Return: The Photographic Archive and Technologies of Indigenous Memory

Abstract

This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances – especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultural protocols that have moved far beyond legal provisions for protecting intellectual property. Experiments with new digital tools attempt to understand and balance the role of photographs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. However, cultural protocols rely significantly upon representations of “remote” Aboriginal communities in northern Australia that emphasize difference and reify practices that may in fact be fluid, and overlap with Western values. In the aftermath of colonialism, photographs are important to Aboriginal communities, especially in southern Australia, not merely as an extension of tradition, but also in the context of colonial dispossession and loss. As a form of Indigenous memory the photographic archive may address the exclusions and dislocations of the recent past, recovering missing relatives and stories, and revealing a history of photographic engagement between colonial photographers and Indigenous subjects.

Acknowledgements

This paper originated in a presentation to the day symposium “Photography, Archive and Memory”, at the Centre for Research in Film and Audio Visual Cultures, Roehampton University, London, in June 2009, and I wish to thank the organizers and particularly Julia Peck for their interest. I also thank Bill Nicholson Senior for permission to reproduce his photograph, and Ian Hunter for permission to reproduce that of his mother Jessie Hunter.