Finding art in Australia

Ms Belinda Scott credits an inspiring Monash University lecturer with arousing a passion for both anthropology and Indigenous art - and starting her on a most unexpected career path. ALLISON HARDING reports.

When 17-year-old Belinda Scott arrived at Monash University in 1980, straight from secondary school, she had no clear career goal in mind. "To be honest, I had absolutely no idea which field I wanted to specialise in - I'd been accepted into a Bachelor of Arts so I just thought I'd see where it would take me," she says.

Ms Belinda Scott

As it happened, a lecturer, the late Dawn Ryan, tapped into a hidden passion for anthropology - a passion that has taken Ms Scott (BA 1984) to parts of the country that few Australians have seen.

In the early 1980s, when Australian Indigenous studies were not on the curriculum at Monash, Ms Scott was granted special permission to research and write on the subject. Now, 20 years later, she manages the Bula'bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation in the Northern Territory and has contributed to the Lonely Planet travel guide on Aboriginal Australia.

But her most challenging project to date has been compiling the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Artists Database (NATSIVAD), which promotes and markets Indigenous art and artists.

"It really all began after I landed a position with the Northern Land Council as a research anthropologist in 1985, looking after the register of traditional Aboriginal owners under the Land Rights Act," Ms Scott says. "I was based in Darwin, but was desperate to 'go bush' and meet people and learn for myself about Indigenous culture, so I started attending regional meetings and going bush more often.

"We discussed land use proposals such as mining and road building with traditional owners, as well as their rights and the cultural and economic implications of the proposals."

Ms Scott's involvement with local communities raised her awareness of Indigenous Australians' culture and, particularly, copyright issues surrounding their artwork. Her burgeoning interest soon took her to Bula'bula Arts, a non-profit Aboriginal artists' cooperative that markets the work of painters, weavers and sculptors in the remote community of Ramingining, about 500 kilometres east of Darwin.

Ms Scott's expertise, plus her Graduate Diploma in Pacific and Aboriginal Studies, led to her being invited to update and redesign the Australia-wide NATSIVAD database project in the mid-1990s. The project took two years.

"There had been growth and resurgence in interest in Aboriginal art, but there was a dearth of information on the artists and their works, so through various grants, the current database was compiled," she says.

With more than 5500 entries, the database promotes and markets Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art to a range of groups.

"Now, galleries, institutions, researchers, and writers can subscribe to the database over the internet and access all the information they need," she says.

Action: For more information on the Bula'bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation, email bulabulaarts@bigpond.com, and for information about NATSIVAD, email martin@discoverymedia.com.au.