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March 21, 2006
It is first encounters between the two peoples--non-indigenous and indigenous--- that the moral, cultural and political foundations of Australian nationhood are defined and contested.
The most interesting visual exhibition in the Adelaide Festival was about one such encounter Colliding Worlds: First Contact in the Western Desert 1932-1984 at Tandanya which mapped the contact between white people and Aboriginal people in the Western Desert, Australia in the early to mid 20th century.
The Aboriginal people of the Western Desert in Central Australia were among the last Indigenous communities to make contact with Europeans. The exhibition, explores both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perception of first contact, incorporates the ethnological photographs of Donald Thompson, previously unseen artefacts and significant artworks of the Western Desert, and is self reflexively critical about imperial anthropology.
It was out of this first encounter that the Western Desert (arcylic) Art movement based in Papunya in the 1970s arose:
William Sandy, Bush Bean Dreaming, 2003
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