Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians 9780822387251

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EYE CONTACT t

O B J E C T S / H I S TO R I E S C R ITIC A L PE R SPE C TIV E S O N A RT, MATERIAL CULTURE, A N D R E PR E SE N TATIO N A SE R IE S E D ITE D B Y N IC HO L A S THOMAS

Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation

EYE CONTACT PHOTOGRAPHING INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS

J A N E LY D O N

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DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London 2005

© 2005 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN HONG KONG O N A C I D - F R E E PA P E R  DESIGNED BY AMY RUTH BUCHANAN TYPESET IN DANTE BY TSENG I N F O R M AT I O N S Y S T E M S , I N C . L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E S S C ATA L O G I N G I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA A P P E A R O N T H E L A S T P R I N T E D PA G E O F T H I S B O O K .

For my mother

CONTENTS

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List of Illustrations Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Colonialism, Photography, Mimesis

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1 ‘‘This Civilising Experiment’’: Charles Walter, Missionaries, and Photographic Theater 33 2 Science and Visuality: ‘‘Communicating Correct Ideas’’ 3 Time Traps: Defining Aboriginality during the 1870s–1880s 4 Works Like a Clock 5 Coranderrk Reappears Epilogue Notes

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Bibliography Index

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176 214

73 122

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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MAP

1. The Aboriginal clans of Victoria prior to invasion.

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FIGURES

1. Douglas T. Kilburn, Untitled [group of Victorian Aborigines]. xv 2. Group of Civilized Blacks. xviii 3. A Bush Photograph. 37 4. Deputation of Victorian Aborigines at the Governor’s Levee. 40 5. The Aboriginal Settlement at Coranderrk—from a Photograph by Charles Walter. 46 6. Mr John Green [from a photograph by Charles Walter]. 48 7. Simon. 49 8. Ellen. 49 9. Old King. 51 10. Mi Mi. 51 11. Grog in the Camp. 53 12. Charles Walter, Front View of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Village. 54 13. Charles Walter, detail of panorama, possum skin rug and clothing drying over fence. 57

14. Charles Walter, detail of panorama, mia-mias. 57 15. Charles Walter, The Station Kitchen, Simon Wonga’s Residence, Johnny Webster’s Residence, and Morgan’s Residence. 59 16. Charles Walter, The Yarra Tribe Starting for the Acheron 1862. 61 17. Ryko (Edward Reichenbach), Massacre Series Number 3— How the Murdered Malays Lost Their Weapons. 65 18. William Barak, drawing. 68 19. Charles Walter, Open Air Service amongst the Blacks in June 1865. 70 20. Charles Walter, Ellen. 71 21. ‘‘Portraits of Aboriginal Natives Settled at Coranderrk,’’ panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866. 78 22. Top-center detail of panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866. 80 23. Bottom-center detail of panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866. 81 24. The Great Hall of the Intercolonial Exhibition. 83 25. Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, Entrance to Victorian Court at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1867, Left-Hand View. 89 26. Enrico Giglioli, Coranderrk portraits, 1867. 97 27. Charles Walter, ‘‘Coranderrk and My Aboriginal Friends.’’ 102 28. Charles Walter, ‘‘Man Climbing a Tree.’’ 104 29. Charles Walter, ‘‘Canoe on Yarra.’’ 104 30. Charles Walter, ‘‘View of Settlement.’’ 105 31. Charles Walter, ‘‘Women with Baskets.’’ 105 32. Charles Walter, portraits. 106 33. Charles Walter, ‘‘Malcolm, of the Loddon Tribe (One of the Leaders of the Tribe).’’ 107 34. Charles Walter, ‘‘King Billy (of the Upper Goulburn Tribe), a Polygamist. Once in the hulks for being concerned in a murder, jumped overboard, and escaped to Healesville.’’ 108 35. Charles Walter, ‘‘Simon Wonga, King of the Yarra Tribe.’’ 109 36. Charles Walter, ‘‘King William Barak.’’ 110 37. Charles Walter, ‘‘Tommy Banfield.’’ 111 38. Charles Walter, Women’s portraits. 112 39. Charles Walter, ‘‘Boraat.’’ 113 40. Charles Walter, ‘‘Eliza’s Daughter (Crocheted a Collar and Sent It to Queen Victoria, Who Acknowledged It by a Letter).’’ 114 x

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Charles Walter, ‘‘Wandin.’’ 115 Charles Walter, ‘‘Little Lizzie.’’ 116 Charles Walter, ‘‘Timothy.’’ 117 Timothy, drawing (detail). 119 Detail of Timothy’s signature. 120 Fred Kruger, Aboriginal Cricketers at Coranderrk. 125 Fred Kruger, Badger’s Creek at Aboriginal Mission Station (Fishing Scene). 127 The Hop Paddock, Coranderrk, Victoria, from Badger Creek. 128 Fred Kruger, Coast Scene, Mordialloc Creek, near Cheltenham. 129 Fred Kruger, Hop Gardens at Coranderrk. 130 Hop Picking by Australian Aborigines. 132 Fred Kruger, Annie Ries—Loddon Tribe. 142 Fred Kruger, Mrs Rees and Family—Goulburn Tribe. 143 Fred Kruger, Matilda—Loddon Tribe. 144 Fred Kruger, Mathilde—Goulburn Tribe. 145 Fred Kruger, Sambo and Mooney—Gippsland Tribe. 146 Fred Kruger, Samson—Goulburn Tribe. 148 Fred Kruger, Group of Different Tribes. 152 Fred Kruger, Mia Mia. 152 Handling Album of Kings and Queens of Victoria. 155 Fred Kruger, Queen Mary—Ballarat Tribe. 157 Fred Kruger, Family of Civilised Natives. 158 After Fred Kruger, Mia Mia and Royal Family. 160 After Fred Kruger, King Billy and His Two Wives. 160 ‘‘Hawaiian Royalty.’’ 166 ‘‘Siamese Twins and Dwarfs.’’ 166 Fred Kruger, ‘‘Coranderrk Portraits.’’ 167 Fred Kruger, opening images. Album of Photographs of Victorian Aborigines and Views of Victorian Coastal and Country Regions. 168 Désiré Charnay, Australien de Coranderrk. 173 Nicholas Caire, Fairy Scene at the Landslip, Blacks’ Spur. 185 Nicholas Caire, Your Photographer at Work. 186 Nicholas Caire, Untitled [Lake Tyers Station]. 187 Nicholas Caire, Native Encampment River Murray. 188 Nicholas Caire, Call to Prayers, Coranderrk. 192 Nicholas Caire, The Dairy at Coranderrk Station, Vic. 192 L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S

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76. Nicholas Caire, Corroboree Men at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Vic. 193 77. Nicholas Caire, Natives and Their Weapons, Coranderrk, Vic. 193 78. Nicholas Caire, Natives Making Firesticks at Coranderrk, Vic. 194 79. Nicholas Caire, Native Women and Children, Coranderrk Station, Vic. 194 80. John Hunter Kerr, A Corrorobby, 1840. 196 81. Nicholas Caire, The Young Aboriginal in Training. 200 82. Ernest Fysh, Raffia Workshop at Coranderrk, Healesville. 206 83. Ernest Fysh, Liie McRae’s Wedding Day. 208 84. Ernest Fysh, A Wedding Day at Coranderrk. Willie Russell— Julia Sherwin. 209 85. Murrundindi throwing the boomerang. 223 86. Murrundindi explaining geneaology through ‘‘the family tree in photos.’’ 224 87. Jessie Hunter in her home, Melbourne. 235 88. Brenda Croft, She Called Him Son. 245

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PREFACE

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As historians of Australian photography have noted in passing, Aboriginal people were an enduring source of interest almost from the medium’s antipodean inception in 1846.The link between photography and colonialism was especially strong in the colony of Victoria, on the southern edge of the Australian continent, where the new technique was introduced toward the end of the first decade of invasion. Victoria was established relatively late, in 1835, but the scale and efficiency of pastoral settlement saw dreadful disruption to indigenous society within twenty years. The response of the colonial administration was to confine Aboriginal people to missions or reserves from around 1860, and it was to these places, as if to a zoo, that many visitors came to observe and photograph the residents.The resulting archive tells us how Western society came to understand Aboriginal people through the authority, accessibility, and impact of visual imagery.Yet it also reflects indigenous objectives and values, and configures an intimate form of cross-cultural communication. This book is about the ways that a powerful visual language was shaped through a process of exchange between black and white. Rather than seeing photography purely as a tool of the colonial project, a closer look at the production and consumption of the photographic images under scrutiny here reveals a dynamic and performative relationship between photographer and Aboriginal subject. Mission-era photography communicated a range of ideas about Aboriginal people in their intended absence from main-

stream Australian society—a discourse perhaps shaped most obviously by the mission environment and the interests of bureaucrats, scientists, and tourists. It cannot be denied that the goal of colonial government was to isolate, know, and manage Aboriginal people, and many images produced by this regime remain testament to such a distancing gaze. But it was also created, in less obvious ways, by the mission residents themselves. This interaction is expressed particularly clearly by the images produced at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, near Melbourne, which constituted a key site in the colonial relationship both because of the political campaign waged by its astute and committed residents and because of its proximity to the colony’s capital. As colonial policy regarding Aboriginal people became increasingly restrictive and authoritarian, and its definition of Aboriginality narrowed, the battle for control of Coranderrk became a test case in colonial politics, mobilizing reformist against conservative interests and generating tremendous public attention. Representations of the indigenous residents circulated as evidence for a range of views about Aboriginal identity and the meaning of human difference.

VICTORIA’S ABORIGINAL MISSIONS

It is interesting that some of the first Australian photographs of Aboriginal people come from the Port Phillip district, indicating their visibility within the landscape at this time. Douglas Kilburn, for example, opened Melbourne’s first permanent studio in 1847 and immediately produced some of the earliest daguerreotypes of the ‘‘curious race,’’ despite their fear ‘‘that it would submit them to some misfortune’’ (figure 1). Here, three women seemingly shut their eyes against the intrusive camera’s gaze, a traditional means of avoiding dangerous or forbidden contact.1 These tantalizingly elusive vignettes are probably our earliest glimpses of the Kulin Nations of central Victoria, a confederacy of intermarrying tribes surrounding the expanding settlement of Melbourne, and comprising the Bunurong, Woiworung, and Taungurung language groups in the east, and the Wathaurung and Jajowrong in the west (map 1). Clans owned specific territories for which they bore ceremonial and economic responsibilities, but reciprocity with other groups allowed cooperative access and resource management.2 Exogamous marriage between clans was determined by patrilineal affiliation with crow (waa) and eagle hawk (bunjil) moieties, crexiv

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1. Douglas T. Kilburn, born Great Britain 1811, arrived in Australia 1846, died 1871. Untitled [Group of Victorian Aborigines], c.1847. Daguerreotype. 7.5 × 6.5 cm. Purchased from Admission Funds, 1983. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Map 1. Map showing the Aboriginal clans of Victoria prior to invasion. The Kulin confederacy of central Victoria occupied a large area extending from the Barwon and Loddon Rivers in the west to the Broken and Tarwin Rivers in the east. Coranderrk was located within Woiworung territory.

ating an enduring network of kinship ties across the confederacy. Europeans knew and cared nothing for this complex system, taking up land and fencing off the traditional owners. Given the violence that had marked the colonization of New South Wales and Western Australia, British humanitarians feared for Victoria’s indigenous peoples, prompting the establishment of the Port Phillip Protectorate in 1839.This organization aimed to protect Aboriginal people by persuading them to abandon their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, instead concentrating them in Christian farming villages. However, there existed a fundamental contradiction between the protectorate’s aim to settle Aboriginal people on the land and the principle of terra nullius (an empty land) that formed the basis of colonial occupation. By the time of Kilburn’s first experimental daguerreotypes, the Kulin had experienced widespread violence, disease, and dispossession by pastoralists, despite various attempts to create mission homes for them. The birthrate plummeted and, in despair, one Kulin man explained, ‘‘No good pickaninnys now no country.’’ In 1849, Aboriginal clans themselves began to seek land grants within traditional country, but at the end of that year the government instead abandoned the protectorate, leaving the indigenous population in a desperate plight.3 The turmoil of the 1850s gold rushes created even greater havoc within indigenous society, and at the end of that tumultuous decade an inquiry found that the Aboriginal population had almost halved, concluding that ‘‘Victoria is now entirely occupied by a superior race, and there is scarcely a spot, excepting in the most remote mountain ranges, or dense scrubs, on which the Aborigine can rest his weary feet.’’ 4 Images of Aborigines during these years, such as amateur John Hunter Kerr’s salted paper prints (see, for example, figure 80), and Richard Daintree and Antoine Fauchery’s 1857–58 album Sun Pictures of Victoria, document a people in transition, most of them still living in mia-mias (bark shelters) on their traditional lands, pursuing a modified hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The Jajowrong, however, had already chosen to adopt a new way of life, farming a land grant at Mount Franklin, near Daylesford, northwest of Melbourne, between 1852 and 1864. The camera reveals them in European dress, standing before their bark huts, in a formulation that anticipates the following decades (figure 2).5 As the local protector stated, ‘‘I have before me families and individuals permanently civilised, actively industrious, and anxious to raise themselves in their social position.’’ 6 P R E FA C E

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2. Group of Aboriginal men, women, and children standing in front of slab hut wear-

ing European clothing, all whole-length, full face. Original title: Group of Civilized Blacks from the album Sun Pictures of Victoria. Accession number h84.167/42. Picture Collections pcv *lta 355 p. 42 and pcv lta 355. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

Juxtaposed within the album, these two different lifestyles generate a sense of change, contrasting those still living in bush camps with the Jajowrong adopting a farming life.The latter represented the protectorate’s hopes for settling their charges in self-supporting villages, but today, they leap out at the modern viewer as a record of Aboriginal self-determination and courage in choosing a new future. Sadly, the Jajowrong were decimated by disease, and the survivors, led by Dindarmin (Malcolm) were moved to Coranderrk in 1864, where they reappear in later photographs. The Sun Pictures were intended to show foreign viewers ‘‘a little of everything’’: alongside scenery, new buildings, and notable people, Aborigines seemed to represent some important truth about this inherited land, telling a story of progress by contrasting indigenous tradition with colonial industry.

ABORIGINAL RESERVES

The 1858 inquiry also recommended that separate reserves should be given to ‘‘tribes’’ in their own territory; in 1860, the Central Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, often abbreviated to ‘‘the Board,’’ was established, and it was decided to confine the ‘‘remnants of the race’’ on government reserves: Lake Hindmarsh (Ebenezer) had been founded by Moravians in 1859, and over the following years Coranderrk, Ramahyuck, Lake Tyers, Framlingham, and Lake Condah were established (map 1). The Aboriginal reserves were intended to be self-sufficient islands, isolating their residents from the white population, and while in practice this proved impossible to achieve (for example, depots for distributing rations were maintained until 1876), representations of Aboriginal people became the way that most Europeans came to know about them. The history of relations between black and white Victorians in the second half of the nineteenth century was enacted largely at these stations, as the camera framed meetings between residents and visitors, creating a formal space of encounter and performance. Despite Aboriginal people’s intended seclusion from colonial society, interest in photographing them never waned. In December 1869 Anna Mary Howitt wrote from London to her brother Alfred, in the Australian colony of Victoria, ‘‘There is now so growing a scientific interest regarding

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the Australian natives that I wish you would write all you know concerning them.’’ 7 At this time European scientists eagerly began to seek information about Australian Aboriginal people, thought to be a kind of ‘‘fossil race’’ preserving the earliest stages of human development. Anticipating their extinction, many across the continent’s uneven frontier participated in the work of salvage, collecting information and taking photographs to serve as scientific data. More popular ideas and attitudes were also motivated by interest in the ‘‘dying race,’’ expressed in forms such as souvenir albums. However, this visual discourse was shaped by the mission or station environment in specific ways, as illustrated newspapers and journals, photograph albums, scientific publications, exhibitions, and tourist guides all articulated particular interests, powerfully communicating ideas about Aboriginal people and their relationship to colonial society. But the Aboriginal residents saw the reserves as home and fought with intelligence and determination to retain them in the face of official attempts to close them and scatter their occupants. They became sophisticated in their understanding and deployment of visual representation, and at times they actively used the camera to express their own values. The missions occupy a strange place in Aboriginal heritage: while from 1849 Aboriginal people had sought to obtain reserves of land as refuges from the devastation caused by white settlement, under the management of missionaries and bureaucrats these settlements became ‘‘machines’’ designed to change Aboriginal people, converting them to Christianity and teaching them how to dress, live, and behave like whites. For this reason the scattered descendants see them as home—a link to kin, memories, and traditional country—but they also serve as reminders of loss and a sometimes resented missionary regime characterized by paternalism and intervention.

CORANDERRK

In this study I focus particularly on Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, sited on the edge of Melbourne, which became a ‘‘showplace’’ of Aboriginal culture. Visited by many local and international photographers, the station’s contact with white society allowed the residents to develop a remarkable sophistication in understanding how they were portrayed, and they became adept at manipulating such representations in their own cause, despite their lack of power in larger society. Due to its accessibility, Coranxx

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derrk constituted a site of prolific visual production, and more photographs of Aboriginal people were produced here than at any other place in Australia, circulating widely, even globally, to express a complex range of ideas about the race as a whole. The enormous photographic archive that resulted configures changing colonial photographic practice; it registers different ways of seeing Aboriginal people, whether as subjects for Christian conversion, objects of science, or as symbols of a distinctive local identity. Blurring the powerful colonial vision, however, are symptoms of an instability that undermines the opposed categories of black and white, European and Kulin. As I consider in the introduction, there are signs of a more intimate relationship between observer and observed—as the white photographer yearned toward his Aboriginal subject, or as the Kulin contested the camera’s capacity to distance and objectify. As I explore in chapters 1 and 2, the first images produced at the station by Charles Walter during the mid-1860s reflect the harmonious relations then prevailing at the settlement, as well as a sympathy between the photographer and his subjects; these images were shaped by Aboriginal as well as white concerns. Framed by humanitarian rhetoric, they celebrated the success of this ‘‘civilizing experiment,’’ yet at the same time Walter’s photographs circulated within an international scientific network, defining the Kulin as specimens of another race. In the context of a clash between the Board and residents in the 1870s that provoked widespread public criticism of official administration, photographer Fred Kruger was commissioned to produce a series of portraits designed to argue for the station’s successful management, and I examine this situation in chapter 3. Some of his images, however, expressed a nostalgic modernist vision of Aboriginal farmers inhabiting a pastoral Arcadia. At the time of a second crisis in 1882–83, further propagandist views charted the improved, tidied landscape. By now the Board had implemented a new assimilation policy designed to absorb part-European Aborigines into white society, and so this series was intended to demonstrate the difference between so-called ‘‘full-blooded’’ or real natives and the ‘‘half-caste’’ residents. In a society in which ideas of fixed biological race were hardening, Kruger’s Coranderrk images were subsequently deployed in a range of dehumanizing commercial and scientific contexts. Internationally, British, French, Italian, and Russian ethnographers seeking to explain the origins and diversity of humankind looked to Coranderrk’s population as a relic P R E FA C E

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of a disappearing race, completing larger schemes of civilization and evolution. As I explore in chapter 4, at the turn of the century Coranderrk became a showplace for visitors, and at a time when Aboriginal people were not visible within wider society, postcards circulated stereotypical symbols of Aboriginality that also played a role in defining a new national identity, reflecting an ambivalent colonial relationship. Following closure in 1924, the station disappeared from public view until its rediscovery by scholars as a compelling site of historical black-white interaction. However, the Aboriginal community has always maintained its attachments to the place. Today descendants are reading the nineteenth-century photographic archive in creative and dynamic ways, asserting an identity shaped by exchange with whites but now represented by Aboriginal people themselves. t

As a white historian, I was drawn to this topic after seeing photographs of Aboriginal people adjusting to colonial society. Seemingly providing a window into the past, these images prompted me to wonder what it must have felt like to have to wear the ornate costume of the Victorian era, to have to be seen to act a role convincingly before a white audience. While I will never really know the answer to this, I soon succumbed to the magical power of the photographic archive to simultaneously evoke the familiar and the strange. I have always tried to work in collaboration with Aboriginal descendants and to ensure that my work benefits their communities. Where Aboriginal people are the most disadvantaged group within Australian society, understanding how this came to be remains an important task. By examining the rich visual archive recording Victorian Aboriginal lives from the midnineteenth century into the present, I hope that this study restores something of Aboriginal history to current communities. I also intend that it illumines the process of exchange between Aboriginal and white Australian, showing that although the relationship was shaped by inequality and ignorance, it was also characterized by dynamism, intimacy, and exchange. In historiographic terms, an emphasis on the documentary accounts produced by missionaries and other European settlers sometimes exaggerates the efficacy of colonialism. Although photographs reveal the power of the colonial gaze, they also express its moments of uncertainty, offering a xxii

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less-mediated view of the past that exceeds their maker’s intentions, capturing details and attitudes beyond their original purpose, and setting in motion the compelling play of past and present, Aboriginal and European, self and other. Photographs seem to draw the viewer in, beyond the looking glass into a wonderland of strange new people and events; yet at the same time, they strike a note of familiarity, revealing a parallel universe of experience and emotion—we see ourselves gazing back from the ‘‘mirror with a memory’’ with stolid, ineffable truth. Old photographs concentrate this play between imagined and lived, animating the past through our own reality, and photographs of so-called others further intensify a movement back and forth, between recognition and disavowal, in the ambivalence of colonialism. Against analysis that stresses the medium’s capacity to objectify and distance, I seek the touching, bodily, performative aspects of photography, seeming to offer us, in the present, a way of feeling what the camera shows.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I could not have reached this point without the assistance and generosity of many people.This book is based on my doctoral research, carried out at the Australian National University’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and its Department of History, Faculties, between 1997 and 2000. Many people helped me during this time, especially my supervisors Ann Curthoys and Nicholas Thomas, but also David and Judith MacDougall, Fiona Paisley, Anita Callaway, Christine Watson, Joan Kerr, Mary Eagle, Isabel McBryde, Ian Coates (with his many cunning plans), Jenny Newell, Minoru Hokari, Kalissa Alexeyeff, Isabel McBryde, Peter Read, Sarah Lloyd, Howard Morphy, Bain Attwood, Tom Griffiths, Dipesh Chakrabarty, John Docker, Ian Keen, Francesca Merlan, Christopher Pinney, and Tim Rowse. In Healesville and Melbourne, I thank all those members of the Aboriginal community who were interested in the project and discussed the photographs with me. Thank you Dot Peters, Ian Hunter, Murrundindi, James ( Juby) Wandin, Joy Murphy, Alan Wandin, Doreen Garvey, Bill Jenkins, Ros Fogley, Brian Patterson, Mick Harding, Judy Monk, Bill Nicholson Sr., Bill Nicholson Jr., JudyWilson, Martha Nicholson,Vicki Nicholson-Brown, Winnifred Bridges, Margaret Gardiner, Jessie ‘‘Wincha’ ’’ Terrick, Margaret Wirapanda, Zetta Wirapanda, Irene Swindle, and Kevin Mason at the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary. I thank Annette Xiberras and Margaret Gardiner of the Kulin Nation Cultural Heritage Organisation. Most of all, I thank Jessie and Colin Hunter who, sadly, have both now passed away.

Since 2003 I have benefited enormously from working at the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University, where Lynette Russell, Liz Reed, Anne Marsh, Rachel Buchanan, Rod MacNeil, and Bruno David have all helped me in different ways. During the final stages of research and preparation I was assisted by an Honorary Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria, where I am particularly grateful to its excellent librarians, especially Dianne Reilly, Gerard Hayes, Mary Lewis, Olga Tsara, Madeleine Say, and Walter Struve, as well as fellow fellows Sue Gore, Bill Garner, Peter Lyssiotis, and Robin Annear. I am grateful to the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (aiatsis) for a research grant in 1998, and I especially thank Carol Cooper, Graeme Ward, Geoff Gray, and Barry Cundy for their interest. I am grateful to the staff of several other institutions for their interest and assistance, especially Mary Morris, Sandra Smith, Melanie Raberts, and Helen Kaptein at the Museum Victoria, Meg Goulding and Steve Brown at Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Isobel Crombie at the National Gallery of Victoria, Helen Cohn of the Royal Botanical Gardens, and Elizabeth Edwards of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. In Healesville I also thank Les Harsant of the Healesville Historical Society, as well as Barbara Tan. A condensed version of chapter 1 appeared as ‘‘1860s: Charles Walter’s Images of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria,’’ Aboriginal History 26 (2003): 78–130. Many thanks to the Duke University Press staff for their enthusiasm and patience—especially Kate Lothman, Ken Wissoker, and Amy Ruth Buchanan. I am grateful to Richard Macgregor for his careful indexing. For their encouragement I would like to thank Ruth Lane, Helen Skeat, Kate Lane,Tracy Ireland, Hilary Ericksen, Alice Gorman, Ingereth Macfarlane, Sophie Beckett, Ross Gibson, Sara Maher, and Enya Gannon. Finally, I thank my family, and most of all Mary and Tim, for their unfailing love and support.

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INTRODUCTION C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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In 1870 a request from the famous Darwinist, Oxford professor Thomas Henry Huxley—seeking images of naked, uniformly posed ‘‘specimens’’— was politely rejected by Robert Brough Smyth of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, who explained that the Aboriginal people of Victoria were ‘‘not sufficiently enlightened to submit themselves in a state of nudity for portraiture in order to assist the advancement of Science. Indeed they are careful in the matter of clothing, and if I empowered a photographer to visit the stations and take photographs with Professor Huxley’s instructions in his hand, he would I am sure offend the Aborigines and meet with little success.’’ 1 Smyth had written the 1878 study The Aborigines of Victoria, and his response carries a hint of professional rivalry.2 It was also reprovingly paternal: as the local expert he spoke confidently for his charges, many of whom he knew to be Christians, literate, and concerned for their respectable appearance. And in this he was right—the Aboriginal people were sensitive to their representation by outsiders and, given the chance, were well able to speak for themselves, as visiting French photographer Désiré Charnay discovered at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station the following year: he complained that his plans to make anthropometric photographs of the residents were thwarted as ‘‘in my second day of work, the natives announced to me that henceforth five shillings per person would be re-

quired for posing. As I had need of them, I accepted the conditions. Then the fee was raised to ten, and next twenty shillings, so that I soon sent them to the devil.’’ 3 Such encounters, marking refusal more than exchange, suggest that Aboriginal people controlled the terms of their representation by white photographers and scientists. But the enormous body of images produced at Victorian Aboriginal reserves from around 1860 into the twentieth century indicates otherwise, demonstrating how Western society defined and managed indigenous people through a widely circulated and effective visual language. At the same time, this archive reveals that Aboriginal people often chose to participate in the photographic project, sometimes with enthusiasm and skill.

COLONIALISM AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Charnay also wrote of the Aboriginal people of Humpybong, outside Brisbane, Queensland, that ‘‘there are sixty or seventy of them, watched over and provided for like the bison in the forests of Transylvania. This still doesn’t prevent them from dying off, however, and they will soon be extinct. I will be fortunate enough to be able to photograph them and take their measurements. These will be all the more precious since the colony is composed of both purebloods and half-breeds.’’ 4 It has become common to regard nineteenth-century photographs of indigenous people as trophies bagged by the colonial hunter, ciphers in a relationship characterized by distance, exploitation, and coercion. A dominant analytic strategy has been to show how the discourse of colonial photography maps the West’s strategies of knowing and controlling indigenous peoples, and some have argued that this distancing, objectifying mode of perception constitutes an inherent feature of modern ‘‘scopic regimes,’’ making photography an ideal tool of surveillance and control. Accounts of modernist vision as ‘‘Cartesian perspectivalism’’ emphasize its rationalist representation of geometric space, producing a mode of detached and disembodied vision that separates observer from observed. Jonathan Crary, for example, traces transformations in the early-nineteenth-century discursive formation of visuality, and especially the subjectivity of the observer, characterized by vision’s increasing separation from and privileging over the other senses; the ongoing abstraction of vision involved ‘‘an unprece2

INTRODUCTION

dented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent,’’ assisted by the technologies of mass reproduction. The new objects of vision, such as photographs, were distanced from the observer, and ‘‘the loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relationship to perceived space.’’ 5 By mid-century, realist photography had become a privileged discourse within Western society, its status as seemingly impartial witness triumphing over its potential to equivocate. In its mechanical and physical reflection of the world, its indexicality, it produced passive and precise imprints of truth that appeared to transcend individual interest, objectively defining stable identities and knowledges. The medium’s seeming veracity drew it into the service of state and empire, apparently able to classify human variation and behavior factually, impartially, and completely.6 In practical ways, photography facilitated the police work central to the European disciplinary apparatus—in Michel Foucault’s celebrated formulation, ‘‘a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.’’ 7 Certain visual conventions such as the perspectival representation of landscape proved especially useful in attaining the goal of charting and knowing as photography’s transparent realism opened up distant territory to imperial eyes.8 James Faris’s magisterial examination of the representation of Navajo peoples in the southwestern United States exemplifies this approach, showing how photographic discourse reflects Western, rather than Navajo ‘‘reality.’’ These images acquire meaning within a limited range of registers that constitute ‘‘the necessary conditions of existence of Navajo to the west.’’ Emphasizing the unequal relations that framed this body of work, Faris argues that ‘‘culturally, not much can be understood about Navajo from photographs of them,’’ remaining pessimistic about the possibility of reclamation or recuperation. Such a conclusion may in part reflect Faris’s methodology, choosing to focus on the images’ ‘‘Western character’’ and explicitly eschewing analysis of Navajo responses.9 Indeed, some images seem irrevocably marked by the exploitation sanctioned by invasion. Roslyn Poignant has shown how Aboriginal people became enmeshed within popular and pedagogical Western systems of repreC O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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sentation through spectacle, telling the chilling story of nine Aboriginal (Manbarra and Biyaygirri) people taken from north Queensland for display in P. T. Barnum’s ‘‘Ethnological Congress’’ and dime museums in 1883–84, and subsequently toured ‘‘through the showplaces of Europe, their numbers steadily reduced by death.’’ Poignant unpacks this shocking episode in such a way as to illuminate broader processes and attitudes, considering how these notions gained narrative force from earlier images of encounters between Europeans and newly ‘‘discovered’’ indigenous peoples.10 Lineups of the diminishing little group are starkly dehumanizing, resisting recuperation or translation into indigenous terms and remaining testament to the degradations of colonialism. Sometimes, however, such images can be reworked by understanding the range of contexts for their production and consumption, including by the indigenous subjects. For example, in examining the turn-of-thecentury Papua New Guinea photographs of Francis Barton, Christopher Wright traces the ways in which these photographs circulated through a complex, and shifting, visual economy and may ‘‘be seen as an attempt to impose one type of inscription over another; to impose one context of revelation with another.’’ As Wright points out, it is our own assumption that an image of somebody captures his or her individuality—by contrast, there exists the Melanesian conception of a collectively constituted personhood.11 In this approach, images provide a starting point for exploring indigenous meanings. A range of nuanced and perceptive studies have emerged in recent years which examine the specific circumstances of the photography of indigenous peoples, tracing the international circulation of imagery in a visual economy comprising scientific and popular discourses of difference, nation, and modernity.12 t

However, in arguing that subaltern groups ‘‘were represented as, and wishfully rendered, incapable of speaking, acting or organising for themselves,’’ John Tagg articulates a view of photographic meaning as wholly determined by shared and incontrovertible norms; discursive conventions are reduced to a rhetoric ‘‘of 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 negotiated.’’ 13 In such readings, the 4

