Is Archie Moore 'taking the piss out of' us with his art? — Dark Emu Exposed

May 2

May 2 Is Archie Moore 'taking the piss out of' us with his art?

“Today . . . modern Australian Indigenous activist art is beginning to lose its powers of negation. For some years now its rejections have been ritual repetitions: rebellion has turned into procedure, criticism into rhetoric, transgression into ceremony. Negation is no longer creative. I am not saying that we are living the end of art: we are living the end of the idea of modern Australian Indigenous activist art.”

— a paraphrase of Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, Source

Once again, many of us roll our eyes at the latest report of a ‘triumph’ of a so-called Indigenous Australian artist.

This time it’s Brisbane man, Archie Moore or, as the ABC describes him in their offical language of the ‘Blak Nomenklatura’, “First Nations artist Archie Moore”, a “54-year-old Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist”, who has won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Sure, its always nice to hear of an Australian doing well in his or her field of endeavour, and the ABC even threw a bone to the national pride of the average Aussie punter and taxpayer, who helped fund Moore and his crew in Venice, with a description of “our” win as,

“Australia has won gold at the Venice Biennale, the world's oldest international art biennial, and "the Olympics of the art world".

One can almost imagine the ‘intellectuals’ down at Creative Australia, who commissioned Moore’s work for the Venice Biennale, jotting down on Moore’s application assessment, “Does, the proposal satisfy the needs of Bogan Australia in some way?, viz; “Is the competition as famous as say, the Olympics?”- check; “Does Australia have a chance at ‘gold’?” - check; “Like our Aboriginal culture, is the competition really old? Perhaps the world’s oldest?” - check; “Ok, this is saleable to the public, send him a cheque.”

Now, in the scheme of things, the probable several hundreds of thousands of dollars that was spent on staging Moore’s artwork is not that much (those wayward Aboriginal kids in Alice Springs will just have to wait), so we here at Dark Emu Exposed don’t really have a problem with the funding of the ‘arts’ as such.

But after studying Archie Moore’s art installation entitled, kith and kin, we can’t help thinking that Archie is ‘taking the piss out of’ us here, back in Australia:

take the piss, (sometimes followed by out of ) to poke fun. [Middle English pissen, from Old French pissier, of imitative origin]

- Macquarie Dictionary

For it seems that Archie is quite an intelligent and diligent fellow who has worked out where the art ‘market’ is these days. Pan-indigeneity, racism, anti-colonialism, white guilt and the victimhood of native peoples are in the air. Make any ‘art’, or write any book, that is recognisable as being “Indigenous”, no matter how contrived - it can even be ‘fake’, or made by ‘fakes’ - and the commissions, cash and accolades will follow.

**Figure 1 -** “**First Nations** artist Archie Moore” a “54-year-old **Kamilaroi** and **Bigambul”** man has won the prestigious **Golden Lion award** at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

And so Archie Moore has produced a piece of ‘art’ to form, and won ‘gold’ at this years Venice Biennale.

But for many of us back in Australia, Moore’s work is just another sad, raced-based, political dig at Australians and their society. It is a piece that relies heavily, for the only substance it can muster, on where it is curated - in the beautiful space that is the Australian Pavilion located in a city representing one of the pinnacles of mankind’s architectural excellence, Venice.

Unfortunately, the what and why of Moore’s kith and kin places it as just another piece of sanctimonious crap that one has come to expect from Australia’s activist arts fraternity.

Australian international art critic Robert Hughes warned us in 1980 about the modern artists coming from the ‘University of Central Paranoia’ and it seems that in Moore, we might well have another such graduate [as explained below].

However, the curators and judges beg to differ, and have lauded Moore’s installation as an,

"… extraordinary history painting" in which the artist "asserts Indigenous sovereignty and celebrates the ongoing vitality of First Nations knowledge systems and kinship"; and is a,"quietly powerful" work, saying it, "stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of shared loss", while also offering, "a glimmer of possibility for recuperation".

We at Dark Emu Exposed think differently.

We won’t call Moore’s work ‘childish’ - despite it consisting of a huge, chalk-drawn diagram on painted blackboard-walls set around stacks of paper-reports in the central space/playground over a pool of water - because that would be disrespectful to the artistic beauty inherent in children, as the Australian art critic Robert Hughes reminded us some forty-years ago:

“I don’t think that there has ever been such a rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future as we've seen in the last 15 years. The famous radicalism of 60s and 70s art, turns out to have been a kind of dumb show, a chirade of toughness, a way of avoiding feeling.

And I don't think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks on the floor or a video tape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself and think - “this is the real thing. This is the necessary art of our time. This needs respect.” Because it isn't, and it doesn't, and nobody cares.

The fact is that anyone except a child can make such things, because children have the kind of direct, sensuous and complex relationship with the world around them that modernism in its declining years was trying to deny. That relationship is the Lost Paradise that art wants to give back to us, not as children, but as adults.

It's also what the modern and the old have in common. Pollock with Turner, Matisse with Rubens, or Braque with Poussin. And the basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible. To restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument, but through feeling.

And then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. This task is literally endless and so although we don't have an avangarde anymore we're always going to have art.

- Robert Hughes, view below

Hughes, an internationalist, art reporter and critic, was based at the centre of the art world in his time, New York, and spoke those words in 1980. Fast forward to an Australia of 2024, where the ABC Arts reporter, Daniel Browning, can write of Archie Moore’s kith and kin installation in Venice:

“Over the past two months, Moore has transformed the archetypal white cube of the Australia pavilion into a giant, sprawling family tree, using his blackboard paint and chalk. The family tree, which is the centrepiece of the work, has been inscribed by hand and details the names of Moore's real and speculative ancestors in an expansive genealogical chart spanning the estimated 65,000 years that Aboriginal people have lived on the Australian continent …

The title of the installation, kith and kin, draws on Old English terms for family and countrymen and extends the Aboriginal notion of kinship systems to include the "kith" of all humankind.

