Article | Indigenous Art in Higher Education | Catherine KEVIN and Fiona SALMON | 2020

In recent decades, and particularly since the Universities Australia Indigenous Strategy 2017-2020, Australian academia has sought to include Indigenous culture and history into university curricula and increase the enrolment of Indigenous students. This text presents the teaching and reception of a history course centred around Indigenous art at Flinders University, in Adelaide.

The course “Maps and Dreams: Indigenous–settler relation in Australian history” has been offered to undergraduate students since the mid-2000s and is mostly chosen by history students in arts and education programs. When Catherine Kevin started teaching this course in 2016, she worked in close cooperation with the university’s Art Museum (FUAM) to put Aboriginal art at its core. The detailed study of 14 artworks from Indigenous artists, dated 1986 to 2006, served to address a variety of themes, from colonial violence to the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families, from police violence and the imprisonment of Aboriginal people to the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the land and the British claims to this very land, among others. Through readings, individual and group works, and careful observations of the art, the forty-nine participants – a majority of which were non-Indigenous – approached history through Indigenous perspectives. During the course, students were asked to write non-graded blog entries to document their personal reactions to the artworks. Analysing these anonymised comments provides an assessment of the course’s impact. 

Working with physical artworks made students realise that written history inevitably marginalised Indigenous voices. On the contrary, engaging with Indigenous art provoked emotional responses to so-far untold histories, and opened up discussions on the representation of Indigeneity in Australian society. If some students initially struggled to make sense of the art, they eventually came to question the power of the written source, as well as their own perspectives. Positive takeaways from this course for teachers and students alike were that: art can convey both an individual and a collective history; the use of art in historical studies allows for moving beyond official archives and their colonial narratives; object-based learning contributes to empowering Indigenous peoples, giving their perspectives a place in the Australian historical narrative. This text encourages anyone interested in history to immerse themselves in Indigenous artworks and unlock new perspectives on historical narratives.