A recent decision by the Federal Court has exposed the conduct of one company in the “authentic Aboriginal art” industry — which supplies much of the material sold to the tourist and souvenir market in Australia — as having engaged in unlawful conduct.

In late December, Justice John Mansfield found that the Adelaide-based Australian Dreamtime Creations Pty Ltd (ADC) had committed numerous breaches of the Trades Practices Act in relation to the production and sale of material purporting to be Aboriginal art.

Justice Mansfield found that since 1996, and particularly between 2007 and 2009, ADC had engaged in “misleading and deceptive conduct” in relation to representations on its website.

Those representations were that a variety of works that ADC and its director, Tony Antoniou, had offered for sale; paintings, prints, boomerangs, bull-roarers, carved wooden animals and statues, table platters, didgeridoos, emu eggs and ceramic objects etc; had been painted or made by an Aboriginal person — the fictional Aboriginal artist Ubanoo Brown — when they had not.

In a media statement, Graeme Samuel, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (the ACC) said:

Art consumers have the right to be confident that when purchasing Aboriginal art it will in fact be Aboriginal art.

That is stating the bleeding obvious, but Samuel’s statement leads to the question:  just how much that is sold as Aboriginal art in Australia is authentic and genuine and how much is fake?

Twenty or so years ago the renowned curator and author Vivien Johnson put together a travelling exhibition that highlighted the widespread and not-so-subtle appropriation of Aboriginal imagery and iconography, particularly by designers and manufacturers in the textile and clothing industries.

That exhibition, the House of Aboriginality travelled widely across Australia and I caught it in Darwin about the time that several landmark legal cases recognised, for the first time at non-Aboriginal law, the rights and interests of Aboriginal people in the control of the use of their imagery from unlawful appropriation.

Johnson’s exhibition has passed into history but you can still see images from it at the National Library of Australia’s invaluable Pandora web archive service.

Several things stand out in my memory of Johnson’s “House”, the unrelenting dreariness and tackiness of much of the material in the exhibition — the “Western Desert” design on the men’s underpants and the toilet-roll holder with distinctive “rarrk” painting style from Arnhem Land come immediately to mind. And back then much of the material was Australian-made and was pitched mainly to a domestic audience.

The mainstream Aboriginal art market is a notoriously fragmented and fractious industry.

The fine-art, high-value work that is largely produced in the centre and north of the country forms a relatively small part of the overall market, the largest part being taken up by more moderately-priced artworks.

Together these make up the most visible — in terms of economic value and artistic activity — sectors of the industry. But, as several recent high-profile cases have indicated, these sectors are not immune from forgery and fraud. And there is recent evidence to suggest that off-shore operators are targeting this most lucrative end of the market with high-quality forgeries — with several instances of actual or suspected forgeries of mid-level art coming out of China and south-east Asia.

And below the mainstream Aboriginal art market lurks the tourist and souvenir market in “authentic Aboriginal art”, which relies in part on companies such as ADC for its product.

The tourist and souvenir Aboriginal art market has changed with the times and is just as tacky now as when Vivien Johnson examined it 20 years ago, though now most of the product is sourced from south and south-east Asia.

And the relative strength of that market can be usefully gauged by a stroll through the Alice Springs CBD.

Apart from the dozen or so commercial galleries that concentrate on fine-art and moderately valued works, in the space of a few hundred metres there are five outlets dedicated to tourist souvenirs and another eight — newsagents, general stores, etc — that sell “Aboriginal art” souvenirs and material as part of their stock.

Add the half-dozen and more similar outlets scattered across town in hotels, shopping centres and at the airport and there would be 20 outlets for souvenir-level works in a town with 24,000 permanent residents that services more than 230,000 international tourists each year.

And where does the “Aboriginal art” these stores sell come from?

That’s one question that Daniel Burdon asked in a front-page expose in the Alice Springs twice-weekly newspaper, the Centralian Advocate on December 24, 2009.

One local retailer told Burdon that he regularly received emails from south-east Asian suppliers offering bulk quantities of “authentic Aboriginal art” at prices several orders of magnitude cheaper than any local manufacturer could ever realistically charge. Another told him that she had seen villages in Indonesia with factories dedicated to producing fake Aboriginal artworks.

And a quick internet search reveals that there is no shortage of websites, some based in Australia, others well offshore, offering bulk quantities of a bewildering range of tacky crap being passed off as “authentic Aboriginal art”.

But maybe the last word on what “fake”, “authentic” and “genuine” all mean in the context of the tourist and souvenir trade in “Aboriginal art” should be left to ADC’s Tony Athaniou.

In July 2009, just after the ACCC initiated the proceedings that led to Justice Mansfield’s judgement that so roundly condemned his business practices, Athaniou told Yuko Narushima and Joel Gibson of The Age that:

The thing is there’s various interpretations of authentic. Authentic to me means that it is hand-painted.

Ubanoo is not a real name, it’s a pseudonym for the artist to paint that style. The fake or misleading advertising I’ve been doing is for an artist who doesn’t even exist.

More than a few retailers and wholesalers — in Alice Springs and beyond — will have been having a very close look at their stock-in-hand and future orders.

Hopefully they won’t be using Athaniou’s guide to the meanings of “authentic”, “fake” or “misleading” as a guide to the provenance of their stock.