INTRODUCTION

power relations inherent in colonialism have already decided the truth of these images, as well as their function in exploiting, invading, and controlling indigenous peoples.14 And as I have noted, the urge to photograph Australian Aboriginal people cannot be dissociated from European imperialism, with its desire to record difference and know the other. Yet sometimes the colonial vision blurred. In photography’s tactile and excessive transcendence of its authenticating function, in its expression of the colonizers’ own uncertainties regarding their project, and in its assertion of indigenous objectives, the visual archive reveals a more dynamic and intimate relationship between colonial photographer and Aboriginal subject than has sometimes been allowed. Even before the medium’s invention, nature and the picturesque had begun to be understood as constituted by the observer, sparking debates as to whether photographs should be seen as passive reflections of reality or as actively produced works of art. A consequence of this recognition was a more intimate relationship between observer and observed, a constant, anxious movement of the observing subject simultaneously toward and away from her or his object, an ambivalence that registers the viewer’s desire for the viewed.15 In practice, nineteenth-century photographers grappled with the difficulties of establishing a single, incontrovertible meaning through their medium; despite strategies of closure such as narrative sequencing or captions, photography’s status as a pure tool of positivist science came under challenge.16 Such problems point to different, sometimes incompatible scopic regimes prevailing within modern Western vision. As Norman Bryson argues, although the ‘‘commotion’’ surrounding past ways of seeing has not always entered the historical record, there is never one, comprehensive, code of viewing; rather, there exist competing, emerging, dying regimes.17 Multiple visual cultures coexisted with Cartesian perspectivalism—Baconian observation, vernaculars, the baroque—making modern Western vision ‘‘a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices.’’ 18 It is evident that in conjunction with the abstraction and detachment characteristic of panopticism, a persistent tactility recurred within photographic practice as viewers recognized photographs as objects and enjoyed their sensual vitality. Devices such as the stereoscope gave the viewer an embodied sense of movement toward the photographic object: for American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing around 1864, this image was ‘‘the card of introduction to make all manC O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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kind acquaintances. . . . The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.’’ 19 In articulating a physical engagement with the photograph, Holmes invoked a movement literally into the image, a motion that unites the subject with the object of her or his regard. Of photography’s various morphologies, perhaps most extolled are the corporeal qualities of the jewel-like daguerreotype, whose delicate yet concrete singularity conferred on it an aura of metallic enchantment. Yet as photographic prints became easier to make and circulate, they took forms that were held to the light, pored over, slipped between the leaves of a book or into an envelope, pasted into albums with other objects, mounted to create their own space of presence and attention. They were fragments of reality whose miniaturization allowed the viewer to enjoy a personal, embodied relationship with them, staring, stroking, folding, tearing, overwriting, owning. As artifacts embedded within concrete social practices such as museum displays and the scholarly lecture circuit, they formed a complex kind of parlor game, moving along ‘‘trade routes’’ between makers, collectors, museums, and other interpretative communities, thereby actively creating meanings about cultures. Lynette Russell has revealed the central role of the museum as a site of visual representation and ‘‘a form of mimetic device’’ that reflected Western culture in constructing ideas about Aboriginal people—for example, in representing humanity’s childhood within a hierarchy of human evolution.20 The physicality of the photographic image, prompting the urge to bring things ‘‘closer,’’ argued first by Walter Benjamin,21 has also been taken up by Michael Taussig in arguing for the mimetic nature of colonial contact exemplified by the camera. Taussig contends that modernity is characterized by an intermingled, tactile mode of experience, linked to this impulse toward mimetically embracing the other through visual reproduction: ‘‘The unstoppable merging of the object of perception with the body of the perceiver and not just with the mind’s eye.’’ The invention of photography recharged the mimetic impulse, both ‘‘copying, and the visceral quality of the percept uniting viewer with the viewed,’’ and within colonial relations, mimetic excess appears—this is mimesis made aware of itself, the circulation of mimesis in alterity. The camera provided a way for colo-

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INTRODUCTION

nists to reach out, to touch the object of their regard.22 Several critics have noted that from photography’s inception in Australia, images of Aboriginal people were a surprisingly popular choice of subject, reenacting the moment of contact and marking colonial fascination with its other. At a fundamental level, images produced at Aboriginal missions are predicated on a perception of difference, but in satisfying their curiosity, the observers’ attention took forms that could diminish or deny it. In their sensual tactility, these photographic objects express a mimetic form of colonial relations that undermines notions of culture as monolithic and autonomous and that foregrounds the role of representation in shaping identity. In another context, postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha identifies the play of representations embodied in mimicry as a key strategy of ‘‘the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite.’’ In colonial discourse, the effect of mimicry is ‘‘profound and disturbing,’’ as the ‘‘look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined,’’ threatening the civilizing mission.23 Such strategies of reading reveal a fundamental colonial ambivalence, demonstrating the ways in which arguments about race and government were internally contradictory and unstable. Disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse disrupts its authority—not by violent rebellion but through ‘‘a process which simultaneously stabilises and destabilises the position of the coloniser.’’ 24 This interpretive shift shows how in the process of producing meaning, the polarities of colonialism are undermined and repositioned as interdependent, decentering the so-called native as a unified subject and ‘‘making known the devious techniques of obligation and persuasion with which the native colludes but simultaneously resists.’’ 25 In the West’s representation of otherness, construed as being ‘‘at once an object of desire and derision,’’ this indeterminacy fixes the colonial subject as a ‘‘partial’’ presence, the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis.26 The mimetic nature of colonial relations between Australian Aboriginal peoples and the nation-state has implications for understanding Aboriginal identity. Writing of the remote community centered on Katherine in the Northern Territory, anthropologist Francesca Merlan shows how landrights legislation, influenced by anthropological accounts that privilege continuity, has been framed in terms intended to reproduce the basis of traditional Aboriginal socioterritorial relationships, with the effect of reifying

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aspects of culture such as relations to place. Such representations of Aborigines by others affect ‘‘what they are allowed to be and become.’’ Changing notions of the relationship between Aboriginal and broader society have moved from assimilation to self-determination, but in the process Aboriginality is mimetically represented ‘‘to produce images partaking of continuity with the past but also yielding definitively new intercultural products and representations.’’ 27 Native title must therefore be understood as an intercultural product rather than a survival from the past. As Merlan shows, Aboriginal people do not occupy an autonomous cultural space but construct identity through a process of exchange with non-Aboriginal society in which representation plays a central role. As I will discuss in later chapters, white fascination with Aboriginal mimicry recurs throughout the history of exchange between black and white, marking derision but also something more. Colonial photography is inherently mimetic, revealing at a fundamental level the European desire to record the cultural other in an impulse that does not always represent alienation and objectification. However, the optimistic and empowering vision of colonialism revealed by Bhabha’s emphasis on subaltern disruption must be qualified by acknowledgment of colonial efficacy in determining cultural process.

INDIGENOUS PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES

As well as these fissures within the European photographic tradition, there are many instances of the medium’s creative reworking by non-Western peoples, appropriating and shaping its form for their own purposes. Outside the West, the photograph as disinterested report loses its power. In New Zealand/Aotearoa, for example, Maori people understand portraits to be a person’s spirit or mana, the living embodiment of their subject, and after the medium’s introduction, photographs quickly came to substitute traditional carvings in spiritual contexts such as marae (sacred open meeting areas).28 Similarly, in West Africa photography has been incorporated into many aspects of Yoruba life, in ways expressing a range of local cultural values: formal portraits are posed in the manner of traditional ceremonial participants, aiming to express dignity and the sitter’s place in Yoruba society, rather than asserting individualizing Western values.These images

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INTRODUCTION

continue an earlier tradition of wooden sculpture and are often mounted on wood to become freestanding objects that participate in ceremony.29 Christopher Pinney also traces the medium’s appropriation in central India, developing a notion of ‘‘corpothetics’’ to express the bodily engagement of Indian villagers in communing with mass-produced religious chromolithographs of Hindu deities. In a ‘‘reawakening of the human sensorium’’ the deity’s power now depends on the viewer’s visual and bodily performances: by placing the image of the deity before the worshipper’s eyes, seeing and being seen, divine energy is activated.30 More recently Pinney has argued that ‘‘vernacular modernist’’ photographic genres that have emerged in postcolonial contexts such as India and West Africa share the tendency to ‘‘project a materiality of the surface,’’ creating a tactile relationship with the viewer and marking a rejection of the documentary use of photography to anchor bodies in specific time and place, instead resisting, subverting, and parodying the ‘‘realist chronotope.’’ He goes so far as to suggest that these practices mark an ‘‘emergence in specific postcolonial contexts as expressions of identities that in complex ways repudiate the projects of which Cartesian perspectivalist images are a part.’’ 31 In their different ways, these studies all point toward the use of the image as more than evidence or proof, instead registering local ways of seeing that form a stark contrast with the detached vision characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism—for example in expressing the desire to get hold of what is represented in tactile, embodied modes of consumption. These varied local uses of photography demonstrate the creative and fluid uses made of the medium within different cultural traditions, combining old and new. Perhaps most important, indigenous transformations of photography show that these so-called vernacular forms are linked to larger processes of continuity and transformation. The persistence and distinctiveness of the traditions characterized by Pinney and Sprague, for example, imply a relatively autonomous indigenous domain, but in the mimetic colonial relationship characteristic of Australian colonialism, power asymmetries limited and framed the visual regimes prevailing at Aboriginal missions, as well as their photographic forms. In Victoria, where Aboriginal people were settled in small and largely self-contained communities from around 1860, the extent to which an autonomous social space was available to the residents is a complex issue.

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V I S I B I L I T Y A N D C O N C E A L M E N T: A B O R I G I N A L R E S E R V E S AS DISCIPLINARY MACHINES?

At the inception of the Victorian Aboriginal reserves, photography marked the intersection of two different visual regimes, embedded within distinct cultural orientations. European attempts to change Aboriginal people through confining them to ordered and productive villages were thwarted in ways they did not recognize, as their disciplinary apparatus was disregarded in favor of traditional Kulin objectives. For European managers, photography was intended to work as an element of a disciplinary apparatus, a refined form of surveillance and control, but in practice the medium produced mutual, sympathetic, or contested forms. Some historians have seen Aboriginal people as passive, subjects easily changed within these ‘‘didactic landscapes,’’ but the photographic archive reveals substantial evidence for a more contested, complex interaction. The Board for the Protection of the Aborigines sought to confine and isolate Aborigines on stations, and to impose corrective technologies of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment on them which relied on the visibility and demeanor of the residents. The Aboriginal mission, like the panopticon, ideally operated by ‘‘dissociating the see/being seen dyad,’’ so that ‘‘power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.’’ 32 In the endless task of defining the individual, the gaze became ‘‘that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality.’’ 33 For whites, the appearance of bourgeois civilization was all-important, a straightforward index of progress. In a sense, the Board saw its Aboriginal settlements as machines, embodying an orderly spatial layout, a division between public and private space, and isolation from wider society. Through these technologies, it sought to impose new ideas of order and time discipline on the residents. The visibility of people and landscape constituted a crucial element of this apparatus: the importance of appearances, being seen to be clean, orderly, and industrious, structured white policy and interaction between people. Some historians have followed this schema in emphasizing the efficacy of Aboriginal stations as carceral institutions and the capacity of spatial organization and landscape to legitimate power relationships. The missions 10

INTRODUCTION

have been compared with sociologist Erving Goffman’s ‘‘total institution,’’ for example, characterized by closure, rationalization, and a hierarchical distinction between inmates and staff.34 In a similar vein, some archaeologists have traced the inequalities inherent in landscapes such as plantations in the southern United States, where slave buildings were clustered around the planter’s house to allow overseers surveillance over slaves.35 In one of the most evocative and concrete accounts of this scenario, historian Bain Attwood argues of Ramahyuck, in Victoria’s east Gippsland, that ‘‘fundamental to [Moravian missionary Friedrich Augustus Hagenauer’s] reconstruction of Aborigines was a plan to produce a carefully defined and ordered social space . . . a didactic landscape, an instrument to transmit Christianity and ‘civilisation,’ mould the conduct of Aborigines, and express a conception of what he wished the Aborigines to become.’’ Hagenauer, a strict disciplinarian, saw the station operating like a game of chess, with the mission house, school house, ‘‘native houses,’’ and the tasks performed around them enabling ‘‘each branch to work separately and yet to form part of the whole machinery.’’ The center of this ideal landscape was the ‘‘top of a gentle rise’’ surrounded by fertile landscape, forming a village designed to echo the familiar European hamlet. Attwood claims that at Ramahyuck the orderly, hierarchical arrangement of buildings, spaces, and fences effectively governed movement and relationships between the residents on the basis of race, age, rank, and gender. Segregated space was an internal feature of buildings too, such as in the chapel, while children were separated from their parents, and boys from girls, in the boarding house. A chief goal of this apparatus, particularly of the design of houses, was to redefine Aboriginal people as individuals, ‘‘an integrated centre of consciousness’’ rather than ‘‘being bound by the obligations of a kin-based society.’’ 36 In Attwood’s view, this physical apparatus transformed Aborigines as the missionaries’ ‘‘ideas and values actually came to be imbricated in the very fabric of Aborigines’ consciousness and way of being . . . becoming integral to their sense of themselves.’’ He argues that this order was consensual and that ‘‘the seeds of oppression came to lie within Aborigines as well as without,’’ making liberation even more difficult. An alternative culture persisted, but this came more and more to frame its resistance in the missionaries’ language—‘‘their protest tended to reinforce the existing relationship rather than recast it on their terms. It was a reactive rather C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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than creative power, with all the limitations this implies.’’ Attwood concludes that by the 1870s the goal of creating Ramahyuck as an isolated, self-contained island of reform had largely succeeded.37 But while Ramahyuck, as the Board’s model establishment, may indeed have proven effective in achieving missionary goals, at Coranderrk, by contrast, white anxiety over control was a recurring theme, and the residents’ protracted ‘‘rebellion’’ was quelled only in the mid-1880s. This contestation can be attributed to several factors, such as Coranderrk’s proximity to white society and the residents’ consequent political sophistication, allowing them to campaign successfully on white terms. Such resistance can also be understood in the light of ethnographic analyses of Aboriginal settlements that query the effectiveness of institutional control and show that aspects of traditional culture may in fact strengthen within missions and that an oppositional, social domain can develop. While it is important not to apply ethnographic analogies uncritically to historical situations, such comparisons can illuminate the complexity of cultural exchange and show how indigenous strategies of contesting colonial structures were enacted. Tim Rowse, for example, argues that even under very disciplinarian reserve regimes, comparison with Goffman’s model denies continuities between inmates’ lives within and outside institutions. Traditions such as age and kinship relationships can find room to persist or even expand within institutional structures, either because of their importance to Aboriginal people or because they are facilitated by new circumstances such as an increased marriage pool, an assured food supply, or social distance from whites. Most important, ‘‘there would seem to be something highly resistant, in the Aboriginal sense of kinship, to the degrading individuations of ‘total institutions.’ ’’ 38 At Coranderrk a range of factors allowed residents to develop their own internal organization, which prevailed during the station’s first decade, not least being its consensual establishment by missionary John Green and the Kulin. However, as at other Aboriginal reserves, the ritual of inspection was conducted rigorously and often, providing the substance of the Board’s annual reports and defining the station’s population in minute detail.These reports assumed an approving tone for the settlement’s first decade, praising its location, layout, and organization. In 1865, the Board’s Fourth Report described the erection of a schoolhouse, the nucleus of the settlement, and the secretary stated that he ‘‘found the huts occupied by the blacks both 12

INTRODUCTION

clean and orderly. The adults were well-clad, the children were as neat and clean as Aboriginal children in a partially civilised state can be expected to be, and the infants seem to be well cared for.’’ He went on to note that ‘‘the way in which the Aborigines conducted themselves at prayers was remarkable. I was particularly impressed with the orderly, quiet, almost solemn manner, in which they entered and left the schoolhouse.’’ 39 The residents knew that they were to be prepared for inspection at any time, and complied with outsiders’ expectations of cleanliness and order. In 1866, for example, it was reported of the secretary’s visit that ‘‘they arrived, they believe, unexpectedly, and found the station in its ordinary condition. They inspected the huts and houses at 9 a.m., and found them clean, neatly swept, and very comfortable.’’ 40 Domestic space, under women’s control, was a particular focus for scrutiny, and reports were uniformly approving. In 1869 it was reported that The garden in front of the [Greens’] house looks very well, and in every part of the station I saw improvement. I entered and examined a great many of the huts occupied by the married people, and it was gratifying to see so many marks of the change produced by domestication. The men were away at work in the fields or on the station, and the women were occupied in little offices in their homes. Objects indicating some taste and some pride in the appearance of their dwellings were not few. Their native baskets were hung up against the walls, the walls were here and there ornamented with pictures, their rugs and clothing were arranged in order, and their fires tidily kept. All these little things serve to astonish those who are acquainted with the habits and feelings of the Aborigines.41

I N V I S I B I L I T Y, C O N V E R G E N C E , A N D T H E P E R S I S T E N C E O F T R A D I T I O N

But there is also evidence that Aboriginal people continued their own practices within the mission landscape. Coranderrk’s equitable and culturally tolerant origins under the management of John Green shaped its spatial organization and operation, thwarting later managers’ intentions of keeping an eye on the village. The first arrangement comprised a north-facing row of huts along the flat top of a ridge sloping steeply behind to Badger Creek.To the west, a little downhill, a schoolhouse stood, with the Greens’

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better-quality house on its farther side. By 1866 the schoolteacher’s house stood in front of the schoolhouse dormitory. One of the most persistent conventions of Kulin society was that the placement of dwellings made a symbolic statement about land ownership: during ceremonial gatherings, dwellings were oriented according to home territories, each tribal group located in the compass direction of its homeland.42 This organization was maintained, in modified form, until at least the 1880s at Coranderrk; the segregated dormitories were comparable to the Kulin camp for single young men and women. The men could still go away for days at a time to hunt. The Kulin retained some aspects of traditional domesticity, coexisting with new, fixed household routines. Green’s more comfortable residence was sited away from the Kulin, which would have given both them and his family more privacy. The settlement area was cleared of trees, as was a large, gently sloping space in front of it. Many observers stress the central role of the ‘‘village green,’’ as if its quaint Old-World associations would have somehow shaped Aboriginal practice. However, its chief function seems to have been for playing games: Robert Brough Smyth described a pastime he was shown here in 1873, where a bulbous-headed stem called a weet-weet was flicked across the ground to a great distance, as a stone may be skipped across the surface of water, resembling a hopping kangaroo. He also described a form of soccer using a ball made from possum skin played here, and wrestling staged before elders.43 Photographs throughout the station’s life show cricket in progress in this area. It constituted public space, left clear to allow people to see across it and especially to the central park area of the settlement where children played, through which visitors had to travel, and where visiting groups sometimes camped.This open space was also the site of public events, including the expression of anger and conflict. It was not a contained compound, and the surrounding bush and the steeply sloping south side of the ridge, plunging behind the houses to Badger Creek, acted as a means of escape for people wishing to avoid restriction. ‘‘Lazy’’ men might leave work to go and fish; and in 1869 Annie Barak took to the bush with her dogs to save them from being destroyed.44 This public space of interaction was linked to another key element of Coranderrk’s initial organization: the court formed by Green and the Kulin where those who broke rules—such as a ban on drunkenness—were pub-

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INTRODUCTION

licly censured and consensus was achieved. Green chaired the court when he was at the station, but the residents otherwise basically ran it by themselves. As Green stated shortly after the station was founded, ‘‘My method of managing the blacks is to allow them to rule themselves as much as possible.’’ When the residents were given a role in deciding on a rule or punishment, they would hold firmly to their decision, but they resisted the external imposition of rules.45 In 1882 Green described how he countered before this assembly a rumor a little girl was spreading about his treatment of a patient who had died, and ‘‘they were all perfectly ashamed of themselves for saying such a thing.’’ 46 Green’s important role as leader within this system of justice and collective management conformed to the paternalistic model of the Presbyterian Church, with Green as shepherd of his flock. Residents quickly adopted Christianity, attending prayers twice daily and keeping the Sabbath, and as Walter’s 1860s photographs show, the tropes of Christianity were easily harnessed to tell the station’s story (see chapter 1). This system can also be understood as a continuation of the tradition of public shaming to maintain order. Shaming constitutes a traditional Aboriginal means of regulation and punishment that relies on a person’s sensitivity to the collective perceptions of a close-knit community well known to her or him. As one Aboriginal person has explained, ‘‘You know when you are doing things in the open and you don’t want it that way.’’ Associated with ‘‘small non-stratified and essentially closed communities with homogenous rules of conduct,’’ institutional life can paradoxically provide the conditions for its perpetuation, sometimes self-consciously in opposition to European practice.47 This awareness of being observed and assessed according to collective rules of behavior seems to offer some points of similarity with panoptical control; it can make people conceal stigmatized customs such as dancing or language, always discouraged by missionaries. But instead of the individualizing and distancing gaze of surveillance, designed to inculcate within each person the awareness of being continuously observed, there are signs that members of the Coranderrk community remained answerable to kin, not an internalized European code of conduct. Some traditional practices, during the first decade at least, continued in private—in fact, they probably relied on their concealment. For example, Green described how

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they are a most remarkable people in their ideas of morality and chastity; and at a certain time, even after I built a house, or huts, the female had a little place at the back of the hut, where she had to sit apart from the men for a week every other month, and she would not touch with her hand anything belonging to the man, and the man would not touch a thing belonging to her while she was in that state. . . . I got them to make two beds inside, and not to go outside, so that people might not ask me why they were sitting there.48 Obviously Green did not see these customs as interfering with his objectives at the station and assisted the residents to maintain them, although he, too, was aware of the importance of concealing non-European practices from visitors. In addition, some residents (especially the elderly) continued to defecate in the bush, believing that using the outhouses, by giving their enemies access to their excrement, made them vulnerable to sorcery.49 These practices did not enter the purview of Board surveillance. Green also enforced certain European taboos, for example keeping children inside the fence, away from women who had lived as prostitutes before settlement at the station. He was proud of his control over the children’s movements, stating that ‘‘I had forty or forty-five there, and just by a snap of the fingers I had them all in the school-house before you could count twenty.’’ 50 These patterns of avoidance and movement across the station landscape indicate the tacit tolerance of cultural difference as well as transformation. It is also possible to recognize the Aboriginal reformulation of Christian rituals such as Christmas, celebrated with cake baking, cricket, and music. Many station managers sanctioned removal from the usual European routine at this time, and at Coranderrk in 1874 Green reported that ‘‘the most of them like to get a few weeks to fish and hunt about the Yarra Flats,’’ the first record of what became a yearly ritual up until the end of the station’s life (and beyond; see chapter 5).51 Before European invasion the annual cycle of movement around their own country had concluded with the Kulin assembling at Merri Creek in December to conduct group business. Archaeologists note how Christmas camp sites often coincide spatially with the presettler landscape, some appearing on ‘‘prehistoric’’ coastal fishing and shellfish gathering sites marked by shell middens.52 These convergences proved satisfying to black and white and point to the creative intersection

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INTRODUCTION

of two cultural orders, whence signifying practices could be read in more than one way.

R E B E L L I O N AT C O R A N D E R R K

By the 1870s, however, the pleased tone of officials congratulating each other on the success of their ‘‘experiment’’ was superseded by more critical reports. Further measurements of progress were introduced—for example, the visiting doctor, Gibson, suggested that ‘‘the next supply of clothing for the children should be a little lighter in colour, so that it can at once be seen whether or not it is clean.’’ And he drew attention to the miamias, which had formerly been suppressed, where possible, in visual and textual accounts of the station, stating, ‘‘There are still five nomadic huts of the station, made of sheets of bark laid together; but these belong to elderly blacks, whose habits are difficult to deal with; but the interior of these is as clean and orderly as the circumstances will allow.’’ 53 As conflict grew between residents and their allies, on the one hand, and the Board, on the other, the village layout—and indeed, its general organization— increasingly became a matter for contestation. The Board’s growing interventionism resulted in manager John Green’s resignation under pressure in 1874. This meant a disaster for the Kulin, who regarded Green as one of themselves, a Ngamajet, or leader with clan responsibilities. From this moment to the passing of the Aborigines Act in 1886, as Diane Barwick’s meticulous study, Rebellion at Coranderrk, recounts, Coranderrk was the site of a sustained mutiny, as the residents protested the Board’s attempts to close the station and opposed its mismanagement of their land. A politically sophisticated campaign of strikes, petitions, and deputations to Victorian parliament publicized the residents’ struggle to keep their land and succeeded in obtaining substantial support in the white community. The residents’ acute awareness of how they were represented within white society enabled them to use arguments and images that carried most weight with the colonial public. Coranderrk’s fate was enmeshed in the battle between conservative and reformist political factions of the day, and in the larger context of ideas about biological race developing in Western society at this time, representations of the local conflict enacted at Coranderrk assumed a metonymic significance, standing for universal truths about Aboriginality and human difference. C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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Trouble began in the late 1860s with pressure from covetous neighbors to resume the valuable Coranderrk land. At this time, demands also began to be made for the removal of the so-called ‘‘half-castes,’’ who were seen as fundamentally different from the ‘‘full bloods’’—assimilable into the general population and therefore a drain on the public purse.The introduction of hops in 1872 proved a commercial success, but it alienated the residents from their labor: an unsympathetic hop master was hired, resources were diverted from general farmwork and maintenance of the residents, and the income it produced was simply paid into consolidated revenue to offset the Board’s annual budget, with the effect that it ‘‘lost all incentive for opposing abandonment.’’ 54 Motivated by a desire to make the station self-sufficient, the Board and its autocratic secretary Robert Brough Smyth began to press for hiring European labor, but the residents opposed this intrusion and demanded wages themselves. In 1875 government policy took an authoritarian turn, and Board members—now mostly members of the squatter establishment whose fortunes were built on the occupation of tribal land—began to argue for Coranderrk’s closure on the basis of its climate, deemed unhealthy for the Aborigines. Many Aboriginal sympathizers, however, perceived the Board to be swayed by settlers who wanted to displace the residents and appropriate their valuable farming land. The initiative was opposed from within by George Syme, editor of the radical Melbourne newspaper the Leader, whose brother David was editor of the Age. The Symes and their radical cohort were sympathetic to Green and the Kulin, and their links to the reformist government led by Graham Berry at this time secured the residents’ protests some political influence and a wide public audience. The dispute over Coranderrk became a test case in the battle between conservative and radical political forces: as Barwick has suggested, the Aboriginal protests ‘‘received extraordinary publicity because they happened to coincide with a crisis in colonial politics.’’ Although the government was highly unstable during these years, the major political issues of the day centered on improving the condition of the poor through temperance, medical care, and land and labor legislative reform.55 Aboriginal policy was shaped by emotions both of guilt and genuine humanitarian concern, as well as by the self-interest of settlers whose livelihoods depended on displacing the indigenous occupants of the land. Newspaper and especially visual representations in colonial newspapers played an important role in this battle, 18

INTRODUCTION

articulating popular, scientific, and official debates about Aboriginality, as I explore further in chapter 3. During the mid-1870s the Board’s determination to close the station and remove the occupants to less valuable farming land strengthened, as did the residents’ protests. In August 1876 a major public scandal erupted over the death of a resident in childbirth, allegedly attended to only by the drunken wife of the hop master, and accusations of neglect met with wide public condemnation, resulting in the appointment of a royal commission in late 1876 to inquire into the conditions and management of the Aborigines. This Board-friendly hearing focused on future policy for the ‘‘half-castes,’’ seeking evidence regarding their differences from the ‘‘full bloods,’’ but it concluded that assimilation was not possible because of prejudice from the white population. Board attitudes toward their Aboriginal constituency at this time were expressed by vice-chairman of the inquiry, squatter Edward Curr, who testified that he had always believed that ‘‘those natives are children’’ and recommended that ‘‘the blacks should, when necessary, be coerced just as we coerce children and lunatics who cannot take care of themselves.’’ 56 The Board could not believe that the residents were capable of self-determination and always attributed their political acumen to outside intervention. The inquiry judged Coranderrk’s overall appearance lacking, concluding that ‘‘greater attention might not improperly be paid to the appearance of the area surrounding the settlement—no effort has as yet been made in this direction.The effect of tidiness, and per contra of untidiness, on the Aboriginal mind is most important; the inculcation of tidiness forms part of civilization as well as discipline.’’ 57 It was during these hearings that the Board commissioned photographer Fred Kruger to produce a series of Coranderrk portraits, and Moravian missionary Friedrich Hagenauer commissioned Frederick Cornell to produce thirty-six photographs of the model Ramahyuck in Gippsland. These series were intended to argue for the Board’s successful management of the stations, or the ‘‘tidiness’’ of their people at least. The residents still wanted Green back, and their campaign continued. The Board, for its part, continued to push for Coranderrk’s closure. A note of rising hysteria characterizes the stream of letters penned by the station’s incompetent manager Frederick Strickland during these years: residents complained about conditions at the station, but the Board did not want C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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to carry out basic maintenance as it hoped to close the settlement down. The residents later told how they had seen ‘‘it in the paper they were going to send us to Lake Tyer’’ (a mission in remote Gippsland, in southeastern Victoria), and on 28 March 1881, a deputation of twenty-two men led by William Barak walked all night to Parliament House in Melbourne, fortyone miles away, to meet with chief secretary Berry.58 He reassured them, stating, ‘‘I will give you that promise, you shall not be removed.’’ 59 As Strickland complained, the deputation returned to Coranderrk ‘‘in great glee, marching in order by twos and carrying flags or handkerchiefs on poles.’’ Continuing agitation prompted another, parliamentary, inquiry into Coranderrk’s management a few months later, reflecting the great interest aroused in the colony concerning its situation. The commissioners examined the attachment of the residents to the site, and especially the status of the ‘‘half-castes.’’ Outsiders believed that there was hostility between the ‘‘full-blood’’ and ‘‘half-caste’’ residents, but Barwick argues persuasively that such conflict was instead always grounded in clan affiliation, a conflict centered on antagonism between the ‘‘Kulin pioneers’’ and newcomers, younger Burapper and Pangerang men.60 Yet the subjectivity of the Aboriginal people was continually in process, a product of the play of representations between black and white, as well as within these categories.61 The white criterion of ‘‘blood’’ was also taken up by the Aboriginal people, as the protagonists came to employ the terms ‘‘pure blacks’’ and ‘‘half-castes’’ themselves. During one confrontation both systems of classification were invoked as a Kulin speaker ‘‘waved his hand over toward the new-comers in the most majestic manner and replied addressing them ‘Why you fellows, who are you, who are you anyhow, why you come here like a lot of scotch thistles!’ ’’ while another argued that ‘‘Sir Henry Barkly gave this station to Mr Green for the blacks, not for the half castes.’’ 62 The inquiry’s report criticized Board management of the station and recommended its retention. But this short-term victory was ominously accompanied by a recommendation that while the ‘‘full bloods’’ should be supported at the station, the ‘‘halfcastes and quadroons’’ should be encouraged to leave to seek work as servants and laborers. This U-turn in Board policy would subsidize Aboriginal support and address the colony’s labor shortage—but crucially, assimilation of the ‘‘half-castes’’ would also solve the Board’s problems in controlling these rebellious people. In August 1883 Fred Kruger was called in again to photograph new landscaping 20

INTRODUCTION

and supposed improvements, but also to record the ‘‘real natives,’’ images that would support the Board’s formulation of its assimilation policy, as I discuss further in chapter 3. This policy culminated in the 1886 Aborigines Protection Act, requiring so-called ‘‘half-castes’’ aged thirteen and over to leave the station, and effectively marking the beginning of the settlement’s end.63 As one of the act’s drafters noted, its object was to ‘‘get the half castes off the reserves and make it possible to prosecute them under the vagrancy laws, otherwise they would refuse to work and might continue to loaf about with Aboriginals without fear of being punished as a vagrant.’’ 64 The amended act redefined Aborigines as ‘‘full bloods,’’ ‘‘half-castes’’ over thirty-four, female ‘‘half-castes’’ married to ‘‘Aborigines,’’ the infants of ‘‘Aborigines,’’ and any ‘‘half-caste’’ licensed to remain on a station.65 Aboriginal descendants today remember with great bitterness the expulsion of the so-called ‘‘half-castes’’—splitting up families and forcing many, without resources, into a hostile society.66

S E G R E G AT I O N O R S O C I A L A U T O N O M Y ?