The artwork was commissioned by Creative Australia and its most senior Indigenous representative congratulated Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose on receiving what she describes as a "historic accolade". The executive director of First Nations Arts and Culture, Franchesca Cubillo, hailed kith and kin as an "extraordinary history painting" in which the artist "asserts Indigenous sovereignty and celebrates the ongoing vitality of First Nations knowledge systems and kinship".

… include[d are] hundreds of de-identified coronial reports into the deaths of more than 560 First Nations people in custody since the watershed Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was handed down in 1991. If the work itself could speak, it might echo one of the key recommendations of the royal commission: that arrest be used as the last resort in dealing with Indigenous offenders.”

Browning’s review is almost entirely focused on Moore’s, and the curator’s, political message - the validity of Aboriginal land-claims, supposedly based on the fictional number of 65,000 years of occupancy, by a recently dreamed-up polity of so-called “First Nations people” [Note 1], with their self-proclaimed “Indigenous sovereignty” over our continent, which would thus push to one side the current rights of the Commonwealth and its existing sovereign peoples, the Australians.

The usual Aboriginal activist tropes are referred to - the victimisation trope of “deaths in custody,” as well as the command that Australians get down on their knees and, “celebrate the ongoing vitality of First Nations knowledge systems and kinship", which undoubtably will manifest itself in future changes to our school curricula, our museums and scientific institutions and the ever ongoing debates and conflicts over the frequency of, or indeed even the need for, Welcomes to Country, where we are meant to pay homage to some unknown, self-appointed, Aboriginal Elder aristocrats.

Noticeably, nowhere did Browning rise to the occasion and professionally critique Moore’s installation from an artistic point of view - the how and the why as to whether kith and kin is good art and worthy our consideration.

Another review, this time in The Australian by art critic Julian Tompkin, was even worse in its sanctimonious critique of Australia.

Tompkin made sure to include all the usual, politically weaponised words of ‘Australia-hate’ [which we have highlighted in bold below], as well as a sufficient number of ‘high-brow’ words, intended to showcase Tompkin’s intellectual and educational credentials, but whose real aim is to confuse the average Australian reader into thinking that perhaps, “there really may be something to Moore’s work that a humble viewer such as myself can’t see - I don’t really understand what Tompkin is saying, so I had better just keep quiet and not embarrass myself by openly criticizing these chalked-up blackboard walls and stacks of papers.”

Tompkin writes,

“Moore was born in 1970, the son of empire and both Kamilaroi and Bigambul lineage.

His was a life sculpted at the margins, impoverished and alienated between seemingly irreconcilable and binary worlds on the fringes of small-town Tara in Queensland, in the Western Downs.

Like much of Moore’s work, kith and kin mines the tenebrous [dark; gloomy; obscure] threshold between presence and absence [WTF?], and the errancy of memory [only uni students educated in 'Critical Theory’ have a hope in decyphering this term - see Note 2].

While his patrilineal line – woven of British and Scottish pedigree – presents a largely cohesive narrative, the matrilineal trajectory is pockmarked with obloquy [discredit or disgrace resulting from public blame or revilement; censure, blame, or abusive language aimed at a person, etc., especially by numbers of persons or by the public generally - that is, his ‘white’ father’s side of the family had an easy time, but his ‘black’ mother’s side always had it tough], blanks and dead ends: a silent memorial to colonisation, racism, massacre and the wanton erasure of culture, records and language.

He turned to trawling DNA sites, electoral rolls, libraries, cadastral maps and social media in an attempt to fill in the empty crevices of his contemporary family story, unearthing details of a fabled great grandmother, known as Queen Susan of Welltown – whose recorded interviews with anthropologist Norman Tindale remain [Note 3].

Behind the seeming banality of each moniker chalked in Conté crayon would emerge a deeply consequential motif: a nameless child, an uncle under surveillance and grandparents seeking to gain permission from the Chief Protector of Aboriginals to marry [Note 4]. While Moore’s inquiries often proved futile – requiring some speculative imagination to chalk in the yawning blanks – other revelations would prove as inconceivable as merciless: namely the discovery that the acreage awarded to his father’s convict European ancestors in a ballot was in fact stolen from his mother’s family and traditional owners. Moore would make an emotional return to the property – a land achingly cleaved between his own two worlds.

“I think, yes, this speaks to Australian history but it also speaks to what is happening all around the world,” Buttrose furthers. “The universality of family and what it means to face racism – but to also show that Indigenous kinship is strong and First Nations connections are strong – comes through. It may be sombre and there is quite an emphasis on looking back to history, but there is also a sense of hope in the strength of the family. Art is not divorced from life.”

… Kith and Kin is an unsettling examination of the innate contradictions at the genesis of contemporary Australian culture: a conflicted sense of identity that is coded into Moore’s own DNA, one he says remains frustratingly irreconciled.

“I still feel this otherness and this binary opposition – you can’t have one without the other,” he concludes …I myself am in the family tree, in the work, and I am trying to say, ‘it doesn’t matter about these differences, we have something much bigger in common in that we are all human beings all on this earth trying to live our lives and survive”.

“They are personal histories but they are also national histories. My story is not unique – or my family’s story. A lot of marginalised people will relate to that. Despite all of that we’ve survived and the tree continues on.”

Moving backwards in time away from the ruptures and trauma that consume the 250 years of Moore’s family tree, the frayed threads begin to coalesce into a more cohesive structural form.

“The tree written on the walls goes back over 2400 generations,” Moore explains. “If we go back far enough, we all have a common ancestor. So it’s about every one of us and every single living thing on the planet being connected in a much larger kinship system. We are all humans, we are all family, we are all kin. That’s an indigenous way of thinking: everything is a connection to place. Indigenous people having a non-linear sense of time, more of a circular understanding of the past, the present and the future being on the same temporal plain. What is happening now has happened before.”

