Transmuting Australian Aboriginal photographs

Abstract

Photographs of Australian Aboriginal people are powerful objects. Produced from the 1840s, when the camera first arrived in the continent’s nascent white settlements, such images are now invested with new meanings, becoming a rich resource for Indigenous families, history-telling and culture. The intersection of imperialism, science and popular curiosity generated a vast body of imagery of Indigenous peoples now held within the archive. This article not only assesses Australian Aboriginal photographic archives as an instrument of past power inequalities, but also explores whether such archives might nevertheless be ‘democratized’ in the present. I first trace the production and circulation of such images – beginning during the nineteenth century – before turning to their more recent transformations in the hands of Aboriginal people, examining the Indigenous significance of historical photographs as revealed through research with relatives and descendants of the images’ subjects. I conclude by exploring the ways that Aboriginal photo-media artists have engaged with this rich and vast archive.

Keywords:

• photography
• archives
• decolonization
• Aboriginal history
• Aboriginal photography
• Aboriginal heritage

Notes on contributor

Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia's colonial past and its legacies in the present. Her books include Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Duke, 2005), The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights (NewSouth, 2012), which won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards' History Book Award, and (ed.) Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014) which brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars to explore the Indigenous meanings of the photographic archive. She currently leads the Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Globalization, Photography, and Race: the Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photographs in Europe’ (DP110100278), which collaborates with four European museums to historicise their collections of Australian photographs and return them to Aboriginal descendants. Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire will be published by Bloomsbury in 2016.

Notes

1. In Aboriginal Australian usage, the titles ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle’ are honorifics, indicating respect for an elder. For an extended discussion, see Hughes and Trevorrow 2014.

2. This has been prompted by studies of scientific communities and cultures such as Latour 2005, and by the anthropology of art, such as Gell 1998.

3. For an overview of repatriation in Australia, see Green and Gordon 2011. For an overview with respect to photography, see Lydon 2010.

4. See for example contributions to Vokes 2012; Peers and Brown 2003; and Peers and Brown with members of the Kainai Nation 2006. Formal guides to ethical research practices include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resources Network (ATSILIRN) Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, [http://atsilirn.aiatsis.gov.au/protocols.php], accessed 29 June 2015.

5. Many projects have established digital points of contact between communities and archives, such as the Ara Iritija Project, [http://www.irititja.com/about_ara_irititja/index.html] and the Mulka Project, [http://www.yirrkala.com/themulkaproject]. Studies of this process include Macdonald 2003; Goodall 2006; and Kleinert 2006.

6. Michael Aird, email correspondence to Jane Lydon, 29 January 2015.