Kruger was also requested to record the extensive landscaping and rebuilding carried out after the inquiry, including a new two-story brick house for the manager. These arrangements probably created greater social distance between white managers and Aboriginal residents. The tall staircase window at the eastern end of the new house provided a distant view of the village, but this would not have allowed the manager to spy on the residents: Strickland and other managers described hearing distant ‘‘disturbances’’ and ‘‘going down into’’ the settlement to intervene. This more detached relationship would have given residents relative privacy and probably acted to preserve cultural differences. At the current Aboriginal reserve Doomadgee in far northwestern Queensland, anthropologist David Trigger concluded that a spatial layout separating living and working quarters assisted Aboriginal people ‘‘to insulate the domain of Blackfella space, thought and behaviour from the white domain.’’ While whites visiting the ‘‘blackfella’’ domain showed no awareness of Aboriginal social etiquette, Aboriginal residents modified their behavior in the presence of whites, warning each other of the approach of a white visitor, for example. Awareness of white disapproval prompted restraint—for example, C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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of demonstrative mourning in the presence of the manager—or concealment—for example, of the grooming of head lice, ritual life, tobacco smoking, fighting, or the kinship system—maintaining social distance.67 Hence the effectiveness of the Board’s machine was undermined in ways it did not recognize. In March 1883 the acting manager William Goodall wrote about a difficulty that had arisen in building the new huts: Johnny Terrick objected to any place being built there unless it was for himself as he looks upon that piece of ground as his own property and as I had already promised the cottage to another I could not grant it to him. I further found that if I persisted in the erection thereof it would cause a large amount of discontent and murmuring so I requested Mr Anderson to lay out the cottages near the original sites of the huts occupied by? Bamfield, Morgan and Dunolly to whom I had promised the cottages when it was first decided they should be erected. This appears to give general satisfaction. He concluded that ‘‘having occupied any place for any length of time they become attached to it and do not like to be placed any where else.’’ 68 Unaware of persisting links to traditional country, he recognized the residents’ new attachments to Coranderrk. Another important goal of the Board’s apparatus of control was to isolate and fix the Aboriginal residents: in 1877 Framlingham station was thought ideal in this respect.69 But at Coranderrk, only two miles west of Healesville, and ‘‘a short distance from the Melbourne road,’’ this was impossible to achieve. Coranderrk was unusual in its level of contact with European society: the station’s proximity to white settlement saw a constant flow of visitors toward it, as well as travel of the residents away; the problem of maintaining the residents’ seclusion became a constant theme.70 In 1874, for example, the Board referred to ‘‘the great difficulty . . . in keeping them under control when they are induced by old associations or superstitions, or tempted by the lower class of whites, to wander from the spots where in health they are supplied with good food and clothing and in sickness tended with the same care as is bestowed on Europeans.’’ 71 Visitors went to the station as to a laboratory or zoo, and the station’s political importance as a site of Aboriginal-white struggle saw the production of visual representations that, for whites, constituted certain ‘‘truths’’ about Aboriginal people. Once it had satisfactorily enforced its assimila22

INTRODUCTION

tion policy in the mid-1880s, the Board allowed the station to become a showplace, open to visitors, and as tourism out of Melbourne developed, Coranderrk became a must-see site on an itinerary that extended northeast into the Dandenongs (see chapter 4 for a detailed account of the residents’ contact with white society). Residents benefited in various ways: by selling souvenirs to visitors to the station or by participating in sporting or cultural events in Melbourne. This contact also allowed residents to develop a sophisticated awareness of white discourse, which assisted them to contest the Board’s attempts to increase its control during the 1870s. The Aboriginal residents’ acute grasp of the role of demeanor and visibility within the white system of control enabled a certain disregard of its power in struggling to retain their land and autonomy. t

While power relationships may inhere within the spatial organization of a landscape, its inertia and scale helping to naturalize authority, it is important not to overestimate their impact on the people living within it. Aboriginal power to construct an oppositional domain was limited, especially under an increasingly repressive management regime, but evidence for strategies to maintain and conceal traditions, or to respond to new circumstances, serves to remind us that the process of cultural exchange is complex and situational. Coranderrk was founded in consensual circumstances, which during its first decade permitted a degree of autonomy. There was space for Aboriginal objectives and traditions to coexist with newer practices, as well as opportunities to reformulate them. Perhaps this is why in 1877 it was said that the residents’ ‘‘bearing and demeanour’’ was unique among the Victorian Aboriginal stations.72 The evidence suggests the coexistence of different cultural understandings of the station’s social and physical landscape: white observers were pleased to note its orderliness and the civilizing functions of schoolhouse and church, as well as the adoption of a new form of private domesticity measured through the appearance of nuclear households. The Aboriginal residents, however, maintained several forms of collective identity, reflected in their dwellings’ spatial orientation to traditional country and forms of sociality such as group regulation. Some retained practices such as a camp lifestyle, betrayed by the presence of mia-mias, or more covert taboos. In some cases such persistence was possible because whites C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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did not recognize Aboriginal practices or, as in the case of Green’s tolerance of beliefs surrounding menstruation and defecation, because they did not perceive these practices to threaten Christianizing objectives. Here, the invisibility of such practices, converging with their repression by midnineteenth-century white society, probably also contributed to their survival, in contrast with the rapid abandonment of the higher-profile corroboree, for example.

ABORIGINAL DISREGARD?

It is also important to understand how Aboriginal notions of power, meaning, and knowledge shaped Kulin responses to the mission environment. Traditionally, all knowledge is land-based in Aboriginal societies, structured by peoples’ relationship with the ancestral powers, or ‘‘Dreamings,’’ who created the world as they walked the earth, making places, people, and culture and marking the signs of their activities into the landscape.73 Aboriginal people reunite with Dreamings by replicating the movements of the ancestral beings—for example, by marking designs on the body, in sand, or on canvases for the art market.74 In contrast to the conventions of geometric perspectivalism, in making images of landscape, Aboriginal people reinternalized it ‘‘in the form of a living and transforming code,’’ revealing the events that underlay it and joining with the powers of the ancestor. Most significantly, Aboriginal art contains a fourth dimension, the ‘‘inside,’’ reflecting ‘‘an epistemological emphasis on an underlying world order’’ and ‘‘truths which have to be approached in a particular way in order to be understood.’’ 75 In a ceremonial context, dance, song, and painting formed a harmonious and inseparable whole, although the West has decontextualized these expressions by taking them up individually. Ceremony, or performance, constituted an integral and foundational element of Aboriginal culture, presencing the ancestors and renewing links between land, people, and Dreamings. Within this organization Aboriginal visual expression and ways of seeing proved very important and elaborate, and as in Western society, the sense of vision was accorded primacy.76 However, as the linguistic research of Nicholas Evans and David Wilkins demonstrates, there exists a culturally variable relationship between the senses’ metaphorical extension into the cognitive domain: in Aboriginal languages, it is hearing, not vision, 24

INTRODUCTION

which is extended to denote know, think, or remember, while see is more likely to be used for specific forms of social interaction ( flirt with, love, supervise/oversee). This reflects an Australia-wide tradition making the ear the organ of intellection as well as of hearing, also explaining the emphasis in Aboriginal society on grasping language, stories, or names as the key to socially transmitted information, and the summoning of verbal records in recollection. The resulting cognitive verbs extend to acts such as remembering or knowing faces, as well as names or sounds.77 This linguistic pattern has cultural foundations. In general, direct eye contact is far more communicatively loaded in Aboriginal communities than in European societies, and it may be offensive or interpreted as a sexual advance.78 Many communities have highly developed sign language systems. Where communal life entails a high level of continuous background noise, individuals tune in or out selectively. Conversational styles are not usually dyadic, or face to face, with the expectation of eye contact and control by the speaker; instead, in remote Aboriginal communities, talk is ‘‘broadcast,’’ with no need for eye contact and with control held by listeners.This is related to complex kin relationships that often require people to remain turned away from each other even when talking. Elaborate rules existed for meetings with strangers that stressed formality and the creation of a physical and temporal space of adjustment (a warning period) for host groups. Movement proceeded behind other people’s ‘‘lines of personal social presentation,’’ such as paths of movement, vision, or personal orientation.79 This visual subtlety and indirectness was perhaps related to the tendency for life to be lived in full public view, with participants engaging or disengaging when they chose. As I have noted, regulation of behavior was traditionally effected through the public shaming of wrongdoers before their relatively close-knit kin, as laws were enforced by reference to an external referent rather than to individual self-mastery. While it proves difficult to discern such intangible and nuanced practices in the past, these observations have implications for thinking about the intersection of nineteenth-century visual and social systems at Coranderrk. The station’s layout, as we have seen, provided spatial buffer zones in the form of public spaces, while the open, uphill approach toward the settlement would have helped maintain Aboriginal sight lines, allowing residents to prepare for visitors. The bush and creeks remained private C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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Aboriginal spaces. The unmediated, face-to-face contact characteristic of the European visual regime, linked to a notion of the observation of external appearances as a realist measurement of things and people, would initially have been very literally confronting to Aboriginal people. By contrast, looking relations within traditional Aboriginal visual regimes were characterized by greater delicacy and tact. Meaning was found in a wider range of less overt signifying practices. At Coranderrk, traditional visual culture, linked to the persistence of forms of collective authority, may have counteracted or undermined the effectiveness of white surveillance. Panoptical control dissociated the see/ being seen dyad of European social intercourse; in mastering themselves, Europeans imagined themselves watched by the reproving eye inherent in face-to-face communication. But Aboriginal people had always lacked the sense of being watched by a controlling speaker who should be constantly attended to, of being an autonomous individual listener of whom politeness required continual attention. These cultural differences possibly help to explain the persistence of practices such as kinship relations, which did not depend on observable, face-to-face contact and which therefore were invisible to white managers. Perhaps, too, we can understand the frustration of white speakers, such as the series of unpopular managers appointed to Coranderrk during the 1870s and 1880s, when their listeners chose to ignore them, assuming a traditional power over communication.

DANCING WITH STRANGERS

Within a culture that lacked the Western emphasis on surface appearance, Aboriginal expressions often stressed a relationship with place and the ancestral beings that created it. Most powerfully, Aboriginal ways of seeing the world, of conceptualizing human relations and ties to land, were traditionally articulated through visual and embodied performances, publicly asserting rights to knowledge and country. Across the continent, Aboriginal responses to colonists drew on these traditions in trying to incorporate these strangers into an existing reality; new practices such as photography were understood in terms of an indigenous epistemology.The conventions of Western photography constituting Cartesian perspectivalism—incorporating a sense of rational, geometric space and a detached and disembodied form of vision—were challenged by equally powerful Aboriginal 26

INTRODUCTION

expressions, and sometimes new photographic forms were created that fulfilled traditional objectives. For Aboriginal people, meetings constituted performances, and they drew photography into this embodied domain as a new way of communicating with others. Europeans have usually failed to understand the subtlety, indirectness, and formality that characterized Aboriginal social relations, and especially the central role of ceremony. However, sometimes they managed to fulfill local expectations: in a wonderful passage, explorer Matthew Flinders described how in 1801 he had ordered his marines to perform a drill for the Nyungar people of King George Sound in Western Australia: When they saw these beautiful red-and-white men, with their bright muskets, drawn up in a line, they absolutely screamed with delight; nor were their wild gestures and vociferation to be silenced, but by commencing the exercise, to which they paid the most earnest and silent attention. Several of them moved their hands, involuntarily, according to the motions; and the old man placed himself at the end of the rank, with a short staff in his hand, which he shouldered, presented, grounded, as did the marines their muskets, without, I believe, knowing what he did. The Nyungar identified the white men as dead ancestors returned, and their interpretation of the ceremony from heaven, or Koorannup, was still being performed over one hundred years later.80 In Aboriginal practice, this public space of encounter was framed within the less confrontational space of disregard, or warning period; it was staged and choreographed, involving visitors and hosts, articulating the status of participants, and ideally creating reciprocity. To dance was to assert knowledge, to claim rights, and to negotiate and legitimize authority over specific countries.81 Of the Kulin confederacy of central Victoria, Wurundjeri leader William Barak explained that ‘‘when visitors came to meetings from some distant place they danced and the hosts looked on; for it was for them to dance and make friends with each other, being from a distance.’’ 82 As the Nyungar demonstrated, the embodied mimicry of strangers participating in a mutual performance expressed a formal relationship and was a key form of communication. In this context, Aboriginal people readily understood photography as a medium that created this theatrical space of performance and that, among other functions, could mediate between black and white. Like C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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traditional performance, it could constitute a means of renewing links between land, people, and Dreamings, as I discuss further in chapter 1, where I examine Charles Walter’s work at Coranderrk. Although there are always dangers in drawing ethnographic parallels between Aboriginal nations distant in time and space, Eric Michaels’s account of the introduction of video to the Warlpiri of central Australia in the 1980s provides some remarkable insights into the inventive ways that Aboriginal societies draw on traditional conventions in making sense of their experiences with Europeans. In their experiments with filming, the Warlpiri employed several visual techniques to express traditional concerns, such as ‘‘exceptionally long landscape pans, indeed there is more attention to the landscape than to actors or action,’’ accompanied by zooms, refocus, and still shots. The cameraperson ‘‘had a purposive explanation for every motion of his camera’’ in ‘‘tracking inhabitants of the landscape, historical and mythical figures who reside there, but are not apparent to normal vision.’’ 83 As in all Aboriginal societies, Warlpiri social organization is grounded in kinship and country, which governs the distribution of informational labor; rights to tell or perform stories belong to owners (Kirda), while managers (Kurdungurlu) do not perform but must be present and have final responsibility for a ceremony’s correctness. In Warlpiri usage, those with rights to knowledge were involved in filming, even if they did not appear on screen, in order to legitimate the performance. Significantly, the camera needed to be inserted into the proper organization of events and was therefore assigned the role of manager, becoming a legitimate and full participant.Warlpiri use of film emphasizes the central role of performance in Aboriginal society, and the amenability of the camera to incorporation into traditional conventions of representation.

P E R F O R M A N C E A S H I S T O R I C A L N A R R AT I V E

Traditionally, performance also included a nonsacred type of historical narrative that re-created and communicated events, often articulating relationships with other Aboriginal groups. Encounters with colonists were quickly incorporated into the Aboriginal repertoire. As Major Thomas Mitchell noted in 1838, their ‘‘pieces’’ were ‘‘not seldom, of late years, representations of scenes they have witnessed when in contact with the whites . . . in mimicry and in invention they are not surpassed by any race.’’ 84 Such per28

INTRODUCTION

formances might celebrate a victory over white settlers, such as a ‘‘corroboree’’ dance witnessed by Gideon Lang in southern Queensland during the 1860s, performed for around five hundred people. It depicted cattle speared by Aboriginal hunters and the ensuing battle with white horsemen played by painted and decorated Aboriginal men: These manufactured whites at once wheeled to the right, fired, and drove the blacks before them.The latter soon rallied, however, and a desperate fight ensued, the blacks extending their flanks, and driving back the whites. The fictitious white men bit the cartridges, put on the caps, and went through all the forms of loading, firing, wheeling their horses, assisting each other, &c., with an exactness which proved personal observation. The native spectators groaned whenever a blackfellow fell, but cheered lustily when a white bit the dust; and at length, after the ground had been fought over and over again, the whites were ignominiously driven from the field, amidst the frantic delight of the natives.85 So it appears interesting that the first video the Warlpiri decided to make told the storyof the 1928 Coniston massacre, in which members lost around one hundred relatives—‘‘the single most telling history of their encounter with Europeans.’’ 86 Here the camera acted as a Kurdungurlu and witness, testifying to the truth of the narrative not in the Western sense as a realist, disinterested report, but as a participant in a social relationship bringing a responsibility to authenticate. In its theatrical and historical character, photography accorded with traditional forms of expressing relationships between groups, and between people and country. Perhaps this is why many premission images record performances staged for the camera, expressing a mutual desire to communicate across racial lines. The corroboree exerted a fearful fascination for the European public who did not understand its inner meanings, and it was quickly repressed by missionary interests.Yet in the modified theater recorded on the Goulburn River by John Hunter Kerr in the 1850s, for example, we see the willingness of his ‘‘Aboriginal neighbours’’ to perform—or, in their terms, to create a proper relationship and accommodate the colonists within the civilized world (figure 80). Perhaps these performative, ephemeral moments of contact between Aborigines and strangers have been overlooked by historians because they are too self-consciously theatrical: in their selfpresentation, they seem not to require professional interpretation, standC O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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ing apart from the raw materials of the documentary archive.87 To modern eyes, photographs, and especially theatrical, antirealist images, occupy the same discursive space, too obviously staged and framed by an acknowledged author to be trusted, apparently rendering further comment superfluous. Unlike the transparent windows of mid-century Victorian realism, vernacular and often self-presencing photographic forms have been disparaged, disregarded, and omitted from official canons and histories. In this way, the corroboree as performative image represents a particularly ambiguous and troubling position, its meaning self-evident but also secret, saying too much and nothing at the same time.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ABORIGINAL PEOPLE

Within the complex system of intersecting scopic regimes that prevailed at Coranderrk, photography was new to the Kulin, but they quickly appropriated the medium. Many visitors commented on the residents’ liking for visual imagery: they decorated their homes with pictures cut from illustrated newspapers and with photographs—most likely including some of themselves.88 Robert Brough Smyth commented on their visual literacy, stating that the figures that are given in this work sufficientlyanswer the oft-repeated statement that the blacks of Australia are unable to understand a picture when they see it. They are fond of pictures; and one thing that has astonished Europeans is the care they take, when partially civilised, to decorate their huts with wood engravings and coloured pictures. There is probably not a little child at any of the Aboriginal settlements that would not at once recognise a photographic portrait of any well-known person who regularly visited the station.89 This capability contrasts with the difficulty many contemporary Europeans had in ‘‘reading’’ photographs: during the famous Tichborne case, for example, in which a butcher from Wagga claimed to be the longlost heir to a British baronetcy, many witnesses displayed a reluctance to look at or comment on photographs, declaring, ‘‘I am a very poor judge of likenesses,’’ or, ‘‘I do not understand these things.’’ 90 Some aspects of the medium probably resonated with a traditional Aboriginal delight in mimicry, expressed in realist narrative forms of dance and art. 30

INTRODUCTION

Gideon Lang, for example, noted of the performance of ‘‘the representation of a herd of cattle’’ he witnessed that ‘‘the imitation was most skilful, the action and attitude of every individual member of the entire herd being ludicrously exact. Some lay down and chewed the cud, others stood scratching themselves with hind feet or horns, licking themselves or their calves; several rubbing their heads against each other in bucolic friendliness.’’ 91 Similarly, many early white observers in the southeast noted a figurative tradition of drawing in charcoal on the inside of bark dwellings that recorded events and people, and which coexisted with a geometric, abstract genre.92 In this sense, the realism inherent in the picture-making process may have marked a convergence of traditions in the mutual enjoyment of ‘‘most skilful’’ imitation. But Aboriginal people also responded to the new possibilities offered by photography. In 1873, seventeen-year-old Jemima Wandin sent a message to missionary Daniel Matthews at Maloga Mission on the Murray River, on the border with New South Wales, requesting a photograph of his wife. She wrote: ‘‘My dear Old Friend, I hope you are very well. I want to see you again soon; will never forget your name. I was sorry I did not write to you before. Your kind letter has been in my pocket ever since it came. I have been waiting for time to answer it. Tell Jane I want her likeness. So goodbye—I remain your loving friend, Jemima.’’ 93 Matthews himself was an enthusiastic photographer, using illuminated lantern slides in his fund-raising talks, and Green also took an interest in photography—in 1881 he was accused of trying to attract young women to Coranderrk from other stations by showing them pictures of the young male residents.94 So it is likely that both managers facilitated residents’ familiarity with the medium. Jemima’s message indicates that photographic portraits had become, as for whites, a kind of currency, artifacts exchanged between friends, and here communicating across racial boundaries. As her affectionate missive reveals, the photograph was a token of friendship, a likeness that would stand in for Jane’s actual presence, uniting viewer and viewed. But there is also evidence for an awareness of photography’s exploitative potential, such as the refusal to cooperate with French visitor Charnay. At this time, too, Fred Kruger was sent by the Board to record the residents, and this series reveals a number of signs of contestation by the Aboriginal subjects (see chapter 3). In a general sense, Coranderrk residents determined the broad parameters of their representation, for example in reC O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

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fusing to remove their clothes at a time when Australian ‘‘anthropometric data’’ was eagerly sought by scientists around the world.This pattern forms a marked contrast with photographs produced elsewhere in Australia at this time, especially in ‘‘remote’’ communities, due to the residents’ early adoption of a Christian and European lifestyle in which clothing stood as a mark of decency. Observers commented on the high standard of their appearance, their attention to fashion, and their eager consumption of fashion goods. Their awareness of how they were perceived, and the pride they expressed in themselves in their dealings with white society, shaped the way they presented themselves to the camera. Hence communication on the missions proved a complex process: European visual regimes emphasized outward visual form and observable practices as a measure of progress effected by the imagined burden of a disciplinary gaze. By contrast, within a society largely structured by elaborate visual conventions rooted in relations to kin and country and expressed in a harmony of performance, song, and art, Kulin behavior can perhaps often be understood as disregard, as they continued to pursue their own objectives. Where Western perspectival conventions relied on the description of surface appearance, Aboriginal art tended to emphasize the inside in associating artists, place, and ancestral power. Against this dynamic and contested background, the colonial photographic archive emerges as more than a record of white government’s success in controlling and ‘‘civilizing’’ Aboriginal people. As Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘‘card of introduction to make all mankind acquaintances,’’ it also yields evidence for a more ambiguous, intimate relationship between black and white, reflecting a fascination with difference and a greater role for the Aboriginal subjects than has been recognized. The first series to be produced at the station by Charles Walter between 1865 and 1866 demonstrates these possibilities.

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INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’: C H A R L E S W A LT E R , M I S S I O N A R I E S , A N D P H O T O G R A P H I C T H E AT E R

t

One night in 1865, the Wurundjeri leader Simon Wonga welcomed the assembled residents of Coranderrk to their new home. This is the first meeting like this I have ever seen. I am very glad this night. When I was camping about in every place I never got any meeting like this. Mr Green spoke to me a long time ago. He told me not to walk about any more. I kept his word. Mr Green told me plenty of good words from the Bible, and they made me very glad. Mr Hamilton spoke to me at Woori-Yaloak, and made me to know more. I now know plenty of good words from the Bible. I am very glad. Mr Green and all the Yarra blacks and me went through the mountain. We had no bread for four or five days. We did all this to let you [Goulburn blacks] know about the good word. Now you have all come to the Yarra, I am glad. You now know plenty. Do not go away any more, else you will lose it again. This is better than drinking. We are all glad this night. This is good.1 Wonga’s speech was reported in one of Coranderrk’s first real public appearances, although certainly not the last: a newspaper account of the new

‘‘civilising experiment’’ outside Melbourne. It comprised a full page of text and five engravings based on Charles Walter’s photographs. Over the year to come several more written accounts of the station would follow, and Walter sold images from his visits to Coranderrk and the surrounding region to a number of other newspapers.2 Some of these he collated in a commercially available album titled Australian Aborigines under Civilisation (aauc). Consequently, the president of the Intercolonial Exhibition, Redmond Barry, commissioned him around May 1866 to make a series of portraits of the residents to be incorporated into a panel displayed in the Melbourne exhibition later that year. These images were also made into an album for the family of John Green, the station superintendent.The following discussion of Walter’s images of Coranderrk aims to explore the specific historical circumstances in which his images were produced. By attending to the physical characteristics and effects of these artifacts—specifically, numerous newspaper features, two albums, and an exhibition panel—we may trace their circulation and effects across a range of social practices. At this time Coranderrk was a symbol of hope for Victoria’s Aboriginal people and their white supporters. Despite opposition and difficulty, the station had eventually been established in March 1863, at the junction of Badger Creek and the Yarra. The station’s internal dynamics seemed uniquely harmonious: relations between John Green and the residents, and between the different Aboriginal clans, were characterized by goodwill, mutual cooperation, and a sense of common purpose, as Wonga’s speech attests. This was also a decade when humanitarians held sway over colonial policy and public opinion, fostering a climate of public sympathy and optimism. However, this hopeful local movement had to contend with the juggernaut of colonialism: white government sought to confine Aborigines on stations in order to impose disciplinary technologies on them that relied on the visibility and demeanor of the residents. This panoptical tendency was coupled with a countermovement, the insertion of representations of Aboriginal people into the developing so-called exhibitionary complex, thereby shaping public understandings of them. The photographs taken shortly after the station’s establishment, by one of Australia’s first professional traveling photographers, were implicated in defining textual and visual tropes repeated over and over again during the century to follow,

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shaping the way people thought about Aborigines and difference, but also reflecting something of Aboriginal concerns. Some of these formative images told stories that had already passed into Aboriginal oral tradition and that came to assume an almost mythical significance to the Kulin. It is possible to see how the images’ densely ambiguous nature enabled a double cultural meaning—for example, in the communication between thirteen-year-old Ellen and the Queen, or in figuring Coranderrk as a Goshen, a land of light and plenty—once condensed into pictorial forms by thewhite photographer.While to Aboriginal people the photographs signified claims to land, they were translated by whites into Western themes: the Aborigines’ rapid ‘‘civilization’’ as measured by the adoption of white goods and customs; the ‘‘royalty’’ of traditional Aborigines. These representations contributed to the creation of public understandings—for example, of an opposition between supposedly savage ‘‘authentic’’ and changed and therefore ‘‘inauthentic’’ Aborigines, or of a notion of Aborigines as civilization’s other. Conversely, it was in this period that the Kulin learned the mechanisms of white representation, exemplified by photography, and the value and means of deploying them to their own advantage.

W A LT E R A N D P H O T O G R A P H Y

But first, who was the photographer? Charles Walter has been the subject of a number of portraits himself: he had arrived in the country in 1855 from Germany and was collecting for the botanist Ferdinand von Mueller by 1856. His earliest known photograph is dated 1862, and hewas advertising as a ‘‘Country Photographic Artist’’ by 1865. Gael Newton locates him at the vanguard of ‘‘the new breed of photographers’’ specializing in landscape work who, from the mid-1860s, set off on solo expeditions into remote parts of Victoria in search of picturesque views. As Isobel Crombie has noted, these professionals understood ‘‘that city dwellers were as enthusiastic to buy images of idyllic fern gullies and tranquil rivers as photographs that showed the destruction of those same areas for timber, minerals, or farming.’’ The Dictionary of Australian Artists called Walter ‘‘possibly Australia’s first photojournalist,’’ and Newton comments that his subject matter was the ‘‘standard fare’’ of the illustrated newspapers, which represented him as

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a heroic explorer, describing the difficulties he surmounted in getting to the remote and picturesque places he photographed.3 In 1866 Walter described a trip he had made to Torbreck Falls with ‘‘his apparatus and tent upon his back—the whole weighing about fifty pounds [twenty-one kilosgrams]’’; he traveled alone and lived off the bush.4 He used a more portable stereo camera for most work but also produced half-plate and whole-plate negatives. In 1873 a drawing showed ‘‘our artist’’ off to work in pith helmet, ax, and camera bag.5 These sketches portray an explorer who collected both plants and images, and whose work satisfied an urban need to experience the bush. In 1874 another newspaper engraving showed Walter photographing an Aboriginal ‘‘pin-up girl,’’ alluding to his work with Aboriginal subjects and indicating the legendary status his travels had achieved (figure 3). 6 The accompanying text explained that Our engraving illustrates a characteristic phase of Australian bush life. A travelling photographer on the lookout for subjects has come upon a camp of natives. One, a half-caste girl, has attracted his attention by her wild beauty, and he has placed her in position, and is taking her photograph. Some of the natives squat close by watching the strange and mysterious process, and presently their grim figures will also be photographed to serve as ethnological specimens and curios to send to friends in England as examples of the rapidly disappearing Australian race. This slightly prurient fantasy bears no relationship to Walter’s oeuvre, which does not contain any images of naked women.The cartoon showing the ‘‘half-caste girl’’ suggests a gypsy rather than an Aboriginal woman, although the group in the background bears a resemblance to some of Walter’s 1869 stereoscopic Gippsland views, also circulated as newspaper illustrations.7 The writer combines romantic fancy with an early allusion to taking photographic souvenirs of the ‘‘dying race.’’ Walter did not take many photographs of Aboriginal people, nor did they become famous, although he was known in Victoria, then as now, for these early and powerful records of a significant moment in Aboriginal history. In general, Aboriginal people were viewed in the wider context of a developing popular interest in the environment. But Walter’s photographs ‘‘improved on nature,’’ using various techniques to comply with contemporary stories told about his Aboriginal subjects, or to invent new ones; his 36

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3. A Bush Photograph, April 18, 1874. Hugh George for Wilson and MacKinnon, Mel-

bourne. Print: wood engraving. Illustrated newspaper file. Australasian Sketcher. Accession number a/s18/04/74/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

images intersect systematically with contemporary rhetoric about the process of civilizing and Christianizing Aboriginal people. We can also recover something of his personal relationship with Coranderrk and its residents, which points to mutual sympathy, from his photographs.

THE KULIN PERSPECTIVE

From the point of view of the Kulin, an important effect of Walter’s photographic practice and its newspaper reproductions was that they developed a sharp awareness of their visual representation by whites. Against the contemporary understanding of the so-called civilizing process (involving a notion of a linear movement from a coherent alien tradition through the abandonment of traditional knowledge and practices to absorption by a more powerful culture), they can be seen to have appropriated these forms selectively, for their own uses.This took place at several levels: as many have acknowledged, the Kulin’s political activism proved particularly effective because it was adroitly expressed through white structures of negotiation, ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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as in the early and formative deputation to Governor Barkly’s 1863 levee (discussed below). An important aspect of this approach was the manipulation of verbal and visual forms of representation, perhaps more congenial to people who had traditionally stressed these dimensions of sociality. I argue that these visual aspects of Coranderrk’s history have been overlooked, perhaps because of European cultural assumptions, equating the written word with a more general competence, and reflected in a historiographical bias toward documentary evidence and political history. Although the indigenous perspective often seems absent in conventional documentary evidence, a detailed understanding of the mechanisms of visual imagery and ephemeral mass media such as newspapers can explain the Kulin’s response to their circumstances. So while the history of colonial photography has generally presented picture taking as a practice that exploited indigenous subjects, at this early stage the Kulin did in some degree shape the content and form of their photographic representation. They also appropriated these images, an assertion of identity taken to remarkable lengths in Garak-coonum’s seizure of Walter’s portrait of him as a self-portrait. This clever manipulation characterized Coranderrk’s political activism throughout its history.

