The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre says they weren't consulted on the TWWHA.
The Indigenous community has not been consulted on the government’s wilderness world heritage plan, and current legislation poses a threat to their cultural land, a leading Indigenous group believes.
On Saturday, the state government officially released its Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) Management Plan, which provided a framework for protecting natural and cultural values for up to seven years.
Environment Minister Matthew Groom said this was the first time the TWWHA management plan recognised the Aboriginal heritage of the land, but the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) said they weren’t consulted in the process.
The organisation’s chief executive Heather Sculthorpe said the government had not undertaken a cultural assessment of the land before producing the final draft, ignoring calls from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
“They have not involved the Aboriginal community in the study, and they’ve appointed white consultants to engage the community,” she said.
However, Environment Minister Matthew Groom said there was no expectation by UNESCO that the cultural assessment would be completed before finalising the plan, and he understood the assessment’s tender was close to finalisation.
He said the cultural assessment of the TWWHA was being managed through the Aboriginal Heritage Council, and the TAC had declined a spot on the council.
Ms Sculthorpe said the government had postponed amendments to the Aboriginal Relics Act 1975, which would introduce legislation that would safeguard the protection of Aboriginal heritage.
“There’s art all over the South Coast Track, and the whole emphasis has been making it easier for tourists.”
Mr Groom said the government was moving forward on amendments to the Aboriginal Relics Act, with the Draft Aboriginal Relics Amendment Act released for public comment.
The Tasmanian Government has been accused of sending mixed messages over its vision for Hobart's Macquarie Point.
Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has announced plans to transform the industrial site into a cultural precinct celebrating Tasmania's Aboriginal history.
The plan includes an art park, a major fire and light installation dedicated to celebrating 40,000 years of continuous culture in Tasmania, and a Tasmanian Aboriginal history centre.
But it has already raised concerns in parts of the Aboriginal community and the Greens have questioned whether it can coexist with a forestry exports terminal.
Greens MP Rosalie Woodruff welcomed the Mona proposal but said she doubted they could coexist.
"Timber exports and cultural precinct — they just don't work," she said.
"Tourists don't want to walk past an 8-metre high pile of logs and woodchips.
"This shows the Government's warped priorities. They can't have it both ways. They have to pick and everyone in Tasmania would be wanting them to pick the MONA cultural precinct."
State Growth Minister Matthew Groom said there would be no woodchip pile.
"It's about exporting logs, and that's a five-year arrangement," he said.
"We believe we can support forestry and also undertake a world-class redevelopment of the Macquarie Point site in collaboration."
Tasmanian Aboriginal writer Greg Lehman initiated the approach and is working with Mona on the development.
"To continually focus on wars we fought overseas, while ignoring the campaigns that were waged in our own backyards prevents us having an honest relationship with our own history," he said in a statement.
"Tasmania is where colonial conflict was most intense, where attempts were made to exterminate Aborigines completely.
"It is therefore the most important place to begin a process of national healing. This will require acknowledgement, mourning and forgiveness.
"By providing a public space that honours and respects Aboriginal people and their culture, we can create a catalyst for change."
Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) chief executive Heather Sculthorpe said she was surprised the TAC had not been consulted on the plan.
"We've been urging MONA for years to include Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and heritage in their museum, because after all MONA itself is built on an Aboriginal midden," she said.
"We have also been urging for years that there needs to be a truth and reconciliation commission, but we haven't heard anything from MONA about this proposal."
Ms Sculthorpe said she would welcome the proposal provided the entire Aboriginal community was involved.
"If they are going to put Aboriginal people on the sidelines, then it is not going to work," she said.
Mona’s Macquarie Point vision the ‘outcome Hobart deserves’, says David Walsh
Mona’s Macquarie Point vision the ‘outcome Hobart deserves’, says David WalshMATT SMITH, State Political Editor, Sunday Tasmanian December 10, 2016 9:30pm Subscriber onlyTHE Hobart waterfront would be home to a music bowl, a day and night produce market, a nationally significant Aboriginal cultural precinct, hotels and conference centre, and an integrated transport hub for light rail, under a plan by the team behind Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art.Mona founder David Walsh and artistic director Leigh Carmichael have revealed their alternative vision for the Macquarie Point site.
The Macquarie Point Development Corporation has been instructed by the State Government to find a way to turn the vision to a reality.
We need to set realistic timeframes and expectations, but the most important thing is getting it right. If we waste this chance, it will be lost for a very long time. – Mona owner David Walsh
Mona’s vision to turn the Macquarie Point industrial site into an internationally significant cultural precinct is expected to take until 2050 to be fully realised.
But Mr Walsh and Mr Carmichael’s plans have prompted the State Government to reset the vision for the site. This includes giving its first public commitment to underwrite the removal of the wastewater treatment plant that has threatened to derail any meaningful development in the area.
