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Part I
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1 Democratising the photographic archive
Jane Lydon
I gasped aloud when I heard this. I have been researching my family history for the last few years, and I knew that Mary Ann Cowan was my Great-Great Grand-Aunt. This exciting news had such a profound effect on me. It is as though this lovely photograph taken last century has spiritually reached through time and altered my perception of her today. She has now magically transformed from being an abstract entity . . . a name on her marriage and death certificates, into a real life, flesh and blood, beautiful young woman.
Shauna Bostock-Smith
Introduction
As Shauna Bostock-Smithâs account of discovering her Great-Great Grand-Auntâs photo through a television documentary suggests, photographs of Australian Aboriginal people are powerful objects. Produced from the 1840s, when the camera first arrived in the continentâs nascent white settlements, such images are now invested with new meanings, becoming a rich resource for Indigenous families, history-telling and culture. Following the invention of photography in 1839, the new medium was quickly disseminated around the globe, capturing new sights and peoples for domestic European audiences. The intersection of imperialism, science and popular curiosity generated a vast body of imagery of Indigenous peoples now held within the archive. This chapter considers debates about colonialism and the archive through the lens of particular Australian Aboriginal photographic archives, assessing them both as an instrument of past power inequalities but also asking whether such archives might nevertheless be âdemocratizedâ in the present. I first review the production and circulation of such images, beginning during the nineteenth century, before turning to their more recent transformations at the hands of Aboriginal people. I trace changing ways of seeing these images â from the scientific and popular frameworks of the nineteenth century, through shifts in ideas about Aboriginal people starting in the 1930s and 1940s, through to present-day uses of these archival images by Indigenous people themselves. I examine the Indigenous significance of historical photographs as revealed through research with relatives and descendants of the imagesâ subjects, and the very different uses to which they are put in the present.
Historical production and circulation
The history of photographing Indigenous Australians reflects the intersection of developing photographic technologies with the visibility of Indigenous people within the historically specific circumstances of each former colony, beginning with the establishment of Sydney on the traditional country of the Eora people in 1788. After photography was invented in 1839, practitioners quickly carried the new medium around the globe, recording sights of interest for European audiences. The first Australian experiment â a daguerreotype of Macquarie Street in Sydney made in April 1841 â was due to this sort of entrepreneurship, produced by Captain Augustin Lucas under the sponsorship of the influential Paris-based la SociĂ©tĂ© dâ Encouragement pour lâIndustrie Nationale.1 This speculative beginning was quickly followed by the arrival of photographers catering to curiosity about foreign sights and peoples, as well as local desires for domestic portraits. Photos of Australian Aboriginal people had commercial value. They had been the subject of Western theories since first contact, with some observers arguing that they represented an earlier stage of humankindâs development.2 Following the publication of Charles Darwinâs (1859) The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, evolutionism quickly became scientific orthodoxy and such ideas only strengthened. Applied to humans, the social evolutionist paradigm was used to rationalise the ill effects of invasion and dispossession upon Indigenous people. The general public took a great interest in these theories and debates during the nineteenth century, and the market for images of Indigenous people included a large general audience.
As a result of the growing belief that the Aboriginal race was doomed to extinction, photographers sought to record what was believed to be a disappearing way of life. They followed the âfrontierâ, seeking to find Aboriginal people apparently untouched by change â seemingly âprimitiveâ, âauthenticâ subjects, stripped of signs of European civilisation, such as clothing. As colonisation spread, such people were harder to find, or paradoxically required greater intervention to appear untouched. During the 1840s photographs in the form of daguerreotypes showed Indigenous people posed in studios, as required by contemporary technology. Some appeared in traditional dress, but a few, such as portraits of Tatiara woman Jemima, nanny to Adelaideâs Mortlock family, produced around 1855â60, show her in neat and respectable European dress as a valued servant (Figure 1.1). A recently re-discovered South Australian series shows prominent members of the community at Poonindie mission during the 1850s, well-dressed and posed with signs of civilisation.3 These are tantalising glimpses of the early years of encounter and accommodation.
During the 1850s the invention of the wet-plate collodion process allowed photographers to move from the studio out of doors, and some of the first photographs of Indigenous people away from the settlements were produced, such as William Stanley Jevonsâ 1859 group view on the Braidwood goldfields, the first images of New South Wales Aboriginal people.4 These relatively early series show the colonyâs Indigenous people still living on traditional country, and adjusting to white incursion. With the emergence of the cheap, palm-sized carte de visite in the mid-1850s, portraiture became an international craze, and permitted collectors to obtain examples, or âtypesâ, of different peoples from around the world. Images of Indigenous Australians, emphasising traditional life and material culture, found their way into scientific collections across the globe. Segregated places such as missions sometimes became sites of cultural encounter and image-making â such as in Victoria, where Coranderrk, near Melbourne, generated thousands of photographs.
Figure 1.1 Jemima, Ambrotype, c. 1855. Ayers House Collection, Adelaide, catalogue 4a, accession 0787.
