniversary of Gallipoli, birth of the ANZAC legend.  The erection of the plinth -could it be a more female shape, say, an oval, or heart shape that can be walked through like a doorway or shell or grove, like Persephone’s grove…with a spring bubbling up from the underworld…

Covered with the names in tear shaped, fertility-symbol shaped, plaques.

Accompanied by a book of names and stories: stories of the mothers lost by their relatives.

A book that recounts the birth of the project, from conceptual idea to fruition in materialized form, the progression from the personal dimension of vision, dream, inspiration, ideation to the social realm of language and culture.

I have made a drawing of the shape of the structure, which includes a central figurative statue of a mother and child. My first thought is that it should be constructed at Balmoral, in the park on the esplanade, or perhaps on the oval, on the edge of the trees, or as I keep thinking, on top of Georges Heights up with the artists’ studios… with the 360 degree view of the harbor, although it’s windy and unprotected up there,

I think I like the idea of the grove or grotto most of all on the (edge of the) oval, and I could bury Mum’s ashes there… or at least some of them…like a blessing, her blessing.

The shape of the memorial would echo the shape of the caves at Balmoral, the caves where the first nation’s people lived… looking out over the placid stretch of water now known as middle harbor.

18.5.2012

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Mothers and History- MIRCI conference Toronto 10-12 May 2012

 I will be presenting my research into  Australian women's art and writing, motherhood and communication studies  at the groundbreaking international conference Mothers and History: Histories of Motherhood hosted by MIRCI (Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement), York University, Toronto, May 10-12th 2012. 

My research rethinks Australian cultural and family histories during the 20th century, and the generations in which countless thousands of mothers were excluded from official records and 'banished' from family memory.

My presentation outline is in the abstract:

Remembering Australia’s Forgotten Mothers

 This paper discusses research into hidden histories in Australia and processes of finding and reclaiming mothers and grandmothers lost from the public record in the 20th century decades of ‘the stolen generations’, when children were taken for adoption under a White Australia colonial policy of assimilation. Fanon showed how in colonial societies colonizers are as damaged as the colonized. This paper discusses personal and cultural effects of social deceptions, ‘white lies’ and identity–loss on descendants of mothers and grandmothers erased from family history, and the shift from observer to participant experienced by the author. When researching a grant on Indigenous and non-Indigenous contemporary women artists in international context I found a secret lost grandmother in my family history. Part of my research is in interviewing and dialogue with artists working with themes of the mother, and grandmother, in their art including Mary Kelly, and Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley’s work on hidden histories. The paper will show how these experiences led to ongoing art writing projects to rewrite forgotten mothers back into family and cultural history. This research was assisted by an Australia Council Visual Arts New Work grant.

Dr Ruth Skilbeck is a writer and lecturer at the Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales. Her current research is in women’s art and writing, motherhood feminism, media and cultural studies. Her work is published in the media, scholarly journals and book chapters.

Ruth Skilbeck's conference  trip is generously sponsored by the Journalism and Media Research Centre, at the University of New South wales.




© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Mothers and History- MIRCI conference Toronto 10-12 May 2012

 I will be presenting my research into  Australian women's art and writing, motherhood and communication studies  at the groundbreaking international conference Mothers and History: Histories of Motherhood hosted by MIRCI (Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement), York University, Toronto, May 10-12th 2012. 

My research rethinks Australian cultural and family histories during the 20th century, and the generations in which countless thousands of mothers were excluded from official records and 'banished' from family memory.

My presentation outline is in the abstract:

Remembering Australia’s Forgotten Mothers

 This paper discusses research into hidden histories in Australia and processes of finding and reclaiming mothers and grandmothers lost from the public record in the 20th century decades of ‘the stolen generations’, when children were taken for adoption under a White Australia colonial policy of assimilation. Fanon showed how in colonial societies colonizers are as damaged as the colonized. This paper discusses personal and cultural effects of social deceptions, ‘white lies’ and identity–loss on descendants of mothers and grandmothers erased from family history, and the shift from observer to participant experienced by the author. When researching a grant on Indigenous and non-Indigenous contemporary women artists in international context I found a secret lost grandmother in my family history. Part of my research is in interviewing and dialogue with artists working with themes of the mother, and grandmother, in their art including Mary Kelly, and Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley’s work on hidden histories. The paper will show how these experiences led to ongoing art writing projects to rewrite forgotten mothers back into family and cultural history. This research was assisted by an Australia Council Visual Arts New Work grant.

Dr Ruth Skilbeck is a writer and lecturer at the Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales. Her current research is in women’s art and writing, motherhood feminism, media and cultural studies. Her work is published in the media, scholarly journals and book chapters.

Ruth Skilbeck's conference  trip is generously sponsored by the Journalism and Media Research Centre, at the University of New South wales.




© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

Toronto MIRCI conference, and Mamapalooza Sydney 2012

From Sydney to Toronto, 2012 Mother's Day week is turning out to be a busy time of multiple 'synergies' for the new Motherhood arts movement around the world..

I am flying to Toronto to present my research project 'Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers: Identity and Colonial History' at the MIRCI international conference Mothers and History: Histories of Motherhood, hosted by the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, York University on the 10-12th May. My trip is generously supported by the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, where I am a Lecturer.

At the same time the Mamapalooza Sydney festival that I have been involved in for the past few months,  runs from 8-13th May. I will be there in spirit and with images from my photographic series, Last Things, in the exhibition. 

Festival coordinator and film-maker Vee Malnar has suggested filming a video-talk of my presentation  to show at Mamapalooza Sydney during the festival; if not quite as good as teleportation nonetheless this would seem not a bad way of being in two places at once- a feat I often dreamt of as a busy working mother .

                                  

 

                  ©Ruth Skilbeck. Armchair Illumination, from Last Things 2008-2012. Digital photograph.

Toronto MIRCI conference, and Mamapalooza Sydney 2012

From Sydney to Toronto, 2012 Mother's Day week is turning out to be a busy time of multiple 'synergies' for the new Motherhood arts movement around the world..

I am flying to Toronto to present my research project 'Remembering Australia's Forgotten Mothers: Identity and Colonial History' at the MIRCI international conference Mothers and History: Histories of Motherhood, hosted by the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, York University on the 10-12th May. My trip is generously supported by the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, where I am a Lecturer.

At the same time the Mamapalooza Sydney festival that I have been involved in for the past few months,  runs from 8-13th May. I will be there in spirit and with images from my photographic series, Last Things, in the exhibition. 

Festival coordinator and film-maker Vee Malnar has suggested filming a video-talk of my presentation  to show at Mamapalooza Sydney during the festival; if not quite as good as teleportation nonetheless this would seem not a bad way of being in two places at once- a feat I often dreamt of as a busy working mother .

                                  

 

                  ©Ruth Skilbeck. Armchair Illumination, from Last Things 2008-2012. Digital photograph.