Icons, living and dead: Transforming Alice Springs

Alice Springs, the modern town at the centre of the Australian continent, is also a converging point of ancient Aboriginal songlines and for thousands of years the homeland of Arrernte-speaking clans. Today Aboriginal people, with Arrernte in the majority, make up one fifth of the town's population. Their presence, however, has mostly not been reflected in the construction of the town's public spaces in ways other than negative. A 1981 mural by Bob and Kaye Kessing, on the new Coles supermarket, projected an image of intercultural harmony long before the word 'reconciliation' was on anybody's lips. At this time the outpouring of art by Aboriginal peoples of the desert had been underway for a decade. Alice Springs became a hub for the movement, and this was reflected in the commissioning of a number of significant works of public art - at the Araluen Arts Centre and airport - but not in the town centre. After strong lobbying, lead by artist Pip McManus, in 2006 the Town Council finally adopted a public art policy. As its first manifestation in 2009 Council commissioned The Gathering Garden for a prominent position in the Civic Centre grounds. This work, a collaboration of ten Central Australian Aboriginal artists with a Melbourne-based sculptor, stands at the head of a recent conscientious, if somewhat haphazard, striving towards balance in the cultural order of the public space.