N E W S PA P E R S

Walter had first visited Coranderrk prior to June 1865, when he took his earliest photographs of it for his own commercial use, and by which time it was noted of the station that ‘‘many of the interiors were tolerably well furnished, the seats and tables being made of rough bush timber, and the walls decorated with pictures cut out of the Illustrated London News and the illustrated newspapers published in Melbourne. There were also several photographs, which were highly prized.’’ 8 The Kulin would have had access to Walter’s photographs of Coranderrk once they appeared in the illustrated newspapers from August 1865, and indeed, in May of the following year another visitor noted that the huts ‘‘were all partially papered with that ubiquitous periodical the Illustrated London News, and on most of the side mantelpieces were photographs of the ladies and gentlemen of the establishment,’’ suggesting that Walter had passed on the results of his work at the station.9 We know that Aboriginal people had always had

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a rich visual culture, and they readily appropriated this new form. During this same period, most Kulin adults remained illiterate, but they were keen to learn, so that they could read the Bible and newspapers, as well as write letters.10 Their consumption of the newspapers commented on by visitors would have focused on the images. It is entertaining to imagine the settlement’s self-reflexive enjoyment of these mass-produced portraits of themselves and their home, as well as the community’s interest in hearing what the papers wrote about them. More to the point, I suggest that the self-conscious awareness of their own public profile and agency in white society through the mass media of the press and commercial photography itself enabled residents to develop the ‘‘sophisticated’’ approach to politics and representation that always surprised outsiders and that they often attributed to external white intervention. It has been argued that an important determinant of debate about Aboriginal people into the 1870s was the policy-makers’ personal experience of Coranderrk, looming larger than life.11 The station’s proximity to Melbourne made it more accessible than the other six Aboriginal reserves, and the intense and self-conscious cultural exchange this prompted formed a crucial aspect of the residents’ political savvy and their ability to manipulate public debate, later to prove so important.

QUEEN VICTORIA’S PROMISE

Traditional Aboriginal protocols had involved sophisticated formal negotiations between tribal groups, and the Kulin quickly learned the value of statesmanship in white society also, for example through publicly enacted relationships between ambassadors. By means of such convergences between old and new, the Kulin were able to assert their objectives, foremost of these being their claim to ownership of Coranderrk. For example, in May 1863, only a couple of months after the station’s establishment, a deputation of Wurundjeri and Taungurung led by Simon Wonga attended Governor Barkly’s public levee, celebrating the Queen’s birthday and the marriage of the Prince of Wales. They presented him, as the vice-regal agent of Queen Victoria, with weapons for the prince and rugs and baskets for the Queen— all traditional objects. The Jajowrong at Mount Franklin sent their gifts to the Queen independently with two letters written by thirteen-year-old

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4. Deputation of Victorian Aborigines at the Governor’s Levee. From the Illustrated Melbourne

Post, 18 June 1863. By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Ellen, who had also crocheted a collar for the Queen and a doily for the wife of the departing governor. Later in the year the Jajowrong joined the others at Coranderrk.12 The levee was reported in the Illustrated Melbourne Post on 18 June 1863, accompanied by an engraving titled the Deputation of Victorian Aborigines at the Governor’s Levee (figure 4). It described how members of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines were introduced, ‘‘accompanied by chiefs of the Goulburn, Yarra, Western Port, and Gipps Land blacks, and several members of the respective tribes to the number of about sixteen, clothed in European costume, but wrapped in opossum rugs and carrying spears.’’ The former premier of Victoria Richard Heales then read an address from the Board that introduced the ‘‘Waworrung, Boonorong, and Tarawaragal tribes of Australian aborigines’’ who wished to congratulate the Queen on the marriage of the Prince of Wales, and explained that the deputation originated with the people of Coranderrk, whom the Board

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merely assisted. The governor accepted the address and gifts, and Simon Wonga, ‘‘the chief of the Yarra tribe,’’ then spoke in his own language, interpreted by guardian of the Aborigines William Thomas: ‘‘His observations were to the effect that the deputation of blackfellows desired to present an address to her Majesty the Queen, and to accompany it with presents.’’ The secretary of the Board, Robert Brough Smyth, then read the address: Blacks of the tribes of Wawoorong, Boonorong and Tara-Waragal send this to the Great Mother Queen Victoria. We and other blackfellows send many thanks to the Great Mother Queen for many many things. Blackfellow now throw away all war-spears. No more fighting but live like white men almost. Blackfellows hear that your first son has married. Very good that! Blackfellows send all good to him, and to you, his Great Mother, Victoria. Blackfellows come from Miam and Willam to bring this paper to the Good Governor. He will tell you more. All Blackfellows round about agree to this. This is all. The governor then said that he would forward the presents and to ‘‘Tell them also the Queen loves all her subjects, of whatever race, or country, or colour, they may be. . . . She will also be glad to hear that they have given up fighting amongst each other, and live like her white subjects.’’ Then Wonga took a ‘‘large and beautifully worked’’ opossum skin rug that he spread out, and the ‘‘other blacks, one of them about eighty years of age [‘Mr King’?] laid on the rug a number of spears, a wimmera [spearthrower], shield and waddy.’’ 13 The engraved image shows the uniformed, decorated governor, flanked by a costumed judge and soldiers, facing an elderly man wrapped in a cloak and the taller, younger Wonga, the rest of the group behind them. A short white man in evening dress stands behind Mr. King, facing away from the Aborigines, hands held apart as if declaiming—presumably Thomas or Smyth. The assembled throng fills the ornate ballroom. The image echoes the written account’s attention to protocol and formality, representing the deputation as dignified, on a footing of equality with the assembly’s other delegates, but it also belongs to an iconographic tradition that formulaically represents defeated peoples paying tribute to their conqueror. The Board later reported that ‘‘the conduct of the Aborigines was grave and dignified; and Wonga, the principal man of the Yarra tribe, addressed His Excellency with becoming modesty,

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and yet with earnestness.’’ 14 This newspaper representation provided evidence to the Kulin of the extreme political importance to whites of English government, represented by the Crown. While Wonga expressed his people’s gratitude to the Queen, this was of a limited kind, specifying only the peace between tribes as a benefit of the culture she represented, exemplified by the united deputation. However, as insinuated by the pictorial icon of surrender, Europeans received it as an expression of loyalty and submission, subsuming it into a model of conquered peoples surrendering to imperial might, as the Queen’s response demonstrates. She expressed the satisfaction with which Her Majesty has received such assurances of their attachment and loyalty, and the Queen would be glad that the girl Ellen should be assured that Her Majesty has had much pleasure in accepting the collar which she has worked. The Queen trusts that the advantage of education may be shown to this poor girl, and that she may be encouraged not only to seek her own improvement, but to acquaint the other aboriginal inhabitants of the interest that their Queen, however distant from her, will always feel in their advancement and welfare. I have also the satisfaction to convey to you an expression of the lively sense entertained by their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales of the kind feeling which prompted the Aborigines to make them an offering of so much interest. I am desired to add that their Royal Highnesses have received many tokens of good will and affection from the subjects of Her Majesty the Queen, but conspicuous in their estimation are those which show, as in the present instance, that these sentiments animate the native population of so distant and loyal dependencies.15 The story of the Queen’s letters to Coranderrk had a double meaning, equally satisfying to black and white, explaining why it became a central narrative told by and about the residents of Coranderrk.To the newspaperreading public and to white officials, it appeared that the Aborigines had acknowledged the importance and power of the Crown, as well as the benefits of white civilization, in a suitably grateful manner.The Board report for 1865 recorded that ‘‘when, in obedience to your Excellency’s commands, the gracious sentiments of her Majesty were made known to the blacks, they appeared to be sensible of the kindness and favour shown to them.’’ 16 Ellen and her crocheted collar became to whites an emblem of acquired 42

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virtues and the civilizing process, and the honor paid her by the Queen’s ‘‘personal’’ response. To Aborigines, by contrast, the event symbolized their rights to the land. While, as I have noted, Ellen’s crocheted collar was not presented at the governor’s levee, the personal expression of royal concern, resulting from the protocols enacted between the ambassadors of black and white, was taken to represent a legal and binding promise of ownership. Diane Barwick suggests that European rituals such as the Batman Treaty, which signed away land to white settlers, were understood by the Kulin in terms of the Tanderrum ceremony, a means of sharing rights to territory, ‘‘a formal procedure whereby approved strangers were guaranteed the host clan’s protection as well as giving and receiving allegiance and access to each other’s resources.’’ 17 These competing meanings coalesce in Walter’s photographs of Ellen, who crocheted the collar and was singled out by the Queen (figures 8, 20, and 40). Walter’s two portraits of Ellen hold great significance: they are very similar in organization, being oval framed and bust length, showing a young, neatly dressed woman. The first portrait shows her in a white dress with a collar tie ending in pom-poms. She looks upward, perhaps at someone behind the camera, seeming slightly uncomfortable. In the second portrait, part of the 1866 series, she wears a checked, close-fitting dress with a white collar, a brooch at her throat, and a fancy belt buckle—this image appeared in an exhibition panel and the Green family album. Her hair is neatly combed into ringlets. She gazes left, out of frame, her expression serious but composed—she is by now a practiced sitter. Both portraits are characterized by her neat and tidy demeanor, easily enfolded into the story of Ellen and the Queen.18 Several analysts have noted the role of Queen Victoria narratives in indigenous responses to colonialism. In his survey of Aboriginal engagement ‘‘with the material facts of colonisation and with the moral framework supplied by the colonists,’’ Tim Rowse suggests that ‘‘to fathom the potential of the invaders’ moral system or ‘law’ has no doubt challenged Indigenous people’s intellectual creativity,’’ prompting a diversity of narratives reflecting indigenous hypotheses, including ‘‘stories of Queen Victoria, who is remembered as having given Aboriginal people their reserves as compensation for the invaders’ dispossession.’’ 19 Henry Reynolds suggests that this version was ‘‘closer to the truth than the version of events which gained ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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ascendancy among the white community,’’ in that elements of white law allowing the possibility for indigenous claims to land were forgotten by whites but remembered in Aboriginal communities.20 More specifically, Barwick argues that the deputation members had ‘‘for years been told that the Queen had explicitly commissioned the Governor to protect Aborigines and were apparently aware that his formal consent was required for the reservation of land. . . . The reservation of 2,300 acres [931 hectares] for their use on 30 June 1863 was probably coincidental. . . . But the timing of this decision, whatever its cause, encouraged the Kulin to believe in the efficacy of deputation.’’ The Queen’s letters helped ‘‘to establish their belief, still voiced by descendants in the 1970s, that Coranderrk was the direct gift of the Queen and Sir Henry Barkly and belonged to them and their heirs in perpetuity.’’ 21 As she implies, the Kulin’s awareness of the Queen’s great importance to whites, as well as their conviction of royal recognition, later prompted them to use this early connection to political advantage. Heather Goodall also notes the recurrence of this theme in New South Wales claims to land, well into the twentieth century, suggesting that it reflects the belief that Aboriginal rights to land had been recognized at the highest levels of the British state. These stories celebrate ‘‘the permanence and dignity of Aboriginal land and its owners.’’ 22 They represent a new layer of meaning about the land added to traditional meanings. The image’s mythical status is reflected in the inclusion of Ellen’s portrait in every set of photographs that survives from Walter’s work at Coranderrk, even in a letter from Walter to the Melbourne exhibition commissioners, as a sample of his work; no other image appears in each instance. Perhaps the newspaper report of the levee had originally inspired him to go to Coranderrk, where the event’s reception by the Kulin as well as by whites directed his attention toward its emblematization in the person of Ellen. The entangled meanings converging in this ‘‘memory trace’’ were enabled by its visual ambiguity and sustained by its physicality as an artifact. In the Green family album, where handwritten captions reveal something of the personal and idiosyncratic relationships prevailing between the Greens and the residents, the memory of this legendary event is prompted by ‘‘Eliza’s daughter (crocheted a collar and sent it to Queen Victoria, who acknowledged it by a letter).’’ Her presence was also invoked by her portraits that hung above residents’ mantelpieces, as noted of Barak in the 1890s.23

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‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

The feature article appearing in the Illustrated Australian News on 25 August 1865 comprehended several themes that remained influential in shaping the representation of the station and Victorian Aborigines. It consisted of a fullpage article accompanied by one large and five small engravings all based on Charles Walter’s photographs (figures 5–10). This account, in a sense, offers a means of anchoring the photographs’ often ambivalent meanings, reducing their polysemy through the less ambiguous text. Changes made to the photographs on which the published engravings were based also point toward editorial intention. Roland Barthes suggested that newspaper text becomes parasitic on the press image, ‘‘a kind of secondary vibration,’’ but here, where the image has been changed, even caricatured, it becomes hard to weigh the relative strength of the text and the image; the photographs are complicitous, telling the same story as the written text: that of the humanitarians, and specifically of the Reverend Hamilton.24 Yet these particular meanings were not fixed but rather altered according to context, serving different interests. A full-page engraved view of Coranderrk dominates the August 1865 feature (figure 5). It differs from the original photograph (figure 12), known from a contemporary album, in various ways. In fact, the original panorama comprised four photographs of different sections of the settlement, glued together to form a more comprehensive view, the different vantage points resulting in an awkward distortion of perspective. The photograph itself improved on the settlement’s layout by lining up the building facades, actually scattered across the hillside, so as to present a united front.The first known engraving showing Coranderrk records this disorder more faithfully, although seemingly based on a sketch. From Walter’s views onward, however, images of Aboriginal reserves are characterized by order and regularity, as exemplified by Nicholas Caire’s view of Lake Tyers, where the houses run in a line downhill toward the water, seeming to stand to attention, much like their residents who stand in front of them. The panorama view encapsulated the station landscape in its entirety, recording its operation as an orderly, self-sufficient system. The engraver’s changes to the original prove significant: it has been tidied up. Formally, the complex, untidy elements of the photograph, with

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5. The Aboriginal Settlement at Coranderrk—From a Photograph by Charles Walter. From

the Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 13. Accession number ian25/08/65/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

its assorted vantage points, have been balanced, its perspective unified. As Louise Partos notes, the mia-mias have been deleted from the extreme lefthand side of the image, denying the problem that white officials had in persuading the Kulin to abandon traditional housing and their nomadic lifestyle. Clothing hanging over fences on the photograph’s left has also been removed. The neat houses and schoolroom have been enlarged, a distortion introduced by the original collage but conveniently ‘‘imbuing the reproduction with a sense of order and the importance of education.’’ The widely scattered figures of the original have been removed to achieve ‘‘a neater scene emphasising industry and education.’’ Partos points out that both this and a later panorama, of Ramahyuck, have been ‘‘filled in’’: the addition of a central bullock and dray balancing the distant buildings and hinting at industry and wealth.25 Pictorially, the flattened, businesslike composition of the photograph, attempting to record as much of the settlement as possible, has been organized according to conventions of the picturesque, reducing the complexity of the photograph to a symbol. These visual insinuations are spelled out by the text, which begins: 46

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About 40 miles from Melbourne is a Government reserve of 2300 acres appropriated to such of the aborigines as may be induced to place themselves under the civilising influences of a settled mode of life and industrial habits. . . . It is well supplied with water all the year round, having a frontage on three sides to the Yarra, Badger’s Creek, and Watt’s River; and the remaining side has a natural fortification of mountainous ranges. It is thus a secluded sort of place, and thereby fitted to preserve the natives from free intercourse with the whites, which is found by experience to be liable to abuse. It goes on describe how nowhere else in the Australian colonies is there to be seen so large a number of natives collected together, of whom it can be said that they appear to be reclaimed from their former wandering and savage life, and to be conformed to the manner of Europeans. They are all dressed in European clothing, not received in charity, but acquired by the earnings of their own industry. They live in huts neatly constructed of slabs and bark, consisting of two rooms, having two square windows in front and a door in the centre. The houses are separated from each other by a small space, and stand on rising ground in a row, like one side of a street. A little lower down the rising ground, and in front of the natives’ houses, stands a spacious school room, with dormitories for the children attached. This emphasis on the place’s physical order accords with the engraved view, underlining the notion of the settlement as productive and shortly to be ‘‘independent of government supplies.’’ It describes the accomplishments of the children’s schooling and the ‘‘religious element [that] is made a prominent part in this civilising experiment,’’ concluding that ‘‘efforts at civilising the blacks have been made before, and have failed. But, as far as we can judge at present, Mr Green’s experiment is very hopeful.’’ 26 Like the engraved view, the original’s complexity has been smoothed out, reduced to a set of tropes stressing industry, improvement, and order. A later report was to criticize the station’s lack of tidiness, going on to note reprovingly that ‘‘the effect of tidiness, and per contra of untidiness, on the Aboriginal mind is important; the inculcation of tidiness forms part of civilization as well as of discipline.’’ 27 As an early ‘‘experiment,’’ Coranderrk’s subsequent history

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6. Mr. John Green—From a Photograph by Charles Walter. From the Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 13. Accession number ian25/08/65/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

would represent an empirical result, proof of the capabilities and effects of the Aborigines under ‘‘civilization.’’ The engraved versions of Walter’s images appear in an easily consumed form, unlike the photographs, which allow us to glimpse a more unruly station landscape. This glowing overview, comprising view and text, is supplemented by several shorter vignettes. First, a portrait of John Green, the manager, a bust of a serious bearded man gazing to the left (figure 6), is underwritten by a biographical account of his arrival from Scotland in 1855 and his conversion to the missionate: He had heard an essay read, in which the blacks were pronounced to be a doomed race, unsusceptible of Christian influence, and utterly incapable of civilization. Although quite unaccustomed at the time to public speaking, he was so grieved to hear such an opinion avowed in an assembly of professedly Christian men that he ventured to combat it. He took his stand on the character of the Gospel, as adapted to every creature and every race, however degraded, and on the divine purpose therein revealed regarding humanity at large.

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Interestingly, two portraits of Aboriginal residents provide a counterpart to Green’s. First is Simon Wonga, the Wurundjeri leader, ‘‘chief of the Yarra tribe’’ (figure 7). It shows Wonga’s strongly modeled forehead, cheekbones, and European dress. The accompanying text describes his conversion from hard drinking to Christianity, and that ‘‘it was very much owing to Simon’s influence with the blacks that Mr Green succeeded in getting them to adopt a settled mode of life; and throughout Mr Green has found him eminently serviceable in the work of native improvement.’’ Wonga’s speech on the occasion of the teacher’s birthday demonstrated the positive view the residents held of the settlement’s establishment and future. He recounted the changes wrought by his friendship with Green and celebrated his conversion from drinking to Christianity. He alluded to the trek to Coranderrk in epic terms and, interestingly, in integral relationship with his references to the Bible. This event held profound importance to the Kulin—and indeed, to their white supporters such as Green and Thomas. Its memory was structured by biblical imagery and, like Ellen’s letter from the Queen, passed into local myth. Then followed Ellen’s portrait (figure 8), for whites, as argued above, representing submission to civilization and accompanied by a short paragraph explaining that ‘‘Ellen is about eighteen years of age, and unmarried.

7. Simon. From the Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 13. Accession number ian25/08/65/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. 8. Ellen. From the Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 13. Accession number

ian25/08/65/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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She is well behaved, modest, attentive to her work, and willing to learn. It was she who wrote the letter and executed the crochet work that were sent to England on the occasion of the Prince of Wales’ marriage; and her name is especially mentioned in the letter from the late Duke of Newcastle, sent in acknowledgement of the loyal manifestations made by the blacks on that occasion.’’ These two examples of a hopeful future are counterbalanced by an account of ‘‘Old King’’ (figure 9), described as follows: King entered at once into the project, and used all his influence to persuade his tribe to agree. The old man has never ceased manifesting an earnest desire for the permanent settlement and improvement of the blacks. He is much inferior to Simon in point of intelligence, but he invariably goes hand in hand with him in their public deliberations, and in their efforts for the good of the community. He speaks his mind with greater fluency and energy than Simon, and is always found on the side of peace, order, and good conduct. The article portrays him as docile and elderly, a remnant of traditional Aboriginal culture but someone who acknowledges the benefits of white society. An interest in Aboriginal ‘‘nobility’’ characterizes white representations throughout the century and is also perhaps evident in this account. Pictorially, ‘‘Old King’’ is complemented by a view of a ‘‘mi mi,’’ inhabited by a man and a woman dressed in European clothes, which we are told is his dwelling, ‘‘until a hut can be built for him’’ (figure 10). This image of savagery, deliberately excluded from the main settlement view, jars a little with the preceding seamless account of progress and prosperity, but the dissonance it produces signifies a larger confrontation.

WILD VERSUS CIVILIZED

By the 1860s, the humanitarians had imposed their moral framework on debates about Aborigines and race, favoring segregation from white society on government-managed reserves. But the missionaries’ hopeful views were challenged by widely held notions of the ‘‘doomed race,’’ which saw Aboriginal people as incapable of change and therefore destined to be displaced by the superior Europeans. Visual imagery, including that of the illustrated press in the 1860s and 1870s, proved an important means of 50

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9. Old King. From the Illustrated Australian

News, 25 August 1865, 13. Accession number ian25/08/65/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

10. Mi Mi. From the Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 13. Accession number ian25/08/65/9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

popularizing the views of a range of competing interests, including both the humanitarian segregationists, such as Reverend Hamilton and John Green, and the opponents of this policy, who became increasingly vocal into the 1870s. Victoria’s very numerous newspapers constituted a powerful agent of political and ideological change, in 1842, for example, encouraging readers to see the violence between dispossessed Aborigines and whites west of Port Phillip in terms of the ‘‘just complaints of the suffering settlers’’ and ‘‘the outrages by the blacks.’’ They ‘‘provided an unequivocal line on a phenomenon deeply disturbing to a community. . . . At a critical time the newspaper helped generate the moral outrage which would assist settlers in the pursuit of control over the territory they were occupying.’’ The ‘‘regular, multiple, individual and contemporaneous acts of reading’’ by its mass audience constructed an imagined world grounded in everyday life.28 Newspaper accounts of Coranderrk as an exemplary civilizing experiment began to appear from the mid-1860s onward, stressing the rapid progress made by Aboriginal residents in adopting Christianity, a work ethic, and European material culture. Broad thematic patterns contrasting different but complementary ideas about Aboriginal people can be discerned, as Peter Dowling’s analysis has shown. Dowling argues that ‘‘it is significant that it was only during the latter half of the 1860s and in the 1870s that illustrations relating to frontier conflict and the dispossession of the Aborigines appear in the illustrated newspapers in any appreciable number,’’ explaining this phenomenon by reference to actual events such as frontier conflict in Queensland and the death of the supposed ‘‘last’’ Tasmanians, but also suggesting that these depictions of sometimes imaginary encounters—such as generic war scenes perhaps qualified by a caption, ‘‘now almost unknown’’—resulted in ‘‘a mythologising of frontier conflict in the name of progress yet without the sordidness of having to record an actual incident.’’ 29 While it must be acknowledged that such representations echoed real conflict in the north, I would extend Dowling’s argument to suggest that images (and especially the imaginary, generalizing depictions) symbolizing the danger of ‘‘wild blacks’’ constituted a category that, alongside others, formed an exaggerated articulation of notions of civilization and savagery. An opposition was created between stories about ‘‘wild’’ Aborigines in conflict with white settlers and supposedly traditional Aboriginal culture, 52

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11. Grog in the Camp. From the Illustrated Australian News, 27 June 1866, 12. Accession number ian27/06/66/12. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

which had appeared from at least the beginning of the 1860s, and the redemptive theme of the more optimistic Coranderrk (and other mission) features, often written by or on behalf of missionaries involved with the station.The civilizing experiment was also contrasted with the fringe dwellers and their vices still to be seen in urban centers, as in images titled Grog in Camp (figure 11). The Age, for example, noted that ‘‘contrasted with the spectacle of debauched natives too often seen in our towns, such a picture of happy, virtuous, industrious life, as Coranderrk, ought surely to be prized as a source not only of edification but delight—as a stimulus to extend the experiment.’’ 30 The Christian view that Aborigines were capable of civilization and assimilation was expressed against and during the same period as contradictory stories of frontier bloodshed, traditional culture, and debased fringe dwellers, in a process of mutual definition. This tension also exists within representations of Coranderrk itself, as exemplified by the August 1865 feature’s inclusion of ‘‘Old King,’’ signifying traditional culture, despite its overt message of progress and redemption. He serves the purpose of measuring the distance covered by the educated residents of the station, marking the difference between traditional and ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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12. Charles Walter, four-part panorama, Front View of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Village. Page 1 of the album Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Accession number lta 807. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

modern. Later, as I discuss with respect to the photographs of Fred Kruger, this distinction becomes structured more explicitly by biological notions of race used to distinguish between ‘‘full-blood’’ and ‘‘half-caste’’ Aborigines in defining Aboriginality. The semiotic equivalent of Old King can be sought in the range of traditional pursuits Walter recorded—for example, basket making and tree climbing—which appear in the 1866 series (see chapter 2), but which remain noticeably absent from the album produced for public sale. Australian Aborigines under Civilisation

Walter’s Coranderrk images of around 1865 were collated in a much more ponderous form, a commercial album titled Australian Aborigines under Civilisation (aauc) (figures 12–16, 19–20). At this time bound albums became very popular. Unlike the newspaper reproductions, the album’s only written signposts take the form of captions; in particular, the album’s title uncompromisingly directs our understanding of these photographs: we are being shown Aboriginal people undergoing change. Its effects are primarily visual, however, achieved by the images’ ‘‘syntagmatic concatenation,’’ or the internal visual logic generated by the choice, arrangement, and rela54

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tionship of the photographs within the album, as well as the connotative procedures that determine each image’s individual import. The album’s structure, like the popular newspaper reports, imposes on the viewer an understanding of the progress of Christianity and civilization at Coranderrk in teaching Aboriginal people how to dress, live, and behave like whites. It tells the story of hardships overcome by Aboriginal settlers whose attachment to a new home symbolizes commitment to Christian values of religious devotion and hard work. The familiar themes of order and industry, attachment to place and their new homes—defined against traditional ‘‘savagery’’—structure this series. Again, however, it is also possible to perceive indigenous intentions and responses that disrupt the rhetoric of ‘‘progress,’’ or, more subtly, that appropriate it for Aboriginal purposes. The album opens with the four-part panorama known from the newspaper engraving of August 1865, its title appearing below in large stamped Gothic script (figure 12). As I have noted, each photograph assumed a different vantage point, emphasizing the schoolhouse and the Greens’ home, both of which were taken from closer up.The photographic panorama, unlike the engraving, makes this disjunction apparent. It also includes rows of schoolchildren standing, stiff and posed, in front of the schoolhouse, with Green on the right and two (unidentified) Aboriginal women and Ellen standing on the steps. Why was the Greens’ home important? Mrs. Green and a child can be seen on the veranda, with a neatly planted garden in ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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the foreground. Perhaps because this house was clearly better built than the residents’ slab huts—with a shingled roof, a veranda, and multipaned, sashed windows—it served as an exemplar of neatness and efficiency, signifying successful yeomanry. There are two other panoramas, or views of this scope, by Walter: one appears in the 1866 exhibition panel, and both in the Green family album (figures 27 and 30). It might be suggested that these represent other attempts at a single view of the settlement which were found to be too distant, and perhaps too untidy, for his purposes here. Perhaps he simply had trouble in capturing the whole, while retaining sufficient detail. His persistence, however, confirms Walter’s determination to capture the entire facade of the settlement. Written descriptions of Coranderrk stressed its seclusion and that it was, or would soon become, self-sufficient, and Walter’s view echoed this, defining the edges of the small village tucked away in the bush. Unlike the careful arrangement of cultural space at other reserves, a totalizing hierarchical plan had not been imposed on the Coranderrk settlement, which arose from more consensual origins, despite the textual accounts that stressed its neatness—and so Walter did his best to create it. He resolved the technical difficulty of getting everything in while giving certain landmarks sufficient prominence by collage, a ruse that allowed him to stress what he thought were the settlement’s salient features. The four parts prompt an evolutionary narrative in reading the image, moving from the mia-mias on the left, across the tidy huts of the civilizing Kulin, to focus especially on the schoolhouse and dormitories, also used for religious services, and the Green family’s exemplary residence. This exhaustive view was aided by the album format, determining the image’s consumption in private: it could be pored over, a slow traverse of the station landscape yielding up many small details—a pictorial vantage point that seemingly confers specular dominance over the place and its inhabitants. But the unruliness of the Coranderrk landscape hints at other priorities: details erased from the engraved version include a possum skin rug and washing spread out to dry over the split-rail fencing across the front of the ‘‘street’’ of huts, marring its appearance, and the mia-mias on the extreme left, last of the row of dwellings, indicate the presence of residents pursuing a way of life that was to some extent traditional (figures 13 and 14). These residents were represented, both in images and in textual accounts of the

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13. Charles Walter, four-part panorama, Front View of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Village. Page 1 of the album Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Detail: possum skin rug and clothing drying over fence. Accession number lta 807. LaTrobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

14. Charles Walter, four-part panorama, Front View of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Village. Page 1 of the album Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Detail: mia-mias. Accession number lta 807. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

station, as marginal to its real work. Yet as comments made by observers, and photographs, reveal, they continued to live in this way into the 1880s. Other elements of the civilizing process were explored in subsequent images, moving closer into the village to examine specific, significant groups.Turning to page 2 of the album, we see four similar views of station buildings, captioned ‘‘The Station Kitchen,’’ ‘‘Simon Wonga’s Residence,’’ ‘‘Johnny Webster’s Residence,’’ and ‘‘Morgan’s Residence’’ (figure 15). In each of these, a family group stands before a neat slab hut, accompanied in almost every case by Mr. and/or Mrs. Green and their children. This format is continued for the third and fourth pages, showing ‘‘Harry’s Residence,’’ ‘‘Werry’s Residence,’’ ‘‘Malcolm’s Residence,’’ ‘‘Tommy Hobson’s Residence,’’ ‘‘Girls of the Station School,’’ ‘‘Boys of the Station School,’’ ‘‘Group of Lubras’’ (young Aboriginal women), and ‘‘Group of Blacks.’’ The families are identified according to the male heads of households. These photographs impose the European structures of domesticity embodied in the nuclear family on the residents, disaggregating the settlement into a series of dwellings. Pictorially, they consolidate a central humanitarian civilizing objective, making each person ‘‘an integrated centre of consciousness, distinct from the natural world and other Aborigines . . . the individual was to replace the group as the fundamental moral arbiter’’ as the missionaries attempted to create a ‘‘culture of individual selves and personal narratives rather than one of social relations and collective stories.’’ 31 The family unit constituted a basic instrument of the managers’ task—placed within cottages but open to periodic inspection and report, a surveillance intended to be continuous. Malcolm, whose hut did not form part of the street visible in the panorama but which might be one of the three less substantial structures seen on the far left, also challenges the domestic pattern, showing two adult men, and women, (and no Greens) standing before the hut. Malcolm was the only elder among the Jajowrong who had arrived by 1866, bringing with him his half-caste wife and daughter Caroline.32 By page 4 Walter has selected groups (girls, boys, lubras, blacks) who stand stiffly in front of a blanket hung on an outside wall of the Greens’ cottage. The girls and boys of the station school are characterized by the extreme neatness of their European dress, while the lubras and blacks both constitute motley groups, dressed in an assortment of clothes—the European garments have obviously been worn in comfortably idiosyn58

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15. The Station Kitchen, Simon Wonga’s Residence, Johnny Webster’s Residence, Morgan’s Resi-

dence. Accession numbers h13881/2-5. Page 2 of the album Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Accession number lta 807. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

cratic ways. The adults wear a mix of European and traditional clothes: the women in traditional possum skin cloaks or slinging their babies in blankets, in place of the cloaks; the men with cloaks over their trousers and shirts. One woman holds what might be a boomerang, but otherwise no traditional artifacts are evident. These neatly posed groups depersonalize the people involved; they are studies of types, distinguishing between the successfully progressing residents of the first ten images, and, as a kind of savage postscript, what is left behind. But while we might be acutely aware of the large-scale, irreversible changes imposed on the Kulin, we cannot overlook the fact that they have chosen to cooperate with the photographer, conforming with his requirements—standing stiffly according to arrangement, even where a small boy’s hurt foot requires that he be supported from behind. More significantly, they stress a theme that was of central concern to the residents as well as to the missionaries—that of home, arguing for the care and attachment of the Kulin to the place. As had occurred with their promise from the Queen, the Coranderrk residents’ assertion of their goals within white discourse proved characteristic.They had their own reasons, perhaps different from the missionaries’, to see settled residence at Coranderrk as necessary and desirable. This is made explicit when we turn to page 5 of the album.

