Concern
for the buyer!
99% of all didgeridoos sold throughout the world are not crafted and painted
by indigenous Aboriginals.
Big factories now mass
produce bamboo and teak didgeridoos and falsely label them Aboriginal
didgeridoos.
There is mass cutting
down of Eucalyptus trees, sometimes the non-termite eaten wood
is bored and Aboriginal style paint is applied.
A Yidaki is a Yolngu
term for the didgeridoo. A didgeridoo coming from anywhere other
than North East Arnhem Land is not a Yidaki.
A Mago is a West Arnhem Land term for a didgeridoo (didjeridu)
The dot art painting
commonly found on didgeridoos and sold throughout the world is
not actually a traditional art form on indigenously crafted instruments,
rather it is a dot.con!
SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT, COMMUNICATIONS, INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
Marion Scrymgour, Minister for Arts
"Without
repeating myself from those areas, I would like to make three
points to your committee. First, I am aware that you do not have
the time to check this out as your timetable is tight, but if
you were to walk 700 metres from the site of this hearing you
would get a sense of some of the threats to the Aboriginal visual
arts and craft industry. Within this radius there are half-a-dozen
shops that deal more or less exclusively with Aboriginal art.
Two are Aboriginal owned, the Tiwi Art Network outlet in the Air
Raid Arcade and the Maningrida Arts and Culture across the road
in the Plaza Hotel. By sheer chance these two represent arts centres
from my electorate of Arafura. Also within this radius there is
a plethora of souvenir shops which sell, as a significant part
of their output, arts and souvenir material that is purportedly
Aboriginal."
"I
make no comments about these shops dealing primarily in Aboriginal
art; some of them do deal ethically. It is the other shops that
are of serious concern. The materials they call Aboriginal art
are almost exclusively the work of fakers, forgers and fraudsters.
Their work hides behind false descriptions and dubious designs.
I made the point last week that the vast majority of purchasers
of Aboriginal art are sympathetic to Aboriginal artists and want
to buy the real thing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of purchasers
are being ripped off. I imagine the rules about unparliamentary
language are much the same in the Senate as in our Legislative
Assembly so I will allow you to imagine the language I would use
to describe the producers of this work."
"A
particular case in point is the production and sale of didgeridoos.
The overwhelming majority of the ones you see in the shops throughout
the country, not to mention Darwin, are fakes, pure and simple.
There is some anecdotal evidence in Darwin that they have been
painted by backpackers working on industrial scale wood production.
Needless to say, my department refuses to issue forestry harvesting
permits for these carpetbaggers, but they still head out bush
and rape our bush."
"Many
are produced and painted by Aboriginal people in New South Wales
and Queensland, and it saddens me to criticise these people but
I must. It also saddens the people whose birthright the didgeridoo
belongs to, those whose cultures take in an arch from the north-east
part of the Kimberley, through Arnhem Land and south to and around
the borders of Queensland. Many of them live in my electorate.
Their heritage has been stolen through the sale out of Darwin
of an estimated 1,000 didgeridoos a week. I make the point here:
my people, the Tiwi, reside in that geographic arch I just described,
but we would never make didgeridoos. They have never been part
of our culture, and we would not steal the culture of countrymen
from across the water. I would make an appeal to Aboriginal people
elsewhere: dressing up didgeridoos with ripped-off design formula
such as crosshatching or, more bizarrely, desert iconography does
not make a didgeridoo genuine; it merely hides the origins of
our respective colonisations behind a mask of complicity."
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here for full report
If you have any questions regarding the authenticity of an
Aboriginal instrument being offered for sale, feel free to contact
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