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Thenaming ofQantas aircraft has followed various themes since 1926.
City names continued on all Qantas ordered and deliveredBoeing 747,Boeing 747SP andBoeing 767 aircraft until 2008.
Earlier this year Qantas, the national airline, featured a picture of a beaming 10-year-old Aborigine girl in an advertising campaign titled "The Spirit of Australia". ... highlights the difficulties companies face in employing Aboriginal imagery. Qantas has used Aboriginal dot painting designs on two of its Boeing 747s, called 'Wunala Dreaming' and 'Nilanji Dreaming'.
The company says that it is a leading sponsor of Aboriginal art exhibitions, and has had an employment programme for Aborigines since 1988. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, however, make up just over one per cent of its workforce.
[page 92] All too often the art work— and this also goes for whitefella art – becomes so much wall-paper. Jenny Green has written of 'the hegemony of the dot' but sometimes it seems more like the enthralment of the dot. Every now and again the Empire strikes back, whether, small scale, in Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula's 'Two women' story', where the canvass was supplied by a pair of Adidas trainers, an entry in a fund-raiser where a number of artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous were invited to contribute artists' statements using sneakers as their medium. Another Indigenous entrant was Bororroloola-born and Flinders University-educated John Moriarty. Moriarty's Balarinji Designs have provided the art work for 'Wunala Dreaming' and its two sister Qantas 747s; the third and most recent design has been supplied by a Pitjitjantjarra woman from Uluru, though with one might still wonder how much of the positive and international feed-back accruing to the airline has benefited the Indigenous community as a whole.
No longer are we stealing children for the study of Dust, but rather we are thieving Indigenous spirituality and traditions that are marketable within the worlds of tourism and advertising; within the world of art where, as cultural theorist, Celia Lury, asserts, 'Dreamings [have] become the new multicultural 'high' gallery art.' As Gobblers, we guzzle down images of Qantas Australiana rhetoric: the company's current advertising campaign, the 'Spirit of Australia', imprinted on the bodies of company airplanes now painted in authentic Indigenous Dreaming designs – Nalanji Dreaming, Wunala Dreaming and the most recent Yananyi Dreaming – while the real bodies of Aborigines as sites of social in[ter]cision, 'power and knowledge' are displaced in national space when they do not correspond with our [post]colonial 'fantasy' of a 'manageable,' 'multicultural' Australia.