The Aboriginal Flag

Abstract

Is the Aboriginal Flag art? And, if it is, to what end does that claim serve? ‘Art’ is not a helpful noun, and certainly a risky one on which to base an argument. Yet, to fail to read the Aboriginal Flag as art – or, more precisely, to fail to read it as Indigenous activist art – is to fail to understand the Aboriginal Flag, and more broadly the role of culture in Indigenous activism, post European settlement. The Aboriginal Flag’s Indigenous and Western art epistemologies are instrumental in shaping its form and semantics. As Aboriginal art, the flag represents a continuum with traditional Aboriginal themes and aesthetic values. In a Western context, it is read as a flag, and it exists as a mass-produced object. In all its guises the Aboriginal Flag has melded itself into many aspects of popular imagination and become one of Australia’s significant symbols. The contested history of the Aboriginal Flag – evident in the passion it evokes on both sides of Australia’s race-based cultural divide – demonstrates that both white and black Australians understand the Aboriginal Flag to be a powerful political symbol. The Aboriginal Flag is therefore two things simultaneously: a work of art and an activist symbol. As a successful pairing, this alliance is rare because each entity or discipline has different values and agendas: activism seeks to bring about social change, art-making is concerned with the subject of art. To confuse matters further, as a work of social and political art the Aboriginal Flag achieves something very rare: it brings about social change. Understood in this way, the Aboriginal Flag has three conceptualising foundations: art, activism and social change. In its totality, the Aboriginal Flag represents evidence of a particular type of art – of which it is exemplary – that remains largely unrecognised as an artistic genre. In light of these factors, it is necessary to define the Aboriginal Flag as distinct from other social and political contemporary works of art that have emerged in recent decades. These art-based interpretations of the Aboriginal Flag constitute the architecture or, more precisely, the armature of this thesis. They give form and structure to the flag’s histories and meanings that in their totality form a cohesive reading of the Aboriginal Flag that is whole and distinctly Indigenous.