Too many cooks?: The 2011 western Australian indigenous art awards

'Is this the real culture wars?', ribs Tony Collins, co-producer of this year's Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, the annual three-day retail hub for Top End Aboriginal art centres which coincides with the opening of the Museum and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory's Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs). Collins alludes to a clash of agendas and dates this year between the the NATSIAAs and the Art Gallery of Western Australia's Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards (WAIAAs), which opened the day after the NATSIAAs. Some people were obliged, and just able, to attend both - like Danie Mellor, a judge for the NATSIAAs and one of the WAIAAs' sixteen finalists, or Patrick Mung Mung and Timothy Cook who were represented in both exhibitions. While each exhibition is so essentially different in structure as to dismiss any idea of competition, the coinciding dates and a general feeling of decline about the NATSIAAs seems to encourage some rivalry.