Vesna Tenodi emails:
Dear Luke,
I came across your post about Australian Aborigines, found the article interesting, and the links informative.
I am an archaeologist and artist, based in Sydney, used to have a gallery in the Blue Mountains, now shut down due to Aboriginal violence and vandalism and the corruption in the Aboriginal industry.
Our ordeal started in 2009, and with the local council deciding to censor our art because some aborigines (especially those white people who nowadays pretend to be aborigines) were “offended”.
We kept fighting for our rights to create and display our art in front of our own private gallery, took the local council to land court (since local councils have no jurisdiction over art and it was unlawful decision). We lost and were forced to remove our “offensive sculpture”. Our case coincided with Andrew Bolt case (who “offended” white aborigines by pointing out that they are white) we both lost at the end of 2010 – but those two cases – our Wanjina Watchers in the Whispering Stone sculpture and Andrew’s court case, marked a beginning of change in people’s attitudes. Australians are no longer so willing to just accept all the nonsense we are forced to tolerate.
We’ve been proactively reclaiming our basic rights to academic and artistic freedom ever since; we have good support and achieved some success in raising awareness of these taboo issues. We keep urging Australian authorities to investigate corruption in the Aboriginal industry, and publish relevant material. I also publish articles regarding Australian prehistory in the American webzine Pleistocene Coalition News.
