by Anita Heiss
I’d always been a firm believer of supporting Aboriginal people so we could have a greater opportunity to put forth our own perspectives on ourselves, as we frequently had to dispel myths and inaccuracies of who we are. Myths are often created by looking at us through the observers’ gaze. But it was day one. I wouldn’t get on my soapbox straightaway, but with my exchange with Adrien in my thoughts, I knew I would be on it sooner or later.
I made my way to the Australian exhibit and read the introduction: ‘The age-old cultural practices existing in this vast territory were handed down by semi-nomadic Aboriginal peoples.’ The words carried me back home to country.
I thought of Moree and my Gamilaroi ancestors, and imagined what life might have been like for them before colonisation, before life allowed us to visit other lands like France to then read about ourselves and our heritage. In some ways, it felt odd to be sitting a hemisphere away, reading about my people back home. I remembered when I was only a few years old, before Dad died and we’d sit on the porch with my grandad who’d tell us stories about the first time his grandfather saw a whitefella and thought it was a ghost. I remember laughing but being a bit scared at the time.
I moved into the Bark Room, which exhibited about fifty examples of bark paintings collected in Arnhem Land in the 1960s by Karel Kupka. The area also had shields and spear-throwers as well as funeral poles from Bathurst Island and contemporary acrylic paintings.
I was anxious to see the space where my own exhibition would hang and went to the West Mezzanine, the temporary exhibition space. The current exhibition just about to close was titled 165 years of Iranian photography, and had images from the mid-nineteenth century up until the most contemporary works by major Iranian photographers.
I looked around the space and started planning where my own pieces would be hung: where the dhouri (the traditional ceremonial headdress of the western Torres Strait) would fit, where Emily McDaniel’s soundscape would best work, and where the mannequin with Michael McDaniel’s possum-skin cloak would have the greatest impact.
‘This exhibition has been very popular.’ Adrien was by my side. ‘With all the discussion about banning the burqa, more people have come in to see it. Extra marketing at no extra cost. We should think about banning other things – maybe the Americans – to get more interest in our collections.’ Adrien laughed but I wasn’t convinced he was joking.
‘Yes, but that’s not really the kind of marketing that’s good for the country, is it?’ I phrased it as a question simply because I didn’t want to have a second disagreement in one day on my first day at work.
‘Professionally, the publicity and marketing for us is a good thing. We want people to come to our museum. Personally, I think we, the French are right. The burqa presents a security nightmare, and there are more and more women wearing them.’ He leant over and whispered in my ear. ‘The Muslims are going to take over Europe.’
I was gobsmacked but contained my physical reaction. ‘Do you really think it’s possible for three per cent of the population in France and one per cent of the population in Germany to take over the whole of Europe? It doesn’t seem probable to me.’ I was thinking Pauline Hanson, xenophobia and racism. This man was ticking all the wrong boxes and pressing all my bad buttons at the same time.
‘So you think the burqa is okay? A woman of such fine fashion as you?’ He said, running his sleazy old eyes over my body from painted toenails to the trimmed tips of my hair.
I looked at what I was wearing quickly then answered. ‘I share the same views as President Obama: you can’t tell people what to wear, especially if it’s going to stigmatise Islam.’
‘You support President Obama but you’re not even American, and you don’t have a president because you are not a republic.’
That stung me but I didn’t bite.
‘Well, I support my President Sarkozy who says, “the Republic must live with an open face”.’
The universe jumped in and saved me as Adrien’s phone rang and I was unbelievably grateful.
‘Pardon,’ he said. ‘I must take this call, but as requested I will email you the press release tomorrow.’ He walked off.
I was exhausted by the mental strain of understanding the level of intolerance in the ‘Republic’ and felt challenged by trying to remain composed in my new workplace when talking about an issue that had incensed me back home. Our opposition leader Tony Abbott had said Australians find the burqa confronting, and he probably wasn’t lying. I still lived in an intolerant, fear-driven society, but at least the discussion on the burqa didn’t last more than a few days in the media, and hopefully would never have to be legislated against in our parliament.
