‘The Nation is Coming to Life’: Law, Sovereignty, and Belonging in Ngarrindjeri Photography of the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

From the moment small consumer cameras became available in Australia in the early twentieth century, Ngarrindjeri people embraced photography as a means to record their history, and represent their families, aesthetic traditions, and worldviews against the perilous times of attempted assimilation by the state, including the rampant forced removal of Aboriginal children that came to be known as the Stolen Generations. In analysing a collection of rare historical photographs from this period, taken by Ngarrindjeri photographers and retained in Ngarrindjeri families, we bring the perspectives of contemporary Ngarrindjeri Elders to bear. Significantly, the photographs can be observed to operate both as a rich counter archive to colonial representation and settler memory, and as esteemed cultural objects capable of drawing the weight of the ancestral past into the present moment, thereby tangibly enlivening cultural and spiritual connections generationally today. Our exploration in this article provides new theoretical perspectives and fresh historical insight into the ways in which photography has been substantially deployed by an Australian Aboriginal nation as a subtle and potent tool to assert self-determination, document survivance, and enact visual sovereignty.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal photography
• Indigenous family photography
• colonialism
• survivance
• visual sovereignty
• Ngarrindjeri
• Albert Karloan (1864–1943)
• Charlotte Richards (ca. 1930–87)
• Point McLeay Mission Station (1859–74)
• Poonindie Mission (1842–90)
• Stolen Generations
• Aboriginal fringe camps
• counter archive
• mobility
• history and memory
• deep time
• decolonising methodologies
• Indigenous military service
• Aboriginal Second World War brides

Notes

1 Camp Coorong was established in 1986 through vital access to land via the Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966 (South Australia), founded by Ellen Trevorrow with her husband Tom, the late Ngarrindjeri leader, and his brother, the late George Trevorrow. See Bindi MacGill, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Debra Rankine, ‘Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong’, M/C Journal, 15:3 (June 2012), 1.

2 Gerald Vizenor, ‘Aesthetics of Survivance’, in Survivance Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2008, 11. Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor first coined the term ‘survivance’ in its present usage. See Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1999.

3 Jolene Rickard, ‘Indigenous and Iroquoian Art as Knowledge: In the Shadow of the Eagle’, PhD thesis, Buffalo: State University of New York 1996, v. See also Jolene Rickard, ‘Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand’, Aperture, 139 (Summer 1995), 50–59; and Jolene Rickard, ‘Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 110:2 (Spring 2011), 465–86. Also useful to this thinking is Faye Ginsburg’s earlier insightful work on embedded aesthetics – a term she invokes to ‘draw attention to a system of evaluation that refuses a separation of textual production and circulation from broader arenas of social relation’. Faye Ginsburg, ‘Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media’, Cultural Anthropology, 9:3 (August 1994), 368.

4 Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005; Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies, ed. Jane Lydon, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 2014; and Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire, London: Bloomsbury 2016. This view is shared by Michael Aird, Portraits of our Elders, South Brisbane: Queensland Museum 1993.

5 Exceptions include recent work on the Kiowa Apache photographer Horace Poolaw, along with work on Charlotte Richards by Karen Hughes and Ellen Trevorrow, ‘“It’s that Reflection”: Ngarrrindjeri Photography as Recuperative Practice’, in Calling the Shots, ed. Lydon, 175–204; the groundbreaking work on Métis photographers in Canada by Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon: Aboriginal Photography as Resistance’, in The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada, ed. Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011, 70–92, and elsewhere in this special issue; and Alison Brown and Laura Peers, Pictures Bring Us Messages: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006.

6 The South Australian colony was officially established in 1836 as the fifth British Australian colony. In 1934, the Letters Patent drafted by the Colonial Office was meant to ensure that Aboriginal people would not be dispossessed of their lands, but long before this, unofficial, illegal foreign sealing and whaling saw disruptions to Ngarrindjeri society. For a deeper understanding of Ngarrindjeri society and history see Diane Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World that Is, Was, and Will Be, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Spinifex Press 2014.

