Enduring friendships forged through trade

Over 200 years ago, the Macassans from the Kingdom of Gowa (in modern-day Sulawesi in Indonesia) sailed south to the northern reaches of Australia every year to collect trepang, their word for sea cucumber. The Macassans traded the trepang they harvested with the Chinese who considered it a delicacy and used it as an aphrodisiac.

“The historical resonance of these events lives on among some Aboriginal groups of the Northern Territory,” says Professor Marcia Langton, widely published anthropologist and geographer who holds the inaugural Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.

The remarkable story of the exchange between the Chinese, Macassan and Aboriginal cultures has now been told in an exhibition currently showing at the Capital Museum in Beijing titled Trepang: The Chinese & Macassan trade with Aboriginal Australia.

“The exhibition is a team effort,” says Associate Professor Robyn Sloggett. Director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. “Professor Marcia Langton has been working on this project for over a decade, and in 2008 put together a group of people who could help develop this work as an exhibition.”

With generous financial and logistical support from Rio Tinto and the management and expertise of the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, this group funded the design team which transformed Professor Langton’s research and concepts into an exhibition proposal that was taken up by China’s Capital Museum in Beijing.

Curator Sarah Morris, appointed with support from Rio Tinto, explored collecting institutions and approached collectors in Australia, China and the United States and proposed a selection of museum-quality works to accompany the art and bring the history to life.

The result is an awesome collection borrowed from Australia’s finest collecting institutions and includes a number of early Aboriginal bark paintings, Macassan and Chinese artefacts from the trepang trade encounters, and images from historical records.

An impressive range of artists is represented, including ancestral and unnamed painters like those who created the Groote Eylandt rock art, and contemporary artists like Lapulung Dhamarrandji whose startling sculpture of a Macassan ancestor, Warramu Mala-Birrkili, is shown alongside the works on paper by the great Mawalan Marika I.

At the heart of the exhibition is the artistic and personal relationship of classically-trained Chinese artist Zhou Xiaoping and Arnhem Land artist and songman Mr Bulunbulun whose individual and joint works provide a startling and evocative example of enduring cross-cultural collaboration and friendship.

“After years of collaboration, dating back to 1988, these two artists, each inheritors of ancient traditions, bring together their understanding of historical events that entangled their ancestors across cultures and the seas and archipelagos between China and the northern coast of Australia more than two centuries ago,” says Professor Langton.

The death last year of Mr Bulunbulun lends even greater poignancy to the exhibition which so graphically illustrates the richness of the cultural traditions that remain with the Yolngu people from the time when trade occurred on an annual basis.

“It was a very moving experience to attend the opening in Beijing and participate with Mr Bulunbulun’s widow Laurie Williams Ma-Arbudug and son Paul Pascoe Milibirr performing manikay (songs) in his honour and to honour the centuries-old links between China and Australia,” says Professor Langton.

Dr Joe Neparrnga Gumbula, Fellow at Sydney University and Professor Aaaron Corn of the Australian National University attended and, along with Professor Langton, performed with Ms Ma-Arbudug and Mr Milibirr during the ceremony to show their respect. “This was a great honour for me,” says Professor Langton. “It was a profound reminder of the power of culture and especially of the narrative that Bulunbulun shared with Zhou. It was a sad and moving experience, but Bulunbulun’s life and work was fittingly honoured.”

After Beijing, the exhibition heads to the Melbourne Museum before travelling north to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin.