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ABSTRACT
In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas Dick and several Birrpai families. The photographs, reflecting Dick's colonial mindset, were staged as pre-contact and sought to depict Birrpai life of a century earlier. The images are now held in local, national and international collections. The TDPC holds particular familial significance for both Heath and Barnwell, who are respectively descendants of the Bugg-Dungay family (featured in the photographs) and the Dick family (the photographer). Heath is the foremost expert on Dick's Birrpai collection, and has done extensive work; to locate the photographs in inter/national collections; to determine and correctly label the participants and places featured; and to develop a set of cultural protocols for its use in dialogue with a Family Stakeholder Group (FSG) and key collecting institutions. The FSG Protocols provide an indication of the value and use of the images as preferred by descendants. In this paper we write about the role of the photographs as family photographs in both the Bugg-Dungay family and the Dick family, including when we each first saw the photographs and what these initial encounters reveal about how such photographs, when looking at them and beyond them, can be used to both construct and deconstruct settler mythologies of time and history.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge all the members of the Family Stakeholder Group, whose participation in discussions has contributed to this paper. We also thank the FSG and the Australian Museum for use of the FSG portrait and the other images included in this chapter.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This title is under review with both the FSG and the Australian Museum to include ‘Birrpai’ to distinguish these photographs from other Thomas Dick photographs in the collection.
2 No written evidence has emerged of the process adopted by Thomas Dick. His son Ray in conversation with Heath in the 1970’s mentioned payments being made to the participants. The earliest essay that examined the project was Isabel McBryde’s work (Citation1985) where she acknowledged the co-operation needed to achieve such a collection. Heath (Citation2009, 8) was the first to posit that it was a collaborative rather than exploitive work.
3 Birrpai is a First Nations group. Birrpai Country is located on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales. Its boundaries can be viewed on AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia: https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia.
4 For a full list of holdings see Heath (Citation2018, 115).
5 Goori is a Birrpai word, initially used to denote a man but now used to describe all First Nations Peoples of this part of New South Wales.
6 For coverage of this ongoing call for truth-telling, see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-23/blackmans-point-massacre-birpai-people-push-for-recognition/100147292.
7 Bugg-Dungay subject/collaborators were embroiled in a co-habitation legal proceeding in 1924, see Port Macquarie News and Hastings River Advocate (NSW: 1882–1950), Saturday 7 June 1924, page 4.
8 Here Dick displays an appreciation of Birrpai language; the broad Birrpai term for women is gaban.
9 This resource is Aborigines of the Hunter Region (1982), available via: https://hunterlivinghistories.com/.
10 To read the full 2022 interview with Bunda-Heath, visit: https://finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/about-us/news/meet-ngioka-bunda-heath-the-2022-hutchinson-fellow.
11 A display is located in the Museum, with an extended exhibit, co-designed with Heath, available online: https://www.nma.gov.au/av/portmacquarie/the-hastings-river/photographing-the-birpai/.
12 Coast Australia, television programme, Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Port Macquarie’.
13 The 7.30 Report episode covering the discovery of a second batch of Dick’s photographs by his descendants is available online: https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/forgotten-1920s-photos-reveal-insight-into-coastal/6970988.
14 In 2017, Heath collaborated with French art critic and curator, Pierre bal Blanc, to curate a small exhibition of Dick’s images and Heath’s narrative at documenta 14 (2017) in Athens and Kassel. Heath delivered a presentation to coincide with the Kassel exhibition: https://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/25441/black-and-white-perspectives-of-the-thomas-dick-photographic-collection.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John Heath
Dr John Heath is a senior Birrpai Goori with extensive experience in Australian Indigenous education, community development, community action research, and historical research. His research regarding the Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) has resulted in media and conference presentations, as well as exhibitions, including Birrpai Yirramboi Festival 2021. John instigated the (TDPC) Stakeholders Family Group and developed the Protocol Guidelines for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people working with the Thomas Dick Photographic Collection. He completed his PhD (UNE 2019) with his familial history thesis, The Seventh Generation, and with the Australian Museum, is currently developing a documentary regarding the TDPC. His new books are Healing the Spirit (2021), a Birrpai history co-authored with fellow Birrpai Bob Davis, and Goori-Bugg Dreaming (2022) a family history.
Ashley Barnwell
Dr Ashley Barnwell is a sociologist at the University of Melbourne. She is interested in sociological aspects of emotions, memory, and narrative, and the role of life writing, personal archives, and literature in sociological research. From 2020-2023, she is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow working on the project ‘Family Secrets, National Silences: Intergenerational Memory in Settler Colonial Australia'. This project aims to investigate the inherited family secrets, stories, and memories that inform Australians’ understandings of colonial history. Ashley has published in leading journals across the fields of sociology, history, and literary studies; including Sociology, Emotions and Society, Memory Studies, Journal of Family History, Life Writing, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing.