Australian attraction retail sells a large volume of Aboriginal-style design, and a meaningful share of it is not made by Aboriginal artists. Visitors increasingly know to ask who made the design and whether the artist agreed to it being used.
Errors here outlast the range that carried them, so the terms covering the artwork are worth settling at the start of a project, in writing, before development begins. The four elements below cover most of what a park, a zoo or a travel retailer needs in place.
Credit, licence, payment and story
- The artist is named on the product itself, not only in a press release
- The work is licensed with the artist's agreement, for a defined use and a defined term
- The artist is paid a fee, a royalty, or both, agreed in writing before production starts
- The story attached to the work is the artist's own, told in the way the artist wants it told
None of that is onerous, and a commercial illustrator would expect the same terms on any other licensed design. Treating Indigenous artwork as a special case, harder to arrange or vaguer in its terms than other artwork, is itself part of the problem. The documents are a licence that sets out use and term, and a written agreement covering the fee or the royalty.
The Indigenous Art Code
The Code sets standards for fair and ethical trade in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Membership is a reasonable thing to ask an artist or a supplier about at the start of a project. It is also a reasonable thing for a park to be able to point to when a visitor asks who made the work.
Lewis Burns
Lewis Burns is a Tubba-Gah Wiradjuri man, born and based in Dubbo, New South Wales, and a member of the Indigenous Art Code. He works with us on Indigenous artwork for retail merchandise, on the terms set out above.
This is the only version of the arrangement a conservation-facing or education-facing attraction can stand behind when a visitor asks who made the design. It costs more than buying a generic pattern from a design library, and the licence, the credit and the fee are all agreed in writing before production starts.