CORANDERRK AS GOSHEN, A LAND OF LIGHT AND PLENTY

Here we see a remarkable photograph titled The Yarra Tribe Starting for the Acheron (figure 16). This description locates the photograph at the moment the Wurundjeri, led by Simon Wonga and John Green, set off from their camp at Yering in their traditional country to join the Taungurung, already at the Acheron, in February 1860. This moment represents the beginning of a new way of life, marking the Wurundjeri decision to join forces with another clan, abandoning the nomadic existence they had always known for a settled, agricultural way of life. It is impossible for Walter to have been present at this time. Instead, the photograph constitutes a fictionalization, a historical re-creation of the almost mythical story of the station’s foundation. It reflects the extreme importance of this event to the Kulin. This unique re-creation of a key event in Aboriginal history must have been prompted by the Aboriginal subjects; while the importance of the theme to Coranderrk’s residents was 60

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16. The Yarra Tribe Starting for the Acheron 1862. Accession number h13881/14. Page 5 of

the album Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Accession number lta 807. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

certainly recognized by sympathetic whites such as Thomas, its conception and execution reflects an Aboriginal perspective. However, as is the case with Ellen’s portrait, it is possible to understand the story represented by Walter’s image in two ways: to whites it signified progress; to the Aborigines it symbolized their rights to the land. Despite the technical requirement to remain quite still during the exposure of the collodion wet plate, there is a sense of movement created by the line of men and women posed as if in the act of taking their first step. Each man holds a gun over his shoulder, as well as a swag. At least some of the original participants are here: the third man in line is John Green, carrying a staff, as befits a man of the cloth. The group is led by Simon Wonga, who we are told was tall, standing five feet and ten inches. Rather than addressing the camera in an explicit relationship of mutual regard, as in the posed groups, here the remembered event itself is the subject. Relationships between people are represented pictorially: it is interesting that Green, the manager, was a full participant in the photograph—both as actor and by implication, sanctioning the creative enterprise. His bond with the residents was close, as we know, and this is shown graphically, with the Aboriginal leaders heading the line but placing Green in a central position. The women in the background carry swags and children, wearing blankets in place of the traditional possum-skin cloaks, occupying a secondary but complementary place. The story of the blacks’ journey to Coranderrk became translated into biblical figures of speech. It is predicated on Coranderrk as a Goshen, a land of light and plenty. The road to Coranderrk was indeed a long one, so it seems hardly surprising that it was remembered in epic terms. We know that William Thomas, guardian of Aborigines, wrote to Robert Brough Smyth, Secretary of the new Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of the Aborigines of the colony of Victoria, in July 1860, stating that ‘‘a deputation of five Upper Goulburn Aborigines [Taungurung] and two of the Melbourne tribe as interpreters [Wurundjeri] waited on me at my residence on 28th February 1859, their object was to have a block of land on a particular part of the Upper Goulburn, on the Acharon [sic] River, set apart for them.’’ 33 On 10 March the Taungurong delegation and Thomas set off to select the land, 4,688 acres. On his return to Melbourne, Thomas met groups of Aborigines ‘‘wending their way to their Goshen.’’ This alludes to the story 62

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of Exodus, where God’s promise to Abraham, subsequently reaffirmed to his descendants, is fulfilled after Moses has led the oppressed Israelites out of Egypt, through a period of exile spent wandering in the desert, finally to Canaan.34 The men assured Thomas that they would ‘‘set down on the land like white men.’’ 35 But they were moved from the Acheron in August 1860 to another reserve, the Mohican, where they were joined by the Wurundjeri in 1862, and finally to Coranderrk in February–March 1863, as Simon Wonga recounted. Coranderrk’s importance and attachment as a permanent home and refuge for its residents cannot be overestimated. The biblical imagery used by Thomas suffused the memories of those connected with the founding of Coranderrk, as evidenced by both Wonga’s and the whites’ language. Many have seen the story of Exodus as foundational to Western colonization and have been troubled by its implications in sanctioning dispossession and oppression. Edward Said, for example, argues that its mythic structure, ‘‘promising liberation to the suffering and oppressed,’’ should be resisted because its ‘‘messianic and millenarial politics of redemption’’ has historically provided the basis for violence and colonialism. The figuring of Coranderrk as a promised land serves as an ironic inversion of this pattern, for the Aboriginal people by no means became the triumphant conquerors who took possession of Canaan. Perhaps this is why whites forgot this story (unlike the Queen’s letter): historically seeing themselves as exiled, having won the land through suffering and hardship, settlers have had difficulty in recognizing indigenous perspectives.36 The biblical story told to the Kulin by white supporters like Green would have provided an explanation for the process of settlement on a reserve and a promise for the future, one which might have been expected to be understood and acknowledged by white society also. Sadly, we have no direct documentary evidence for the process of collaboration between Walter, Green, and the Kulin that resulted in this image. It is certainly true that Green played an important role as cultural mediator and translator, and was clearly an enthusiastic participant in Walter’s work, to judge from his central presence in many images. Given the series’s emphasis on the conversion and successful ‘‘civilization’’ of the residents, as well as the humanitarian use made of these images, it is possible that he and Reverend Hamilton instigated them, or at least recognized their potential as a means of popularizing their cause. ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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But this image most directly reflects Aboriginal values. Given substantial evidence for the awareness of the Kulin of their plight, their determined and active response to it in claiming a reserve of their own, and their lasting commitment to retaining it, it seems clear that the decision to join with traditionally distinct clans and to settle down on the reserve would have been of primary symbolic and historical significance to them. Despite traditional links to different territories, to which the speeches of Wonga testify, a firm alliance existed between the Kulin clans, the Taungurung, whose land at the Acheron housed the first reserve, and the Wurundjeri, whose territory Coranderrk lay within, as well as an agreement to share the reserve. This unprecedented amalgamation and settlement must have seemed like the only option available to these people, who had by 1860 experienced twenty-five years of social dislocation. Perhaps most tellingly, the moment celebrated here reflects the Wurundjeri decision to join with another clan, rather than the generalized process of settlement and conversion promoted by whites and explored by other images within the series. In its relationship to traditional performance, it is evident that the form of this image derives directly from Kulin practice. By contrast, it marks a sharp departure from European photography of the period, differing from other photographic reenactments in its relatively early date and its expression of Aboriginal concerns. Most known reenactment images date to the turn of the century and reflect European interests—for example, in recording colonial exploits such as the capture of ‘‘wild’’ or ‘‘criminal’’ blacks, as in the 1916 ‘‘artificial reconstruction’’ of the police capture of Maori leader Rua.37 This is a view from the other side of the frontier! Anthropologically motivated reconstructions became common toward the end of the century, when it was not unusual for anthropologists to persuade their informants to perform in such a way, but again, these tableaux were prompted by the ethnographer and were seen as a way of resurrecting fractured cultural wholeness.Yet as Elizabeth Edwards has pointed out, unlike ‘‘salvage’’ photography, this kind of image reconstructs what is no longer there, inevitably signifying something lost. The Kulin utilize the medium’s supposed power as realist document, adopting the stance of an eyewitness, yet their obvious theatricality creates a distanced, visually privileged mode of seeing, divorcing the observing audience from the observed actor. Likewise, J. W. Lindt’s European genre scenes such as Gossip, showing an encounter between a maidservant and a male visitor, depict acci64

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dental moments of observation.38 These staged moments convey a sense of triumph, as if the camera has stalked and captured its subject. t

Perhaps the closest parallel to the scene described above is found in a photograph produced by Ryko (Edward Reichenbach) in 1916, showing the reenactment, by men of the Crocodile Islands in eastern Arnhem Land, of the murder of two trepangers (Southeast Asian island maritime voyagers collecting sea cucumber) for brutalizing the local population (figure 17). As Roslyn Poignant shows, this was probably a collaborative production, intended to demonstrate how the murder was committed: a council of elders made photographer Ryko their spokesperson, representing their views in a fashion presaging the bark petitions of later years. As she states, ‘‘An Aboriginal way of telling meshes with the narrative construction of the photograph, and the information-bearing intention underlying the photograph rests on the mimetic memorialisation of the performance.’’ 39 Poignant links this image to others produced by Ryko depicting performances of the so-called Fort Dundas Riot, themselves commemorating a clash between British soldiers and Tiwi Islanders on Melville Island, Torres Strait, between 1824 and 1829. Poignant’s analysis reveals the connections between 17. Ryko (Edward Reichenbach), Massacre Series Number 3—How the Murdered Malays

Lost Their Weapons. Rabuna Island nt number m105, 42. National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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traditional performances of historical events, especially encounters with others, and indigenous perceptions of the potential of the camera to fulfill a similar purpose, such as commemoration and testimony. By contrast, however, the Wurundjeri image does not adopt the naturalistic stance of a bystander to actual events, a vantage point later facilitated by the development of the dry plate and its wide availability from around 1880. This early image, belonging to the experimental days of view photography, has adopted a dynamic structure, posed as if in midstep, highly unusual for the period. Despite the stillness required by the photographic process, the image does not incorporate the frontal regard characteristic of portraits of this time, instead centering our attention on the event. Its complex pictorial structure is formal and symmetrical, symbolizing certain elements of the foundation story recounted by Wonga in 1865: ‘‘Mr Green and all the Yarra blacks and me went through the mountain. We had no bread for four or five days. We did all this to let you [Goulburn blacks or Taungurung] know about the good word.’’ These elements of the image—Wonga’s leadership, Green’s guiding role, the women’s complementary status, yeoman strength marshaled to accomplish a grueling trek, and a new beginning—suggest its links to Kulin ceremonial tradition. It fulfills a key objective of traditional Aboriginal narrative in transmitting an important story through formal performance, involving the correct people. (The Aboriginal actors are probably the original participants—perhaps including Barak and Bamfield and their wives.) Wonga’s story articulated the relationship between Woiworung and Taungurong clans and their respective territories—like ceremonial performance asserting knowledge, claiming rights, and legitimizing and negotiating authority over specific countries. Performance was central to Aboriginal people’s communication with each other and with strangers, articulating the status of participants such as elders and mediating their relations. It was an obvious way of communicating with whites, as I discuss further in chapter 4 when I consider representations of corroborees. Ideally performance created reciprocal obligations and led to ‘‘amicable arrangements for land usage and exchange of goods, and marriage ties.’’ 40 Performance could also become a kind of history making as events were reenacted for the audience—such as victories over whites, for example, or new sights such as an airplane. Walter’s photograph reenacts a particular, important moment: the origin of a foundational journey from one terri66

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tory to another which also articulates the relationship between clans. It implies an itinerary, pointing toward the proposed route of the participants’ journey, as well as a social trajectory. As Eric Michaels notes of Warlpiri narratives, significant moments ‘‘may be drawn out, repeated or elaborated, at the expense (from a European perspective) of the connection between these moments. . . . In fact, plots move, self-evidently in Aboriginal stories—literally by the transportation of characters over the landscape.’’ 41 The image can also be located within traditional visual expressions. During the early days of white settlement, charcoal drawings on bark often decorated the inside of shelters, representing a genre that appeared ‘‘almost totally naturalistic and figurative in content and to be concerned with recording historical events’’ such as encounters with white settlers.42 The persistence, and transformation, of this tradition is best known through the art of Wurundjeri leader William Barak, whose paintings, predominantly depicting ceremonial and hunting scenes, are also interpreted as images of the past. Recently, Carol Cooper has argued that Barak’s paintings often commemorate specific stories or events, and even links one drawing (figure 18) to the story of the ‘‘setting off.’’ 43 This drawing depicts rows of journeying figures dressed in cloaks, holding staffs, and carrying swags; above them, a celebratory ceremony is performed—also paralleled by Walter’s next photograph. The centrality of the story to Kulin memory and identity is reflected by its emergence in Barak’s oeuvre as well. Even the formal arrangement of the figures, so different from contemporary European photographic conventions, reflects Kulin orientation. For example, traditionally performance draws important distinctions between the sexes and the generations: men usually dance directly in front of the audience, with women in a line or group on one side of the singers, or further back behind the men. When stressing unity, all participants will dance the same version together. Here the unity of the Woiworung/ Wurundjeri is emphasized. All participants hold a gun or stick, the standard prop for dancers, as the Reverend Bulmer of Lake Tyers noted of the people of Gippsland, commenting that ‘‘when they present themselves in figure only bringing the body into play, they mostly have something in the shape of a stick, which it is presumed belongs to that particular kind of dance.’’ 44 Most tellingly, the image recalls Barak’s combination of geometric and figurative elements, expressed for example in the detailed rendition of the ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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18. William Barak, drawing. Accession number vi 25.159. Staatliche Museen, Preußischer

Kulturbesitz, Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin.

abstract motifs incised on the cloaks worn by corroboree dancers. He also tended to abstract forms such as human figures, forming banded patterns, which ‘‘embodies a different sense of order from the European pictorial order of perspectival space’’—the order of ‘‘Barak’s traditional culture, both in its social structure and in its integral involvement with the natural world, as expressed through ceremony.’’ 45 While the uniform spatial distribution of dancing figures across Barak’s sheet of paper remained impossible for a camera to imitate stylistically, the arrangement of bodies in The Yarra Tribe Starting for the Acheron reminds us of the repetitive lines of figures that feature in Barak’s art, mimicking the rows of dancers who shaped lived experience into a formal public statement. In sum, the photograph’s thematic and formal relationship to traditional Kulin expressive practices speaks to their active engagement: informingWalter of their recent and momentous history, suggesting this key event as a photographic subject, and developing the tableau. Here the potential of the camera to create a space of performance has been recognized by the Kulin, formalizing theirencounter with the sympathetic photographer. 68

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Walter’s role as mediator with, or conduit to, white society would have been well understood, and here, as with Ryko in 1916 or the video camera taken up by the Warlpiri in the 1980s, the photographer and his camera were assigned the status of both witness and participant. This image publicly asserts the story of the station’s foundation, claiming rights to country and articulating a relationship between clans, as well as between Kulin and colonial society.

OPEN-AIR SERVICE

Turning the album page, we return to the participants’ present, forming the logical sequel to the ‘‘setting off ’’ image.This photograph takes the title Open Air Service amongst the Blacks in June 1865 (figure 19). Reproduced several times, the image of the white preacher, Green, declaiming to his black congregation, clearly had power in contemporary eyes. The people, many of them recognizable individuals, are neatly arranged according to age and sex, and each man holds a book, symbolic of literacy and Christianity. It represents the residents’ Christian thanksgiving after their arrival, for the fulfillment of God’s promise. This powerful narrative structure effects a movement from the past, and the station’s origins, to a hopeful present and future.The evidence for progress and a settled lifestyle, documented by the album’s other photographs, are thus inserted into a Christian teleology. On page 7 we see Ellen and Mr. King, ‘‘Chief of the Goulbourne tribe,’’ reproducing the logic of the newspaper feature (figure 20). Finally, on page 8, we see ‘‘Mrs Cotton’’ and ‘‘Mr Cotton, the oldest Native in Victoria.’’ Whites were interested in his status as an elderly ‘‘king’’ a link with the past, and possibly as indigenous ‘‘royalty’’; perhaps he signified the melancholic passing of his race (also see chapter 4). The album’s production was prompted by an interest in the supposed civilizing of the residents within the dominant contemporary discourse of Christianity and humanitarianism. Its narrative structure first incorporates an overview, an encapsulation of ideas of the settlement as orderly, selfsufficient, and centered on the schoolhouse-dormitory and the pastoral care given by the Green family. The camera then advances into the ‘‘village,’’ showing us specific groups within the population, selected according to European criteria and stressing domesticity and a Western notion of the family, a settled lifestyle, the education of children, and material progress. ‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

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19. Charles Walter, Open Air Service amongst the Blacks in June 1865. Accession number

h13881/15. Page 6 of the album Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Accession number lta 807. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

This account of the current state of the place is followed by two linked historical re-creations that equate the station’s establishment with the central biblical story of hardship overcome by faith in God and gratitude for his promise fulfilled, implying a future commitment to Christianity and a settled European lifestyle. The album concludes with an even more detailed look at key individuals, representing current hopes for the progress of the younger residents and a backward glance at the elders. This complex collation of documentary record and myth invokes past, present, and future in amalgamating a range of popular and local ideas about Coranderrk, framed by Christian rhetoric. t

The 1865 images produced by Walter, as circulated within both newspapers and in the aauc album, comprise a uniquely celebratory record of Aboriginal life in this period. During the 1860s the missionary element within the developing scientific study of humankind remained influential, arguing 70

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20. Charles Walter, Ellen. Accession number h13881/16. Page 7 of the album

Australian Aborigines under Civilisation. Accession number lta 807. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

against more extreme views of fixed biological differences between different human groups encouraged by Darwinism.46 It lay in the humanitarians’ interest to stress the pliable, teachable nature of the Aboriginal people of Victoria, as well as their potential for conversion. As Nicholas Thomas notes of images produced by evangelical missionaries in the Pacific, these often sought to diminish rather than exaggerate difference in the interest of persuading white audiences of the worth of the missionary project.47 In campaigning for civil rights, missionaries saw photography as a useful tool: the Melbourne-published Weekly Review and Christian Times, for example, advocated the use of photographs in the contemporary struggle for the abolition of slavery.48 That the English owner of the aauc viewed these images within a missionary framework is hinted at by the interest in the Christian activist Charles Kingsley, indicated by a newspaper clipping preserved within the album which recapitulates Kingsley’s career as parson, historian, and social campaigner. On one level the aauc can be read as missionary propaganda, intended to show a Christian audience the progress at Coranderrk, the success of this ‘‘civilizing experiment.’’ From another angle, however, Aboriginal interests emerge too, through images that commemorate Kulin stories and signify their claims of ownership of Coranderrk, an issue of central political importance throughout the station’s life. These unusual and important photographs testify to a distinctively Aboriginal expression, exploiting the camera’s potential to define a theatrical public space of collective performance and deploying it to record their history and define relationships between people and place. Hence the prominence of these images might reflect white interest, but it also constitutes evidence for Aboriginal actions and ideas, specifically the Kulin’s consistent claims to land and their cultural inheritance, and their active engagement with the circumstances of colonialism. In the larger context of theories about Aborigines and civilization, which at this time were beginning to undergo scrutiny and revision within developing scientific frameworks,Walter’s next series of photographs were to play a rather different role.

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CHAPTER 2 S C I E N C E A N D V I S U A L I T Y: ‘‘C O M M U N I C AT I N G C O R R E C T I D E A S’’

t

In 1866, Charles Walter visited Coranderrk over a period of at least six months, during which time he made a series of portraits of the Kulin. Redmond Barry, the president of Melbourne’s exhibition commissioners, had been struck by his views of Coranderrk in the newspaper and sent a message to Green requesting photographs for the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866.1 These spectacular, but temporary, mass displays were held throughout the modern world, beginning with Great Britain’s 1851 Great Exhibition. Like that event, the 1866 exhibition aimed to present ‘‘the various industries and productions’’ of participating countries, as its Official Catalogue proclaimed, and to reveal ‘‘the richness of their resources and enterprise of their populations.’’ 2 In May Walter responded, with enthusiasm, to Barry’s request: Sir, Mr John Green the Superintendant of Aborigines of Victoria has informed me that it is desired to have Photographs of the Blacks for the forthcoming Exhibition. Now as I shall be most happy to comply to the wishes expressed by Sir Redmd Barry I beg to inform you, that I am intending to take the photographs required as follows:

1. separate, single portraits of both sexes and all ages from infancy (6 months) up to old age (80 years!) 2. the different tribes as far as they are represented in this establishment (there are 123 Blacks in all belonging to about 10 or 12 different tribes!) 3. The photographs will be bust portraits the head of each portrait of the size of a half a crown piece. Those photographs can be arranged according to the tribes ages & sexes on different large plates holding from 12 to 24 different portraits, as might be suitable for framing. If anything more should be desired as above already stated, I shall be very glad of being informed of it. If Sir Redmond Barry approves of their arrangement I will be most happy to know and also very thankful for any hints as additional information on the Subject. I may further remark that it was me who has supplied the proprietors of the Melb. Illustrated periodical paper with the portraits and photographic views of the Aboriginal settlement. I enclose the portrait of Eliza [sic] a black girl of ab. 18 years of age, not as a sample of a photograph but merely to show the size of the portraits. Hoping not to impose to [sic] much upon your kindness by expecting an answer soon, Believe me to be Sir, Yours, Most obedient servt, Charles Walter, Photographic Artist It is apparent that Barry had not specifically sought Walter out, but that the latter was eager to take on the commission. The selection and arrangement of the portraits—by sex, age, and tribe, as well as the focus on the subjects’ heads—echoes a contemporary ethnographic interest in individuals as racial types, and specifically Barry’s preferences. The Melbourne exhibition, as noted by the commissioners in the official catalogue, was ‘‘in some degree preparatory to the arrangements for forwarding certain productions to Paris for the Exhibition to be held there in 1867.’’ In October, the month the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition opened, Walter, presumably having overseen the installation of the series, wrote again to say that he had ‘‘returned to my residence amongst the

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Natives here, I intend to make up now the Collection for Paris.’’ 3 He went on: Whenever you have done with the list of the names of the Blacks I beg you respectfully to oblige me by returning the same as it would save me the trouble in making a new list. As I cannot obtain here the Copyright for these photographs I beg you to grant me the favor of the Commission, that they will not permit the copying of this collection as long as the photographs remain the property of the Commission. If desired by Parties interested in the Blacks, I shall be most happy to furnish duplicates of the whole collection at a moderate Charge, but I do not wish my black friends to be sold in every shop at the rate of 6d. each! Walter approached his task systematically, recording all but one or two of the station residents. His surviving lists record the English name, native name, tribe, and age of each of the 104 sitters, both starting with the eldest men, progressing through younger and younger men, to end with number 50, baby Thomas Harris (sitting on his mother’s lap), aged three months. Then it continues with the ‘‘Female Sex,’’ from the oldest woman (number 51, ‘‘Old Mary,’’ aged sixty, Jim Crow tribe) to the youngest (number 80, Minnie, aged nine months, Yarra Yarra tribe). There follows a section headed ‘‘Half Castes,’’ starting with men (number 81, Dan Hall, Loddon, aged twenty) descending in years to the boys (number 91, Alfred, Quadrone, aged five). Then come the female ‘‘half-castes,’’ again beginning with the oldest (number 92, Ellen White, Carngham, aged twenty-one) down to the youngest (number 104, Nelly Bly, Wimmera, aged two).4 Hence the category of ‘‘pure-blooded’’ man was of the greatest interest or importance, the male elders representing the archetype of cultural otherness.This hierarchical ordering of the population descended systematically to the youngest. Below this list, Walter noted under ‘‘Remarks’’ that No. 95 and 99 sisters the only half castes with grey eyes. Nos 82, 98 and 102 are Brothers and Sisters (all half castes!) No 86 and 78 Brother and Sister; the first born a half-caste Boy Bobby and the last born a pure black Girl Mary! All the Aborigines in this ?colony have assumed english

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Names, generally the vulgar names of Bob for Robert, or ? Jack, Larry, Jimmy, Ned etc etc. I have added the Native Names, where I was able to obtain them.5 This interest in ‘‘blood,’’ and the effects of miscegenation, may have stemmed from Walter’s familiarity with the contemporary concerns of local ethnographers such as Robert Brough Smyth, perhaps transmitted by the latter’s informant John Green. His comment on ‘‘half-caste’’ and ‘‘full-blood’’ siblings appears to refer to a debate regarding the effect of Aboriginal women’s intercourse with white men, subsequently explored by Smyth’s 1878 publication The Aborigines of Victoria, in which he refuted the Polish scientist Paul Strezelecki’s hypothesis that intercourse with whites caused a ‘‘native female . . . to lose the power of conception on a renewal of intercourse with a male of her own race, retaining that of procreating only with the white men [following] laws as cogent, though as mysterious, as the rest of those connected with generation.’’ Smyth argued that the error had taken ‘‘such deep root that it is necessary to confront a theory (though unsupported by evidence) by numerous incontrovertible facts collected by correspondents who have no theories to maintain, and who relate only what they know to be true.’’ 6 He provided various examples taken from the different Victorian stations, and specifically that of the Woiworung woman Boraat’s children: Robert Wandin, whose father was white, and his younger sister Mary, a ‘‘full–blood’’—the same example Walter had given, four or five years earlier, as ‘‘No. 86 and 78 Brother and Sister; the first born a half-caste Boy Bobby and the last born a pure black Girl Mary!’’ 7 Here Walter was actively collecting ethnographic information, a role he perhaps saw as analogous to his acquisition of botanical specimens on Ferdinand von Mueller’s behalf. In his supposedly scientific approach we see his own concerns and attitudes shaping the form of the images. Barry’s decision to commission a photographic series reflects larger currents of inquiry into human difference, and specifically contemporary notions of the medium’s accuracy as a means of making scientific records.8 As Elizabeth Edwards has shown, the so-called type portrait was the most common form employed by adherents of the emerging discipline of anthropology for collecting data, using methods that followed the precision, taxonomic arrangement, and comparative approach of the biological sciences.9 The ‘‘racial type’’ assumed fresh importance after the Darwinian

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theory of natural selection gained popularity from the 1860s onward, but the notion of ‘‘type specimens’’ was already well established in the natural sciences of the eighteenth century, and the idea of racial fixity had long been accepted by monogenists and polygenists alike. For those interested in racial diversity, photographic types allowed the possibility of systematic comparison. For example, in 1869 British photography enthusiasts were informed that ‘‘the Ethnological Society, under the presidency of Professor Huxley, is making arrangements to take photographs of specimens of all races of men in all parts of the globe. Such photographs should be taken before a background, ruled off by plainly visible lines into spaces six inches square, so that all the pictures shall show the dimensions of the individual photographed, and be directly comparable. The ‘sitter’ should stand upright, and be in contact with the background.’’ As relics of a disappearing race, these images had a larger significance, as Huxley explained: ‘‘When photographs of such value are collected from all parts of the earth, it is ten thousand pities that they should be printed on paper by the ordinary silver process, to fade away in the course of years, and never, perhaps, to be replaced, as many tribes of savages are dying out before the progress of civilisation.’’ 10 Walter produced his series a few years before Huxley’s and John Lamprey’s development of standardized photometric methods, attempting to ensure that the image would contain comparable morphometric data—but his experience as botanical collector, Barry’s instructions, and perhaps his knowledge of popular debates about Aborigines shaped his approach to his commission. His knowledge was probably acquired through firsthand contact with local scientists such as Smyth and von Mueller, for whom Coranderrk served as a kind of archive of information about Aboriginal culture, as well as through contact with Green and the residents. The surviving panel measures 176 centimeters wide by 123 centimeters high, a central, elaborately painted title reading ‘‘Portraits of aboriginal natives Settled at Coranderrk, near Healesville, about 42 miles from Melbourne. also views Of the Station & lubras basket-making’’ (figures 21– 23).The arrangement of the palm-sized portraits over the huge space of the panel amplifies the logic of the list: the (‘‘full-blood’’) older men occupy the top left-hand quarter of the panel, boys below, and the adult women are displayed at the top right. So-called ‘‘half-castes’’ occupy the lower center. As

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21. Charles Walter, ‘‘Portraits of Aboriginal Natives Settled at Coranderrk.’’ Panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866. Accession number h91.1/1-106. LaTrobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

22. Charles Walter, ‘‘Portraits of Aboriginal Natives Settled at Coranderrk.’’ Top-center

detail of panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866, showing ‘‘males (fullblooded).’’ Accession number h91.1/1-106. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

23. Charles Walter, ‘‘Portraits of Aboriginal Natives Settled at Coranderrk.’’ Bottom-

center detail of panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866, showing ‘‘half-castes.’’ Accession number h91.1/1-106. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

our gaze sweeps downward and to the right, we see increasingly younger, whiter faces, graphically predicting the future of the race. As human types, the people of Coranderrk lose their individuality in their massed and diminishing arrangement over the huge panel, made to form a human pattern structured by sex, age, and blood. In a final reductive movement, this single object abridged 104 people, making them stand for the Aboriginal ‘‘race’’ as a whole. In the center, below the title, we see two views of Coranderrk: one of the settlement from a vantage point similar to that of the four-part panorama described earlier, but much farther away. This view achieves the expansive scope of the panorama, but at the expense of detail; Walter has backed into the bush, and trees have started to obscure the distant buildings.The details would have been lost to the exhibition visitor in the sheer size of the proffered overview, giving an impression only of a tiny bush settlement. The choice of subject of the second view is interesting, showing women (possibly Boraat, Eliza Warren, Big Annie, and Harriet) making baskets, an activity lauded, encouraged, and photographed throughout the settlement’s life. This positive interest in a traditional activity marks a departure from the resolutely progressive message of humanitarian discourse surrounding Coranderrk, probably because it had the novelty of cultural difference but at the same time accorded with European notions of appropriate gender roles and industry, contributing to the support of the residents. And it was aesthetically pleasing: the baskets are beautiful objects. They showed the nineteenth-century public indigenous women pursuing a traditional Aboriginal task in the primitive setting of the camp, a scene of some cultural interest. The panel was displayed, as intended, in 1866 at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (figure 24), and according to the official catalogue, it hung in the Fine Arts Gallery between C. Hewitt’s Portraits, in Fancy Dress and Charles Nettleton’s Coloured Photographic Views of Melbourne. The entry, by the commissioners of the Intercolonial Exhibition, omitted Walter’s name and read simply Photographs of Aboriginal Natives at Coranderrk, near Healesville.11 Classified by medium and subject matter, the panel served as an illustration of the people and places of the colony, marking a distinctive aspect of the region’s identity.

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24. The Great Hall of the Intercolonial Exhibition. From the Illustrated Australian News,

27 October 1866, 8–9. Accession number ian27/10/66/8-9. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

BARRY AND THE ABORIGINES

The series can be understood in the first instance as an expression of commissioner president Redmond Barry’s personal interest in Aboriginal culture, and his recognition of its place within contemporary questions of science and society. During the 1860s, colonists began to debate the significance of Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, in which Australian data played an important role, and information about Aboriginal people was increasingly valued in debates about evolution and the nature of human difference from around this time.Widespread ideas about the inevitable extinction of the race may also have prompted Barry’s activities in this direction. Barry pursued two other Aboriginal projects in 1866, commissioning sculptor Charles Summers to make life-cast busts of Aboriginal people at Coranderrk and overseeing the compilation of a vocabulary of Aboriginal languages. Barry resigned as president in a much-publicized huff following a twelve-day delay in the opening of the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition, but the Aboriginal presence within this forum can be attributed to his efforts.12 SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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Barry’s sympathy forand interest in the Aboriginal people of Port Phillip developed during his early career as magistrate and barrister in Melbourne in the 1840s, when he was often assigned to act for Aboriginal prisoners, coming to be regarded as their standing counsel.13 Later he became active in developing Melbourne’s major cultural institutions—the University of Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Melbourne Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria)—and served as the official commissioner of the colony of Victoria for several overseas trade exhibitions. Intellectually he was conservative, notably regarding the ‘‘new theories of evolution.’’ 14 In his view, ‘‘One of the humblest races in the gradation of the human family has yielded to us the possession of the vast territory over which our people are now dispersed; and by an inscrutable regulation of Providence is waning before the access of civilisation.’’ 15 He was conscious of Western society’s unprecedented development and expansion, as anyone living through the turbulence of Victoria’s rapid colonization and 1850s gold rushes might have been, and worked to establish the forces of law and order within the colony. He must also have been aware of the effects of this colonial turmoil on the Aboriginal population, as investigated, for example, in the 1859 Select Committee on the Aborigines. He spoke of the delight to be found ‘‘in dwelling on the vast design of nature . . . the celestial scheme which prescribes to planets and their satellites stated revolutions . . . the structure, development and admirable adaptation of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, ascending in unbroken series to man.’’ 16 Here Barry echoes the creationist thinking that prevailed before Darwin, underlying scientific arguments for design in nature and represented in Europe by scientists such as Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen.17 In the colonies, Darwinian ideas were staunchly opposed by Melbourne scientists such as the botanist Von Mueller, anatomist George Halford of the University of Melbourne, and director of the National Museum of Victoria Frederick McCoy—in contrast to their positive reception in New South Wales, where Gerard Krefft of the Australian Museum promoted them. Churchmen such as Bishop Charles Perry, the Anglican bishop of Melbourne, also strongly rejected evolutionist thought.18 By the mid1860s, colonial newspapers widely reported these debates: for example, in the same pages that reported on the exhibition committee’s progress, the Australasian’s ‘‘Scientific Gossip’’ column summarized Huxley’s latest lec-

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tures to the Royal Institution and devoted a full-page feature to William Grove’s inaugural address as president of the British Association, titled ‘‘On the Origin of Species.’’ 19 However, although Barry may have been influenced by local experts and stimulated by the scientific ferment of these years, no evidence exists for his direct engagement with biological or social evolutionism. Nonetheless, certain specific concerns reflect his familiarity with the ideas of James Prichard, who in the 1850s established ethnology as the most general model of inquiry for the systematic study of human difference. Prichard’s Quaker leanings shaped his commitment to defending both primitive revelation (the notion that God had revealed the one true religion to all humankind) and the unity of ‘‘man,’’ hence returning to an earlier biblical anthropology and the proposition that humankind was once and rightfully subject to a ‘‘single ethical dispensation’’; this framework always constrained his interest in comparative anatomy.20 Prichard’s views and especially his methodology shaped Barry’s Aboriginal projects, through which he sought to participate in international cultural and institutional networks.

