Domesticating Settler Colonization at the Art Gallery of South Australia

This review mobilizes critical race and whiteness scholarship to question the curatorial intent underpinning the recent reimagining of "Australian Art" at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). This essay contends that culturally curated silences and privileged presentations of white settler domestication and domination tacitly perpetuate the foundational fiction of terra nullius. Captain James Cook proclaimed possession of the Eastern Coast of Australia in 1770. The presumption of terra nullius ("land belonging to no-one") was based on his belief that Indigenous peoples lived in a "state of nature" after determining the land was "uncultivated" and that the peoples did not display property rights as he knew and understood them.¹ His decision afforded legal possession by defining First Nations peoples as part of the landscape—eventually classified as the property of state and territory governments.² This appropriation of sovereignty denied Indigenous peoples political, economic and civil rights throughout Australia's history.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the newly founded Australian nation took action to secure its White racial identity. The domestic policy geared toward "extermination of the culture of the colonized Indigenous people"³ was allied with the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act aimed at excluding racialized peoples from entering Australia.⁴ The act formalized the Anglocentric White Australia Policy (finally revoked in 1973), which made race the definitive marker of citizenship. Given the history of Australia's white supremacist approach to migration, the increasing numbers of nonwhite migrants in the latter half of the twentieth century has led to a repositioning of the cultural and racial norms of citizenship. Curatorial appropriation of language typically used to describe nonwhite experiences of migranthood in order to describe settler colonialism conflates the two and implicates racialized migrants in the denial of Indigenous sovereignty. Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson asserts narratives of Australian national identity are premised on a valorization of white possession that is achieved through the disavowal of Indigenous dispossession.⁵ This essay critically examines the ongoing sociopolitical and cultural ramifications of settler-colonial narratives of nation on Indigenous peoples and nonwhite migrants to Australia in the context of public art galleries, in this case the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Located in central Adelaide (South Australia's state capital), AGSA opened at its current venue to the public in 1900, one year before Federation. Situated on a tree-lined boulevard, with 150 bronze plaques set in the pavement in 1986 to commemorate 150 years since the colonization of South Australia, this "cultural corridor" connects institutions of power and knowledge including Government House, the Royal South Australian Society of Arts, the State Library, the South Australian Museum, the Elder Conservatorium of Music, and the University of Adelaide. The imposing architecture indicates the settler-colonial ambition, both symbolically and materially, of presenting these institutions as a direct descendent of European civilization.

Initially operating as the National Gallery of South Australia, the building is comfortably set among institutions that served to bring the fledgling state into a relationship with what Tony Bennet, in his influential essay "The Exhibitionary Complex," refers to as "two new historical times—national and universal." Bennet presents a history of the museum as entwined with the apparatus of emerging nation-states in which the museum serves to annex "universal histories" to national narratives and represent them as the "outcome and culmination of the universal story of civilisation's development."⁶ The colonnaded portico of the AGSA's classical façade (an echo of the Parthenon) serves as a mnemonic device that recalls the grandeur of Greece, Rome, London, and all the associations embedded in the residual civilizational and colonial cultural memory.

Entering the gallery through the portico leads audiences into a vestibule and then through to Galleries 1–5, known collectively as the Elder Wing of Australian Art. Only a few years ago, visitors to the Elder Wing were flanked by two sets of busts as they entered the main gallery, one pair black and the other white. On the eastern wall sat Woureddy and Trucaninny, a Nuennone man and woman from Bruny Island, and English explorers...