And this, the terminology and underlining narrative of negation expressed in these two reviews, is what confirms that kith and kin is just a piece of sanctimonious crap. It is nothing but a politically conspired commission, funded by the ‘committee’ down at Creative Australia [Australia’s own ‘University of Central Paranoia’, the renamed in 2023 Australia Council ], during the heady months leading up to the Voice referendum.

For example, why call Moore a ‘son of empire’ unless you want to slur our British colonial past? - can you really ascribe any imperial characteristics to a kid like Archie, born in modern Australia in 1970? - can he still be a ‘son’ of the British Empire given that it was being dismantled in Australia two or three generations prior, when we federated in 1901?

Tompkin notes that Moore’s great-great-grandmother was known as ‘Queen Susan of Welltown’ [Note 3]. Does that make Moore the ‘son of nobility’? - of course not, so why call Archie disparagingly, the ‘son of empire,’ unless one wants to delegitimise in some way our country’s British heritage and thus keep the republican and so-called ‘First Nations sovereignty’ activism on the boil until its time for the next set of referenda?

Tompkin also goes for the usual Aboriginal victimhood trope on Archie’s behalf when he tells us that, “His was a life sculpted at the margins, impoverished and alienated between seemingly irreconcilable and binary worlds on the fringes of small-town Tara …”

But Archie actually went to ‘uni’ - possibly the first in all the generations of his family to do so - when as a 28-year-old he completed his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1998. Then, in 2001, he was sent on a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the centre over many centuries of some of the most powerful and influential Western Civilization ‘empires’ (Source & Source).

How many ‘impoverished’ 31-year-olds living as ‘fringe’-dwellers on the ‘margins’ of society win scholarships to study the artistic techniques of Western Civilization in Prague?

But why would Moore seek to claim victimhood and negate the wonderful opportunities that our Australian society has actually provided to him?

Why would he engage in ‘Australia-hate’ speech in his artwork’s curation notes, accusing us of being ‘racists’, members of a ‘colonialists project’, ‘european [sic] settlers’ and perpetrators of ‘invasion, massacres, and systemic over-incarceration’, but then, with no sense of irony at all, brag about how with,

“… pride i [sic] identify as aboriginal.” and how he “… once had to attain a certificate of aboriginality for approval of a loan from a first nations organisation — they asked for the surnames of my family and where they were from, and that’s all they needed to confirm my status. this [sic] proof may be required for employment in indigenous-identified positions, enrolling in schools, for government loans and assistance, and for land rights claims…” [Source: extracts from kith and kin curator notes here with highlights]

In our opinion, why he does this is because, he is ‘taking-the-piss.’

Think about what is really happening here - a grown man finds that, despite his early promise as an artist, his life has actually been reduced to spending two months drawing repetitive boxes with chalk on a blackboard wall and ‘just making up’ most of the names and words needed to fill them.

That must play on a real man’s mind - “How is it that my life has come to this?” , he must think - “I’m a grown man having to create this ‘Toytown’ rubbish for an audience of over-educated and privileged, but under-achieving, upper-middle-class white kids.”

**Figure 2 - Aboriginal man Archie Moore and Attendants***. Creative Australia* has announced the Pavilion Attendants for Archie Moore’s exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale. They will **leverage** Australia’s participation in the Venice Biennale to create **professional development opportunities.** They will **travel to Venice for a period of 6–12 weeks** to undertake **mediation** of Archie Moore’s presentation in the Australia Pavilion, curated by Ellie Buttrose (***Source***).

We suspect that the only way for an intelligent, 54-year-old man like Moore to get out of this disappointment, and perhaps save his own sanity, is to ‘take the piss’ - “give them the crap that they crave,” he thinks, “and put on a serious face when presenting it. At least it pays well and I can get a free trip to Venice.”

In our opinion, it is no coincidence that Moore has written the curation notes for kith and kin, in ‘kiddie-university’ language - aimless sentences, full of New-Age environmentalism and overloaded with the ever hopeful sentiment for Aboriginal sovereignty [reality-check: The Voice referendum failed miserably]. The curation notes also include a good dose of Critical Race Theory-inspired, ‘Australia-hate’ terminology.

Moore also takes a ‘powerful’ anti-establishment stance against the 'English colonial oppressors’ by refusing to be bound by their imposed language’s grammatical rules - he refuses to use capitalized lettering in his curatorial notes. How revolutionary chic!

**Figure 3 - An excerpt from the curator notes for, *“archie moore kith and kin. australia pavilion at venice biennale 2024”* [sic].** ***Source: Full notes here***

So Moore reached deep into his kit of genealogy and defined himself as a proud Kamilaroi & Bigambul man based solely on his 25% Aboriginality from his mum’s side of the family and, in the process, over-riding his 70% British, Scottish and Irish ancestry from his dad side. He also ignored his approximate 6% American Negro [slave?] ancestry [for the time being at least - It might come in handy in the future when slavery reparations are on the agenda perhaps?]

As Moore himself tells us,

**Figure 4 -** *Source:* ***Curator notes here***

It is with no sense of irony that Moore is open about the genealogical techniques he relied upon for determining his family history, namely Ancestry.com. This is a genealogical data base that was started by two ‘white’, Mormon researchers from the Brigham Young University of the Church of the Latter Day Saints in Utah, and is now owned by one of the world’s largest, capitalist, private equity firms, Blackstone Inc.

The reason why Moore was forced to rely on Western science and knowledges to create his genealogy was because, as he admits, Indigenous knowledges are actually very ‘shallow’ - with the impending passing of his mother, he realised “how much information would be lost if she died.”