SUMMERS’S ABORIGINAL CASTS

Barry’s first Aboriginal project, conceived in April 1861, had been the production of life-cast bust portraits of Victoria’s Aboriginal people, and a bust of Wurundjeri leader Simon Wonga was sent to the 1862 London Exhibition.21 In 1866 Barry’s enthusiasm was rekindled, and he commissioned sculptor Charles Summers to produce sixteen bust portraits of Coranderrk residents for display at the 1867 Paris Exposition. Some critics have suggested that one of the reasons for the commission was a request by the commissioners that appeared in the Australasian in July, a few months before the exhibition was due to open.22 It is worth reproducing this item in full: The Exhibition Commissioners, it appears, are determined to make the Australian Court at Paris very complete indeed. The last new idea is to have a collection of skulls—empty or otherwise, we presume—of Australian native tribes. The following letter on the subject, which we received from the Secretary of the Commission, fully explains the object

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in view:—‘‘On behalf of the Commissioners, I beg to solicit your kind assistance in a branch of science which has no prominent place in the prospectus of exhibits, but which ought to be represented at the forthcoming Paris Universal Exhibition. Although phrenology is not particularly mentioned, and is in no way connected with fine or industrial arts, the science has of late occupied so much of the attention of the technical world in Europe, that the Commissioners have thought some specimens of skulls of the Victorian native tribes would be of great interest in Paris. We should therefore be thankful for any assistance you may render to this object by placing the matter before your supporters, inviting them to give the Commission the benefit of their assistance in the shape of contributions of aboriginal skulls of both sexes, and at the different periods of life.’’ 23 As we have seen, however, Barry’s Aboriginal projects, including both the photographic and life-cast projects were already underway. This public appeal by the commissioners (read Barry) should be seen simply as another expression of the contemporary scientific interest in Aboriginal data, specifically the demand for skulls. The journalist’s distaste was typical of the contemporary odium attached to body snatching, which prevented large quantities of Aboriginal remains actually finding their way into collections despite an eager scientific market.24 Perhaps the appeal also reflects the reawakening of Barry’s enthusiasm for obtaining such data, in the form of Summers’s Aboriginal bust portraits and Walter’s photographic portraits, as alternative means of recording Aboriginal cranial forms. Phrenology was a form of generalized scientific interest in skull measurement that developed from the early nineteenth century onward and was locally promulgated by Melbourne’s own M. Philmore Sohier, who published his Register of the Size of the Phrenological Organs of the Brain Shewing Which to Cultivate and Which to Control in 1861. Sohier was also the proprietor of Madame Sohier’s Waxworks, which like its rival Max Kreitmayer’s Museum of Illustration, employed local sculptors including Summers. Perhaps this milieu, with its scientific connections and professional expertise in rendering anatomical form, provided Barry with the practical impetus for achieving his objective of documenting Aboriginal people. Life-size dioramas also constituted a staple mode of display within museums and exhibitions, allowing Aboriginal peoples’ naked bodies to be

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presented to an audience in ways that conveyed messages about their supposed savagery.25 As a serious scientific theory, phrenology had lost favor with European men of science by the 1840s, but it retained popular appeal, and the Melbourne library collected works on phrenology into the 1880s. Its basic principle, that individual function must correspond with different parts of the brain, was accepted by biologists to the end of the century, and its techniques and concerns were appropriated by the prevailing racial biology, notably through focusing attention on the skull and its measurement, which it was assumed reflected mental organization. A shift from the study of individual differences, which sought to identify fixed mental faculties in different organs of the brain, to that of group difference, prompted the collection of large numbers of representative and comparable specimens. So although Barry’s interest seemed belated, the usefulness of his visual data regarding Aboriginal skull shape would have been widely acknowledged. More specifically, Barry’s approach to his Aboriginal projects reflects his reliance on the Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry, as indicated by his correspondence with editor Sir John Herschel, his quotation from it in his requests for information, and his close adherence to its precepts. This technical guide for intelligent laypeople was first published in 1851, giving ‘‘general instructions for observation and for record in various branches of science’’ to naval officers and other travelers, advising that ‘‘its directions should not require the use of nice apparatus and instruments: they should be generally plain, so that men merely of good intelligence and fair acquirement may be able to act upon them; yet, in pointing out objects, and methods of observation and record, they might still serve as a guide to officers of high attainment.’’ 26 The manual’s chapters on astronomy, magnetism, geography, geology, and botany, for example, were authored by distinguished scientists such as Richard Owen, Charles Darwin, and William Whewell, and it was indeed widely used by travelers, embassies, and colonial governments. James Prichard wrote the contribution on ethnology, dealing with ‘‘all that relates to human beings,’’ both as individuals (that is, the ‘‘physical history of man’’) and ‘‘as members of families of communities.’’ Regarding the former he wrote that

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The shape of the features and the form and expression of the countenance should be described. For this purpose words afford but very imperfect means of communicating correct ideas. It will be advisable in all instances to obtain, if possible, correct portraits of persons of both sexes, and these should be coloured so as to represent the complexion as well as the form of the countenance. If no artist should be present who is capable of taking a likeness, the form of the features may at least be described by a profile or shaded outline. The article also urged that ‘‘particular attention should be paid to the shape and relative size of the head, since this forms one of the principal characters distinguishing the several tribes of the human family from each other,’’ concluding that ‘‘the most authentic testimony in regard to this particular, and one which will be very acceptable to scientific men in this country [Britain], will be afforded by bringing home a collection of skulls, if they can be procured. . . . If skulls cannot be procured, the best substitute will be casts of heads.’’ 27 This advice, with its emphasis on the visual form of the head of both sexes, seems likely to have prompted Barry’s approach to recording Aboriginal people, in the first instance through Summers’s casts, but also through the medium of photography, which he seized on as a new scientific tool. We have no direct evidence for the production of the casts, but it cannot have been a very pleasant experience for the sitters, although Barry was concerned that none of the subjects should undergo the process unless they understood it and felt completely comfortable about participating in the project.28 The completed sculptures are bust-size and made of plaster, tinted black and burnished. The sculptures were not shown in Melbourne in 1866 because Summers served as an exhibition judge, but in a photograph of the Paris 1867 exhibition by Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, the busts are clearly visible to the left of the entrance to the Victorian Court (figure 25).29 In Paris, Walter’s Portraits Photographiques des Naturels et des Races Mélangées were displayed nearby, as were views of the colony by Victorian photographers Frederick Cornell, Charles Nettleton, and Alfred Selwyn.30 Although Summers’s earlier and larger-scale treatments of Aborigines as ‘‘noble savages’’ borrowed from classical and romantic prototypes such as Michelangelo’s David and the Borghese Warrior, here the factual purpose of the busts dictated certain aspects of the work, such as the range of sexes

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25. Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, Entrance to Victorian Court at the Exposition Universelle, Paris,

1867, Left-Hand View. Accession number h3910. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

and ages chosen and the focus on the head.31 More important, given that they were cast from life, there was little room for nonrealistic treatment— and the art world for this reason came to despise life casting as a sculptural form of mechanical reproduction.32

THE VOCABULARY PROJECT

Barry viewed the photographic portraits and the busts through the Admiralty Manual’s scientific framework, a conceptual structure that also dictated his third Aboriginal project—the recording of indigenous languages and culture. Despite the growing scientific importance of visual data at this time, the integral relationship of language, human identity, and history was also acknowledged. Barry sent out a circular preceding the 1866 exhibition, which he termed ‘‘a favourable opportunity for collecting materials relating to the history, traditions, customs, and language of the aboriginal natives of Australia.’’ He advocated the collection of weapons and impleSCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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ments, as well as ‘‘authentic accounts upon which reliance may be placed touching their ideas with regard to the Supreme Being, a future state—rewards and punishments—and such of the affections, social relations, moral obligations and sentiments as they are capable of understanding and explaining.’’ He also requested ‘‘skeletons and skulls, as many as possible, with photographs of individuals of each sex and of all ages.’’ This call, like the newspaper announcement of July, is closely modeled on Prichard’s contribution to the Admiralty Manual, which emphasized the need for linguistic data in particular. The Manual’s methodology is reflected in Barry’s argument for a systematic collection of vocabularies, for the ‘‘elucidation of the general laws of Philology’’ and a ‘‘symmetrical and homogenous result.’’ By gathering a wide range of evidence through systematic collection practices, he explicitly worked to remedy previous ad hoc efforts. He appended the ‘‘scheme suggested by Sir John Herschel, in his addendum to the article on Ethnology in the Admiralty manual’’ and the ‘‘Ethnical Alphabet’’ of Cambridge’s Alexander John Ellis in the hope that the project might ‘‘form the groundwork of future more extended enquiries of a like nature, in the progress of which the intercourse with the Aborigines may lead to improvement in their intellectual and social, as well as their physical condition’’ and might redeem ‘‘the obligations [colonists] owe to the humble race—the primitive possessors of the soil.’’ Closely following Prichard’s chapter on ethnology, he argued regarding humankind’s ‘‘social being’’ that language and dialect ‘‘of all things [afford] the most important aids in all researches as to the origin and affinities of different tribes or races.’’ 33 The Vocabulary of Dialects Spoken by Aboriginal Natives of Australia was produced as a result of this enterprise, but Barry later wrote to Herschel that the project had failed to achieve its intended scope: to the more than three hundred circulars sent forth he received only thirteen responses in return. His regret was sharpened by ‘‘the knowledge that as the Aborigines are disappearing so rapidly from the face of the earth, all traces of the forms of Speech, whether distinct languages or dialects will have disappeared before long.’’ 34 He was not alone in seeing a need to salvage evidence for what was perceived as a dying race. Barry’s interest in undertaking these projects may have originated with his personal early contact with the region’s Aboriginal people, and perhaps he was further stimulated by an awareness of the increasing value of Australian data to scientists in Britain at this time 90

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and his pride in his adopted country. In the context of his cultural ambitions for the colony as a prominent and influential member of Melbourne’s elite, these projects would prove useful in developing contemporary ideas regarding race and civilization.

VICTORIA ON SHOW

Why were these works felt to constitute an appropriate contribution to the exhibitions? What impact did they have on the exhibition-going public? Amid the chaos of the 1850s gold rushes, the exhibitions, like Victoria’s other quickly established cultural institutions, stood as symbols of civilization in a dangerously volatile world. As the 1861 Victorian Exhibition catalogue stated, ‘‘the Colony has attained such a state of development as could hardly have been anticipated by those who witnessed the disorganisation of society, and the paralysis of the ordinary avocations of industry, which followed the gold discoveries.’’ 35 Exhibitions provided a vehicle for asserting an imagined local identity on the world stage: when Redmond Barry opened the 1861 Melbourne exhibition, he proudly welcomed the opportunity to ‘‘set the people of Europe right upon many points relative to this country, respecting which ignorance and confusion prevail. . . . Victoria will appear to advantage and the progress made by her during the last decade may rival that of any of the numerous possessions of her Majesty.’’ 36 However, in this transnational context, the Aboriginal works did not form a prominent feature of either the 1866 or 1867 exhibitions. As art, for example, Walter’s portraits were not highly regarded: although two Tasmanian photographers received medals in the 1866 photography category—Charles Woolley for portraits of Aborigines and S. Spurling for portraits of Tasmanian children—Walter received merely an honorable mention some way down in the list, as well as the dismissive comment, ‘‘For a collection of Aboriginal portraits, on account of the interest they possess, although exhibiting little merit as photographs.’’ Woolley’s portraits were probably regarded more highly than Walter’s because they showed each of the five Tasmanian subjects full face, in three-quarter view, and in profile, thereby conforming more closely to developing anthropometric conventions. Their subjects also had tremendous, tragic significance as the supposed ‘‘last of their race.’’ 37 It also proves interesting to contrast Woolley’s vignetting of his subjects, a visual device that decontextualized and disSCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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tanced his subjects, with Walter’s intimate framing and his individualizing approach. Despite their relative insignificance, and although it was not until later in the century that emerging discourses of nationalism and anthropology saw cultural difference become a basic structuring principle of the exhibitions, these works may perhaps be seen as participating in a formative stage of a process of defining global conceptions of humanity and civilization. The Paris 1867 exposition, for example, was marked by great French nationalism and for the first time indigenous (North African) people were imported to form living exhibits. Some observers have argued that this increasingly popular feature of the expositions ‘‘glorified French industrialization, but in an antithetical sense. Since indigenous cultures were offered as evidence of local conditions and contemporary reality, their present state seemed to recall that of the industrialized nations’ past and therefore provided a measure of their relative advancement and superiority.’’ 38 While domestic Aboriginal policy consistently sought to separate the residents of Coranderrk, as a place of Aboriginal incarceration, from the white population, here it intersected with a contemporary, countervailing movement, which Tony Bennett has termed the ‘‘exhibitionary complex.’’ Orchestrated by the colony’s cultural elites, these emerging institutions ‘‘served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision.’’ The exhibitionary complex reoriented the gaze and made the forces of order visible to the populace. By providing ‘‘object lessons in power,’’ arranging bodies and things for public display, the people, en masse, were enabled ‘‘to know rather than be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge.’’ This new technology of vision was organized by architectural design, allied to the emerging disciplines of history, archaeology, geology, biology, and especially anthropology, working to locate the nation within the development of Western civilization. This new mode of experience construed indigenous peoples as humankind’s past, serving as a counterpoint to European modernity. In the totalizing, ‘‘temporally organized order of things and peoples . . . metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time,’’ a unified public was constructed in opposition to primitive peoples.39 The exhibitions celebrated 92

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imperial achievement, simultaneously glorifying and domesticating empire. Walter’s images saw wide circulation in this global economy, appearing also at the 1872 London International Exhibition and at the 1873 Vienna Universal Exhibition, events that asserted a colonial identity before a European audience, defining colonial society and culture.40 The Aboriginal portraits occupied the margins of this imagined identity, marking the boundaries of civilization.

T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L C U LT U R E N E T W O R K

The images’ real scientific impact was felt after the exhibitions closed, however; standing for the Aborigines of Australia, Walter’s photographs and Summers’s busts were sent to Europe to participate in scientific debates about human evolution. Britain

For example, the photographic series was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, where it is housed in a ‘‘mixed album of visual material which appears to have been shown at meetings of the Anthropological Society of London [later the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland]’’ in 1867. This larger collection, amassed by geologist John Wickham Flower, who had some anthropological interests during the 1860s (not William Henry Flower the anatomist), includes ‘‘a few more scattered Aboriginal images,’’ as well as photographs from India, South Africa, and the European margins, crania (from all over the world), drawings of archaeological sections, maps, photographs of stone tools, and Peruvian mummies. Walter’s images do not appear in the pages of the Institute’s Journal, published from 1871 to 1872, although otherwise there are many studies of and references to Australian Aboriginal people and culture at this time, suggesting that the series was acquired solely for scientific reference.41 This arrangement explicitly represents them as one of many ‘‘primitive’’ human groups, typical of a museology that presented artifacts and remains according to typological systems irrespective of their ethnographic origins: an evolutionary series was constructed leading from the simple to the complex, in which Australian Aborigines represented the lowest stage.42 The Pitt Rivers Museum holds all 104 portraits, as well as both lists. SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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As I have noted, the list of eighty people includes only the so-called ‘‘full bloods.’’ Elizabeth Edwards explains that their arrangement within the album proves significant: the eighty ‘‘full bloods’’ appear first, ‘‘in closely mounted grids of nine per page.’’ The ‘‘half-caste’’ series was mounted separately, and ‘‘scars on the album show that the lists [written by Walter] were originally pasted in separately,’’ documenting what were clearly perceived to be two different groups on the basis of racial difference.43 Walter’s botanical patron, Ferdinand von Mueller, was a member of the Anthropological Society and may have sent the series to the society or to Flower 44— a proposition strengthened by evidence for his having presented the series to Russian and Italian colleagues. Russia

Von Mueller was appointed director of Melbourne’s botanical gardens in 1857, shortly after his arrival in Australia, and was already employing Walter to collect botanical specimens at this time. By 1858 he was sending specimens to the Imperial Botanical Gardens of Saint Petersburg and the Moscow botanical gardens. He was related to the Russian ‘‘scientifically active Mertens family,’’ which may have constituted his link to Russia, although northern German/Estonian links with Russia were quite common.45 His counterpart in Saint Petersburg, Edward Regel, also took an interest in anthropology, and they exchanged information and specimens throughout the 1860s. Von Mueller’s interest in the Aboriginal people of Australia was stimulated by his involvement in local organizations such as the Philosophical Society and his contacts within the Lutheran Church, as well as by his election in May 1864 to the Russian Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences. At this time the society proposed a national exhibition that later became the 1867 Ethnographic Exposition of all Russia, held in Moscow.46 Von Mueller responded with energy to his Russian colleagues’ request for Australian material, assisted by his friend Robert Brough Smyth, who as member of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines had been collecting artifacts and information since the early 1860s.47 Von Mueller and Smyth were friends whose scientific interests overlapped considerably; von Mueller subsequently contributed botanical information to Smyth’s Aborigines of Victoria. Both were senior public servants (Smyth served as secretary for mines between 1861 and 1876) and members of the Ecological and Acclimatisation Society (as were other members of the Board), which 94

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visited and collected at Coranderrk. Smyth’s large collection held many Wurundjeri (Woiworung) duplicates, and these formed a significant proportion of the two consignments of material von Mueller sent in 1865–68. Von Mueller’s appreciation of photography as a scientific tool is indicated by his gift of a pair of photographs by 1868, and four more stereoscopic tableaux by 1869, and I suggest that these, too, were taken by Walter. His second major dispatch in 1869 also included 102 photographs, and later accounts of their use in Moscow reveal these to belong to Walter’s 1866 series.48 The contemporary value of Walter’s series is demonstrated not merely by the gratitude expressed toward von Mueller by his Russian colleagues: they bestowed an honorific title on him, while the society repeatedly declared its appreciation in its reports, and Alexander II presented him with a vase. Its continuing scientific usefulness is indicated by the series’ subsequent deployment by museum director Dimitri Anuchin, who like many contemporaries saw photography as helpful evidence for the variations among humankind. While Moscow collection records do not mention the 1867 series in detail, eighty portraits, including those of Simon Wonga and William Barak, ‘‘figured prominently’’ at the 1879 Moscow Anthropological Exhibition. These must have portrayed the eighty so-called ‘‘fullblooded’’ residents, indicating that it was this supposedly ‘‘pure’’ group, rather than that with European blood, which provoked interest as specimens of a race. There were also nine views of buildings and groups at Coranderrk and elsewhere.49 The listed subjects conform with Walter’s series, although variations are due to transcriptions to and from the Cyrillic alphabet, and most of the views are recognizable from their captions as Walter’s 1860s images. Some of these were his 1869 Gippsland stereoscopes from Lake Tyers and Ramahyuck including Divine Service in an Encampment in Gippsland, An Encampment of Natives, and Natives from Suovy River (sic).50 Italy

Von Mueller also presented the series to Italian scientist Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in Florence, in May 1867. The internationally respected ethnographer Giglioli was attached to the scientific expedition aboard the Italian naval vessel Magenta; he made an excursion to the Dandenongs with Von Mueller on which they hunted possums and observed the flora and fauna. On a separate visit SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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Giglioli made to Coranderrk, he described the settlement and its inhabitants in some detail, noting especially the family of Tommy Hobson, and made his own series of photographs. Giglioli also noted that ‘‘later I received from Dr Mueller an almost complete collection of photographic portraits of the aborigines [sic] and halfbloods [sic] living at Coranderrk, which has been very useful to me in recalling my impressions,’’ and which he also used in making arguments about the origin and distribution of different human races.51 Giglioli’s own images form an interesting contrast with Walter’s, made only months before (figure 26). Eleven 1867 photographs by Giglioli remain extant, nine taken at Coranderrk.52 These show the residents in less elaborate dress than Walter’s series, probably because they were taken for scientific purposes, capturing the people in their everyday circumstances, rather than in formal sittings.While Walter’s portraits feature signs of preparation such as well-brushed, even oiled, hair, new-looking suits and dresses, and key symbolic objects, Giglioli’s bust portraits show the subjects (including William Barak, Simon Wonga, Timothy, and possibly Tommy Hobson) in much more careless garb. Some exhibit signs of care for their appearance in European terms, such as neatly parted and brushed hair, but most do not, and some, for example, Man of the Hamilton Tribe, 1867, are seemingly naked except for a possum skin rug. The images complement Giglioli’s published account of the visit, which assumed the imminent extinction of the race. In this publication he reiterated his hypothesis that the whole of Australia had been ‘‘populated by a people identical with the Tasmanians, and that this people was destroyed or assimilated by the present aborigines [sic] of New Holland,’’ whom he believed unique among the peoples of the world (occupying an ‘‘isolated position in ethnical terms’’). He supported his argument with detailed anatomical comparisons, citing the Coranderrk portraits with the comment that ‘‘the facial features are the most marked, not the dolico-cephalic skull nor the small cranial capacity nor the maxillary prognathism, all found in other races, but the parietal thickness, the prominence of the supraorbital region and the depression of the nasal radical region.’’ 53 He also reproduced portraits of the indigenes of Papua New Guinea to support his contention that they constituted a distinct people, as well as to argue against Paul Topinard’s theory of the plurality of Australian races.54 Giglioli maintained contact with Australian institutions and scientists into the 1890s, notably 96

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26. Enrico Giglioli, Coranderrk portraits, 1867. Reproduced from Aldo Massola, Coran-

derrk. A History of the Aboriginal Station (Kilmore, Victoria: Lowden, Kilmore, 1975).

in obtaining zoological specimens and Aboriginal artifacts and skull casts from Edward Ramsey, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney, between 1874 and 1894.55 While Giglioli’s account of his contact with Tommy Hobson indicates a degree of sympathy (‘‘I was moved by the happy and prosperous appearance of this little family’’), it certainly does not compare to the intimacy between Walter and his collaborators, the Green family and the Kulin. One Giglioli photograph even shows a ‘‘woman of the Yarra tribe’ ’’ wrapped in a blanket with one breast exposed—a uniquely revealing and impersonal image for this appearance-conscious community. Comparisons between this overtly scientific series and Walter’s demonstrate significant differences, despite both having been circulated within an explicitly scientific framework. Walter’s personal relationship with the residents, who desired to be portrayed according to specific European conventions of respectability, and his work’s framing by a missionary perspective, shaped the form of the images. As a result it is easier to read the subjects of his series as individuals, as well as specimens of a race. As active members of an elite and close-knit international scientific network, von Mueller, Flower, Giglioli, Regel, and other men of science participated in an intense exchange of information and objects, including the photographs of Coranderrk. As evidence for the appearance of the ‘‘fullblooded’’ members of the Aboriginal race, these portraits represented scientific information, visual data deployed within scientific arguments of the day. In the form of reference material shown by the anatomist Flower at meetings of the Anthropological Society of England, and as evidence used by Giglioli and Anuchin for their arguments regarding Aboriginal peoples’ relationship to other human races, the portraits, and especially the eighty ‘‘full-blooded’’ subjects, constituted evidence for the biological difference of Aboriginal people.

T H E I M PA C T O F S U M M E R S ’ S B U S T S : ‘‘A Q U I D F O R O U R Q U O’’

Redmond Barry also sent Summers to the Paris Exhibition in 1867, taking the portrait bust molds with him; a set was made up and presented to the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical gardens. Copies were also presented to the British Museum in 1869 and sent to the Vienna Exhibition in 1872.56 Correspondence from Barry to Sum98

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mers suggests that this trip was intended to accomplish several tasks on behalf of the State Library of Victoria, such as acquiring works of art and giving sets of the busts to different institutions for ‘‘an equivalent in exchange.’’ Barry stressed that ‘‘it is not our desire to give these casts in any quarter (except to the British Museum) without a quid for our quo.’’ 57 They were evidently seen, by Barry at least, to have international bargaining power, and he wrote, ‘‘there can be no doubt whatever that these would be highly prized, if presented, on the part of Victoria, to the British Museum, the Royal Museum of Brussels, as well as the Royal Museum of Berlin, in the last named of which institutions, great attention has been paid of late years to the illustration of every branch of Ethnic Science.’’ 58 Like Walter’s photographs, the busts were used in scientific debates regarding the nature and origins of humankind. For example, French anthropologist Armand de Quatrefages disputed Darwin’s argument that species diversify, and argued for the fixed nature and single origin of human species. He used Australian craniological data in arguing for two distinct races of Aboriginal people—one homogenous group spread throughout the continent, and another restricted to the southeast and represented by few individuals. In his and fellow scientist Ernest Hamy’s Crania Ethnica, for example, a man, a woman, and a child from Summers’s Coranderrk series were reproduced as engraved profiles in support of their ‘‘australodravidienne’’ theory. Although detailed comparison of skulls from several parts of Australia led them to conclude that the people hailed from diverse origins, their languages indicated an ancient Dravidian connection. Local Australian ethnographers took an interest in these theories, which were translated and summarized for scientific societies.59

T H E I M PA C T O F T H E E X H I B I T I O N P H O T O G R A P H I C S E R I E S

The exhibition panel demonstrates how photography, as a means of collecting supposedly objective information, worked within the discursive formation of race. There are signs that local whites were not unsympathetic to the Coranderrk residents: Barry, for example, seemed adamant that the process of producing the life casts was not unpleasant for the subjects. Respect for their civilized lifestyle and, notably, for their respectable European dress is indicated by Smyth’s concern that they would not disrobe for Huxley’s project. Most significantly, Walter’s extended contact with his SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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‘‘Aboriginal friends’’ resulted in a relatively intimate relationship reflected in the power of his photographic portraits. Yet despite these local circumstances, and the evidence for personal concern for the Aboriginal subjects, these photographs were used in both public and scientific contexts to represent the people as objects of science.They constituted emblems of a culture assigned a specific place in the history of Western civilization, designed to complete larger cultural and historical schemes that assured European civilization its preeminence. As Prichard argued, ‘‘words afford but very imperfect means of communicating correct ideas’’; physical form more effectively signified invisible attributes and capabilities. He and his colleagues were to find that visual representation had its drawbacks too, however. Preceding Huxley’s and Lamprey’s more objective approaches by just a few years, the ‘‘data’’ Walter recorded—for example, with respect to cranial form—was likely to have been regarded as flawed by the same subjective variations that hampered their methods. The exhibition panel represents Walter’s idiosyncratic attempt to draw on both his background as botanical collector and his newly acquired local knowledge of debates about Aboriginal people in applying the methods of natural science to the task of representing a race. He took his own taxonomic approach to the problem of human difference: the scale and arrangement of the exhibition panel reveal the form of a group rather than individuals. Significantly, Walter created a visual text whose internal relationships and differences would have been read from top to bottom by the exhibition-going public, showing the ‘‘full-blooded’’ men and women, arranged in decreasing age order, displaced by the young so-called ‘‘halfcastes.’’ With all the evidential force of visual imagery, this temporal organization appeared to demonstrate change over time consequent on contact with whites, simultaneously constructing a relationship between black and white, explaining the community’s past and calculating its future.

T H E G R E E N FA M I LY A L B U M

It is astonishing to see these same portraits—as if unfurled, or fully developed—in the context of the Green family’s photograph album. Here, the people come to life. As we were told by the August 1865 newspaper article, John Green, the first manager of the station, had arrived from Scotland in 1857, and began holding services for a number of Woiworung at 100

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Yering in 1860.60 Green emerges as an exceptional figure in the history of Australian race relations. His closeness to the Aboriginal people of Coranderrk was doubtless shaped by his Presbyterian beliefs, as well as by contemporary notions of civilization and progress, but in many ways he was unusual for the period in his sympathy for Aboriginal traditions and needs. The Reverend Hamilton recalled that a Wurundjeri man named Wildgung (aka Jemmy or Jamie Webster) believed him to be the reincarnation of his brother; hence ‘‘Jamie implicitly believed’’ his scriptural teachings about the ‘‘unseen world’’ because he thought they were based on direct experience.61 Green’s policy was to help the residents rather than manage them, and a court was established that communally ‘‘laid down rules of conduct and punished offenders by administering fines, withdrawing privileges or imposing the ultimate sanction of banishment.’’ The Board frowned upon this independence, and he resigned under pressure in 1874 and went to live nearby in Healesville; the efforts of the residents to reinstate him were unceasing until his death. Hence the Green album was viewed in a context of friendship between the Aboriginal subjects and the Green family. On the first page we see a third version of the view of the settlement, here captioned in Walter’s hand, ‘‘Coranderrk and my Aboriginal Friends’’ (figure 27). Presumably Walter presented the album to the Greens (and perhaps on behalf of the Aboriginal residents) following his lengthy stays at the station. Again, this distant view gives only an impression of a cluster of houses with smoking chimneys. It is only when we enlarge the image to enormous proportions that we notice the cricket game several children are playing in front of the schoolhouse. But this is how nineteenth-century viewers would have viewed the album—repeatedly, holding it to the light, close to their face to see every familiar detail. On the second page we see a man climbing a tree, surrounded by an actively involved audience (figure 28). This image is structured by the relationship between photographer and subjects: in documenting Aboriginal skill in climbing a tree—an activity that continually fascinated whites, as documented by its recurrence in photographs throughout the century— the camera is openly acknowledged and welcomed. It is not that the people have stopped what they were doing to watch the photograph taken—this is what they were doing! Several figures have even climbed onto the cottage roofs to get a better look—or a better chance to be included. This relationship of mutual regard—the white photographer examines the tree SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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27. Charles Walter, ‘‘Coranderrk and My Aboriginal Friends.’’ Accession number xp 1937. Page 1 from the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

climbing, the Aborigines examine Walter—characterized the photographer’s work at the station. While largely obscured by the photographs’ subsequent manipulation and circulation, here is evidence for the interest shown by the Aboriginal subjects in the process of taking pictures. More generally, the Kulin’s evident engagement with Walter’s activities implies their active presentation of the activity shown, through choice of subject, staging, and performance. Whites observed Aboriginal people and recorded activities that seemed interesting to themselves, perhaps because of the contrast formed with their own culture.This admiration, often generated by difference, of certain feats such as tree climbing was freely expressed, if often qualified by an assertion of white superiority: visitor Giglioli, for example, described this skill as ‘‘almost miraculous.’’ 62 Aboriginal awareness of this admiration, and pride in their own skill at boomerang throwing, tracking, or fishing, structured relationships between the residents and visitors to the station. Performing for white observers became the ritualized, public face of the station, and photographs taken throughout its life record these encounters. The recurrence of the sub102

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jects of tree climbing, canoeing, fishing, or boomerang throwing in the photographic archive reflect this dialogical process, begun with Walter, as white fascination with such exploits prompted further performances by blacks, subsequently recorded in photographs by whites. This cyclical process of imitation and refinement constituted an integral element of colonialism’s ambivalent operation, undermining totalizing notions of colonial photography as structured by the exploitative, controlling eye of the white photographer. On the album’s third page we see a man and two boys in a canoe on the Yarra, again showing several friendly extra figures in the foreground (figure 29). The following page shows the ‘‘exhibition’’ views of the settlement (they are still playing cricket) and a photograph captioned ‘‘Women with baskets’ (figures 30 and 31), both reflecting an interest in traditional pursuits acceptable within the missionaries’ Christian framework. Pages 5 to 24 are filled by portraits, their arrangement respecting Walter’s, but at only five to a page, allowing us to examine them closely (figures 32–43). Penciled captions, presumably by John Green or another family member who knew the people, have later been inked carefully beneath them in elaborate lettering. These postscripted captions record sometimes idiosyncratic details about the subjects, such as about Mussy Fundert (Mr. King): ‘‘King Billy—of the Upper Goulburn Tribe. A polygamist. Once in the hulks for being concerned in a murder, jumped overboard and escaped to Healesville’’ (figure 34). These statements hint at the Greens’ memories of the people. What do they tell us of the subjects? The 1866 series comprised portraits of people whom Walter by now knew reasonably well. Despite the supposedly scientific principles that dictated their group structure, and some of the subjects’ apparent discomfort, which might be attributed to technical constraints, we must set these circumstances against the residents’ generally happy, successful situation at this time, and the images’ powerful effect as portraits of individuals. When we look at these portraits now, we are struck by the dignity and strength that radiate from them. The people are well-dressed, in good quality European clothes.They stare to one side or the other, permitting us to gaze unashamedly at them. The oval frame, cropped tightly around the head and torso, embraces each person, bringing him or her into close proximity with the viewer, allowing their force of character and individuality to SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

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28. Charles Walter, ‘‘Man Climbing a Tree.’’ Accession number xp 1938. Page 2 from the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

29. Charles Walter, ‘‘Canoe on Yarra.’’ Accession number xp 1939. Page 3 from the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

30. Charles Walter, ‘‘View of Settlement.’’ Accession number xp 1940. Page 4 from the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

31. Charles Walter, ‘‘Women with Baskets.’’ Accession number xp 1941. Page 4 from the

Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

32. Charles Walter, portraits. Accession number xp 1942–1946. Page 5 from the Green

family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

emerge. Where many photographs of Aboriginal people (as is often noted of the studio portraits of J. W Lindt or the later Coranderrk visitor Fred Kruger) prominently display artifacts, deploying them as props to maximum effect, the possessions of many of the Kulin are often cropped or obscured, thus subordinated to their owners (they wear the cloak rather than the cloak wearing them). I believe it is because of this power as individual portraits that descendants today are drawn to this series (see chapter 5).

