Audio on demand

Childhood friend Dick Richards provides an insight into Bob Edwards’ early years, from growing up on family farms on the Adelaide Plains, to market gardening, the Royal Geographic Society and his anthropological studies.

A welcome by Andrew Sayers followed by Neil MacGregor’s reflections on Bob Edwards as museum curator, anthropologist and archaeologist, founding director of the Aboriginal Arts Board and exhibitions wheeler and dealer.

Highlights from Bob Edwards’ fieldwork, collecting Aboriginal stone tools and documenting rock art and engravings, and his time at the South Australian Museum in the 1960s–70s.

Songman Archie Roach, former AFL star and Indigenous activist Michael Long, and Bill Johnson, whose Indigenous son Louis died tragically, with curator Stephen Munro, answer questions from the audience following the screening of the film Liyarn Ngarn.

After introductions by Andrew Sayers and Dr Margo Neale and a welcome to country by Matilda House, Mawalan 2 Marika speaks on behalf of the Marika family, followed by Franchesca Cubillo, senior Indigenous art curator at the National Gallery of Australia.

Anthropologists Howard Morphy and John Carty, and senior curator Mike Pickering, discuss Indigenous art from the Western Desert and Arnhem Land, and how art from both regions reflects concepts of Country, family and memory.

Margo talks about the new exhibition of Aboriginal artworks sent from Catholic missions in the north and west of Australia to the Vatican that recently opened at the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum and coincided with the canonisation of St Mary MacKillop.

The Canning Stock Route, combined with the concept of Walyja (family), acts as a prism through which it is possible to trace both the human and the subsequent artistic movements that characterised the far Western Desert region in the 20th century.

Listen to part of Elena Kats-Chernin’s 2009 composition Garden of Dreams, inspired by the Kimberley points display, performed in the First Australians gallery.

Jeanie Bell, a Jagera and Dulingbara woman, talks about the importance of language to Indigenous identities, the impact of the forcible loss of language and culture, and the attempts to revive Indigenous languages.