Publication │ Protecting Indigenous Art

Protecting Indigenous Art: From t-shirts to the flag by Colin Golvan

Discover how copyright law is empowering Indigenous creatives

There is the country non-Indigenous people can see, and then there is the country Indigenous people see that the rest of us can barely comprehend, but glimpse through the vivid colours, shapes and imagery of their artworks, and their visual recounting of ancient stories and settings. 

The unauthorised use of Indigenous artworks is a global industry that damages cultural integrity and harms the livelihoods of artists and their communities. While the western idea of private or individual ownership can be at significant odds with tenets of Indigenous ownership and control, copyright remains one of the primary tools available to protect Indigenous visual artists from fakes, cultural threat and appropriation. In Protecting Indigenous Art, leading intellectual property barrister Colin Golvan provides a privileged insight into how legal protection of Indigenous art offers unique opportunities to empower Indigenous artists and their communities. Golvan gives a first-hand account of landmark legal campaigns such as the unauthorised reproduction of prominent Bulun Bulun artworks on T-shirts, the seminal carpets case, the campaign to recover the copyright of Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira and the extraordinary story of the Aboriginal flag. Altogether, we get an understanding of the importance of protection for this much-loved form of artistic and cultural expression.

• Copyright in Indigenous art, from the person at the frontline defending it.
• Art provides meaningful opportunities for establishing Indigenous economic independence, and the Indigenous art movement has been one of the truly successful developments in black–white relations of recent years.
• From a copyright perspective, the challenge has been to have claims properly understood and recognised—a challenge embraced by courts and, most recently, by the Commonwealth government, in the case of the Aboriginal flag assignment. Cases:
  • The T-shirts case
  • Yumbulul and the ten dollar note case
  • The carpets case
  • Copyright and communal ownership
  • Fakery
  • Cultural heritage protection
  • Namatjira
  • The Aboriginal Flag