Background On Storylines

Storylines is the first sustained attempt to explore Indigenous art making outside of ‘remote’ Aboriginal Australia. The research was conducted by DAAO’s Editor-in-Chief Professor Vivien Johnson, Indigenous Research Officer Tess Allas, and research assistant Laura Fisher. It was supported by a three year (2007-9) Australian Research Council Discovery grant supplemented by the College of Fine Arts UNSW. Data collection proceeded on a state-by-state basis over a three year period, starting with NSW, the ACT and parts of Queensland, followed by Victoria and Tasmania, followed by those parts of Western Australia and South Australia which lie south of the so-called ‘Rowley line’ dividing ‘remote’ Indigenous Australians from those who live on this side of the ‘frontier’.  Storylines’ findings have implications for Indigenous arts funding policies, but the project’s concerns are primarily cultural and conceptual: the re-positioning of Indigenous artists from ‘settled’ Australia as part of both Indigenous art and Australian contemporary art.

Storylines is a blueprint for what the DAAO platform can achieve in terms of documenting a specific thread of Australian artistic practice. This Report is intended in part to provide future researchers with a guide to how similar projects, documenting other aspects of Australian art practice can be carried out. Tess Allas and Laura Fisher of the Storylines team prepared A Guide to Researching with the DAAO on the methods they used to gather the data, which they hope will be useful to others. We also encourage you to follow the links in this Report to some of the 641 individual biographies published on the DAAO during the lifetime of the project on which these survey results are based, and to trace through them a rich narrative of Indigenous lives.