Links Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
29 July – 25 September 2011
Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw is a collaborative
exhibition by visual artists Margaret Woodwardand Justy Phillips.
Associate Professor Margaret Woodward is Head of
School of Communication and Creative Industries,
Charles Sturt University. Justy Phillips is an AdjunctLecturer in the School of Communication and Creative
Industries, Charles Sturt University and is currently
undertaking a PhD (Creative Media) at RMIT, Melbourne.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw is generously supported byWagga Wagga Art Gallery and the Faculty of Arts, Charles
Sturt University. The artists would like to acknowledge
the production assistance of Lily van Heeckeren;
Precision Signs, Wagga Wagga; Focal Printing, Hobart;
AAA Logos, Brisbane; Gecko, Wagga Wagga andLogoMePrint, Newcastle.

2Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW< Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw (Sturt’s), 2011

The Romance of Nomenclature, 2011 (detail) >15

THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE
Margaret Woodward
I have long harboured a fascination for souvenirs,
pestering my parents to buy me cloth badges and rulers
on family holidays. This fixation was transferred to mygrowing collection of snow domes boosted by friends andfamily returning from visits overseas. And while these
items were often regarded as tacky or kitsch by my family,
the passion for them did not diminish. Much later, I foundmyself analysing souvenirs and tourist ephemera as an
aspect of my PhD research into the communication ofnatural and cultural heritage through design.
This exhibition, Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw employssouvenir tea towels as the foundation to make a bodyof creative work which tests ideas relating to place,tourism and national identity. The work highlights therole of codes, symbols and icons that develop into whatsociologist, Dean MacCannell calls ‘tourist markers’1 andquestions their contribution to ideas of place, national
identity and the tourist experience, inviting audiences
to look beyond the surface to a deeper, more complex
understanding of where we live.
45
Dining room traveller, 2011 (detail) >WHERE IS IT?
Works in this exhibition combine to create a fictitious
place called ‘Aggaw Aggaw’— what Roland Barthes
would call a ‘fictive nation’2 — a place with an inventedname made up of tourist sights and sites, slogans andimages. Barthes contends that tourists focus on ‘flashes’,
that is topics, sites and activities of significance, rather
than attempting to offer a coherent picture of the place
they are visiting3. Likewise this exhibition offers ‘flashes’of a constructed destination; an island with a souvenir
kiosk, a living room cabinet atop a castaway’s raft, asuite of dining chairs that become pedestals for holiday
trophies and a set of enamel mugs that reflect European
interpretations of indigenous places.

8This exhibition culminates in the installation of a project
which has been exhibited a number of times since 2009,each time occupying a larger footprint and growing inscale. The work was inspired by a Hobart City Council
marketing campaign to brand the city in the newmillennium, with the marketing slogan ‘The way life
should be’. This campaign hinged on promoting Hobart
for its lifestyle rather than through previous familiar
themes of wilderness, treasure islands and convict
heritage. The idea that life should be different, and this< Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw, 2011

The Romance of Nomenclature, 2011 >could be found in Hobart, resembled the way souvenirs
depict a romanticised, idealised view of a place throughthe coded language of stereotypes.
Through the lens of tourism, Greetings from Aggaw
Aggaw invites the viewer to reconsider the way life
actually is. The project seeks to challenge the universallypromoted, nostalgic vision of place as depicted in thetea towels, and proposes that life in Australia is a multilayered, situated experience, whose cultural geography
also includes local stories, indigenous heritage andmemories. While city councils, tourism boards and clevermarketing may want to airbrush and ‘brand’ the local
away, it’s impossible to distil only the palatable essenceof a place without indeed taking in the whole view. The
fictive world of Aggaw Aggaw is a mash up, created from
artefacts which celebrate destination — a familiar yet
twisted world of memory — ‘flashes’ of experience anddesire. Here 1970’s domestic kitsch meets desert island
fantasy, framed by memories of summer, sea and sun
from inland Australia. Well known icons are fragmentedand sit together with lesser known places, combining
Sydney and the bush, city and country, holiday and work,
industry with domesticity.
10The Romance of Nomenclature, 2011 (detail) >The Romance of Nomenclature, 2011 (detail) >ARE WE THERE YET?
Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw...you’ve arrived!
This is a constructed postmodern fictional destination.
It’s superficial, a re-skinned island where the armchair
traveller can rest their feet on comfortable surfacesthat speak the familiar language of place marketing,the code of the tourist sign forever trapped in souvenirs.
The code speaks to us in slogans, shorthand for the places
we’ve been and ‘the way they should be’ — ‘The Pearlof the North’, ‘Gem of the South’, ‘Goldrush Country’,‘Silver City’, ‘Apple Isle’ and ‘The Golden Mile’. Dig deeperand look closer, the ‘map’ of Australia created in Aggaw
Aggaw is not all beach, sun and surf. Celebrated here arealso bauxite mines and town halls, engineering marvelsof railways and dams, wind and cane farms, shearing andgambling. The world of tea towels, from the 60s and 70s
depicts a predominantly European settler map, noticeably
absent are indigenous names and culture apart fromclichéd, outdated stereotypes such as the ‘noble savage’4
watching a train crossing the desert…‘Greetings from PortHedland, Western Australia’.

