A Way Forward Through Indigenous Art

Explore how the success of Indigenous art may indicate a way forward in improving black-white relations.

Discover how copyright law is empowering Indigenous creatives.

These are the two themes of this insightful, stimulating and highly interesting discussion by Melbourne Forum member and leading intellectual property barrister Colin Golvan AM KC.

Colin Golvan is a King’s Counsel at the Victorian Bar. He practices law throughout Australia in the intellectual property and trade practices areas, and has extensive involvement in the arts as an author, legal adviser and counsel, as a board member and supporter of arts organisations.

In his new book Protecting Indigenous Art, From T-shirts to the Flag (Melbourne University Press, September 2024) he provides a privileged insight into how legal protection of Indigenous art offers unique opportunities to empower Indigenous artists and their communities.

The unauthorised use of Indigenous artworks is a global industry that damages cultural integrity and harms the livelihoods of artists and their communities. While the western idea of private or individual ownership can be at significant odds with tenets of Indigenous ownership and control, copyright remains one of the primary tools available to protect Indigenous visual artists from fakes, cultural threat and appropriation.

Colin gives a first-hand account of landmark legal campaigns such as the unauthorised reproduction of prominent Bulun Bulun artworks on T-shirts, the seminal carpets case, the campaign to recover the copyright of Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira and the extraordinary story of the Aboriginal flag. Altogether, we get an understanding of the importance of protection for this much-loved form of artistic and cultural expression.

There is the country non-Indigenous people can see, and then there is the country Indigenous people see that the rest of us can barely comprehend, but glimpse through the vivid colours, shapes and imagery of their artworks, and their visual recounting of ancient stories and settings.