It was 4 pm and I needed some air. More importantly, I needed some light. I headed to the gift shop and admired the work of Bernard Naube with his works made out of recycled goods like Coke cans. I picked up a book called Boomerang Collection by Sergio d’Ignazio which was positioned next to mass-produced Kenyan beads.
There were a few ‘Aboriginal-inspired’ items like wallaby-decorated boomerangs called ‘bamboorangs’. I was at first sceptical, but when I googled the company later I saw that they were affiliated with the Keringke Aboriginal Arts Centre eighty kilometres from Alice Springs on the Aboriginal community of Ltyentye Apurte, also know as Santa Teresa.
I spent the rest of the day filling out paperwork and going through the works that were waiting to be hung in the temporary space. I got the train home at 6 pm and was exhausted and brain dead, but I found the glamorous people along the way lifted my spirits. I felt crappy having not touched up my makeup all day, too busy with details and learning.
I sank onto my pull-out bed with a baguette and cheese and glass of wine – my now regular dinner – and emailed the girls.
Lauren emailed back:
Denise emailed:
The week flew by quickly. I was flat out at work and it wasn’t without drama. Adrien had emailed me a press release with ‘aboriginal’ in lower-case throughout. It was an exercise in grammar and diplomacy to finally have him accept the need to capitalise it to ‘Aboriginal’.
I printed out the style guide from the NAG for him and highlighted the bits relevant to our current disagreement so he understood the need to use initial capitals for Aboriginal and Aborigine as an adjective and noun in relation to the First Peoples of Australia. Then he should use the word ‘aborigine’ as a generic term referring generally to indigenous people from anywhere in the world.
Adrien also wanted to amend my quote on the exhibition that I had finally managed to convince him to include. I wasn’t sure if he genuinely didn’t like my style of writing and voice or felt the need to know more than his female colleague twenty years younger than him. The main problem, though, was that in the collection of images he sent to the media, he included a photograph of a local French model wearing Michael McDaniel’s possum-skin cloak as a fashion statement. Worn over a barely-there black silk slip with no bra, it totally demeaned the fur.
‘It’s a cultural artefact and not for fashion purposes,’ I stressed down the phone. ‘Unlike Andrea Fisher’s work, which is body adornment or wearable art. Please, please don’t allow anyone else to put it on. The artist will be here as you know and he will expect it has been handled with respect by staff.’
‘Of course, Elizabeth, please don’t question my professionalism.’ Adrien sounded annoyed. ‘In case you didn’t know, women here like fur coats – I thought it was a good marketing hook.’
‘These are not fashion statements, Adrien.’ I gritted my teeth. ‘They represent culture and history. And in case you didn’t know, fur coats aren’t seen as a fashion statement in Australia, more an animal rights issue.’ I really was on the wrong foot with this man or, more so, he was on mine.
Despite all the strained communications via phone and email, Adrien did line up some useful media. A crew from the French cultural television channel ARTE interviewed me under Yunupingu’s installation and I truly felt
her galaxy and universe were looking over me with a blessing of support. Print and TV media from across Paris and French Polynesia interviewed me in the amphitheatre outside the building, and interest in the exhibition was gaining momentum.
Life at the musée immediately replicated my fulfilling and frantic life back home. My fashionable feet hardly touched the ground as I raced around the building, getting lost more often than not, and making new acquaintances.
Canelle asked me to do a briefing for the other curators on the artwork in the exhibition for their own knowledge base and then I signed off on the printing for the catalogues that were already at film stage. I was glad we’d done a lot of work by email before I arrived.
The last step before the opening was supervising the hanging of the works. When I was still in Canberra, Lauren and Canelle discussed how it looked at the NAG, but at the end of the day the musée mob would place the artwork and set up the installations with their own vision and flair.
