As early articles in their section make clear, some visual artists found it difficult to accept grants that year, particularly when they realised that they might have to acknowledge the ABA as ‘participant and censor’. One wonders why this is not such an issue with musicians, theatricians and dancers, whose reviewers seem often to lack or overlook such notions. They are exceptions, who saw Brook’s production itself as ‘only another form of neo-colonial “appropriation”’. The performing arts tried to address the race issue, but at times appeared to reiterate uncritically a traditional ‘obsession with Aborigines (as object)’. In contrast, a speechless iconic response to Robert Dowling’s colonial painting Early Efforts could create its own ironic distance, representing and historicising the imperial act of representation.

Moreover, if Aborigines were not in the audience, as someone observed, they could not be offended. The elitist structures that facilitate some of our less subtle attempts at conciliation and expiation may very well be the same ones that serve sometimes to marginalise truly criti­cal thought – into the more visual, less performance-orientated and less pecuniary-investment intensive fields. By no means do I include Robin Archer’s Akwanso, Fly South, whose British-Jamaican actress Jigsie Campbell stated a fine desire, not for ‘sameness, but equality. Equal but different.’

Age and Herald reviewers some­what bagged Jack Davis’s autobio­graphical play Barungin, the third of his trilogy, for a perceived stylistic naivety: ‘the novelty of simple abo­riginality is in danger of wearing thin.’ This was in the face of its themes of dispossession and black deaths in custody. The Riverside audience lauded the earlier No Sugar for its documentary power, the com­parison being made with Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. London critics saw through an artless ‘anthropological’ form, into matters of utmost gravity:

The treatment by Australia of her Aboriginal population must rank as one of the most successful and sustained acts of disinheritance the world has seen in the last two hundred years.

Note with what finesse one may emerge with the fragrance of roses, just given a little time. At any rate, the quality of Davis’s later work had not deteriorated to any extent whatsoever. He did not write it hurriedly to meet an ABA deadline, which was an accusation Michael Gow faced with his 1841. More probably, the English reviewers enjoyed a critical distance (or insula­tion) from Davis’s subject. Maybe Gow should not have been moved to rewrite by a vitriolic Adelaide reac­tion from audiences who would rather not have subjected themselves to ‘another boring anti-Australian exercise in guilt: a guilt which they say they do not share’. Is Gow’s mis­understood 1841 our own Waiting for Godot? Time may tell.

Can you tell a book by its cover? With the ABA’s volume of reviews, I believe so, to some extent. The signification I have emphasised slices through the collection, perhaps a manifestation of that ‘black-white psychic gulf which is a feature of contemporary Australia’. For all it is worth, Peter Couchman’s idée fixe may be recalled, which he displayed in his memorable program on the activities of the Aboriginal Protection (aka Welfare) Board: ‘they meant well’. Support for Aboriginal rights is widespread in the arts community, and although real actions might be said to be required instead of words and pictures, artists and writers are well aware of the power of representation.