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In black and white or beyond the pale? The ‘authenticity’ debate and protection for Aboriginal culture

If, as Tim Rowse has suggested, the task of rethinking the nation's responsibility to indigenous people is primarily an issue of the imagination, I then Australia's writers and artists must play an important part in this task. By writing or painting about issues such as land rights and the stolen generation, both indigenous and non-indigenous artists may, if in an indirect and imperceptible way, be helping contemporary Australians 'to engage with matters that are not so much imponderable as endlessly ponderable.'2 Indeed, it is arguable that since the effort of the imagination is required primarily from non-indigenous Australians, then it is particularly important that non-indigenous artists write and paint about these issues, providing this is done in an appropriate and respectful way. A crucial question is raised by this last phrase. What, exactly, does it mean to require of a non-indigenous artist that she write or paint about indigenous issues in an 'appropriate or respectful' way? While notions of 'appropriateness' and respect are familiar in contemporary legal and political discourse about indigenous issues, they sit uneasily within mainstream discourse on art which, for at least the past century, has usually privileged ideas of rebellion, radical novelty and unconventionality. Standards of law (which are concerned to set limits) and of literature (which are concerned to protect freedom) are in this context potentially radically opposed. It is clear, nevertheless, that different ethical standards arise for writing or painting about indigenous culture compared to, say, Ukrainian culture. While these differences may be sometimes applied in artistic practice, I suggest that there has been little articulation in mainstream Australian cultural and legal debate of precisely what these differences are. This article, then, seeks to explore a deceptively simple question and provide some tentative solutions to it: how far should indigenous or non-indigenous authors either painters or writersgo when 'speaking about' Aboriginal people today? At a certain point it is clear that permissible reference or depiction becomes impermissible, and unethical, appropriation. For writers, that point exists somewhere along a spectrum between an author who depicts an Aboriginal presence as a minor character in a novel, to a major character or narrator, to an author who herself trades upon her Aboriginal experience or 'street cred', or