GARRAK-COONUM

There is evidence for a similar fascination on the part of at least one sitter. One portrait shows a mature man recorded as ‘‘ ‘Timothy,’ thirty-four years old, of the Yarra Yarra Tribe, his Aboriginal name ‘Garrak-coonum’ ’’ (figure 43). His family resemblance to Barak and Wonga is marked. As we stare at Garrak-coonum, he looks seriously out of the frame, past us, at 106

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33. Charles Walter, ‘‘Malcolm, of the Loddon Tribe (One of the Leaders of the Tribe).’’ Accession number xp 1943. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

34. Charles Walter, ‘‘King Billy (Of the Upper Goulburn tribe), a polygamist.

Once in the hulks for being concerned in a murder, jumped overboard and escaped to Healesville [sic].’’ Accession number xp 1944. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

35. Charles Walter, ‘‘Simon Wonga, King of the Yarra Tribe.’’ Accession num-

ber xp 1949. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

36. Charles Walter, ‘‘King William Barak.’’ Accession number xp 1952. From the Green Family Album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

37. Charles Walter, ‘‘Tommy Banfield’’ [sic]. Accession number xp 1960. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

38. Charles Walter, Women’s portraits. Accession number xp 1992–1996. Page 15 from

the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

39. Charles Walter, ‘‘Boraat.’’ Accession number xp 1995. From the Green

family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

40. CharlesWalter, ‘‘Eliza’s Daughter (Crocheted a Collar and Sent It to Queen Victoria, Who Acknowledged It by a Letter).’’ Accession number xp 2003. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

41. Charles Walter, ‘‘Wandin.’’ Accession number xp 2016. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

42. CharlesWalter, ‘‘Little Lizzie.’’ Accession number xp 2043. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

43. Charles Walter, ‘‘Timothy.’’ Accession number xp 1951. From the Green

family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

something in his own time, his expression heavy and thoughtful. Like the other men in the series, he is well dressed in a serviceable suit—coat, waistcoat, shirt—with neatly brushed hair. But unlike the others, he holds a small book, possibly a Bible, in his right hand, deliberately central, chest high, one finger marking his place. Among this gathering he does not immediately stand out—it is only when we stop and take up his oval framed image, peer closely at his expressive eyes, his grave face, partly shielded by his beard, that we begin to wonder about him. Like each one of the portraits in this series, the man’s personality seems tangible and vivid. Although he does not engage directly with us, his gaze cannot be dismissed: to my mind, it conveys something profoundly touching. In staring at Garrak-coonum, we reproduce Walter’s gaze: the white photographer imprinting this Aboriginal man on to his plate, mechanically reproducing his likeness in permanent form.Why were Walter and his patrons so interested? Did their fascination lie with the successful appropriation of European ways—clothes, industry, religion, goods, and accomplishments (symbolised by the book)—that is, in the Aboriginal mimicry of whites? Evidence for the missionaries’ pride in such transformations suggests that this was so. But perhaps beneath the rhetoric of improvement lies something more fundamental. As Michael Taussig notes, photography ‘‘concentrates to an exquisite degree the very act of colonial mirroring, the lens coordinating the mimetic impulses radiating from each side of the colonial divide.’’ 63 In Walter’s interest in the Aboriginal people of Victoria expressed through a visual language, we see the circulation of mimesis and alterity as white fascination with Aboriginal mimicry is itself expressed mimetically when subject reaches out to embrace object. Garrak-coonum’s averted gaze does not mark a refusal to engage either with the new circumstances he found himself in, nor with us. In an astonishing drawing held by the Museum Victoria, our yearning to share Timothy’s vision, see what he sees, is extravagantly satisfied (figure 44). This drawing measures seventy-five by fifty-two centimeters, comprising two pencil sketches glued to a cardboard-and-cloth backing. It is signed ‘‘Timothy, Coranderrk’’ in running script, and beside it appears a thumbnail sketch of an Aboriginal man, dressed in a suit, and holding a book (figure 45). The drawing shows several scenes of traditional Aboriginal life, starting with a cosmological frieze of stars, clouds, and planets, below which ap118

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44. Timothy, drawing (detail). Accession number xp 86705. Museum Victoria, Mel-

bourne.

45. Detail of Timothy’s signature. Accession number xp 86705. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

pear hunting scenes showing the pursuit of kangaroos, emus, an echidna, and a koala. We also see a register depicting two rows of figures—men holding spears and dressed in cloaks, women with eel fishing spears, holding hands with children: this might even tell the story of the journey to the Acheron, much like Walter’s ‘‘setting off ’’ photograph and Barak’s painting of the same event discussed in chapter 1. In the lowest register appears a scene of ceremonial meeting, showing two men surrounded by seated onlookers—again, perhaps the ‘‘giving praise’’ sequel to the story of the station’s foundations. Timothy’s traditional choice of subject looks backward, preserving memories of life before colonization, but it also tells the story of the momentous decision to change. Timothy’s mark inflects this drawing, otherwise so reminiscent of Barak’s concern with the past, with a sense of transformation and the future. When Garrak-coonum identified himself as owner and author of this story, he signed his drawing in a new language, as ‘‘Timothy,’’ and, beside the word, he signed it with his new image of himself. Just as he presumably chose to be photographed holding a book, the symbol of a new skill (and, if it is a Bible, a new religion), Timothy self-consciously names himself as the white photographer saw him, as an Aboriginal man who had adapted to new circumstances. Carol Cooper argues that what is essentially new about the work of nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists was that their work (unlike traditional art intended to be read only by insiders) communicated with outsiders.64 Similarly, Timothy’s drawing demonstrates the 120

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Aboriginal appropriation of white forms to communicate with whites, deploying photography to express a new consciousness of himself. Walter’s Coranderrk series demonstrates the active engagement of Aboriginal subjects with the theatrical process of making pictures. As I have argued regarding the 1865 series, it is possible to read some of these photographs as a white record of Kulin performances, and so their form must be acknowledged to owe much to the subjects’ decisions and intentions, as well as to European conventions. They also reveal the multivalence of photographic objects, simultaneously meaning different things according to context. These different readings reflect the physical form and concrete functions of the medium, able to be endlessly reproduced, made large or small, crammed onto a large display panel for consumption during a crowded public event or scattered across the pages of an album, to be pored over repeatedly, in private. This polysemous quality belies the images’ apparent clarity, inscribing them with multiple and contradictory meanings. Yet in 1860s practice, a range of strategies effected closure and decided their significance. Within scientific discourse the series was deployed by ethnologists arguing about Aboriginal people and humankind. The 1866 exhibition panel used techniques such as reducing the scale of each person’s portrait, diminishing the individual standing within an assemblage of patterned visual differences, to create physical, cultural, and temporal distance between observer and observed, thus allowing the subjects to be seen as scientific data, objects of public curiosity. In other contexts these same portraits effect an opposing tendency, drawing the viewer toward the viewed: in the Green family album, the oval framing hugs the subjects’ heads and shoulders, the lens caresses their faces, revealing texture, form, and expression in fine detail. Walter’s visual experimentation expressed the social and intellectual ferment of the 1860s, creating new ways of seeing black and white.

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CHAPTER 3 TIME TRAPS: DEFINING ABORIGINALITY D U R I N G T H E 1 8 7 0 S -- 1 8 8 0 S

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A man was almost in tears. He said, ‘‘The white people have only left us a miserable spadeful of ground, and now they want to take that away from us.’’ —Reverend Alexander Mackie, 1877

During the 1870s, ideas about race began to narrow and harden.The photographs produced by Frederick Kruger at Coranderrk trace a transition in public attitudes from an appreciative acknowledgment of difference to an increasingly rigid and discriminatory definition of Aboriginality. This was an intensely political decade. As conservative and radical causes battled for control of colonial parliament, these competing agendas mobilized contradictory ideas about Aboriginality by focusing public attention on Coranderrk as a test case for Aboriginal policy: the humanitarian reformists supported the residents and their demands, opposing those seeking to close the station and resume its valuable farmlands. Kruger’s images of fishing, cricket, and hop picking prove unusual for the time in expressing a sympathetic curiosity about a people changing yet surviving. Yet in their circulation a more ambivalent movement emerges, vacillating between approval and skepticism. Kruger’s idyllic studies of a people living in harmony

with nature show the Aboriginal residents of Coranderrk adopting a rustic peasant lifestyle amid the tranquil setting of the Yarra Valley. Framed by a modernist sense of loss, these views delight in the preindustrial simplicity of rural life, domesticating their subjects in a humanitarian vision of an Aboriginal pastoral. Yet drawn into local conflict about the station’s management, Kruger’s photographs defined the identity of the Aboriginal residents in less sympathetic ways. As the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines became more authoritarian, Coranderrk’s residents mounted a sustained protest that successfully aroused public support and in 1882 secured official agreement that they be allowed to keep their home. By the mid-1880s, however, the rebellion at Coranderrk was quashed, as a new assimilation policy divided the community into so-called ‘‘full bloods’’ and ‘‘half-castes,’’ excluding the latter from Coranderrk and thereby effectively marking the beginning of the station’s end. The Board commissioned two series from Frederick Kruger at moments of peak conflict with the Aboriginal residents: the first, in 1877–78, was intended to argue for the residents’ successful management and progress toward civilization; the second series, commissioned in 1883, explicitly sought to show the racial limitations of the so-called ‘‘full bloods.’’ Recontextualization of Kruger’s images in commercial albums construed the subjects either as the last of their race or as grotesque objects of derision. As anthropological data, these albums were sent to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where, alongside contemporary French photographer Désiré Charnay’s anthropometric images, they participated in scientific discourse. Kruger produced more than 160 photographs spanning almost two decades at Coranderrk, and these circulated as newspaper engravings, official and commercial albums, and as anthropological data, generating a wide range of sometimes competing and contradictory meanings. Kruger had emigrated with his family from Berlin in the early 1860s, becoming a successful professional photographer and receiving international recognition for his landscape views.1 His photographs trapped moments that contemporary viewers read as facts about the subjects and used to prove arguments mounted by politicians and administrators; they also catered to popular interest.

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S U R V I VA L

Kruger’s first photographs of Coranderrk appeared in the colonial illustrated newspapers, showing Aboriginal people undergoing cultural transformation—scenes of hop pickers, a fishing holiday, or cricket. What is remarkable about these images and distinguishes them particularly from contemporary representations of a ‘‘doomed race’’ is that they show Aboriginal survival. Indigenous photographer Brenda Croft, for example, sees them as reflecting Kruger’s personal interest in and sympathy for the residents’ situation, and finds them ‘‘fascinating as I consider he was closest to honestly depicting a rapidly changing lifestyle, and Aboriginal peoples’ adaptation to those changes.’’ 2 They reveal Aboriginal industry and vitality; change here could be understood as progress, with the implication of a hopeful future. While the images lack an explicitly evangelical perspective, they do overlap with Walter’s slightly earlier views in sharing a friendly interest in the residents’ successful adaptation to a European agrarian lifestyle, stressing their shared humanity with whites. Aboriginal transformation became embodied in new practices—shopping, the cultivation of hops, and the adoption of European games—that to whites signified progress and reform. Yet while change could be registered as progress, or as survival, it could also be seen as a more ambivalent aspect of Aboriginality in watering it down, rendering it inauthentic.

CRICKET

One of Kruger’s best-known views shows a cricket game in progress in front of the settlement, its popularity perhaps due to a continuing Australian passion for the game (figure 46).3 Cricket, as a performance at which Aboriginal people excelled, provided mutual satisfaction, and so one reading of this image would group it with Kruger’s other scenes showing successful transformation. Yet I find this image particularly ambivalent and disturbing in Homi Bhabha’s sense: as mimicry, it fixes the colonial subject, both colonized and colonizer, as a ‘‘partial’’ presence. It belongs to the same discursive field as an account by Henry Mosely, an English naturalist aboard the Challenger expedition who visited Coranderrk in 1872. While Mosely concerned himself chiefly with acquiring specimens of the elusive platypus, he also described something of the human ‘‘types’’: 124

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46. Fred Kruger, born Germany 1831, arrived in Australia 1860s, died 1888. Aboriginal Cricketers at Coranderrk, c.1877. Albumen silver photograph. 13.3 × 18.1 cm. Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979. Accession number ph 225-1979. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

We found the cricket party in high spirits, shouting with laughter, rows of spectators being seated on logs and chaffing the players with all the old English sallies; ‘‘Well hit,’’ ‘‘Run it out’’; ‘‘Butter fingers,’’ &c. I was astonished at the extreme prominence of the supraciliary ridges of the men’s foreheads. It was much greater in some of the Blacks than I had expected to see it, and looks far more marked in the recent state than in the skull. It is the striking feature of the face. The men were all dressed as Europeans; they knew all about Mr W.G.Grace and the All-England Eleven.4 Interestingly, when this passage is quoted, the comment on the men’s foreheads, occurring in the middle of the description of the game, is always excised, as if it were irrelevant. Yet to my mind, it gives the paragraph its point (it is the striking feature of the piece), revealing difference as much as sameness: in Bhabha’s words, it articulates the distinction between being English and being Anglicized. Mosely continues, in high irritation, to describe how the cricketers and their audience were so engrossed that no one would sell him any artifacts, nor take him to hunt the platypus. The TIME TRAPS

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menace of mimicry—its double, ambivalent vision—emerges here as the gap between what Mosely demands from the ‘‘natives’’—work discipline, thrift, and deference—and the Aborigines’ own priorities. Expecting authentic primitivism, his account betrays his disappointment at their civilization, even as he sneers at them. Mosely’s typifications work metonymically, standing for something that they only partially resemble, revealing contradictory articulations of reality and desire. In the light of Mosely’s text, our reading of Kruger’s image of Coranderrk’s cricketers moves from sameness to difference—from cricket, the quintessentially English pastime, to the black skin of the players against their ‘‘whites,’’ revealing white fascination with the Aboriginal mimicry of a white man’s game.

ABORIGINAL IDYLLS

Kruger’s picturesque views of Coranderrk stressed harmony, productivity, and peace, assuring viewers of the residents’ appropriation of a rural peasant lifestyle—as in one of Kruger’s best-known images, the idyllic Fishing Scene at Badger’s Creek (figure 47). This image shows residents in their Sunday best, clustered along the sides of the steep slopes behind the settlement. Engraved versions of this photograph appeared at least twice in early 1878, titled The Hop Paddock, Coranderrk, Victoria, from Badger Creek and accompanied by an optimistic account of the station as an attempt ‘‘to prevent the extinction of the aboriginal race’’ and teach ‘‘habits of order and industry’’ (figure 48). It explained that at Coranderrk the soil and climate are favourable to the growth of hops, and hop grounds have been planted. The vines are poled and attended to during their growth by the aborigines [sic], and they also secure the harvest at hop-picking time. Our view shows the hop-ground at a distance, with the Badger Creek, from which it is irrigated, in the foreground. . . . The proceeds of the hops grown at Coranderrk go far towards paying the expenses of the establishment . . . they are allowed occasional holidays, one of which they are enjoying as presented to our view. On such occasions there is no issue of rations, but that is immaterial, as the creek abounds with fish, and the aboriginals are expert anglers, and find no difficulty in supplying themselves with an ample quantity of food in a short time.5

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47. Fred Kruger, Badger’s Creek at Aboriginal Mission Station (Fishing Scene), Coranderrk. Accession number xp 1934. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

48. The Hop Paddock, Coranderrk,Victoria, from Badger Creek. From the Illustrated

Australian News, 1 January 1878, front page. By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

49. Frederick Kruger, born Germany 1831, arrived in Australia 1860s, died 1888. Coast scene, Mordialloc Creek, near Cheltenham, c.1882. Albumen silver photograph. 20 × 27.2 cm. Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979. Accession number ph 329/1979. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

While stressing progress toward civilization and discipline, almost despite itself the text circles back to the arcadian quality of this moment. Isobel Crombie notes Kruger’s tendency to ‘‘gravitate’’ toward ‘‘thoroughly domesticated’’ landscapes, unlike contemporaries such as Nicholas Caire and J. W. Lindt, who sought out scenes of picturesque wilderness such as the giant tree ferns and ash forests of the Dandenongs east of Melbourne. Like Coast Scene, Mordialloc Creek, Cheltenham (figure 49), the Coranderrk fishing scene is ‘‘gentle, almost timeless . . . a lyrical celebration of Australian leisure.’’ 6 The fishing scene signals the advent of Aboriginal people enjoying an ideally tranquil, harmonious relationship with each other and with the landscape yet clearly not leading a traditional, precolonial way of life. The image and account emphasized their closeness to nature, but at the same time the fishing ‘‘holiday’’ encouraged the ‘‘sable labourers to persevere in habits of order and industry’’: the subjects’ civilization, marked, for exTIME TRAPS

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50. Fred Kruger, Hop Gardens at Coranderrk. Accession number xp 1933. MuseumVictoria,

Melbourne.

ample, by their European dress and their diligence, becomes the framing trope of the text. In April, the Illustrated Australian News featured two scenes from Coranderrk’s new hop industry, titled The Hop Kilns, Coranderrk and The Hop Grounds—Dinner Hour (or, The Hour of Rest), based on Kruger photographs (figure 50).7 Hop cultivation became a particularly appealing theme at this time, representing an archetype of rural picturesqueness and evoking a sense of nostalgia for the preindustrial European lifestyle it recalled. Scenes of hop picking remained a popular subject in the colony’s illustrated newspapers and tourist guides throughout the century, characteristically showing men, women, and children working in the shade of the tall feathery arcades, baskets strewn at their feet. (Nicholas Caire was also to reiterate such scenes in his later Coranderrk views.) As one Melbourne writer mused, ‘‘the mere association of ideas recalls the charming fields of Kent and the pleasant scenes of harvest time. . . . It is the season of rejoicing. Bustle and animation is discernible on every hand. Nature never looks so beautiful and benignant. She pours forth with unstinted hand her barn of plenty, and all the land smiles like a garden full of the choicest products.’’ 8 The 130

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relatively cool, wet climate of Victoria and Tasmania, unlike Australia’s tropical north or its arid desert heartland, produces forms of temperate rain forest and rolling river parkland that, to homesick immigrant eyes, were reminiscent of Europe. Hop picking, amid pretty trellised rows, by the whole community seemed the archetypal scene of English plenty, signifying a rural stability that had in fact been disrupted by urbanization and industrialization. Immigrant nostalgia for home, combined with the settlers’ own experience of the colony’s rapid growth, gave a particular local inflection and poignancy to a larger modernist consciousness of loss amid a fast-changing world. This nostalgic sensibility, often couched in older, pastoral terms, constituted a defining characteristic of Western responses to the effects of industrial capitalism from the early nineteenth century onward, as observers lamented the destruction of the natural environment and the rustic order. British painters and writers of this period celebrated the rural landscape, and especially scenes of harvest, in nostalgic terms evoking harmony, plenty, and biblical associations.9 Popular English writers William and Mary Howitt were ardent proponents of this celebratory British genre, commanding a wide readership in the colonies as well as at home. Pastoral nostalgia embraced the supposedly pristine Australian landscape: for example, following a stint on the Victorian diggings, William Howitt’s Land, Labour, and Gold cast Victoria as an unspoiled garden, though threatened by the upheavals of the gold rushes. For Australian migrants, Melbourne’s astonishing growth, particularly following the discovery of gold in the early 1850s, invoked a sense of dizzying change as industry and progress flourished in what some colonists still remembered to have been a pristine wilderness peopled by ‘‘savages.’’ It became an ‘‘instant city’’ whose swelling population threatened to outrun government control, and many feared that the forces of chaos and anarchy would prevail.10 A vision of agrarian stability was advanced against the uncertainty and fluctuations of gold seeking, praising the moral value of the small farmer embedded in a fixed social hierarchy.11 The increasingly urban population viewed places such as Victoria’s own lakes district in Gippsland and the rain forests of the Dandenongs with great delight, and they especially enjoyed arcadian scenes of ‘‘pioneer’’ farmers leading productive lives of tranquility, simplicity, and contentment.12 Their admiration was heightened by the contrast with the apparently pristine wilderness that TIME TRAPS

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51. Hop Picking by Australian Aborigines. From the Illustrated Australian News for Home

Readers, 10 September 1872. Ebenezer and David Syme, Melbourne. Print: wood engraving. Accession number ian10/09/72/201. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

surrounded them—an ironic perception given that Aboriginal land husbandry, for example in the form of lighting regular, controlled bushfires, had produced the form of open parkland that European arrivals so much admired. One such immigrant, the colonial adventurer, geologist, and, later, ethnographer Alfred Howitt—interestingly, also the son of William and Mary—had begun cultivating hops on his Gippsland property in 1872 using Aboriginal labor, suggesting to John Green that this would prove a suitable crop for Coranderrk. To European observers, the Aboriginal pickers added an extra note of pleasing exoticism to the scene, as was noted of the hop harvest on Howitt’s property (figure 51): ‘‘Of all rural scenes, perhaps that of hop picking is the very prettiest; and as this industry is now thoroughly acclimatised in Victoria, it will no doubt be familiar to some of our readers. At Bairnsdale, however, (as may be seen from the annexed view), a fresh element of the picturesque has been introduced by the employment 132

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of aboriginal labour, and our Gipps Land friends certainly deserve credit for this entirely new development of ‘native industry.’ ’’ 13 Kruger’s picturesque view of hop picking echoes the fishing scene in forming a ‘‘panorama, full of diversified and suggestive objects, [that] glows with brightness, and is replete with signs of happiness and contentment.’’ 14 For a moment, a vision of Aboriginal Arcadia flickered into existence, impelled perhaps by local humanitarians’ hopes for an indigenous future, but also underwritten by an older European aesthetic. The notion of Aboriginal villages—combining the European agrarian ideal with aspects of tradition and traditional skills such as fishing, involving above all a closeness to nature—assumed the form of an idyll, a charming scene of rural peace. Even the hostile journalist John Stanley James (‘‘the Vagabond’’), who compared the residents to the ‘‘lazy Negro’’ and argued for their removal, acknowledged this appeal in describing the picturesqueness of Aboriginal life on the Gippsland lakes where ‘‘on a rounded peninsula, is the aboriginal station, consisting of some white cottages on a green slope, a church turret peeping through the trees. . . . In all Australia there is not a fairer sight than this view of the mission station at Lake Tyers.’’ He also praised Coranderrk’s hops industry, stating, ‘‘I have seen hop-picking in Kent—at a slight distance, one of the prettiest sights in the world. Here, however, hops grow luxuriantly, and the long poles were covered with trailing plants, bent beneath a weight of blossoms.’’ 15 Many visitors to the lakes were delighted by the comfort and order of the Aboriginal villagers’ lifestyle, and especially of its beautiful lake setting, a theme taken up by Caire in years to come, especially on the lakes. However, as critics of the rustic idyll have often pointed out, its apparent peace and plenty were a fantasy of the disenchanted modern viewer. As early as 1856 George Eliot noted that ‘‘idyllic literature’’ had always ‘‘expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life.’’ 16 British observers pointed out that the apparent harmony of hop picking, in particular, masked its use of itinerant urban labor and its associations with vagrancy, promoting the old myths of rural happiness despite prevailing circumstances of social unrest and poverty. In a similar way, a picturesque aesthetic was invoked by white settlers to conceal the brutalities of the Australian penal colonies, directing attention instead toward the beauties of the landscape as defined in familiar British terms.17 Kruger’s tranquil Aboriginal Arcadias also worked to disguise the disTIME TRAPS

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possession of the indigenous people, expressing the humanitarians’ vision of Coranderrk as idyll, in which the residents would lead productive Christian lives as the colony’s rural peasantry. But tranquil scenes of hop picking were misleading as evidence for the community’s stability, as I discuss further: although the crop proved a commercial success, the demands of the hop field and the constant attempts of the Board to hire European labor became a problem for the Aboriginal residents and their supporters, forcing them to work for profit rather than their own subsistence. More important, Kruger’s views appealed to a yearning for a return to a lost world of peace and harmony with nature, excluding as they do any reference to everyday modernity as experienced by the urban readers of Melbourne’s newspapers. They constructed a fantasy that located the Aboriginal subjects in a country retreat, secluded from the present and its conflicts, denying their battle for autonomy. Perhaps, too, these Aboriginal idylls drew strength from the contemporary view that hunter-gatherer Aboriginal culture represented the earliest stage of human development, seeming, in the transition from a nomadic to an agrarian lifestyle, to chart a natural evolution toward civilization. Such a vision maintained the association of Aboriginal people with nature and the past, making them particularly amenable to incorporation into a nostalgic narrative.

V I S U A L M O V E M E N T: A T E M P O R A L N A R R AT I V E

Images such as the fishing scene work to affect the viewer not only through theme but also in specifically photographic ways. Kruger’s views express photography’s mimetic impulse, creating an embodied sense of movement to embrace the object of vision, as well as an intimate, domestic relationship with their subjects. While it has been argued that the lexis, or unit of reading, of a photograph remains limited by comparison with film, elements of still photography nonetheless work, like film, to decide or close off meaning, lending the image motion and depth. From its inception, the photographic medium has been characterized by rich experimentation with visual movement and bodily engagement.18 As Oliver Wendell Holmes recognized in the 1860s, the stereograph prompted a physical, tactile engagement with the image, and ‘‘by means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with 134

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our hands, or with our thumb and finger, and then we know it to be more than a surface.’’ 19 More recently, Rosalind Krauss has disputed accounts of nineteenth-century photography that attempt to subsume it into the story of modern painting, characterized by the emptying out of pictorial depth and the ‘‘transformation of landscape after 1860 into a flattened and compressed experience of space spreading laterally across the surface.’’ When we look at nineteenth-century photographs, we should remember that what appears to be a flattened space stripped of perspectival depth was in fact often intended to be viewed stereoscopically, and even in the process of consuming still photographs, 1870s viewers would willingly have succumbed to the magic of verisimilitude. Specifically, Krauss argues that the sensation of refocusing the eyes within the image, recoordinating the eyes to fix on different points, constitutes a ‘‘kinesthetic counterpart to the sheerly optical illusion of the stereograph . . . [a] physio-optical traversal of the stereo field’’ 20; as in cinema, the isolated viewer is transported optically by a sensation of physical movement, traveling into the image. As the viewer gazes uninterruptedly, searching out the ‘‘infinite complexity’’ of nature, the image’s temporal dimension dilates, the viewer emplotting its elements.The detail captured within a photograph prompts the viewer’s fascinated scrutiny: as Roland Barthes wrote, ‘‘If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. . . . I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.’’ 21 Poring over a photograph is like diagnosing an illness, trying to understand the hidden story concealed by its surface. For Ross Gibson, this potential for storytelling makes historical photographs interesting as ‘‘timetraps’’: ‘‘A momentary action is arrested and stored, but, crucially, it is also primed to grow.’’ 22 The remarkable depth of field evident in many of Kruger’s views, notably in Fishing Scene at Badger’s Creek, prompts a similar engagement with the image, creating a sense of movement beyond the picture’s surface, into its heart. The eye rambles diagonally downhill, from side to side, deeper and deeper into the scene, lingering over the sharp detail and complexity of each successive plane, finally to be held by the distant horseman. Kruger created this effect using a small aperture and short focal length, as well as the large-plate format available by this time. The spatio-temporal dimension opened up by this visual traverse itself narrativizes the subject, telling us of the people, their association and purpose, their relationship TIME TRAPS

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to the landscape. It exhausts the scene, taking us from the photograph’s surface relentlessly to its vanishing point. Like the Europeans in Kruger’s well-known Coast Scene, Mordialloc Creek, the Aboriginal fishers here tell a story of domestication as they seem to live in natural harmony with the landscape and each other. Although the photograph draws the Aboriginal subjects into an intimate and familiar relationship with the viewer, this took a fundamentally paternal form. Kruger’s transparent realist window facilitated the colonial project of surveying new terrain and knowing its people, prompting a narrative that linked humanitarian hopes for an Aboriginal future to a nostalgic return to a European past. The people of Coranderrk are shown here as a happy Christian flock in a blissful vision of an Aboriginal Arcadia.