The history of Aboriginal Australia is largely written by ‘white’ Australians - historians, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, ethnohistoriographers, missionaries and government patrol officers and bureaucrats. Sure, there are some wonderful Aboriginal autobiographies, but that bookshelf is short.

Moore even admits that he only has knowledge of many aspects of his Aboriginal side of the family because he,

“… referenced the genealogical chart from anthropologist norman tindale’s [sic] visit to boggabilla [sic], when he interviewed my maternal great-grandmother, jane clevin [sic], in 1938. what tindale [sic] recorded from my great-grandmother seems accurate and correlates with what my mother has said, but it reflects a western [sic] idea of how people are interconnected as a family.”

What Moore and many Aboriginal activists fail to realise during their attacks on the ‘colonial project’ is that colonisation freed up many Aboriginal people, especially women, from a life of suffocating strictness. A flood of freedoms and a human flourishing were possible for Aboriginal women once British Common Law gave them rights, albeit perhaps not fast enough, to control their own speech and lives, and to express their own agency, in the new modern world that appeared on the continent after 1788.

Figure 5 - Aboriginal law/lore, as enforced by Aboriginal men, ritually controlled the speech of Aboriginal woman - what they were allowed to say, and indeed what women were allowed to observe and to remember. *Source archival TBA*

By comparison to their pre-colonial ancestors, Moore’s more recent female, Aboriginal ancestors could speak freely regarding topics about dead relatives, something denied to them in traditional Aboriginal culture. As colonialism took hold they were gradually allowed to express their own agency in telling their stories, even to a ‘white’ man such as Norman Tindale.

A similarly important point is that the oral history of Aboriginal people has been noted many times as being deficient when trying to understand past genealogies of Aboriginal people, a people with no recorded written history beyond rock painting and ‘records’ held in carved trees and rock engravings.

As has been determined in many anthropological studies and Native Title cases, Aboriginal societies generally had no real memory of any individual ancestors beyond the generation of grand-parents, or at most, great-grandparents. Any ancestors prior to that were just lost in the ‘Dreaming’ or the ‘everywhen’.

This ‘shallow’ genealogical memory of Aboriginal socities is well documented [See also Note 6].

**Figures 6A & B - Samson, B., *The Brief Reach of History and the Limitation of Recall in Traditional Aboriginal Societies and Cultures,* *Oceania* , Jul., 2006, Vol. 76, No. 2, (Jul., 2006), p157-8.**

**Figure 7 - *ibid.,* p158,** [An exception is the Yolngu of Arnhem Land who go to four generations, ie. 2x-great-grandparents due to the exceptional degree of polygyny - some men have ‘accrued ten or more wives’ so that a first wife would be decades older than her husband's youngest bride. In fact, the set of wives of a polygynist would contain women of different generations, thus making it easier to a collective memory of 4 generations. (*ibid.,* p159)]

In other words, Aboriginal societies had no real memory or reliable records for ancestor’s names beyond the grandparent or great-grandparent generation. Indeed, they actively adopted customs that prevented the names of the dead being mentioned, recorded and thus remembered by subsequent generations. It was as if they purposefully erased all memory of the names of their ancestors.

But then, this doesn’t really worry Aboriginal man Archie Moore given that he is ‘pissing on our backs and telling us its raining’ - that is, he is using Western science and technology developed by a couple of Mormons from the US, members of a fundamentalist branch of Christianity (who were deeply interested in proving the ancestries written in the Bible), to create the genealogies of his Aboriginal ancestors and then, at same time, criticising the West and its colonial projects, such as in Australia and the US, that provided the knowledges that made his genealogical research possible - Oh the irony!

Moore has no qualms, as he ‘takes the piss’ in thus claiming,

“i [sic] have 3484 people in the family tree on the genealogical website ancestry.”

However, this is misleading - even misinformation perhaps.

To give Moore some credit, he has at least created and then published his family tree for us to check. But we find only 157 members in his genealogical family tree - consisting of 13 family members of Aboriginal descent (from 100% down to the estimated 25% Aboriginality in Archie Moore himself), 1 member who was an American Negro and the remaining 143, who were of English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh descent [See Figures 10 and Note 5].

It appears, but we are not certain, that his claimed number of “3484” might have come from all the family members of all the siblings, uncle & aunts and cousins in all the trees associated with each of his own ancestors that he says he located on the Ancestry website. Moore has not specifically spelt this out. If this is indeed the case then this number will automatically keep growing as new, distantly-related ‘family-tree’ members join the Ancestry database. As of 27 April 2024, it appears that this number has grown to 4492 in the “Moore Family Tree” [Figure 9].

**Figure 9 - *Ancestry.com* family tree published by Archie Moore**. *Source*

We have produced a summary of Archie Moore’s alleged Family Tree below based on Moore’s own published records.

**Figure 10 - Archie Moore’s Alleged Family Tree of *his direct* ancestors.** Moore himself appears to be of predomiately (approx 70%) British and Scottish descent, with some minor (6%) American negro (slave?) ancestry and about 25% Aboriginal. These ethnicities are represented by the colour codes: shades of green for varying % Aboriginality, blue for Irish, red for British & Welsh, light purple for Scottish, yellow for American negro. ***Source Download*** ***File.pdf here*** ***and*** ***File.jpg here***

For his artwork kith and kin, Archie Moore then proceeded to re-create what he claims is his Family Tree on the blackboard walls in Venice. It consists of little boxes, each containing one of these 3484 “names”, as shown in the following two photographs.

**Figure 11 - Photograph of an excerpt of a wall section of Archie Moore’s *kith and kin* installation in Venice.** *Source* *Presspack*

**Figure 12 - Photograph of an excerpt of a wall section of Archie Moore’s *kith and kin* installation in Venice.** *Source* *Presspack*

But something just doesn’t look right.