There was a buzz around the musée about ‘my exhibition’, as I’d taken to calling it in my head, and I was anxious about everyone’s expectations – including those of my colleagues back home. By the end of the week I was exhausted and ready for the weekend – not to sleep, but to get amongst it again as a ‘recently arrived local’.
As I stood in the shower one evening after work, my skinny Koori ankles ached from walking so much and my feet were scarred with blisters from not wearing the correct shoes in the city of cobblestone streets. There was a choice to be made. Be comfortable or be fashionable. I had clearly made the wrong choice trying desperately to fit in to Paris glamour. I couldn’t keep the fabulous shoe thing up any longer. It was time to throw away the self-imposed need to look chic 24/7 and so I decided from then on to wear my running shoes to the Metro stop one kilometre from my home, then change at the station.
As I headed downstairs, I bumped into Dom on his way to take his jet-black poodle, Romeo, for a walk. I hadn’t seen him all week but had heard the dog bark on occasion. Each time it made me think of my own pets back home.
‘Mademoiselle Libs, you are hardly ever home. Catherine wants to know: are you eating enough?’
I felt strangely loved by that one question of concern by Dom, but laughed as well as I’d not stopped eating since I’d arrived.
‘Dom, how kind, please tell Catherine that I am eating far more than I ever would at home. The food here is too good. I should really run up and down these stairs twenty times a day!’
‘No running on these stairs, mademoiselle, please, I would hate for you to fall. You can take Romeo for a walk any time you like for extra exercise.’
I liked that Dom was such a caring old man, and I was glad that of all the places I could’ve ended up in Paris, I was in his apartment block. The sense of community in the 20th was the very reason I moved there.
‘I have to go, Dom, I promise I’ll drop in for coffee soon.’ I kissed him on the cheek instinctively and remembered I used to kiss Dad on the cheek all the time as a child. Before school, before bed, before he died.
‘The French do two cheeks,’ Dom reminded me, so I corrected myself, kissed his other cheek, patted Romeo on the head and felt a pang of homesickness, missing Bonnie and Clyde.
The train was packed at peak hour but I loved it. The efficiency of travelling so fast and far and most of the time underground, made me wish we had something similar in Canberra. Maybe then I’d visit Tuggeranong more often.
People didn’t generally talk on the train or even look at each other. And yet the seats were so close I was forced to touch knees with strangers. I liked it, in an odd kind of way. There was a whole sense of intimacy in my life with using public transport and standing or sitting so close to people, as well as asking people for directions so they then knew where you were going. These are things I never did back home: random conversations, and even accidental brushing up against strangers every day.
I watched a young couple in business suits smiling and holding hands, pushing hair out of the other’s eyes and removing lint from the other’s shoulder. Who would’ve thought that romance was to be had on the train?
As the elbow of the man next to me kissed mine, I could see how small accidental moments of touching, even on trains, could be romantic and even sexually arousing. I could feel how Paris was already impacting on my own thoughts about intimacy and the opposite sex.
I slowly became infected with the romance of the city and thought that perhaps the Libby Cutmore that never existed in Canberra might emerge in Paris. I was even beginning to feel a little desirable as strangers smiled at me. I knew the difference between sexy and sleazy: the little winks and nods of the head were sexy, the Red Béret was sleazy.
I found myself smiling at my musings and saw my reflection in the window as we went through another tunnel. I looked good. I looked fresh and happy and even somewhat attractive. I certainly never considered myself ‘pretty’ at home. Did anyone think of themselves that way? I thought I was fit and firm, even with my big bust and wide hips, but never did I think I was pretty, or even very girly for that matter. I never did the frills and flimsy frocks; conservative, clean, simple lines – that was me.
And here I was in Paris, on the train to work, looking more feminine than ever before. I turned to catch a smile from a man in a grey suit and knew it was a reflection of my own. ‘We get back what we give out,’ Mum had always told me.
