I just read two very different books: Painting Culture by Fred R. Myers and Talking to my Country by Stan Grant. (Apparently I'm on a social justice kick at the moment.) The first one was academic, dry and actually immensely informative. I feel like it would have made a great documentary film, if only we had the footage. The second was ... Worthwhile.

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art is about the history of how acrylic "dot" paintings by a particular group of artists in Central Australia came to be sought after, sourced, hung in prestigious galleries around the world and subsequently valued at high prices. (I certainly had not expected that it happened in that order.) It's written by an American anthropologist who was part of the community for a short while, in theory to study the culture of the artists themselves - to the point where at the time, he did not take pictures of the art they were making, and described it only through rudimentary sketches. There are great insights into how the artists viewed the process of painting, how the sale of the paintings was expected to support the community, how the culture being painted was adapted to artificial materials and presentation, their relationship with the individuals whose job it was to promote and sell their work on a government budget, how the sellers worked to change the classification from "anthropological artefact" to "modern art", and the formation of the organisations backing these individuals, in the context of the history of Australia. It was fascinating and very well referenced with many personal accounts, but it would need to be significantly dumbed down to reach "readable". I slogged through it and didn't finish it in the nine weeks I had it out from the library, and felt like I'd learned a lot all the same.

Talking to my Country was extremely readable - you'd hope so, given the writer is a veteran journalist. The stories he tells of his family's history might be unknown to some, but personally I felt like I was just reading accounts of stories I already knew existed. Having made it to the end, it seems like the thesis was supposed to be "all Indigenous people share this history, and that is why [Indigenous public figure, not actually part of the book] responded to [events in 2015] by leaving the public sphere - he had just had enough". Which, while probably true, is not actually a logical conclusion of the book itself. But the individual stories were well told.