“Resetting the vision will ensure the project’s full potential can be realised,” Mr Hodgman said.
“Macquarie Point presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Hobart and Tasmania and we are determined to get it right.”
As revealed by the?Mercury, the centrepiece of Mona’s vision for Macquarie Point is a National Truth and Reconciliation Art Park that acknowledges Australia’s dark history of colonial warfare.
The?Sunday Tasmanian?has obtained the first artists’ impressions and details for Mona’s broader vision.
That proposal, expected to be developed in three stages between now and 2050, includes:
AUSTRALIA’S?first reconciliation art park.
NINE?major fire and light installations – representing each of the first Tasmanian nations.
TASMANIAN?Aboriginal history centre, living culture centre and education facilities.
LIGHT?rail (three stations including options for a heritage rail station).
EDEN?Project.
CONTEMPORARY?gallery and art space.
ANTARCTIC?science and research precinct.
LUXURY?500-room hotel (or three hotels).
CONFERENCE?and exhibition centre for 2500 people.
PRODUCE?market day and night, operating regularly.
HOBART?music bowl with a capacity of 7000.
UPGRADED?Antarctic gateway.
RESIDENTIAL?and retail marina with ferry terminals.
UPGRADED?cruise terminal facilities, additional warehousing and allied commercial offices and retail. An artist’s rendering of Mona’s Macquarie Point 2050 Vision.
Mr Walsh said the vision was a starting point for a new direction, not a final destination.
“The project will evolve and new ideas will emerge, but we feel confident enough that the concepts proposed will allow the project to progress, and provide Hobart with a chance for the outcome it deserves,” Mr Walsh said. Mr Carmichael said Mona had set out to create something that would make Hobart a better place to live, work and visit.
“Our vision is for a unified cultural precinct with a range of attractors across the fields of art, culture, tourism and science. At the heart of the project is a reconciliation art resonate internationally.
“We need to set realistic timeframes and expectations, but the most important thing is getting it right. If we waste this chance, it will be lost for a very long time.” An artist’s rendering of Mona’s Macquarie Point 2050 Vision.
State Growth Minister Matthew Groom said the new vision presented an extraordinary opportunity for Hobart and Tasmania.
“This will continue to be a challenging project and it’s going to take time to deliver,” Mr Groom said.
“The new plan will set out three clear stages of development.
“We have formally directed the Macquarie Point Development Corporation to prepare a detailed action plan for the achievement of stage one.”
Stage one of the project will include the development of commercial space, exhibition space and accommodation. Work on developing those detailed plans is under way.
RAISED in a world of serene beauty framed by isolation and oppression, artist Lola Greeno is now represented in every major Australian museum and sought after internationally
At low tide on some isolated beaches, the maireener shell can be spotted tangled up in kelp. Its potential for pearl-blue iridescence is picked out of a salty nest by oyster-catcher figures with knowing fingers and a fine spotter’s eye. It is the right of certain women in Tasmania to harvest particular precious shells of which the king maireener, found mainly on the Furneaux Islands, is coveted for its jewel-like qualities. These beachcombing women, older than most, are practising a traditional cultural activity that goes back at least 1800 years.
Shell necklace Artist Lola Greeno gathering shells on the beach at Weymouth. Picture: CHRIS KIDD
It is something to stop and consider deeply: that a mindful female pastime — to scour for shells and make necklaces from them — somehow managed to survive despite the horrific and catastrophic events that overtook the people of Tasmania when outsiders arrived. Few realise the deep significance of Aboriginal grandmothers, mothers, daughters, nieces, sisters and aunties continuing to meet and gather, to sit on the sand, to fossick in rocks, to walk knee-deep into the ocean with the modern collector’s plastic sandwich bag in pocket, collecting the jewels of their culture, one by one.
Lola Greeno (nee Sainty) had Shirley Temple curls as a toddler when she first started picking up shells at Cape Barren Island, off the coast of North-East Tasmania, where she was born in 1946. Back then, a small Aboriginal population was confined to a Cape Barren reserve, first established in 1912 with curfews. For part of their life Lola’s parents, Valerie and Maurice Sainty, were unable to leave the house before sunrise and had to be home by sundown. At Cape Barren, the boat would come in once a week to deliver mail and groceries. Lola remembers her family having to be self-sufficient: growing vegetables and making and recycling clothes.
“Dad snared kangaroo for meat and we ate salted mutton-birds in brine for most of the year,” recalls Lola, who turns 70 this month.
When the family moved to nearby Flinders Island when Lola was 10, she remembers her mother washing their clothes on a wood-fire copper boiling pot outside.
While her brothers — she has seven — were fishing, Lola and her two sisters accompanied their mother and the elders to Prickly Bottom beach, all of 50m from their house, to collect shells, though they never made necklaces. That came much later.