From the 1870s onwards, evolutionist notions of Aboriginality began to predominate, as Darwinism became dogma. These were challenged only from the 1920s, when distance from the frontier conditions of the north enabled an urban audience to be shocked by revelations of ill-treatment conveyed by new visual media. Indigenous activists themselves began to campaign for reform, and
Figure 1.2 Day of Mourning and Protest 1938. Source âCurrent Camera History: Australiaâ, Man, March 1938, pp 84â5. Moral/cultural permission courtesy of June Barker and Suzanne Ingram.
deplored the power of racist media representations: in 1938 at the first Day of Mourning and Protest, campaigners Jack Patten and Bill Ferguson demanded equal citizenship and criticised how âthe Popular Press of Australia makes a joke of us by presenting silly and out-of-date drawings and jokes of âJackyâ or âBinghiâ, which have educated city-dwellers and young Australians to look upon us as subhumanâ (Figure 1.2).5 Activists took up photography as a form of witness to past injustice and as the basis of demands for rights in the present.6
Following World War II, official attempts to promote assimilation relied heavily on visual propaganda, showing âmodelâ settlements that were being constructed, and âsuccess storiesâ profiling individual Aboriginal people who had made it in mainstream society. However, such narratives clashed with graphic and sometimes shocking documentary imagery deployed in the service of housing and welfare reform, seeking to show the violation of Aboriginal peopleâs rights as citizens. Such photographs helped to prompt reform, but it was not until the 1970s when the movement for Indigenous rights gained momentum that photographers made the activism of these years publicly visible. Indigenous and non-Indigenous photographers now seized upon the medium as a means to express an explicitly Indigenous perspective; their political project was frequently driven by an intense desire to counter degrading historical imagery.7
During the early 1980s, a self-consciously Indigenous photography movement began to emerge and represent Aboriginal culture, identity and political claims from an explicitly Aboriginal perspective. A range of mostly young, mostly art-school-graduate Aboriginal photographers established public profiles, including now-famous artists Tracey Moffatt, Brenda L. Croft and Michael Riley. The Bicentennial year was a particularly important landmark that focused attention on the nationâs unresolved past and Indigenous photographers, for example Peter McKenzieâs image of a protest at La Perouse against the First Fleet reenactment of January 1788 (Figure 1.3). These oppositional projects took issue with the celebration of the Bicentennial, rejecting the triumphalist tone of most commemoration.
From this time Indigenous people realised that the visual archive offered evidence for their historical experience, and might be framed by Indigenous narratives in order to counter colonial, documentary, history. In particular, the legal need to demonstrate prior occupation and a continuous history underlay the recognition of rights to land, and so photography was drawn upon as a means of demonstrating this history factually and clearly, in a language accessible to all. One landmark was the Bicentennial After 200 Years project, coordinated by Penny Taylor and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which brought together 21 photographers (of whom eight were Indigenous) who visited 19 communities to document the diversity of Indigenous life in Australia. It sought to transcend the binary stereotypes of ânoble savageâ versus âfringe-dwellerâ by revealing the diversity of everyday lives and âsome of the positive things that were going onâ.8 Three decades later, photography has become a powerful medium for Aboriginal artists and photographers, as well as a valued aspect of everyday life across Aboriginal Australia.
Figure 1.3 Peter Yanada McKenzie, âLa Perouse demo protest against First Fleet reenactment Jan 1988â. Courtesy of Peter McKenzie and Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Interpretation: from surveillance to heritage resource
Since the 1970s, when ideas of Indigenous rights shaped public debate, and intellectual approaches under the banner of postmodernism attended to issues of power and knowledge, historians of photography have tended to emphasise the mediumâs role in exploiting and distancing its Indigenous subjects. This interpretive tradition has emphasised photographyâs tendency to distance its subjects, seeming to show another world and its inhabitants as if far away and inherently other. These interpretations emerged in conjunction with post-structuralist critiques of modernism that emphasised the entanglement of knowledge, vision and power: for example, in 1988 John Tagg influentially drew upon Foucaultian notions of surveillance and control in arguing that the social and political context in which the image is embedded organises the viewerâs experience and gives the image its meaning. Rather than being a transparent window into the world, or a self-evident slice of reality, Tagg argued that the image is itself an ideological construct, producing an all-seeing spectator and effacing the means of its production. By attending to questions such as who has possessed the means to represent and who has been represented, and who has controlled the circulation and meanings of imagery, this approach has revealed that photography has been profoundly implicated in structural inequalities of race, class and gender.9
This interpretive tradition also shaped studies and exhibitions of colonial Australian photography throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as quite correctly, historians of photography showed how ideas of primitivism structured the ways that photos of Aboriginal people were circulated and viewed in Australia and around the world during the nineteenth century.10 Ideas that Aboriginal people were âhumanityâs childhoodâ were prevalent, and photography often argued for their status as living remnants of Stone-Age man, doomed to give way before Western civilisation. The urge to photograph Australian Aboriginal people cannot be dissociated from European imperialism, with its desire to record difference and know the other. A range of studies examine the specific circumstances of the photography of Indigenous peoples, tracing the international circulation of imagery in a âvisual economyâ comprising scientific and popular discourses of difference, nation and modernity.11
However, in arguing that subaltern groups âwere represented as, and wishfully rendered, incapable of speaking, acting or organising for themselvesâ, John Tagg articulates a view of photographic meaning as wholly determined by shared and incontrovertible norms; discursive conventions are reduced to a rhetoric âof precision, measurement, calculation and proof, separating out its objects of knowledge, shunning emotional appeal and dramatisation, and hanging its status on technical rules and protocols whose institutionalisation had to be negotiatedâ.12 In such readings, the power relations inherent in colonialism have already decided the truth of these...