7 Tom Trevorrow, presentation to Alexandrina Council, Goolwa, South Australia, September 2009.

8 This has been similarly noted on missions in Victoria. See Lydon, Eye Contact.

9 Frederick Taplin to Samuel Sweet, 31 August 1880, ‘Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, letter book, Point McLeay, 1879–1884’, South Australian Museum Archives, AA 676/1/2.

10 Racette, ‘Returning Fire’, 70.

11 See, for example, Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell’s photography of survivors on missions and reserves in 1938–39, South Australian Museum Archives; and the tellingly titled book by Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt, From Black to White in South Australia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951. Over this period, Aboriginal people’s civil rights diminished, following Australia’s Federation in 1901.

12 For a comparison with Shinnecock in the USA, see Karen Hughes and Cholena Smith, ‘Un-filtering the Settler Colonial Archive: Indigenous Community-Based Photographers in Australia and the United States – Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock Perspectives’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1 (2018), 2–18; see also Lydon, Eye Contact; Christopher Pinney, ‘The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography’, in Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1992, 74–95; Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Anthropology and Photography: A Long History of Knowledge and Affect’, Photographies, 8:3 (2015), 235–52; and Jane Lydon, ‘Transmuting Australian Aboriginal Photographs’, World Art, 6:1 (2016), 45–60. See also Sabra G. Thorner, ‘Inside the Frame, Outside the Box: Bindi Cole’s Photographic Practice and Production of Aboriginality in Contemporary Australia’, Visual Anthropology Review, 31:2 (Fall 2015), 163–76, for an analysis of pervasive assumptions equating Aboriginality with skin colour.

13 For greater understanding of the breadth and significance of Albert Karloan’s cultural knowledge see also Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt, A World that Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press 1993; and for more on the context of his venture see Karen Hughes, ‘Stories My Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego-Histoire’, in Ngapartji Ngapartji, ed. Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Oliver Haag, and Karen Hughes, Canberra: ANU Press 2014, 73–91; and Catherine Berndt, ‘Karloan, Albert (1864–1943)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Canberra: Australian National University 1996.

14 Albert Karloan to the Protector of Aborigines, 15 March 1916, State Archives of South Australia, Adelaide, GRG 52/1/1916/34.

15 Notably, Karloan’s venture, had it been supported, would have predated Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, ostensibly considered the world’s first documentary.

16 There is a wide body of scholarship on the historiography of Indigenous peoples and colonial photography that explores its imbrication in the subjugation and categorisation of Indigenous people. See, in particular, Pinney, ‘Parallel Histories’; Racette, ‘Returning Fire’; and Hughes and Smith, ‘Un-filtering the Settler Colonial Archive’.

17 See Christobel Mattingley, Survival in Our Own Land: Aboriginal Experiences in South Australia since 1836, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 1998, 155.

18 Polly Sumner, personal communication, 19 November 2016.

19 Karen Hughes and Whitney Long, interview with Donald Roberts, 6 July 2015; and Walter Richards, personal communication, 14 August 2013. For more on fringe camps see Hughes and Trevorrow, ‘“It’s that Reflection”’, 190–99.

20 See Calling the Shots, ed. Lydon, for a range of perspectives on this. In particular, on helping members of the Stolen Generations and other Ngarrindjeri who have been dissociated from their communities to piece together shattered histories, see Hughes and Trevorrow, ‘“It’s that Reflection”’; and Hughes and Smith, ‘Un-filtering the Settler Colonial Archive’.

21 Comments from Alice Abdulla, the day after the meeting.

22 Note that Country is spelt in the Aboriginal English way to mean an animate and nourishing terrain imbued with sacred significance. See, for example, Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission 1996.

23 The Wirungu people are the traditional owners of part of the west coast of South Australia; their lands and waters include western Eyre Peninsula and the eastern Great Australian Bight.