Many of the boxes are filled with names and words that don’t make much sense.

Names and words like, “Garroop”, “Karmarowan”, “Gooboolli”, “Deemandeel”, “Pilpil”, “Gardi” “Din din” , “Looloo” and “Tingon”, amongst many others. We can’t seem to find any independent references that supports the claim that these are Aboriginal names. So where are these from and why has Moore used them?

Even the curator notes to kith and kin, containing a list (purportedly to be the complete list?) of only some 1560 “names” fails to explain where the unusual names are from. Some names on the list carry the recognisable surnames of Moore’s family, viz: “Fitz”, “Clevins”, “Moore”, et al.

But many others are apparently meaningless, viz: “tanna”, “nargra”, “geegee”, “djoli” (see pages 4 - 7 here), except for the usual, somewhat derogatory, suspects - “Blackfella”, “Full Blood”, “Bung Eye”, “Half Caste”, “Old Gin”, “Abo”, which Moore has decided to include in his count.

So where are the actual names of 3484 family members, names that Moore claims to have added to his blackboard artwork?

Maybe the New York Times correspondent was onto something when he made the perceptive observation that Moore, “has smudged some details so that they are hard to read.” [Figure 13]

We bet he did, because it appears to us that Moore has largely ‘just made up’ words and names to fill the great majority of the boxes on the blackboard walls and, in the end, he ran out of alphabetic combinations so had to resort to illegible “smudging” to fill in the last 2000 or so boxes.

**Figure 13 -** Review of *kith and kin*, ***The New York Times***, 20 April 2024

So where to from here?

At the superficial level, Moore’s kith and kin is crap - it’s just a hotchpotch of Aboriginal, political activism and slogans of ‘Australia-hate’, funded by a naive committee of virtue signallers. It’s a perfect example of an artwork produced by what Robert Hughes called,

“… a rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future…”

At a deeper level however, kith and kin may be Australia’s Fountain moment, echoing that piece of 1917 art by Marcel Duchamp - a urinal - which philosopher Stephen Hicks believes Duchamp chose very carefully,

**Figure 14 -** *Fountain*. Marcel Duchamp and his urinal

“In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.”

Stephen Hicks, 2004

Maybe Archie Moore really knows that modern Indigenous activist art is crap, but he can’t admit it publicly. Maybe he hatched a plan to ‘take the piss out of’ the Indigenous activist fraternity by turning Marcel Duchamp’s message on its head?

With kith and kin, Moore’s art was not to be pissed on - as Duchamp was encouraging us to do - but rather Moore was actually going to ‘piss on our backs and tell us it was raining’; that is, Moore was going to give us the crap that is kith and kin and deceive us into believing that it was meaningful art carrying an important message!

If indeed this was the case, Moore has been successful in getting his political message of ‘Australia-hate’ believed by the usual, gullible suspects - the Left press and the sycophants in the arts’ fraternity.

Just as Duchamp’s Fountain signalled a change in the international art scene in 1917, maybe the appearance of Moore’s kith and kin is signalling something to us here in Australia, in 2024, something that says our beautiful country could go one of either of two ways.

With the failed Voice referendum, as a country we might now have realised that all this Indigenous-inspired political and artistic activism is just a load of divisive crap. The NO voters have been vindicated and our country will settle down onto its historical path of steadily building one of the greatest cohesive societies in the history of the world.

Or, the activists and the arts fraternity will only be further enraged - and emboldened - to keep up the ‘good fight’ in even more radical terms. Perhaps we will see a massive rise in the activism of sore YES voters, like one Monique Grbec below, whose only upside in life now seems to be in praising the crap that is kith and kin.

We shall see which direction we, as a country, take.

**Figure 16 - Praise for *kith and kin* by ‘blak activist’, Monique Grbec.** ***Source***

In Conclusion

It would be unfair of us to end our blog post on Archie Moore as just a ‘hatch job’, on his so-called artwork, kith and kin, without us taking some responsibility for our critique. We can’t just exclaim that Archie is ‘taking the piss’ without us offering an alternative on what he, and the ‘Australia-hating’, group-thinkers down at Culture Australia, could have done otherwise.

We offer an artistic suggestion below in the Further Reading section.

Notes

Note 1 - The Dreaming-up of the New Polity of “First Nations” Peoples

I (editor) first became aware of this new term “First Nations”, probably around 2015, when it was applied to Aboriginal people in a collective political sense. The ABC was an early adopter and promoter and it gained common use in ABC News items and other broadcasts. Without any real public debate, this word inserted itself, via actively willing vectors such as the ABC, into Australia’s normal political and cultural conversations, such that it is routinely used, and thus legitimised, even in the conservative media (eg. The Australian).

Even though “Aboriginal First Nations” is a completely made-up notion - Aboriginal societies were not “nations” as commonly understood and defined by Australians in relation to their own nationstate of Australia - Aboriginal political acivists and their supporters such as the ABC want to push and promote the term as a political concept on the way to achieving so-called Aboriginal “sovereignty”. The activists rightly surmise that you can’t have Aboriginal “sovereignty” unless you have a legally recognizable “nation” to hold that “sovereignty”.

Hence, there has been an explosion in the appearance in the literature of the term “First Nations”, and its synonym “First Peoples”, since about 1980, when the Aboriginal political project really got underway, not only in Australia but also in other countries such as Canada, where the term First Nations first gained a strong political foothold, prior to it being copied and imported into Australia.

This explosion in recent use is illustrated by the Ngram views below. The fact that it wasn’t in common use prior to 1980 indicates that it was just a new fabricated term, used only by the Aboriginal activists and not by ‘real’ Aboriginal people themselves, who refer to themselves by family, clan or tribal name and even just as, ‘Australians.’

