Intellectual and cultural property rights for indigenous Australians

© 1998 Sonia SmallacombeThe issue of intellectual and cultural property rights for Indigenous Australians was raised in 1974 when the late Wandjuk Marika, walked into a shop in Cairns and found his own sacred design on a tea towel that had been manufactured in Holland. He said “I was shocked when I walked into that shop, and when I saw it I was shocked and break my heart”. To add to his anger and humiliation, Mr Marika was charged $10 for the tea towel. He believed he should have been charged $2 for the cloth as the design belonged to him. He expressed outrage that those people who had stolen and copied his designs would consider his work to be purely pleasure paintings rather than the expressions of power and knowledge of important cultural symbols. Mr Marika’s devastation was apparent when he stated “[a]fter I found my own designs on the tea towels I was shocked and I loose [sic] my power to paint, lose my power for a number of years. Mr Marika passed away in 1987 and sadly the issues he raised are yet to be resolved. Mr Marika’s desire to obtain legal protection of the art and culture of Aboriginal people lives on in the minds of many Australians including a number of Indigenous scholars and academics, like myself. The issues that Mr Marika raised back in 1974 are the basis of my thesis on intellectual and cultural property rights for Indigenous peoples. It is the struggle for control of the identity and culture of Indigenous Australians; their continual marginalisation within the colonial nation-state; and the role that colonial institutions play in maintaining and reinforcing the dominant ideology which provides the foundation for this thesis