The Truth in Painting: Cultural Artefacts as Proof of Native Title

Abstract

This article unpacks the significance of tendering a painted canvas as proof in a native title claim in Australia. The painting is a collaboration of around 50 artists, all members of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala and Juwaliny peoples. The painting works in three ways: as proof of laws about country required under the criteria for native title (law), as establishing the credibility of the claimants (truth) and as a map. I disassemble the painting’s function along these three axes, and argue that in each case it targets a particular orthodoxy in the common law and pushies towards a realisation of the transformative and plural character of evidentiary practices in native title. Part 2 takes up the claim that the Ngurrara Canvas is evidence of Indigenous law. Although subordinated to the category of ‘fact’, the painting must be taken on its own terms in order for it to be meaningful as proof, including a very different person-place relation as the basis for entitlement and the point that, for the claimants, the painting embodies the law. In Part 3, I argue that the painting makes a claim to credibility that confronts conventional legal understandings of truth because it operates aesthetically, rhetorically and therefore a-rationally. Lastly, to read the painting as a map entails a challenge to the European valuation of land, the way it is thought and depicted. Where maps have historically colluded with property law in order to communicate a particular mode of entitlement, the canvas insists on disrupting the universality of this vision. In all three instances, there is a strong normative aspect to the canvas which is missed in a conventional reading of it as something purely factual, purely aesthetic or purely cartographic. I will show that it is this much larger challenge which must be met if Australia is, as was claimed for the recognition of native title in Mabo (1992), to reject terra nullius.