My thought pattern was broken by a man who boarded the train and started busking. He was singing, ‘Those were the days, my friend …’ and I loved it. I was tapping my foot and wanted to sing along and I really had to restrain myself. Other commuters just continued to read their papers or their novels or sat with their iPods plugged in. It was the coolest possible way to go to work, being serenaded by a French busker at 8 am. It was so European and so un-Canberran.
There was a homeless man asleep on the footpath across the road when I arrived at work. I asked a bloke in a café if we should call someone.
He frowned as if I was being ridiculous. ‘No! He is always there. He drinks more coffee than I do.’
I bought a coffee and took it over to the homeless man, leaving it next to his swag. I wondered what his story was, and I felt a pang of sadness and sorrow, and even some guilt for the extraordinary life that I had. It reminded me of the homeless people I sometimes saw in Canberra and I wondered how in such wealthy countries like my own, people still went without basic living standards.
I was still disturbed by the incident when I got to the office.
‘I saw a homeless man across the road this morning,’ I said to Canelle at the coffee machine.
Canelle shook her head and tut-tutted in disgust and disappointment. ‘Yes, he is there often, most of the staff know him. It’s not the same in Australia?’
‘Of course, but it’s less obvious in Canberra. And the worst thing is Canberra is meant to be the most affordable city in the country because wages are so high, and yet there’s still homelessness.’ I reminded myself I needed to get back into working for the night patrol when I returned. Sometimes I forgot what was going on outside the NAG and Braddon.
‘He is a gypsy,’ Canelle said, walking away from the machine, ‘one that the government wants to get rid of. You have heard of this?’
I nodded. I had read about the thousands of gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria that France hoped to deport under the Roma crackdown.
‘The government will give people a one-off payment of three hundred euros and a so-called “voluntary” return flight home.’ Canelle sounded sympathetic. ‘They have already gotten rid of about one thousand Roma and dozens of “non-authorised” Roma camps have been broken up since the beginning of August.’
I knew the ruling party was very conservative but it was still hard to fathom how and why the French government would execute such a policy. And indeed, how it could not be more greatly condemned by other European nations and countries internationally. But then again, there was our own unchecke
d treatment of refugees back home.
‘It sounds a little like Australians with asylum seekers. We have a huge landscape, we’re a first world nation, we have resources and space, but not the spirit, it seems.’
‘Elizabeth, I cannot tell you how embarrassed I am that men and women are being hunted down in this country just because they are of a certain ethnicity and not because they have committed crimes. That man you saw this morning – his name is Petru – he used to live in a camp but I think he feels it’s safer to be alone than in a group, and so survival for him means being without friends also. Some of us, we invite him out for lunch and bring him food, at least he has that.’
Adrien walked past at that moment. ‘You’re talking about Petru?’ he asked Canelle who nodded yes.
‘He probably eats better than I do, and drinks more coffee. He just takes from other people who work hard. Send them all back I say.’
‘My boss Emma has always said that some of the best artwork comes from the oppressed and the politically voiceless,’ I said angrily, staring directly at Adrien, who just sneered in response.
I couldn’t let him get away with that. ‘The arts are our political platform in Australia. Our plays, novels, poetry, paintings give voice to the truth of our history, give voice to the oppressed. What would the artistic voices say about the Roma crackdown?’
Adrien shrugged his shoulders and walked off. Canelle had some words of support.
‘It is the same here, Elizabeth, soon I will take you to les banlieues – the poor housing estates on the outskirts of the city – where you will see the work of the oppressed. But first, we must take you shopping for a new parisienne look.’
‘I’m under the Arc de Triomphe,’ I squealed down the phone with excitement on Saturday morning. ‘And I’m wearing Chanel No. 5. I feel at home, really. I want to live here.’
‘Homesick, I see,’ Lauren laughed down the line.