Bruce Morris: I’m Bruce Morris from Grafton; I’ve heard that you set up the art gallery here, The Aboriginal Land Art Gallery, how long has it been in operation for Maureen?
Maureen Watson: I don’t know exactly Bruce; it’s been going about three months I’d say, maybe a little bit longer.
BM: What do you have in stock here?
MW: Well we got a lot of things from all over the place, its basically an Aboriginal peoples gallery, that’s the way we promote it and the gallery itself owns very, very little, I spread the word and I visited Aboriginal people, tell them what we’d like to do and they supported the idea very strongly, so they took down boomerangs from their own walls, they took down spears from the corner of the lounge room, they took stuff off their coffee tables so just about everything in here comes from people in the Aboriginal community. We promote it as the gallery that spans 50 000 years of Aboriginal culture, from the string bags and the rocks that are, that have been dated, carbon dated at being 40 000 years old, down to the doll that was only painted up yesterday.
BM: It hasn’t been radio carbon dated at all yet has it?
MW: No this is vintage December 1980 Redfern this one. So we’ve got stuff as I say that spans 50 000 years of Aboriginal art, but it doesn’t matter if this was made in Hong Kong or Japan, before we got to it, it was just a doll, now it’s something that our kids can identify with, that we can identify with, it doesn’t need any words, the positive images are there and these types of dolls, this coffee table, these chairs, there part of the way we live now. So we got a coffee table with Aboriginal carvings on it and the thing is it’s the positive images that are being projected that Aboriginal kids can walk past that street and say “see that, see that shawl? My mother knitted that or see that painting my uncle painted that” that’s the difference with our art gallery and the one at the rocks or Paddington or in the city I mean there all very good no doubt they serve the purpose that they were set up for but ours wasn’t set up for the same purpose, ours is set up to pose the positive images. People stand their across the road at night at the pub and they pull up white people when they going past and they got a few drinks in them and they say “see that… that’s ours!” and they point over here to the flag and the black is beautiful shirts in the windows, and I mean down the rocks we haven’t got Kooris filling a pub down there, over in the city we haven’t got kooris coming in to listen to Black lace play there, here this is where it’s at, this is where it’s happening. We refused to put in for a grant for this place because we wanted to do it on our own and its breaking us but we are still here, even if we got to sell, raffle, chooks among the community to pay the rent for this place.
BM: Are you given a hand by anyone else in the shop or is it run totally by yourself?
MW: No, no it’s not my shop, it’s not my idea, it’s an aboriginal peoples thing its very much a community thing, it only went ahead because the community supported it and certainly my sister and I, my sister Lila Watson from Brisbane, we talked about having this kind of thing in Brisbane, we talked about it here in Sydney ,and we knew what we wanted we just couldn’t get hold of a place, and the more we talked about it the more support we got from the community, so it seemed that everybody had the same kind of idea you know so it’s very much a community thing, my family, I’ve got five sons and my sons and their wives they all help, other people come in from off the street and say look you know I can carve emu eggs and we say we’d like to learn and we say right well we’ll arrange a time we’ll come in and sit down and show you how. Or they say we do wood burning or wood carving and we say right would you like to come in, there a lot of people want to learn, others come in and say gee I’d love to have a garbage bin like that can you do one for me and I say no if you want one come on in there’s someone here show you how to do it. So again it’s not, it’s no one person who runs this thing or organises or who does the work it’s a group thing, a community thing, very much a community thing.
BW: Maureen where did this shield come from?
MW: that was done by a young aboriginal artist here, we’ve got a lot of his paintings and he’s got a degree done three or four years, but the interesting thing about the shield and no doubt about many of the other things Aboriginal people will bring in and we had the curator from the museum down and he was saying that they’ve got shields in the museum that the people from that area have been making for hundreds of years and this young man who made that one like I said he’s been to art college and that and he said it conforms in design composition shape size and its exactly the same as aboriginal people from that area have been making for hundreds of years, it means that even here on the east coast, we are retaining much of our skill and our traditional culture as opposed to the city culture that were in now so it’s really heart-warming to know and he’ll teach his kids and they’ll teach their kids and its really good the museum wanted to buy that, they wanted to buy it and it gives us a good feeling (BM that’s great, that we’ve acquired something that they haven’t got) yeah the museum of Australia and they wanted to but that
BW: where does the artist come from and what’s his name?
MW: this is Colin Isaacs work and Colin’s got paintings and wood carvings and wood burnings and sculptures does a lot of different things as do a lot of other aboriginal people
BW: what do you see for the future development of the gallery and what’s likely to happen in the near future?
MW: well what we want is mainly, apart from projecting the positive images of aboriginal people today, what we want is that it plays a meaningful part in the Aboriginal community, in aboriginal development, in aboriginal identity, so that means aboriginal people having access to the tools, the lessons, the courses to do the things that they want to do. Leatherwork for instance, we’ll have leatherwork classes here, we’ll have wood carving workshops, we’ll have painting, we’ll have sketching, we’ll have didgeridoo playing, we’ll have spear making, maybe boomerang throwing and spear throwing, we’ll also have weaving, we’ll also have painting in oils, portraiture, whatever Aboriginal people want to do we hope that we can help them to do that.
Produced at the Aboriginal video workshop Sydney December 1980
Ray Hunter
David Williams
Bruce Morris
Assisted by John Bayles
