Warraba Weatherall on Aboriginal Leadership,
Self-determination and the Protection of Knowledge Systems

This story is part of a series profiling artists and mentors involved in the Country Road + NGV First Nations Commissions: My Country. In their own words, artists and mentors share their personal stories, shine a light on their work and community and share the messages they have for the next generation of First Nations creatives.

Here, Warraba Weatherall talks about the importance of protecting knowledge systems and respecting Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual property rights.

I connected with Uncle Laurie Nilson and Uncle Marshall Bell and ended up doing the Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art Degree at Griffith University. I went on to do Honours and now I am the Acting Director of the degree program. So yeah, I guess you could say that things have come full circle. The degree was started by Jennifer Herd in 1994 with support from the Brisbane arts community, including proppaNOW collective and the Campfire group.

I am also lecturing in the degree program, as well as doing my PhD. I do a lot of research and teaching and try to continue to make work as well. I love teaching a lot. It’s such a close-knit little family in the degree program. We get deep into the research and the conceptuality of the artworks. We spend a lot of time talking about cultural perspectives and lived experiences and expanding on the knowledge that exists, as well as bridging gaps where things may have been fractured.

I would describe my practice as conceptual research practice—in that my practice is heavily influenced by my research. That can often result in making artwork in response to an historical event and considering what the future of something is, and it also involves interrogating cultural knowledge and trying to get an accurate read on things. So many of our knowledge systems have been corrupted by other knowledge systems, but I am hopeful that we can come to better understand them.

I’m interested in not only repatriating tangible materials, but also intangible knowledges.

I thought this commission process was a really good one. As an artist, sometimes you can feel a loss of agency, but this process was free and open. My mentor Tony Albert is also a peer, so it was good to have his involvement. His experience and knowledge, especially in working in a large institutional setting, helped me to refine my ideas and bring them to life.

I hope people can see my work and start to understand that a lot of documentation within museums and repositories are not benign and that they hold power. Aboriginal knowledge systems have been bastardised, especially through academia, and people can still access that knowledge and use it how they see fit. There are not enough people who respect and uphold Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property rights and I want to promote the importance of that.

There must be agency and self-determination of Aboriginal peoples to govern our own materials, and at least be consulted if someone wants to look at some of those knowledges. Still, there’s a real lack of process that includes Aboriginal peoples.

None of these conversations are new. I’m just putting it into artwork to understand it better myself. Hopefully, there is a different way to resolve it for the future. Our communities have been advocating for this for generations.