Qantas Celebrates NAIDOC Week By Not Paying an Aboriginal Artist For Her Work

It appears that Australia's national airline Qantas has chosen to celebrate NAIDOC Week with the most corporate example of tokenism possible—asking an Aboriginal artist to paint culturally inappropriate "animal totems" for its customers. Without paying her.

Artist Elizabeth Close is a Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara woman from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in Central Australia, now working in Adelaide. She told VICE that a South Australian representative from Qantas reached out to her earlier this week to ask whether she would like to participate in a NAIDOC-affiliated "cultural" event, to be held in a Qantas club lounge at an Adelaide airport.

"I got a phone call on Tuesday morning from someone at Qantas…saying they had this great project in mind that they wanted to run with to mark NAIDOC week," Close said. "They had these white crockery plates left over from their Business and First Class cabin, that were sitting around unused. They wanted to get an artist in to paint 'totems'—her words, not mine—on the plates and then to paint an Aboriginal word that corresponds to said animal on them too. In my head I'm like, so which one of the 500 languages am I going to use here? The idea was that staff and members of the Qantas club lounge would get to choose which animal gets painted and stuff like that."

Close explained that the phone call from Qantas was offensive for a number of reasons. "First of all, this woman hasn't even looked at my work, because that kind of art isn't remotely what I do. Most of my work is quite abstract…clearly she just thought she could get any generic Aboriginal artist and get them to paint any old generic Aboriginal thing, and that would be okay."

Close also said that refusing to pay an Aboriginal artist for their work, especially during NAIDOC Week, felt particularly insensitive. "It's so disrespectful to call any artist, particularly an Aboriginal artist, to come and paint for free. You're a multi-billion dollar corporation and you're going to tell me you can't find the budget? You're asking an Aboriginal artist to work for free, use their materials, time, and effort, their intellectual property and their culture, and use that to make yourself more culturally aware?"

After explaining her stance to the representative from Qantas, Close said she received an apology. "She was a little bit upset. And I felt a bit bad. But she needed to hear this."

In the aftermath of her experience, Close posted a Facebook status explaining her outrage. Shortly after this, she said, she received another apologetic phone call from Qantas head office in Sydney. "They were quite apologetic and it was a breakdown in communication, basically saying all the right things, they'd give their staff cultural sensitivity, all sunshine and rainbows."

Perhaps the most upsetting outcome of Close's interaction with Qantas, she said,s that the airline's behaviour towards her appeared to part of a wider pattern. "I was told there was a woman who did [a NAIDOC event] last year and she'd volunteered," she said.

"Clearly they have a large cultural problem at Qantas…I've gotten wind from various channels that this isn't an isolated event."

An established artist with a "two-year-long commission list", Close felt comfortable turning down Qantas' offer of being paid in exposure. But she still finds it ridiculous that the offer was made in the first place.

"Alan Joyce made 11 million dollars last year, and yet they couldn't pay an Aboriginal artist to come and paint on plates. Which I would not have done anyway, because the project was ridiculous."

VICE has contacted Qantas for comment.

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