24 For more on Poonindie and the role of photography, see Jane Lydon and Sari Braithwaite, ‘Photographing “the Nucleus of the Native Church” at Poonindie Mission, South Australia’, Photography and Culture, 8:1 (2015), 37–57.

25 See Karen Hughes, ‘“I’d Grown Up as a Child Amongst Natives”: Ruth Heathcock (1901–1995), Disrupting Settler-Colonial Orthodoxy through Friendship and Cross-Cultural Literacy in Creolised Spaces of the Australian Contact Zone’, Outskirts, 28 (May 2013), available at http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes (accessed 10 August 2018).

26 For a fascinating insight into the popularity of studio portraiture among Aboriginal people in south-eastern Queensland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Michael Aird, Portraits of Our Elders, Queensland: Keaira Press 1993; and Michael Aird, ‘Aboriginal People and Four Early Brisbane Photographers’, in Calling the Shots, ed. Lydon, 133–56.

27 For an understanding of the public face of pre-war Australian masculinity see, for example, Russell Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1958. Nicholas Peterson provides a parallel analysis as to the selective absence of the father in photographs of Aboriginal families taken by non-Indigenous photographers at the turn of the twentieth century: Nicholas Peterson, ‘Early 20th Century Photography of Australian Aboriginal Families: Illustration or Evidence?’, Visual Anthropology Review, 21:1–2 (March 2005), 11–26.

28 See Karen Hughes, ‘Mobilising Across Colour Lines, Intimate Encounters between Indigenous Australian Women and American Servicemen on the World War 2 Homefront’, Aboriginal History, 41 (2017), 47–70.

29 This forbade Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to mix freely together.

30 Via a further 1939 Amendment to the Aboriginal Act, the South Australian government introduced exemption certificates in 1943, exempting certain Aboriginal people from restrictive legislation and entitling them to move freely and work amongst non-Aboriginal Australians, but prohibiting them from consorting with others who were not exempt, thus causing many problems. The Aboriginal war brides who immigrated to the USA from South Australia and other states either held exemption certificates or were able to provide evidence of mainly white ancestry.

31 Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Regulating Koori Marriages: The 1886 Victorian Aborigines Protection Act’, Journal of Australian Studies, 25:67 (2001), 22–29.

32 See Hughes, ‘“I’d Grown Up as a Child Amongst Natives”’, n.p.; and Hughes and Trevorrow, ‘“It’s that Reflection”’.

33 Katherine Susannah Pritchard’s 1941 novel Haxby’s Circus provides an understanding of the life of travelling circuses at this time. For a darker look at the abuse of a Queensland Aboriginal family performing in the USA, see Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2004.

34 Lyn Lovegrove-Niemz, personal communication, 21 October 2016.

35 Mugshots were portraits taken for identification purposes commonly displayed on government-issued exemption cards (referred as dog-tags by the community) that Aboriginal people, unlike their non-Aboriginal counterparts, were required to carry to be able to obtain employment and live off the missions and reserves and move about with relative freedom. A similar style of portraiture was deployed for the well-known visual identification data collected by anthropologists Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell in the 1930s to survey and classify Aboriginal peoples nationally.

36 On coercive images see Christopher Pinney, ‘Other Peoples’ Bodies, Lives, Histories? Ethical Issues in the Use of a Photographic Archive’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 1 (March 1989), 57–69; for an understanding of the political uses of glamour see Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism, London: Zed Books 2010.

37 Muriel Van Der Byl, personal communication, 16 October 2016.

38 See Henry Louis Gates, Jnr, ‘Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura’, Aperture: Vision and Justice, 223 (Summer 2016), 26–29, for an understanding of the way Douglass used photography and self-presentation as part of a multipronged effort to engage the American public in the struggle to end slavery.

39 Alice Abdulla, personal communication, 20 October 2016 (emphasis in original).

40 See Karen Hughes, ‘Arnhem Land to Adelaide: Deep Histories in Aboriginal Women’s Storytelling and Historical Practice, “Irruptions of Dreaming” Across Contemporary Australia’, in Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place, ed. Ann McGrath and Mary-Anne Jebb, Canberra: ANU Press 2015, 83–100.