The beach was just an extension of their backyard and playground. “Shell collecting was just what we did growing up,” she says. “I used to help pick up shells — all sorts of different shells, colours and shapes — and not really make anything out of them in those days.”
Dad snared kangaroo for meat and we ate salted mutton-birds in brine for most of the year.
It didn’t mean that much to Lola until, well into her 40s, she started talking to her mother about making shell necklaces. Before then, Lola had lived raising two children, moving to Launceston, driving her brother’s buses, opening a takeaway shop with husband Rex and studying at the Riawunna Centre at the University of Tasmania.
But it was her mother’s stories that opened the artist’s eyes, as well as an enduring friendship with indigenous Queensland artist Fiona Foley. While learning the difference between black crows, rice shells, cat’s teeth and the maireener, Lola started to unravel part of her history. And, as mother and daughter started making necklaces together, the stories told by Valerie finally meant something to Lola.
A necklace from Cultural Jewels. Picture: PETER WHYTE
“My mother told me they used to have their own concerts for mutton-birding, and at Christmas time, and didn’t think they were dressed unless they were wearing a necklace they made mainly during birding time,” she says.
“I can remember going to Big Dog Island, where my family worked in a processing shed. In those days they closed the school, packed up everything and took it with us for six weeks. The chooks and the cow stayed, but everything else went. We’d go over in a boat and I remember hanging on to the sides when it was rough. I’d never do it today. There was a little cove near the shed where the women used to get together on Sundays. Once with a friend — we would have been only about 10 — the women had to come and rescue us because the tide was coming in around us.”
Life is very different for today’s 10-year-olds, but Lola says it is just as important for her to pass on her stories to her family.
“I taught my daughter Vanessa to come to the beach, identify shells, collect shells, and know what to look for,” Lola says. “She hasn’t been part of the cleaning process yet, but that will come. The next thing is to take my granddaughters back to the islands. It’s not easy. Young women born in the urban environment have lost that connection to the land and their culture. Rex and I try to go back once a year. I always say it recharges my spirits, my whole being.”
Lola has also learnt the intricacies of shell necklace making from her mother-in-law Dulcie Greeno. Now 92, Dulcie still makes one or two necklaces a year for national exhibitions or collections. She’s at Launceston’s Inveresk market every Sunday, where she’s been an antiques stallholder for many years. Sometimes she is with four generations of her family, including her two daughters, Patsy Cameron and Betty Grace, who also make shell necklaces.
“The making of shell necklaces is very significant to Tasmanian Aboriginal women,” says Lola, whose sisters Rachel Quillerat and Audrey Frost also practise the traditional craft. “When I first started I didn’t feel confident making bracelets. But today I work with non-indigenous people in workshops and schools. We sit down and I show them how to make a bracelet. They would make it as a wearable item. I make it as part of my culture.”
A maireener shell necklace. Picture: PETER WHYTE
I meet Lola and Rex at the Pipers River shop and follow them in their car to Weymouth beach, the closest to Launceston for collecting certain kinds of shells.
“I don’t feel anything until I’ve set foot on the beach,” Lola says, explaining how her necklaces are inspired by the shells she finds and the places she collects them.
We stroll onto the sand and up to some rocks at the end. While Lola and I chat, Rex looks for something that will please Lola. When he was a fisherman on the islands, the maireener turned up in strands of kelp. Lola’s cheeks brighten with Rex’s finds — tiny shells he calls buttons, “because they were used as actual buttons by the old people”, he says. He turns to go back to the car to find a sandwich bag to put them in.
“It’s therapeutic,” Lola says. “Every time I go to the beach is time to think about the older women, what I’ve learnt from women and what they tell me. But you need to get your eye in. Rex is twice as fast as me. You see a bunch of sand and shells and you really have to study it — there are so many shells there. You’ve got to be passionate. There’s a lot of work in it and only the dedicated ones make necklaces.”
Lola’s prized king maireener shell crown, a star piece in the touring exhibition Cultural Jewels, is made from 145 shells that took two years to collect. Like Tasmania’s version of the Crown Jewels, Lola made it in honour of Aboriginal elder Lucy Beedon, the first Aboriginal teacher on Badger Island, west of the Furneaux Group, who became known as “Queenie” for her entrepreneurial skills.
Like many Tasmanian Aboriginal men, Rex is happy to find shells but knows this is “women’s business”. Once the shells are cleaned and sorted, he drills holes into them for Lola, who sits at their dining table overlooking the Tamar River, threading them onto strands. She only threads during the day. Some shells, such as rice shells, are so small they fit under her fingernail.
Not long ago, the Tasmanian Aboriginal shell collection resided in museum history departments, and necklaces were regarded as anonymous cultural objects with their makers identified frequently as “Unknown”.
