CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA.- The National Gallery of Australia presents today “Tactility: Two centuries of Indigenous objects, Textiles and Fibre,” on view through September 14, 2003. Tactility: Two centuries of Indigenous objects, textiles and fibre will provide a visual overview of the diversity of Indigenous three-dimensional and material objects over almost two centuries, covering the range of traditional objects through to transitional works and recent conceptual and politically-charged artworks. Media includes sculpture, decorative arts, ceramics, textiles, weaving, ceremonial objects and conceptual works of art, drawn from all regions throughout mainland Australia, Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islands.

In the earliest collecting forays for Indigenous material culture in Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, the collectors — usually anthropologists or missionaries — often neglected to record the identity of the creators, as the objects were considered more important than their makers. Consequently, a large number of early works in Tactility are noted as having been produced by ‘artist unknown’.

The majority of nineteenth-century Indigenous material culture collected in the earliest days of colonial contact — commonly without the permission of the traditional owners — resides within the collections of ethnographic institutions and historical, as opposed to art, museums. Most major public collections in Australia comprise some historical Indigenous cultural material, but the greater part is held overseas, ‘captive’ far from home.

Two regions were severely affected by deleterious early collecting practices. The bulk of objects collected from the Eora/Yura clans of the Sydney region during the late 1700s were destroyed during a devastating fire in 1882 at the Garden Palace built for the Great Exhibition in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Sydney Cove. In the case of pre-contact material culture from the Torres Strait Islands, very few of the objects assembled during the early collecting incursions remain in any institution in Australia, the vast bulk being in Britain. The most comprehensive, representative and well-documented collection of 2000 artefacts was collected by Arthur Cort (A.C.) Haddon during the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, and is housed at the Cambridge University Museumof Archaeology and Anthropology.