41 Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Sydney: Australian Human Rights Commission 1997.

42 Henry Reynolds, Nowhere People, Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin 2005.

43 As in Canada and the USA, Australian Aboriginal people were subject to large-scale assimilation attempts that took many legislative and coercive forms.

44 Fringe camps were spaces of activism and resistance as well as spaces that celebrate culture. When the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established in Canberra in 1972, it bore some of the features of the fringe camps. Following the referendum, they drew a younger generation of leaders into activism. See Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Belonging to Country: Racialising Space and Resistance on Queensland’s Transnational Margins, 1880–1900’, Australian Historical Studies, 43:2 (2012), 174–90.

45 See in particular the case of Bruce Trevorrow expressed in the legal judgement ‘Trevorrow v State of South Australia (No 5) [2007] SASC 285’, 1 August 2007, available at http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/sa/SASC/2007/285.html?stem=0&synonyms=0&query (accessed 10 August 2018). Uncle Walter Richards, personal communication, 4 August 2013; and Uncle Claude Love, personal communication, 6 September 2014. Following a mid-1990s national inquiry, these children became formally known as the Stolen Generations; for more on this, see Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000, Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press 2000; and Bringing Them Home, Australian Human Rights Commission. In a much-heralded first act in office in February 2008, newly installed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued the National Apology to the Stolen Generations and their families.

46 As Charlotte Richards’s birth appears not to have been formally registered, we have only an approximation from family members, ranging widely from 1926 to 1936. For earlier work on Charlotte Richards, see Hughes and Trevorrow, ‘“It’s that Reflection”’, 194–99; Hughes and Smith, ‘Un-filtering the Settler Colonial Archive’; and Karen Hughes ‘Reading Resistant Landscapes in Ngarrindjeri Country: The Photographic Legacy of Aunty Charlotte Richards’, in Reading the Country: 30 Years On, ed. Philip Morrissey and Chris Healy, Sydney: UTS ePRESS, University of Technology Sydney 2018, 254–71. Charlotte Sumner-Dodd and Joyce Kerswell were other important Ngarrindjeri women photographers from this era, who form the basis of a forthcoming study.

47 We have considered this collection in detail elsewhere. See Hughes, ‘Reading Resistant Landscapes’.

48 Walter Richards and Jeffrey Hunter, personal communication, Murray Bridge, 4 August 2013.

49 Ngatji translates as ‘close relation’.

50 Lydon, ‘Introduction’, in Calling the Shots, ed. Lydon, 1–20. Aunty Charlotte Richards’s work has parallels with the important, more extensive body of work of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolow that has recently come to wider scholarly and public attention in the USA with the restoration of his negatives. See For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw, ed. Nancy Marie Mithlo, Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution 2014.

51 For an understanding of the way deep time permeates Ngarrindjeri worldviews, see Hughes, ‘Arnhem Land to Adelaide’.

52 Lydon, ‘Introduction’, in Calling the Shots, ed. Lydon, 6; see also Gaynor Macdonald, ‘Photos in Wiradjuri Biscuit Tins: Negotiating Relatedness and Validating Colonial Histories’, Oceania, 73:4 (June 2003), 225–42; and Heather Goodall, ‘“Karoo: Mates” – Communities Reclaim Their Images’, Aboriginal History, 30 (2006), 48–66.

53 See Anna Szorenyi, ‘Distanced Suffering: Photographed Suffering and the Construction of White In/vulnerability’, Social Semiotics, 19:2 (2009), 93–109.

54 Walter Richards, personal communication, 24 November 2017.

55 See Fay Anderson, ‘Chasing the Pictures: Press and Magazine Photography’, Media International Australia, 150:1 (February 2014), 47–55.

56 See, for example, Faye Ginsburg, ‘Black Screens and Cultural Citizenship’, Visual Anthropology Review, 21:1–2 (March 2005), 80–97.