ABSTRACT
The Olympics are coming, the Olympics are coming! And Sydney prepares: the Olympic site of Homebush is bustling, main streets downtown are getting fixed up, and parks are being replanted. Enter the Sydney 2000 Olympics: vast, expensive, exciting and attention-grabbing, the Sydney Games are going to be a major marketer and exporter—maybe even creator—of Australian culture over the next several years. It is important to remember, however, that whatever the intent might be when non-Indigenous people use Aboriginality to promote a product (including Australia) and/or what they perceive to be the nation's interests, the actual consequences for Indigenous people might be something else altogether. Many forms of social behaviour and expression fall into anthropological definitions of performance, but in this chapter the author would like to take a very literal interpretation of performance and briefly discuss Aboriginal participation in the performing arts.