**Figure 17 - Ngram view of the occurrence of the phrase First Nations in that literature covered by Google Books** [This chart should only be used for qualitative purposes - it indicates the use within the literature scanned by Google, not all literature] ***Source***

**Figure 18 - Ngram view of First Nations Aboriginal.** ***Source***

**Figure 19 - Ngram view of First Peoples**. *Source*

Note 2 - Decyphering for Dummies

Some hints on the meaning of Julian Tompkin’s use of the term, ‘errancy of memory’ [nb: ‘errancy’ doesn’t even appear to be a real word - it has no entry in Macquarie dictionary] can be obtained from the abstract of a 2015 PhD thesis, Errant Memory in African American Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, by Tristan Alexander Striker from the City University of New York:

“In this dissertation, I trace the complex black literary trope of errant memory through American and African American literature. Authors of African descent are constantly subjected to what I call Africanity, or the paratextual historicizing elements provided by white interlocutors that seek to impose specific caricatures and stereotypes on them and their works to force them into the American historical narrative that depends on their dehumanized and commodified status.

These caricatures and stereotypes are rooted in an Africa imagined by these white interlocutors, one that does not match any reality. Authors of African descent transcend this paratextual Africanity through what I call errant memory.

Based on Edouard Glissant's errantry, which stipulates a way of life that is simultaneously aware of and disproves the sovereignty of Universalisms, errant memory emphasizes the act of remembering over fetishized narratives of trauma and inescapable violence inherent in Universal History and its version of black life and history.

In short, persons of African descent are not just socially dead, they are mnemonically dead as well.

Their mnemonic life is replaced with static and dehumanizing historical narratives. However, African American literature serves as a testament to mnemonic life. Africanity seeks to disallow authors of African descent to participate in the true freedom found within the space of literature, defining and determining their literary capacities to mimicking, parroting, rebelling, resisting, or otherwise reacting to and against the way white hegemonic society reads them.

Errant memory, occupying the space of literature, explodes these definitions through the choice to embrace and emphasize personal, indeterminate, and disorienting memories. Instead of allowing the rhetoric of trauma to dictate their mnemonic lives, authors of African descent, including Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Turner, Hannah Crafts, and W.E.B. Du Bois, read their determined roles within the larger historical narrative and reclaim their personal mnemonic relationships with the important moments of the Middle Passage and American Slavery, freeing their literature and these cultural memories to the possibility of unlimited interpretation.”

By substituting ‘Aborigines’, ‘Aboriginality’, ‘Aboriginal descent’, etc., at the appropriate places in place of ‘African”, etc, one gets the general idea of what Tompkin might mean with his unique term of ‘errancy of memory.’ But then again, maybe not?

Note 3 - Queen Susan of Welltown

Tompkin, in his ‘politicised’ art review of Moore’s life, claims that Moore’s ‘great-grandmother’ [sic, should be great-great-grandmother], Suzannah Clevin was the fabled Queen Susan of Welltown. She wasn’t “fabled” at all but real [fabled - mythical; legendary, having no real existence; fictitious].

**Figure 20 - Photograph (1920?) of Suzannah Clevin (1854 - 1934), “Queen Susan of Welltown”, Archie Moore’s great-great-grandmother, with her sons, Joe and Billy.** *Source: Archie Moore*

**Figure 21 - Newspaper report on Queen Susan of Welltown**. *Source: Archie Moore*

Note 4 - Just another Activist Trope: Marriage Permits for Aborigines

Moore is reported to have claimed that his, “grandparents [required] seeking to gain permission from the Chief Protector of Aboriginals to marry.”

Yes, many Aboriginal people did previously require permits to marry given that many were classed as ‘wards of the state’, just like many white ‘wards of the state’ and ‘white’ children under the age of 21 were similarly encumbered in requiring to get permission to marry from the authorities or their parents respectively.

This permit system is a topic which we will study and post on in some detail in the future, but essentially the requirement for permission was to protect Aboriginal women from sexual or slavery exploitation by ‘white’ men who essentially wanted to kidnap them and then hold off any government retribution by claiming that “we are married”, when in fact they weren’t officially.

Aboriginal activists and their supporters frequently use this ‘marriage permit trope’ as part of their ‘Australia-hate’ campaign. This government policy, while not perfect, was designed with the best of intentions to protect Aboriginal women, and opposition to it is indicative of the political arguments that we still have today about policies such as the Cashless Welfare Card. Detractors of the card claim it treats Aboriginal people as ‘third class citizens’, but then it has supporters such as Professor Marcia Langton who say it protects Aboriginal women and families women.

Aboriginal politics is about debate and conflicting policies - always was, always will be. Regulation of the marriages of Aborigines living under state care was never a wholly a good, nor a wholly bad, policy. It is very unfair for today’s activists to roundly attack a policy that undoubtably protected many Aboriginal women and young girls from being exploited and having their basic human rights violated by unscrupulous men, both ‘white’ and Aboriginal.

Another point which the activists never mention is that, under Aboriginal law, Aboriginal women have always required special permission to marry. For millennia, strict rules governed, according to one’s totem or ‘skin’, who, and when, an Aboriginal woman could marry. So it is a bit rich for activists to blame Australian government policies that restricted (but did not necessarily prevent) who and when Aboriginal women could marry.

Indeed, the irony of all this is that Archie Moore’s mother and his two Aboriginal great-grandmothers could only ‘marry’ the men they chose to (two ‘white’ and one American negro) because of the laws in place by the ‘colonising’ British. Under traditional Aboriginal law they would have been refused permission to marry these men who were outside their totemic system.

Note 5 - Archie Moore’s 157 Direct Ancestors

Moore himself has published the names of only 157 members of his family tree, which we have reproduced here. As far we can ascertain, the remaining 3327 (3484-157) names of his family members, that he claims are in his tree, could be ‘just made up’.