YOU’VEARRIVED
Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw

This is a souvenir postcard by Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward published with Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Australia, 2011.
Limited edition of 500. Image: (detail) taken from a vintage souvenir tea towel ‘Emus Australia’, designed in Australia by Souvenirs Australia.
Slogan originally sourced form the Austrian National Tourist Office http://www.austriatourism.com

12YOU’VE ARRIVED, 2011 (postcard, front and back) >I WANT A SOUVENIR
Souvenirs, along with posters and brochures belong
to the category of designed artefacts known as tourist
ephemera, generated by the travel and tourism industry
to promote and sell Australia as a destination for migrants
and holiday makers. During the 1950s—60s the work ofprominent Australian modernist designers Percy Trompf,
Gert Selheim and Douglas Annand featured in travel
poster design. The humble tea towel, however, renders
anonymous the designers behind the brand name ofsouvenir companies — the most well known of the1960s and 70s being Souvenirs Australia, Neil, Lamont,Rodriguez and Summit Souvenir. Souvenirs Australia,
a premier souvenir company in the sixties which still
operates today, had a fleet of caravans as mobile
showrooms that traversed the country selling souvenirs.
These were later replaced with trucks when five caravans
were ‘rolled’ in one year5.

14

The tea towels also use what Denise Whitehouse calls
the key trope of the ‘panoramic narrative to construct
an all-encompassing vision of an instantly recognizable
and reassuringly familiar Australia’6. Meanings andassociations that cluster around particular places reveal
what Jay Arthur refers to as ‘word maps’ of European
Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw, 2011 (detail) >Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw, 2011 (detail) >13

settler culture expressed in place names, slogans andnomenclature7. Books on meanings of place names,such as the one presented in the exhibition, subtitled‘The Romance of Nomenclature’ revealed European
interpretations of indigenous place names and theirmeanings, some of which, such as Wagga Wagga,
have endured.
Individual symbols comprise shorthand for meanings
associated with place, such as the Sturt’s Desert Pea
flower which symbolises the delineation between coastal
and inland landscapes, along with the associated humanqualities of resilience, flourishing in harsh environments.
Visually the Sturt’s Desert Pea is used widely by many tea
towel designers as a striking decorative and repeat motif.
Research into the project has taken place in local andnational collections and private homes. The National
Library of Australia, and the Tasmaniana Library holdlarge collections of tourist ephemera and provided
information about place names from slogans, jingles andtourism marketing campaigns. Tea towels were found inopportunity shops, garage sales, friends and relative’shall cupboards and most recently the highly competitive
world of eBay.
1615WAAAF Adelaide, 1983, linen tea towel by Souvenirs Australia, ITEM 4124 (detail) >WHEN ARE WE GOING HOME?
These artefacts are widely travelled. Linen, the raw
material in most of these collected tea towels comes fromthe northern hemisphere countries of Poland, Ireland, andCzechoslovakia. Design and production took place largely
in Australia, with customisation for individual towns
and places. Mobile shops and a network of travelling
merchandisers, saw them distributed to their finaldestinations. Purchasing, collecting and gift-giving alongwith associated memories and stories continues the cycleof travelling for souvenirs as they are taken home andsent abroad, and finally this exhibition has drawn themto the destination of Aggaw Aggaw.
The project has generated a range of limited edition
souvenir wares which have been released for sale aspart of the exhibition. For ‘tourists’ to Aggaw Aggaw,
just as bower birds to the linen cupboard, a newgeneration of contemporary souvenir wares await
liberation, as the restless pattern of travel, settlingand memories continues.
© 201118

Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw, 2011 (detail) >Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw, 2011 (detail) >19

NOTES

20

1

MacCannell, D. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theoryof the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken.

2Barthes, R. 1982 Empire of Signs. New York:
Hill and Wang, p3.

3Berger, A. 2011. Tourism as a postmodern
semiotic activity. Semiotica 183, 105-119.

4A term first coined by John Dryden in
The Conquest of Granada, (1672).

5

History of Souvenirs Australia Pty. Ltd.
http://www.souvenirsaustralia.com.au/history.php

6Whitehouse, D. 2007. This is Australia: The
panoramic narrative, graphic design andspatial consciousness. In Extroverts andExhibitionists: typotastic 3, 52-56. Hobart:
University of Tasmania. p 52.

7Arthur, J. 2003. The Default Country: A lexical
cartography of twentieth-century Australia.
Sydney: UNSW Press.

Dining room traveller, 2011 >All at sea, 2010 (detail) >21

LIST OF WORKS

LIMITED EDITION SOUVENIRS

All at sea, 2010
Linen, cotton, featherDimensions variable

The Romance of Nomenclature (Box set), 2011
9 x printed enamel mugs, vintage tea towel
400mm x 300mm x 105mm
Edition / 5

BATS FLYING AT NIGHT, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw (Sturt’s), 2011
Embroidered cotton badge
85mm x 85mm
Edition / 10

MUCH SPOILED, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw (cockatoo), 2011
Embroidered cloth badge
85mm x 85mm
Edition / 10

HILL OF BLACK STONES, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

Greetings from Aggaw Aggaw (crow), 2011
Embroidered cotton badge
85mm x 85mm
Edition / 10

MOTHER’S MILK, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

the way life should be, 2011
Engraved carpenter’s pencil
175mm x 12mm x 4mm
Edition / 50

PATIENCE, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

YOU’VE ARRIVED, 2011
Printed postcard
148.5mm x 105mm
Edition / 500

SISTER, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

SPRING, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

GHOST WATER HOLE, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 5

Dining room traveller, 2011
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
The Romance of Nomenclature, 2011
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Welcome to Aggaw Aggaw, 2011
Mixed media
Dimensions variable

22 All images and text reproduced in this publication are copyright of the artists © 2011.

AGGAW AGGAW, 2011
Printed enamel mug
90mm x 100mm
Edition / 523
The Romance of Nomenclature, 2011 (detail) >