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

Safety First

By Ruth Skilbeck

 New trends: fluoro safety-gear for Aussie workers spreads to ' Newcastle bottle shop workers' ... I was fascinated to notice on my recent return from Canada when the plane touched down at Sydney airport the eye catching yellow and orange fluoro gear of the airport crews on the landing strip...(how they stand out in contrast to the muted shades of the Canadian airport staff). Inside the airport I noticed that the airport officials were wearing the same fluoro gear.

Today when I called into my local bottle shop in Newcastle,

I was unable to not notice that the young man behind the counter was sporting a large padded fluoro orange vest - rather like a life saving jacket- emblazoned with the initials BWS - which stands for the name of the alcohol chain- Beer Wine Spirits. When I looked up their website, to check I had the right name, I found their tagline " We take responsible service of alcohol seriously".

Safety gear. Mum was, after the family returned to Australia, an education officer of the ACT Cancer Society -she introduced the Legionnaires Hat to Australian schools (she had someone design it according to her vision). But I don't recall that she wore it herself. She wore rather natty wide brimmed straw hats. To keep her safe from the sun.

Even so, even she who was so careful and educated so many about this very thing, contracted a melanoma on her calf.  Could it have been all the hours she spent gardening in the house we moved into in Kambah when the family first moved back to Australia? There was so much to do there to try to hurry the speed of progress and natural growth, to transform the surreal suburban moonscape into a functional pleasure garden. Who would not have felt burdened by that responsibility? that she took on, and maintained, even after Dad left. But it was more likely she explained to us to have been the result of a childhood in Sydney, at a time when the word melanoma had not even been invented. A time of happy innocence. On the edge of the gully.  It was after that diagnosis, and the subsequent operation that left a crater in the surface of her pale calf that, despite her condition of chronic fatigue syndrome, she defied Doctor’s orders and stoically packed up her house in Raymond Terrace and flew out of Australia, to the other side of the world, back to London. Never to return.

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012

The Hidden Mother

By Ruth Skilbeck

In the late Victorian and Edwardian era, in the early days of black and white photography, there was a popular photographic portrait practice – now know as The Hidden Mother.

Babies and young children were photographed in images where their mother was both present and absent, literally concealed – hidden, often (to our eyes) hilariously clumsily, or eerily, under a spread, which could be carpet or a curtain.

The hidden mother was a covered-up, obscured shape that, in some shots, the infant was sitting on, in others the hidden mother was a strange standing presence shrouded in a patterned bedspread standing next to or behind the child. In each of the images the mother was completely ‘hidden’ – no part of her protruded from the covering, yet in most of them the hidden mother was impossible not to see.

The rationale behind covering up the mother – which overturned the Madonna and child genre of painting representation of mothers and their children was that, the sight of the mother distracted the eye from the image of the child. Yet the child felt more secure in the photographic studio having their photograph taken if the mother was also ‘there.’

This strange solution of absence and presence was surely disturbing for the child- let alone the mother under the heavy stifling carpet or curtain- and the expressions on the faces of the children in hidden mother portraits show their distress and bewilderment. None are smiling or relaxed, they all look disturbed and haunted by the knowledge of the absent presence of their hidden mother.

The popular photographic portrait practice of  ‘the hidden mother’ now in retrospect serves as a reflexive visual metaphor for the highly ambivalent ways in which mothers were regarded in late Victorian and Edwardian society, and in Australia in the twentieth century decades known as ‘the stolen generations’- when under an official White Australia Policy children of “part Aboriginal” mothers were routinely taken from their mothers and their mothers’ existence was erased from official and family records; this was a practice that affected not only “part Aboriginal” mothers but also the children of mothers who for a multitude of reasons were not considered socially or officially acceptable (or perhaps the mothers had died, in childbirth or when the children were very young.) Rather than remembering these mothers, official policy erased their memory and presence from the record, so that their families were supposed to never know who they were (as was the case in my own family history). Yet, like the shape of the hidden mother under the carpet or the curtain, the mothers’ presence remained, in a way that was disturbing, eerie and impossible to ignore and not be aware of, for those who started to search. Like looking at the photos of the hidden mother. The shape of the concealed mother remains in the picture frame.

The images of the hidden mother have a great resonance and have struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of users in the blogosphere

http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/the-invisible-mother/.

The Hidden Mother flickr photo sharing group started 32 months ago (0ctober  2010). Here’s a link to the first entries:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1264520@N21/pool/.

The Hidden Mother group rapidly gained hundred of members and hundreds of images of children with ‘hidden mothers’.

What is most interesting is the level of interest in the group. The images of the hidden mother- that most have not known about- have spiked a huge response in the blogosphere.  Some photographs have received thousands of hit per day. The members report in the discussion pages on their surprise at the popularity of their photographic curiosities.

I came across this site through a link to another photographic archive on Retronaut that a friend posted on Facebook. When I looked it up my eye was immediately drawn to the archive of the Hidden Mother, on the menu next to the rules on dating.

When I clicked on it I was astonished to see these images - that add another dimension and context to my own research into Australia’s forgotten mothers, in the decades known as ‘the stolen generations’.

Was this a style of photography that was practiced in Australia?

I will put this onto my research project agenda to find out.

5/28/12

© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck, 2012