Moore has provided an additional list of some 1560 names in his curation notes, which contain a sprinkling of what appear to be extended family (uncles, aunts, cousins) names - names such as Helen Crofter, John William Mundy, George Richard Clevens, et al, set amongst a lot of other words (are they names?) that don’t make much sense, such as gundawinda, buwa-thi, yimbin, gooloo, yumma, tunna, amongst many others.

We couldn’t find any corroborating evidence that these words are the names of any of Archie Moore’s ancestors.

Note 6 - Further Confirmation of the Shallowness of Aboriginal Oral Genealogies

Australia’s Western-based society is very different to Aboriginal societies in how we remember and record the names and lineage of our ancestors. As noted by the findings of the various anthropologists below, Aboriginal society, with its limited ‘Indigenous knowledges’, is what is called “shallow” - families can only really remember the names of the parents and grandparents of the oldest, currently living, member. This gives rise to a memory recall ability of three, or at the most, four generations. As there was no way in Aboriginal societies to accurately record the names of more distant ancestors, all knowledge of their names and familial relationships were ultimately lost to the past, or to the Dreaming.

In contrast, Aborigines who have made the transition to living a typical Australian/Western-based lifestyle have access to the power of Western science and knowledge systems. This allows them, and others, to know accurately the names and relationships of their more distant ancestors.

Thus for example, we can define in detail the maternal family line of Australia’s Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney to the eighteenth generational level - she is the 18X great-granddaughter of King Robert II of Scotland, who ruled as king from from 1371 to 1390. The ability to undertake and document this level of “deep” genealogy is incomprehensible to traditional Aboriginal people.

And so too for Archie Moore, he can only comprehend and undertake a “deep” genealogy - 2400 generations as he claims - of his family because he himself is the product of a Western science and knowledges society.

If he was solely a ‘real and traditional’ Aboriginal man, he would not have the philosophical or cultural outlook, nor the ability, nor indeed the need, to comprehend what a family of 2400 generations really looked like or meant.

But then again, Archie Moore is just ‘taking the piss’, so this hypocrisy and inconsistency is of no real consequence to his political and artistic aims.

Figures 22A,B&C - Excerpts from Julie Finlayson and Ann Curthoys, *The Proof of Continuity of Native Title*, **Issues paper no. 18**, **June 1997**

To the observant viewer, there is an inherent, compositional beauty to this photograph - a woman sits quietly on a park bench her eyes gazing, but also protectively focused, on a small child - her grandchild perhaps - who is learning to ride a new bike. With each hesitant peddle stroke, the bike lurches and clunks, from side to side, the child protected within the boundaries set by the training-wheels.

**Figure 23 -** “***Tara Lagoon”, 2016***

To an indigenous Australian [either ‘black’ or ‘white’, someone born here who has travelled regional Australia and knows it] the location is familiar and pregnant with artistic possibilities to speak to the human condition - the feeling of the inevitability of ‘Bogan’ architecture as it spreads across Australia, ever so practical but ugly, with its corrugated iron and steel pavilion and bench and the backyard fences encroaching onto the murky stand of water; and the surrounding grounds denuded by overuse, all coupled with a sadness at the loss of what would have once been, in Aboriginal times, the pristine beauty of the Tara Lagoon, a wetland teeming with wildlife.

But it is the woman in the picture that requires our attention. The viewer gets the impression that this grandmother, with the wisdom that a parent often lacks, knows that she must be there, patiently, to help the child successfully traverse life’s different stages. She knows that her adult supervision must be carefully calibrated to fall right in the middle, between that of full control and unfettered freedom - between being a helicopter parent or being a parent of neglect. A child must have boundaries - social trainer-wheels - without being overly smothered.

We have no idea who the photographer, Jack Blisken is, or why he took this photograph in 2016, or indeed why he uploaded it onto Wikimedia in 2017.

We are not even sure if Blisken was aware of the artistic and historical undertones that his photograph carries - the angle of the path to the left and then to the right to create the sense of movement (for the child on the bike) a technique first developed by the great Japanese woodblock printers, such as Hiroshige, in the early 1800s and to be copied by some of the great, late nineteenth-century European artists, such as Degas during the birth of Impressionism [* see below]

But what we do know is that this photograph should be of great interest to artist Archie Moore because, according to the caption on Blisken’s photograph, the woman in the picture is “Jennifer Cleven”, who from our research we know is Archie Moore’s mother:

Captioned by the photographer, Jack Bliskin, as, “Tara, Qld lagoon pictured is a small child and lady by the name of Jennifer Cleven” - 16 December 2016. [nb: photograph’s original contrast has been adjusted by DEE].

Source . And from the electoral rolls we know Archies mother, Jennifer (Joan) Cleven was living in Tara at least up until 1980 (the limit of the online electoral rolls).

This brings us to our criticism of the artistic direction that Archie Moore has decided to take with his work.

Instead of the ‘piss art’ of Aboriginal political activism, Moore might have been able to create real art with meaning and a usefulness, not only to Australians but to humanity in general. He could have attempted to rise about the venal pit of the ‘Australia-hate’ arts industry and instead sought to produce art that helped Australians understand the ‘meanings of life’ and the human condition. He could have made a submission for the Venice Biennale that made all Australians proud, not just the smug and sarcastic, ‘Australia-haters.’

It is a pity Moore did not heed the words of Robert Hughes, warning against the ‘kind of dumb show’ that Moore now finds himself entrapped in:

It's also what the modern and the old have in common. Pollock with Turner, Matisse with Rubens, or Braque with Poussin. And the basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible. To restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling.

