NECKLACE NARRATIVES

Unraveling the narratives that attach themselves to necklace making in Tasmania is an exercise full of irony and there is no comfort whatsoever to be found in the postmodern proposition that "truth is myth, and myth, truth". Dr. David Hansen[6] in his recent essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ among other things talks about the ways we might look at Benjamin Law’s bust of Truganini and says:

• “Representations of Aborigines are not calibrated against the lie of the land, the history of the invasion, the character of the parties involved, the specific sequence of particular incidents or the sensitivity and technical accomplishment of the artist. Instead we are presented with an abstract zone of retrospective judgement, a killing field of theory, a terra nullius where imported European aesthetic stock – the Picturesque, the Sublime, the Grotesque, the Melancholy – may safely graze”.
  

Hansen looks for another way to look at Truganini and one that allows us to speak about everything that we can see in how she is represented.

Mixed up within Social Darwinism are ideas to do with ‘survival’ and ‘fitness.’ Survival quite often has something to do with the need to identify and to be identifiable. Typically, body ‘adornments’ are sophisticated identity tools. Yet a ’necklace’ can be translated into many things – a talisman, a souvenir, a token, simple adornment – yet almost always there are issues of identity present. In the context of the Western Industrial era, ‘necklaces’ are generally designed to come without inbuilt meaning. Generally that is something that has to be added later.

Necklaces are given their meaning once possessed and by their possessors. Typically they wait to be given a social function or perhaps some personal significance once they move out of ‘the market place’ and are contextualised as a possession.

Essentially, a “necklace” is a commodity – increasingly its a globalised idea, a ‘globalish’ word/idea if you like. It’s not an idea that fits at all well within local or Indigenous peoples’ naming and belief systems. ‘Necklace’ is nonspecific, its the kind of idea that best fits the imperatives of hegemonic and homogenised globalism. It’s a catchall term, a lowest common denominator, something that comes to a wearer via ‘commercial’ production, and at best, ready to be invested with meaning.