[They] didn’t think they were dressed unless they were wearing a necklace they made mainly during birding time
But a turning point in Lola’s artistic and cultural practice helped change that in the early ’90s, when she accompanied her mother to deliver the first necklace the older woman ever made into the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery at Launceston. “I thought that was important,” Lola says. “The necklaces never had value in those days. Even at the museum they were at the lowest value. But the way to change is by connecting with cultural institutions.”
QVMAG’s curator at the time was Glenda King, who had experience in the Northern Territory working with Arnhem Land, Tiwi Islander and Central Australian artists.
“I had a broader understanding and came from an aesthetic and cultural practice rather than purely ethnographic,“ says King, who had also been looking at non-indigenous familial pieces made by mothers and daughters in the late 19th and early 20th century.
One of Lola’s recent pieces. Picture: PETER WHYTE.
For Lola, shell necklace making was about coming to understand her family history. King says she just happened to be there at the time. “Lola recognised she needed to pick up the baton — there was a whole cultural heritage she needed to embrace,” King says.
“In recognising her family history, Lola recognised the role she could play and the responsibility she had to honour the traditions held by her mother.”
Later, one of Lola’s first necklaces, made from white toothies, went to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. She says she’ll never make another one of those because she’ll never find enough shells — they are increasingly hard to find.
After her mother passed in 1999, Lola carried on working with themes that were significant to her mother’s necklace making, especially her contrasting use of black and white shells. As well, she used materials that had cultural significance to her family history, such as abalone shells, echidna quills and muttonbird feathers.
She graduated from UTAS with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in textiles and, in 2000, was hired by Arts Tasmania as its first Aboriginal Arts program officer.
Every time I go to the beach is time to think about the older women, what I’ve learnt from women and what they tell me.
King went on to curate and project manage the exhibition Strings Across Time, which played a central role in the launch of the refurbished QVMAG in 2006.
“I was well aware of the potential of shell necklaces to be looked at in a new context,” King says. “QVMAG started looking at the context and stories of cultural objects and for the stories to be told by the makers themselves. It was quite a significant shift.”
Before then, when it was commonly believed there were no Tasmanian Aboriginal people left, shell necklaces were regarded as a souvenir of Tasmania and sold in souvenir shops.
“If you believe that there are no people of a particular culture surviving then you don’t recognise objects made by descendants of that culture,” King says. “Not being recognised as a living culture, people were unlikely to see their necklaces as specific examples of a very old continuing culture.”
While acknowledging Lola’s tremendous strength, her art-world peers also recognise her generosity and gentle nature.
“Many Aboriginal people still have reservations about sharing their cultural heritage — and that’s quite understandable — but she’s found a way of bridging that gap,” King says.
“For Lola, it’s a way of saying, ‘This is where I come from, this is who I am, this cultural practice is a critical part of my life’. And it’s her way of saying her culture is not dead in aspic in a box on a museum shelf.”
Another of Lola’s recent pieces. Picture: PETER WHYTE
For Lola, the journey from “half-caste” to national living treasure is complete. Her work is selling at the highest prices she thinks they will ever reach (prices at her upcoming Hobart show range from $400 to more than $2500, depending on shell type and necklace size). The touring exhibition Cultural Jewels, which first opened at Launceston in 2014, continues to travel the country, making its return to TMAG at Hobart in 2018. This month, Hobart’s Handmark Gallery marks Lola’s 70th birthday with the exhibition Lola and Friends, featuring 10 ceremonial necklaces she has made especially for the occasion.
Despite being brought up in a physical world of serene beauty framed by isolation, oppression and racism, Lola’s artwork is now represented in every major museum in Australia and sought after internationally. Unlike many artists who work alone, Lola says it’s not just her journey; it is the journey of her family and of the Tasmanian Aboriginal women for whom the practice of shell necklace-making helped retain a culture.
It’s her way of saying her culture is not dead in aspic in a box on a museum shelf.
“I’ve always been nervous about presenting any work in Tasmania as I feel I am more judged at home than I am away from home,” she says.
“When they first started asking me about my culture at the School of Art I thought, ‘No, that belongs here in my heart, that information’. But then I looked into other artists and I could see that once you know your own history your life story is easier to share.”
Lola is sometimes asked: “How can you charge so much for your necklaces when they’re just shells off the beach?”
She simply replies: “There’s a big story in that shell off that beach for me.”
Lola and Friends opens on Friday at Handmark Gallery, Salamanca, and includes work by artists Philip Wolfhagen, Melissa Smith, Katy Woodroffe, Rex Greeno and Lola and Rex’s daughter Vanessa. The exhibition continues until Monday, June 13. Lola and her sisters Rachel Quillerat and Audrey Frost are part of kanalaritja: An Unbroken String, which opens at TMAG in December and will tour nationally.
For more great reads, pick up a copy of TasWeekend in your SaturdayMercury.
