Aboriginal Culture, Heritage
& Arts Association of NSW

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property rights are fundamental to First Nations peoples’ ability to maintain, control and protect their cultural heritage, knowledge, and artistic and cultural expressions.

ACHAA has partnered with member Boomalli Aboriginal Artist’s Co-Operative as a pilot program to develop a greeting card collection that respects Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) practice, supports a selection of NSW Aboriginal artists and our member centres, and seeks to build awareness of ICIP principles and protocols across the wider community.

Putting ICIP into practice

With strategic funding from the Federal Government’s Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support (IVAIS) program, the project ACHAA devised seeks to:

• Create practical interactions between member centres and artists around ICIP protocols
• Ensure engaged artists and the centres representing them as brokers received clear agreement documents and appropriate reproduction licensing fees
• Build awareness more generally about ICIP principles through including a QR code on the back of each card linked to a discreet ACHAA website page with ICIP information
• Promote the work of NSW Aboriginal artists by making the cards available for sale at the Host Centre and on its website as well as ACHAA’s.

By choosing greeting cards, the project creates multiple opportunities for conversations about respectful cultural engagement to continue as each card is shared.

Supporting artists, centres and communities

We are thrilled to have four incredible artists selected in conjunction with Boomalli to launch this project in James P. Simon (Wiradjuri and Biripi), Jeffrey Samuels (Ngiyampaa), Deborah Taylor (Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung), and Nola Taylor (Ngiyampaa and Wiradjuri).

Boomalli was a natural choice as partner for the first iteration of this project, as an ICIP champion with extensive reproduction licensing experience on behalf of their artists. Their talented and knowledgeable team provided invaluable feedback as we developed an overarching Memorandum of Understanding and a third-party licensing agreement with them plus an ICIP checklist for the artists’ approval.

Subsequent centres engaged in the project also receive an agent’s fee for their negotiations with artists and administration involving the agreements including adapted templates from Arts Law Centre of Australia.

Building on ACHAA’s ICIP work

The greeting card initiative builds on ACHAA’s broader commitment to ICIP education. In 2024, ACHAA delivered one of our bi-annual member conferences and cultural gatherings that brings together our member network artists, knowledge holders, and arts and cultural workers, this time with a distinct focus on ICIP at the Art Gallery of NSW. By unpacking ICIP principles and protocols through real-world examples it laid the groundwork for organisations to better apply ICIP principles and protocols in members’ own contexts.

The greeting card project continues that conversation by demonstrating practical applications of those principles. It reflects ACHAA’s commitment to supporting its members to move beyond theory and implement respectful ICIP practices that benefit artists, cultural organisations and audiences alike.

This launch is only the beginning for this project, with further iterations of artworks coming soon from other centres.

Available now

The greeting cards are available for purchase as single cards and in multipacks packs of four through the ACHAA website here. You can also find them at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative’s gallery in Leichhardt. Future collections will be released through ACHAA member centres and online.

ACHAA gratefully acknowledges the Federal Government’s Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support (IVAIS) program for its support of this project.