- Excerpt of Robert Hughes, view here

If Moore had pursed a different artistic course we might have heard a 2024 reincarnation of Robert Hughes proclaim an additional artistic duo in his comparison of the modern with the old. Firstly, Hughes linked Pollock with Turner:

*Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth*

Then he linked Matisse with Rubens:

And perhaps in 2024, at the Venice biennale he might have linked, Moore with Van Hooch, or Moore with the Japanese Ukiyo-e

*Japanese woodblock print, untitled [silhouette figures, woman seated on bench with teapot, two people walking], No date.*

Perhaps if Moore had of seen this photograph, said to be of his mother, he might have seen the compositional beauty and artistic potential - her perfect white ‘mission-modest’ dress and her quiet demeanour informing us of her important role within contemporary Aboriginal society where ‘grandmothers’ have largely assumed much of the peak responsibility in Aboriginal families and communities.

It seems that Aboriginal men have been unable to maintain their agency and many now appear largely emasculated in being able to provide meaningful leadership in many Aboriginal communities [details TBA at a later date].

No, Moore missed all that. Not for him to bring into the modern world the art of Van Hooch, a master in capturing the simple beauty and meaning of domestic life, or depicting the feeling of love, duty and responsibility a mother has towards her child.

Instead of a 2024 version of the insights of Robert Hughes, we instead get told to ‘just suck it up’ while the likes of Moore and their sponsors, such as the National Gallery of Australia and corporate Australia, ‘piss on our backs’ and tell us they are making great art with our tax dollars and the prices they charge us for their products.

**Figure 24 Archie Moore's Black Dog was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2014, in recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum.**
"Skin was an identifier of who I was and what status I held—not in the long gone birth right of a traditional ‘skin name’, but from racist slurs that we’ve all heard at some time and continue to hear today. The skin of Black Dog is preserved by taxidermy, filled with sawdust and old newspapers but also full of a history of racism and a feeling of being subhuman. The dog wasn’t black enough so it got darkened with boot polish, a medium itself rich in racial connotations and make-up for ‘black face’ performers from decades ago and the odd, misguided incidents of recent times. It sits awkwardly on the floor, staring up at you with accusatory eyes as an indictment of past mistreatment of an individual but also of a marginalised group. There have been many papers that speak of a link between discrimination and mental illness, how words said in jest or abuse can lead to depression. A name tag hangs around the dog’s neck in case you are still unaware that this is a self-portrait." Archie Moore
***Sources:*** ***here*** [**and with Aboriginal Activist and Communist symbols in background too!**] and ***here***

* Notes on Ukiyo-e (Japanese Woodblock Prints)

‘Many French painters were influenced by Japanese woodcut prints. All the Impressionists had developed a taste for their stylized, comic-book simplicity. None more so than Edgar Degas, whose paintings owe much to the images produced by the Ukiyo-e artists. He was particularly admiring of Hiroshige, an artist who made hundreds of prints, including a series that featured the fifty-three stations on the 290-mile highway between Edo (now Tokyo) and Kyoto.

One of these works, Station of Otsu (c.1848-9) (see Figure 25), shows an everyday scene of travellers going about their business, buying goods from market stalls and walking about carrying heavy bags on their backs in readiness for the onward journey. None of which is remarkable. But the viewpoint and composition are noteworthy.

Hiroshige has taken a bird's-eye view of the action, as if seen through a CCTV camera placed on top of a high building. The voyeuristic effect of the aerial position is accentuated by the structure of the image, which he has arranged along a diagonal line, running from the bottom left-hand corner of the picture to top right, creating a sense of motion that takes the eye beyond the frame to a single, imaginary vanishing point. To add yet more dynamism to the picture, Hiroshige has aggressively cropped the action that is taking place in the foreground, a favourite technique of the Ukiyo-e artists. The result is an image that makes you, the viewer, feel strangely present - complicit even.

Now take The Dance Class, a picture Degas painted in 1874, the same year as (what would become known as) the First Impressionist Exhibition (see Figure 26). It shows a dance studio full of ballerinas paying scant attention to their elderly ballet master, who is standing, supported by the long pole he uses to mark time by tapping the floor. The young dancers are standing, leaning and stretching along the studio wall. All are dressed in white tutus, with a variety of coloured sashes tied in bows around their waists. A small dog peers round the ankles of the ballerina standing in the foreground to the left of the picture: she has her back to the viewer and is sporting a large red hairclip. On her left, at the edge of the composition, is the most inattentive dancer, who is scratching her back, eyes closed and chin raised in momentary relief.

People who have worked backstage in a theatre and watched ballet dancers rehearse will realise it is a wonderfully accurate, evocative painting. It captures the feline nature of ballerinas, at once lazy and distant, while at the time emitting a poised physicality that is both sensuous and powerful. Degas has pulled off a great representational feat.

He has done so by ignoring the traditional rules of the Academy and instead mimicking the compositional techniques of Japanese woodcut artists. Like Hiroshige's Station of Otsu, Degas has arranged his composition in a diagonal band running from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right. He has also chosen a raised viewpoint, an asymmetrical design, exaggerated foreshortening and severe cropping at the outer edges of the picture. For instance, the ballerina placed halfway up the picture to the extreme right has been cut in half. It is a visual trick, of course, but a very effective one. It animates what would otherwise appear to be a static scene.

Degas's intention was to communicate to us that what we are seeing is a fleeting moment that he has frozen in time. And yet, it was nothing of the sort. 'No art was less spontaneous than mine,' he once said. In that respect Degas wasn't really an Impressionist at all. He couldn't get as worked up as Monet and the ochers about the whole painting en plein air business, preferring to work in his studio from preparatory sketches. He was meticulous in his research and preparations, making hundreds of drawings, and taking an almost scientific interest in human anatomy, reminiscent of the investigations Leonardo da Vinci had made into human physiology 400 years earlier. As for the depiction of nature's ever-changing light, well, that was not Degas's principal concern; his focus lay more in an artist's ability to give his or her subject the illusion of movement. [Source: Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye 2012].