PHOTOGRAPHING CORANDERRK’S REBELLION

Yet in the context of local debates about the station’s management, which prompted Aboriginal protest, government intervention, and widespread public interest, Kruger’s views also participated in increasingly contested narratives about Coranderrk. This local conflict effectively ensured the destruction of the Aboriginal idyll, and in the eyes of their local audience, resulted in the residents’ fall from grace. Competing interests deployed newspaper accounts to argue for one side or another—either that Aboriginal people were becoming successful peasant farmers or, alternatively, that they were helpless children in need of control and discipline yet whose impurity rendered them unworthy of protection. Visually, Kruger’s techniques and concerns—such as his trademark domesticated landscapes— were easily appropriated by rival views regarding Coranderrk’s management. As mentioned earlier, Coranderrk’s rebellion became widely known in early 1876, when an Age headline, ‘‘Coranderrk Hop Farm: Mr Green and Mr R. Brough Smyth,’’ told a fascinated public about the authoritarian and unjust treatment of the residents, and their much-loved manager Green, by the Board.This appeared particularly newsworthy because the Board’s secretary, Smyth, had been suspended from his position as head of the Mining Department only weeks before for his bizarrely dictatorial work practices. This, however, would prove just the first shot in the battle over the station’s

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future: although hop cultivation had been a commercial success under the management of John Green and the Kulin, it became a problem in diverting resources away from basic subsistence and maintenance of the settlement, and to improve profits, the Board sought to hire white labor. When the hop income was diverted to central revenue, the Board lost any incentive to support the station and began a push to close it down. Residents allied with Green and other humanitarian supporters (such as the Reverend Hamilton and wealthy philanthropist Anne Bon), agitated to work their lands without outside interference and to protect their homes. In the developing conflict between the Board and the residents, personal links with the major newspapers, in turn allied to opposing political factions, saw their arguments translated into public representations in the form of polemical feature articles, attracting a wide readership and assuming intense local significance in articulating different ideas about Aboriginality.23 Kruger’s images—such asThe Hop Kilns, Coranderrk andThe Hop Grounds —Dinner Hour—were given pointed, political meanings by the reformist Age, as well as by the conservative Argus (and their subsidiaries), through accompanying texts.24 In the following case, a pro-Green view emerges strongly from the writer’s review of the hops industry, giving him credit for its success, providing lots of detail about the process and its yields, and referring sympathetically to the ‘‘complications’’ that had arisen due to Green ‘‘himself having been discharged under what many may hold to be rather harsh circumstances.’’ Further, ‘‘as Mr Green knew the ways of the natives, and was thoroughly versed in the system of managing them, he was able to obtain their cheerful service.’’ Regarding Kruger’s images, the article explained that The first illustration shows the men, women and children enjoying their noonday recess from the labour of picking, and the well-clothed bines occupy the background. In the second illustration the two hop kilns of the farm are shown, with natives carrying the newly-picked hops from the hop ground to undergo the process of drying.The smaller kiln of the two was built by the blacks, under Mr Green’s superintendence, with round bush timber, at a cost of £20, and is capable of drying 450 bushels per twenty-four hours. The larger one was erected after Mr Green’s dismissal by white labour, with sawn timber, at a cost of £500, but it is found to be not more effective than the smaller one.25

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In this context, the images become framed in such a way that they, too, argue for Green. If we place the photographs beside the engraved versions, it becomes apparent that they have been altered to increase the sense of industryand purpose of the Aboriginal workers. InThe Hop Kiln, the scattered still figures of the photo have been replaced by busy pairs of men carrying hop bushels into the kiln. Kruger’s images expressed the humanitarian vision of a hardworking agrarian community, domesticating its industrious, orderly Aboriginal subjects and incorporating the settlement into a stable colonial hierarchy. Perhaps it was this domesticating function that prompted the Board to turn to Kruger for proof of their efficient management of the station, although their objectives conflicted with those of the humanitarians.

B E F O R E A N D A F T E R : T H E B O A R D C O M M I S S I O N , 1 8 7 7 -- 7 8

Between mid-1877 and mid-1878, Kruger was commissioned to make a series of portraits of Coranderrk’s residents, today comprising most of the ‘‘Board for the Protection of the Aborigines Album.’’ 26 The project was initiated at a key political moment, as the residents’ opposition to the Board, and especially its goal of closing the station, reached a climax.The residents’ political campaign ranged from strikes and disputes within the station to writing and sending petitions and even mounting deputations directly to chief secretary Graham Berry. In early 1877, a Board-friendly royal commission was appointed to ‘‘inquire into the present condition of the Aborigines.’’ Hearings held between April and July collected evidence that Coranderrk was not well managed and criticized the state of housing.The inquiry focused on future policy for ‘‘half-castes’’ amid widespread criticism of the humanitarian segregationist position and demands for assimilation. The royal commission at this time endorsed the view of the Board, suggesting that the so-called ‘‘half-castes’’ lacked the capability to live independently of the stations largely because of white prejudice. It recommended retention of the station.27 In response to public criticism and accusations of poor management, the Board mounted its own public relations campaign, aware of the need to represent itself in a positive light. In September 1877 it decided to introduce a system of visitors’ books to be kept at the Aboriginal stations, expecting these to function as useful propaganda in reflecting the views of observers 138

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who already had a kindly interest in the welfare of Aboriginal people.28 Also in September, Friedrich Hagenauer, manager of the model Ramahyuck in Gippsland commissioned a series of thirty-six photographs from Sale photographer Frederick Cornell.29 This series comprises portraits of the neatly dressed residents in the studio setting of a Victorian parlor, framing a central view of the settlement dominated by the church, school, and regimented huts. Ramahyuck was considered the mission exemplar, and its orderly physical form embodied the control that the Reverend Hagenauer enforced there: the photographic record presents an impressive spectacle of official efficiency. Kruger’s commission must have been conceived as part of this propaganda-gathering exercise, intended to lend weight to Board arguments regarding its effective management. Unlike that of the exemplary Ramahyuck, Coranderrk’s appearance had by this time begun to attract criticism, and the 1877 inquiry concluded that ‘‘greater attention might not improperly be paid to the appearance of the area surrounding the settlement—no effort has as yet been made in this direction. The effect of tidiness, and per contra of untidiness, on the Aboriginal mind is most important; the inculcation of tidiness forms part of civilization as well as discipline.’’ Yet they also acknowledged that ‘‘the physical condition of the residents indicates a very liberal scale of diet: their bearing and demeanour form a contrast with those of the natives on all other stations.’’ 30 Hence instead of showing the settlement itself, Kruger recorded the progress the Aboriginal subjects had made, producing a sequence of portraits of ‘‘civilized,’’ well-cared-for residents (figures 52–57). In deciding the form of this complex series, Kruger may have been affected by contemporary images of Aboriginal people, such as those by his Melbourne colleague J. W. Lindt’s slightly earlier (1873–74) Clarence River series from northern New South Wales, which became very widely distributed, and Thomas Washbourne’s Melbourne carte-de-visite studio portraits of the late 1860s.31 Like Kruger’s portraits, Lindt’s show people posed before a studio backdrop, surrounded by props. Unlike Kruger’s Coranderrk series, however, Lindt’s Clarence River people, the Gumbainggar, only partially clothed, are arranged in elaborate, stereotypical poses, surrounded by a dense array of artifacts. A number of writers have argued that such decontextualization, as well as the subjects’ subsequent framing by anthropologists and within commercial albums as a dying race, indicates that the TIME TRAPS

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images were viewed forensically, as specimens.32 The subjects’ displacement from the environment to the studio has been read as a metaphor for their actual dispossession.33 Instead, Kruger’s portraits show a dignified, obviously Europeanized community. Despite his attempts to define some of the sitters as representatives of an ancient tradition, and to create a narrative of progress through contrast between past and present, to an extent, indigenous objectives emerge. In this series Kruger created a structural relationship between individuals dressed in simulated traditional garb and those same people wearing modern European dress, prompting a narrative of evolutionary change. The images suggest the effectiveness of the work of civilizing through the juxtaposition of these opposed material and visual signs. While we do not know the original sequence of the images, this pairing is particularly consistent with respect to adult women, such as Annie Reece, who appears in one image with loose hair, a blanket twisted in traditional style around her to form a pouch for her child, and holding a spear in her right hand (figure 52). Notably in these views, a tree fern is propped against the canvas backdrop: the mid-nineteenth-century craze for ferns, as symbols of subtropical landscape, underlined the exoticism of Aboriginal culture. The plant’s association with Eden and primevalness may also have stressed the primitive lifestyle Aboriginal people were considered to have led before settlement. However, the ferns also provided an emblem of local identity, connecting the people to the fern-tree gully and mountain-ash scenery of the region. Kruger also shows Reece seated in an indoor studio setting with her children and her husband James, in a pose typical of studio portraits of the period; here she is elaborately dressed, with neatly tied hair and a brooch at her throat, holding a posy of flowers and a book (figure 53). One daughter also holds a posy, and the other a book, perhaps a Bible, while James Reece wears a buttonhole in his coat. Matilda Mooney undergoes the same transition (figures 54 and 55). In all, there exist twenty-six such pairings, and as a result, viewing the series prompts a narrative movement as a specific, oppositional relationship is created between the uncivilized ‘‘native,’’ on the one hand, and the docile subject making satisfactory progress toward a European lifestyle, on the other. Overall, however, the majority of portraits show the subjects in European dress, perhaps undermining the effect of the ‘‘traditional’’ views: this 140

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inconsistency may also have emerged from the fact that by this time, none of the residents would have willingly removed their clothes, having become accustomed to a Europeanized way of life. In 1870 Smyth had refused T. H. Huxley’s request for anthropometric data, stating that the Victorian Aboriginal people were ‘‘not sufficiently enlightened to submit themselves in a state of nudity for portraiture in order to assist the advancement of Science. Indeed they are careful in the matter of clothing, and if I empowered a photographer to visit the stations and take photographs with Professor Huxley’s instructions in his hand, he would I am sure offend the Aborigines and meet with little success.’’ 34 Although Brough Smyth may have been motivated by professional rivalry, such concern for their respectability would not be surprising on the part of people who had been living in European society for decades, whose interest in fashion and clothing was well known, and who were well aware of how whites viewed them.35 The Coranderrk archive displays a marked absence of naked bodies, in contrast to those of other parts of Australia. The residents’ concern to present a reputable appearance in this case coincided with the Board’s. Further, although the before-and-after schema prevails numerically within the series, variations exist that disrupt its symmetry. Portraits of men are not as consistently organized as those of women: while men often appear in both indoor, family and supposedly traditional settings, they tend rather to be shown in either traditional or European dress, as if they had not made the effort to change their clothes. Yet sometimes men such as Edward Mooney, appearing in one portrait with Matilda and their son, are also shown in traditional dress, holding a wide range of artifacts such as boomerangs, clubs, and spears, and with bare chests and calves, covered by skins or a blanket, like the outdoor view of John ‘‘Sambo’’ Rowan and Edward Mooney (figure 56). The emphasis on warfare as exemplified by outdoor views of staged opponents holding weapons underlines the theme of savagery in these ‘‘before’’ shots.36 Hence while more than half of this complex series conforms to a ‘‘savage’’ (before) versus ‘‘civilized’’ (after) narrative structure, the large number of exceptions to this rule challenge such a formulation. While we do not know what relations between Kruger and his subjects were like, it is interesting to ask what factors dislocate his crude racial and cultural status quo. Tommy Avoca, for example, photographed indoors in a suit, as well as in traditional attire outside, holds a boomerang in both: TIME TRAPS

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52. Fred Kruger, Annie Ries—Loddon Tribe. Accession number xp 1788. Mu-

seum Victoria, Melbourne.

53. Fred Kruger, Mrs. Rees and Family—Goulburn Tribe. Accession number xp 1787. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

54. Fred Kruger, Matilda—Loddon Tribe. Accession number xp 1789. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

55. Fred Kruger, Mathilde—Goulburn Tribe. Accession number xp 1790.

Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

56. Fred Kruger, Sambo and Mooney—Gippsland Tribe. Accession number

xp 1803. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

perhaps this is because he wanted to be shown with this symbol—perhaps he had made it, or it symbolized his identity? In a similar inconsistency, Samson Barber stands in full cricket gear amid the fern trees (figure 57). Perhaps the men’s tendency to be shown in either European or traditional dress reflects their unwillingness to perform for Kruger by changing their clothes; it would have been easier for the women to don a blanket over their dress. French photographer Désiré Charnay, who visited Coranderrk the following year, described how his plans to photograph the residents were thwarted by their escalating demands for payment.37 These contestations should be seen in the context of the political activism of the people of Coranderrk, producing results at precisely this time. The Aboriginal subjects of Kruger’s 1877 series were at the height of their political campaign to reinstate John Green and to prevent the Board from closing Coranderrk down. In viewing the series as a whole, it is possible to construct an exoticvision of traditional culture (the category comprising women wearing cloaks and men performing activities such as fighting), providing a foil for the images of well-dressed residents, which argued for the Coranderrk residents’ orderliness and progress. Such a narrative was perhaps the Board’s intention. Nonetheless, just months before, during the 1877 inquiry, Board employee Edward Ogilvie warned that ‘‘the apparent civilisation which they have now arrived at may all be dissipated and lost in a moment,’’ typifying the often provisional nature of contemporary perceptions of the residents’ progress.38

‘‘R E A L N AT I V E S’’: T H E B O A R D C O M M I S S I O N , 1 8 8 3

Continuing Aboriginal agitation prompted another, parliamentary, inquiry into Coranderrk’s management in mid-1881, reflecting the great interest the case aroused among the general public. The commissioners examined the attachment of the residents to the site, but ominously, they focused particularly on the status of ‘‘half-castes.’’ Since the mid-1870s, some observers had argued that there existed a basic difference between ‘‘half-caste’’ and ‘‘full-blood’’ Aboriginal people. Despite the 1877 royal commission’s decision not to send ‘‘half-castes’’ outside the station to work, figures such as Ogilvie and Hagenauer, at Coranderrk and Ramahyuck, respectively, continued to push for this policy, and it was provisionally adopted, for boys, TIME TRAPS

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57. Fred Kruger, Samson—Goulburn Tribe. Accession number xp 1840. Mu-

seum Victoria, Melbourne.

in January 1879.39 Yet even while the parliamentary inquiry was underway in late 1881, the Board fiercely debated the issue, its annual report arguing that ‘‘half-castes,’’ while ‘‘sharp and cunning enough in small matters,’’ would be unable to compete in settler society.40 At this time, many observers noted that Coranderrk had a large ‘‘half-caste’’ population, and critics attributed the unrest at the station to their influence; it became increasingly common to argue, even by humanitarian supporters, that the ‘‘full bloods’’ alone had a claim to government support. The inquiry criticized the Board’s management and recommended the station’s retention. However, it also recommended that while the ‘‘full bloods’’ should be supported at the station, the ‘‘half-castes and quadroons’’ should be encouraged to leave to seek work as servants and laborers. This policy would both subsidize Aboriginal support and address the colony’s labor shortage—but crucially, assimilation of the ‘‘half-castes’’ into the white population would also solve the Board’s problems in controlling these rebellious people.41 The Board immediately began to formalize this policy, holding a managers’ conference in August 1882 for the purpose, and official pressure came from the chief secretary, writing in December 1882 to the Board: You state that the Central Board for the Protection of the Aborigines are strongly opposed to aboriginal [sic] girls being hired out as servants, unless in very exceptional cases, I have the honor to inform you it has been brought under notice that the Board on the Coranderrk Station recommended that male and female half-castes and quadroons should be encouraged to hire themselves out under proper supervision, and that they should be carefully trained to this end. It has been further stated that to maintain half-castes, and quadroons, with the pure blacks is not just to the latter. The Chief Secretary desires the Board will be so good as to again consider the matter, more especially in regard to the half-castes and guardians of both sexes.42 The highly gendered nature of arguments about assimilation emerges from these exchanges; it is evident that a profound fear of miscegenation underlay popular and official debates, focusing on the women. The press consistently commented on the white appearance of some residents as evidence for racial mixing: around March 1883, for example, using a formula typical for the time, ‘‘Bruni’’ wrote of Coranderrk that ‘‘besides men and women TIME TRAPS

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of the true type of the Australian black, [there are] a considerable number of young women and children, many of whom were astonishingly fair. . . . These young people are being brought up to a life of hopeless, aimless pauperism.’’ 43 The accusation that the Aboriginal women were ‘‘unchaste’’ was hinted at slyly or rejected with embarrassment by a society that did not openly acknowledge sexual exchange between black and white. While these slurs on the residents’ morals caused some annoyance to the Board, it, too, saw the ‘‘half-castes’’ as less authentic, and hence less deserving of support. As the Board formulated its new assimilation policy, an opportunity arose to obtain visual proof of the difference between the ‘‘full bloods’’ and ‘‘half-castes.’’ In July 1883, Captain Page, secretary of the Board, commissioned Kruger to make another series at the station, prompted in the first instance by chief secretary Berry’s desire to be represented at the 1883 Calcutta Exhibition. Berry’s initial request for Aboriginal material was regretfully declined because ‘‘everything of interest was sent to the Amsterdam Exhibition.’’ 44 As well as acknowledging the problem of losing material sent overseas, commissioners were wary of boring their audiences with sketchy or hackneyed displays.45 Developing exhibits also proved an expensive business: the Calcutta commissioner told Page that because ‘‘Mr Berry was very anxious that his department should be well represented,’’ the Board might be able to apply for funds to cover the expense of producing exhibit material. Page requested reimbursement to the value of fifty pounds for ‘‘photographs of Blacks & stations and articles made by Aborigines’’ for Calcutta, and on 6 July, ten days before writing to Kruger, Page was informed that he would receive twenty-five pounds ‘‘towards the cost of his collection.’’ 46 Kruger was enthusiastic about this commission, responding, ‘‘I think it is a capital suggestion of yours to have a Panorama view, which I am confident I can obtain from one of the hills near the School, in eather [sic] 3 or 4 parts.’’ 47 He wrote again, ‘‘I can not go to Coranderrk for less than £10. but will agree to make you 12 or 15 large views of Station & people will also make some of the Ferntree gully’s if they [sic] are any about, also if you wish one or two on the Yarra near Station, & groups of the real natives.’’ 48 The correspondence indicates that a second, later group of images existed within the ‘‘bpa Album,’’ comprising outdoor views of the station, including a panorama, and group portraits of the ‘‘full bloods.’’ It reveals that the 150

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choice of subject was again the Board’s, and in particular that the four-part panorama was Captain Page’s ‘‘capital suggestion.’’ Kruger was perhaps fortunate in being the obvious choice for the commission, having worked at the station before and having won prizes for his photographs at several exhibitions.49 In 1879 the photographer Lindt had sent a proposal to the chief secretary to produce an album of photographs of Aboriginal people along the lines of his famous Clarence River studio portrait series of Australian Aboriginals, but he was rejected on the grounds that there were no available funds.50 Kruger’s ‘‘groups of the real natives’’ show people still living in miamias and reliant on traditional artifacts, in strong contrast to his earlier portraits. Group of Different Tribes and Mia Mia (figures 58 and 59), for example, show people gathered before bark shelters; by comparison with the subjects of the earlier series, dressed in their Sunday best, these groups present a disorderly, dirty appearance, suggesting that these people were still leading a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and locating the ‘‘full-blooded’’ residents in the past. There are eight views of this kind, establishing a temporal relationship with the altered, potentially civilized subjects of the earlier portraits. It is important to remember, however, that in the context of the entire Board series, this group provided a counterpoint to the dominant theme of civilization, a contrast that served to underline the overall progress made under Board supervision.This equation participated in constructing the contradictory formulation of Aboriginality—still powerful today—whereby ‘‘real Aborigines’’ are located in the remote past, leaving no room for change.51 These images provided visual evidence for the different appearance and capabilities of ‘‘half-castes’’ and ‘‘full bloods,’’ underpinning arguments about their differential treatment. The 1881 inquiry had also determined that the Board had neglected Coranderrk’s housing and general appearance. As Kulin leader William Barak argued, ‘‘No wonder the visitors that come here and go away and say the station ought to be sold, when we won’t be allowed to clear the ground; the Central Board, and the manager too, are only leaving this open for to give room to the white people to have something to say about it.’’ 52 The report had been critical of Board management, and in 1882 it embarked on a large-scale building and landscaping program, including the erection of new cottages for the residents, a large brick residence for the white manager, new fences, water supply, and even massive earthworks TIME TRAPS

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58. Fred Kruger, Group of Different Tribes. Accession number xp 1929. Museum Victoria,

Melbourne.

59. Fred Kruger, Mia Mia. Accession number xp 1926. Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

around the approach to the station. In the archives, the letters to Page— commissioning the panorama, views, and ‘‘real natives’’—are sandwiched between those to the architect and contractors at work on the station’s image-management program, reflecting the Board’s intention to produce solid evidence of its capable management of Coranderrk. At Christmas time it took the unusual step of inviting members of the press and several prominent politicians to inspect the place. But the Board’s intention to make its control of the station manifest, by now expanded from the persons and homes of its residents to the very landscape, is furthered by Kruger’s photographs in complex ways. Jennie Boddington notes his tendency to make a series of images taken from successive, related vantage points, each one showing the shot before.53 This almost filmic approach has a counterpart in the panorama Kruger made of the station. Here, as in the fishing scene photograph discussed earlier, the eye is drawn into the picture, sweeping horizontally across the landscape. Again we see the detail and interest of each successive ground receding to the distant village. Interestingly, the reference print I was shown at the Museum Victoria has been densely annotated, each landmark labeled from above or below, picking buildings and sites out from the planes compressed by distance. A contemporary observer, as she or he followed the camera, panning across the landscape, would have found even more points of interest to dwell on. Traversing the station’s terrain in this way has produced a particularly discursive record. Starting outside the boundary in the foreground, a space marked by signs of labor spent in its clearing, it tells us of an extensive, prosperous settlement, moving from the left, and of the awardwinning hops fields, across well-fenced cultivated paddocks to the newly rebuilt village and the substantial manager’s residence, and beyond to the encircling mountains. Like the annual reports, or the ritualized inspections recorded by both official and recreational visitors, the photograph explores and charts the station’s progress. The following year, in 1884, the Board formally adopted a policy of absorption or assimilation, which it began to implement at Coranderrk from January 1885 onward, sending the so-called ‘‘half-castes’’ away, separating families, and marking the beginning of the station’s decline. The final blow came in 1886 when the Aborigines Protection Act was passed, stating that only ‘‘full bloods’’ and ‘‘half-castes’’ over the age of thirty-four were entitled to remain on the station.54 Among the punitive clauses the Board TIME TRAPS

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had originally proposed was a provision empowering magistrates to decide ‘‘on their own view and judgement’’ whether a person was Aboriginal or ‘‘half-caste,’’ suggesting that, in the Board’s opinion, such a distinction was clearly visible to the eye.55 The amended act redefined Aborigines as ‘‘full bloods,’’ ‘‘half-castes’’ over thirty-four, female ‘‘half-castes’’ married to ‘‘pure’’ Aborigines, the infants of Aborigines, and any ‘‘half-caste’’ licensed to remain on a station.56 The act anticipated the end of the race, discouraging younger ‘‘half-caste’’ girls from marrying with the ‘‘full bloods’’ segregated on stations and encouraging the ‘‘half-castes’’ to marry into the white population. This divisive move weakened the Aboriginal campaign, in part because the wider public now believed in a basic difference between the ‘‘full bloods’’ and the ‘‘half-castes,’’ one readily discernable on the basis of skin color. Kruger’s ‘‘real natives’’ participated in this work of documenting and defining Aboriginal people through the clarity and objectivity of photography. The Aboriginal idyll was over.

T H E ‘‘K I N G S A N D Q U E E N S O F V I C T O R I A’’

Kruger made use of his commission series to produce more commercial products, attracting a broader audience. Portraits from the Board series were collated in albums such as the palm-sized Souvenir: Album of Victorian Aboriginals; Kings, Queens, &c.57 Cartes-de-visite were small, cheap, ‘‘sixpenny’’ photographs, often of notable public figures or family members, that flourished from the mid-1850s to the end of the century.58 In this case the viewer purchased a series already put together by the studio, its overall impact determined by the selection of images from the larger Coranderrk series, their relationships to one another, and their captions. A lithographic version of the photograph albums reveals small but significant alterations made to the originals, together with an introductory text, sharpening the album’s meaning and encapsulating widely held views about Victoria’s Aboriginal people as a doomed race (figure 60). Headed ‘‘The Kings and Queens of Victoria,’’ the text reads in part: Anterior to the advent of the white man, he displayed great skill in the manufacture of stone axes, spears, clubs and shields of wood, and also wondrous dexterity in the use of them. His marvellous skill in throwing the boomerang is well known. He is an adept in obtaining fruits,

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60. Handling Album of Kings and Queens of Victoria, illustrated book (showing King David

and Gellibrand). Planographic. 12.0 × 7.4 cm. Accession number 81.2285.1-12. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

roots and seeds in the bush in abundance, and in killing game, and in capturing of fish, he has no rival. The ‘‘Black Fellow’’ is occasionally an anthropophagist, but unlike the Maoris and Fijians, he does not exult in the opportunity of devouring his slain foes, but eats his friends and enemies indifferently when pressed by hunger, or in the observance of some traditional ceremony. The Government of the aborigines of Victoria was patriarchal, regulated by traditions. Tribal distinctions and feuds were actively maintained, so that every man was accustomed to the use of arms. Civilisation, or contact with the white man, never agrees with the untutored savage. He becomes too familiar with his habits, vices and diseases, and although the Victorian Government has taken the ‘‘Black Fellow’’ under its special care; like the aborigines of Tasmania which have become an extinct race, those of Victoria (which now number about 700) are so rapidly disappearing that at no very distant date they will have an existence in history only.59

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As with Walter’s earlier exhibition panel, an expectation of extinction structured popular and scientific perceptions of Aboriginal people, prompting an ethnographic and sometimes nostalgic interest in customs thought to be vanishing. This text reveals a respectful curiosity about traditional Aboriginal culture, shaped by contemporary anthropological concerns including spiritual belief, subsistence, and social organization. It instructs the observer to look for evidence of a disappearing way of life, locating Aboriginal culture in the past.60 Several writers have argued that as the medium of impermanence, one marking a single, vanished instant of time, photography signals death: as photographer Ludovico Hart argued in 1878, ‘‘Its never-ceasing voice cries, ‘In memoriam, in memoriam.’ ’’ 61 By showing something gone forever, photographs serve as a reminderof temporal rupture, emphasizing notions of the Aboriginal subjects as belonging in the past, or signaling their inevitable disappearance. Despite the active resistance of the Aboriginal subjects in the moment of production, these images, in subsequent usage, seem to show a people who have already passed away. Maybe for this reason Kruger chose the traditional portraits from his Coranderrk series for reproduction, all subjects identified by captions as royalty, such as ‘‘Queen Mary—Ballarat Tribe’’ (figure 61). The images include the very few Coranderrk portraits that show people partially naked, wearing traditional dress, holding objects such as spears and boomerangs, or featuring markings such as ‘‘Queen Rose’s’’ pierced septum.62 At the time the images were made, residents of the stations would not have willingly taken their clothes off for a photographer. King David and Gellibrand, with bare chests and initiation scars, were rarities, remnants of precolonial culture. The single exception to these traditional images is the family portrait here titled Family of Civilized Natives—actually Matilda Mooney, Edward Mooney Jr., and Edward Mooney (figure 62). The photograph formed part of the 1877–78 series, as indicated by Matilda’s death at Ebenezer in 1879 and Edward junior’s death around 1877.63 Was this ill-fated family’s portrait chosen because it complied with the album’s gloomy predictions, or was the choice an unhappy coincidence? Matilda and her child appear to be socalled ‘‘half-castes.’’ It is not always clear to us now how subtle variations in Victorian dress were understood by contemporaries, nor how skin color and physical form were perceived, but the whiter appearance of Matilda 156

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61. Fred Kruger, Queen Mary—Ballarat Tribe. First page from Souvenir: Album of Victorian Aboriginals. pic Album 30c nk4165, Rex Nan Kivell Collection. By permission of the National Library of Australia.

62. Fred Kruger, Family of Civilised Natives. From Souvenir: Album of Victorian Aboriginals. pic Album 30c nk4165, Rex Nan Kivell Collection. By permission of the National Library of Australia.

and her son would have seemed evidence of miscegenation, emphasizing the contrast between the traditional and altered lifestyles of the album’s subjects. The inclusion of this image serves to construct the same narrative technique of opposing tradition and transformation as the original Boardcommissioned 1877–78 series, but it reverses its emphasis to accentuate savagery. Comparison of the original photographs with the lithographic versions in The Kings and Queens of Victoria reveals several small differences that provide clues to the images’ intended meaning. Slight irregularities have been smoothed out, and the subjects have been given a more dignified demeanor expressed through more classical stances, according with a European notion of royalty. This respectful treatment, like the introductory text, suggests a genuine interest in traditional Aboriginal culture and social organization. For example, Mia Mia and Royal Family tidies up the subjects and their camp, although this effect is perhaps in part due to the technical process, which requires each detail to be deliberately placed, tempting the lithographer to smooth out the ragged textures of grass and foliage, and to whiten grubby clothing (figure 63). The result appears more formal, and the pose has lost its impromptu quality. Further, the lithographic version of King Billy and His Two Wives has removed the child leaning against Rose Phillips’s knee, the pipe from King Billy’s mouth, and the basket full of wattle in the foreground (figure 64). In many cases, the subjects have been resituated within the natural landscape. Yet there are also prominent signs of European contact in the metal gorgets worn by the men in King William, Mount Cole Tribe, King Tom, Derrinallum Tribe and King Billy and His Two Wives. Europeans equated highly esteemed men within Aboriginal society—revered either because of their age, strength, or other attributes—with kings, and by bestowing brass plates on these key figures, obtained cooperation from local groups. Some plates were also presented to the ‘‘last of the tribes.’’ They did not necessarily reflect authority held within Aboriginal society, and were often despised by Aboriginal people as patronizing, but Jakelin Troy suggests that one reason for their acceptance ‘‘as symbols of power’’ might have been the acute Aboriginal grasp of European social hierarchy.64 To whites, gorgets symbolized complicity with colonial authority, the taming of indigenous peoples, and the appropriation of their land. Domestication is also effected by the smallness and portability of the TIME TRAPS

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63. After Fred Kruger, Mia Mia and Royal Family. From Album of Kings and Queens of Victoria, illustrated book. Planographic. 12.0 × 7.4 cm. Accession number 81.2285.1-12. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

64. After Fred Kruger, King Billy and His Two Wives. From Album of Kings and Queens of

Victoria, illustrated book. Planographic. 12.0 × 7.4 cm. Accession number 81.2285.1-12. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

souvenir album, able to be held in one hand while the leaves are turned with the other (figure 60). Its power to create a transcendental, appropriative gaze stems, like a postcard’s, from its reduced scale combined with the use of photographic realism, as I discuss further in chapter 4.65 Through its selective combination of Coranderrk portraits, the album manufactured an internally contradictory discourse that represented traditional Aboriginal society as a relic, soon to be gone, and simultaneously as compliant with colonization. The album also reflects a widespread white fascination with Aboriginal ‘‘royalty.’’ Grounded in an awareness of the difference between European and ‘‘native’’ notions of nobility and leadership, this appeal was perhaps also due in part to a contemporary desire to understand human difference in terms of representative figures, emblems of a race. This popular interest was most intense with respect to the figure of William Barak, Coranderrk leader since the death of Simon Wonga. Barak’s absence from commercial versions of Kruger’s series can be explained by his unsuitably well-dressed, Europeanized appearance with his wife and son in the 1877–78 series. Many accounts of the station center on Barak as a figure who bridged precolonial Aboriginal life and the aftermath of white invasion, and white Australians continue to express deep respect for Barak’s dignity, authority, and knowledge of traditional culture, often coupled with a nostalgic perception that he was the last of his kind. A genre of melancholy paintings of such Aboriginal figures developed during the 1880s and 1890s, and an unusual local example of this genre is Florence Fuller’s portrait entitled Barak—Last Chief of the Yarra Yarra Tribe of Aborigines, commissioned by supporter Anne Bon in 1885.66

THE HEGEMONY OF LAUGHTER

It is sometimes hard for a modern viewer to distinguish between nineteenth-century observers’ sympathetic curiosity and respect for traditional Aboriginal culture and a more derisive acknowledgment of difference; indeed, sometimes both were expressed at once. When Barak married in 1890, a long account of the event was given in the local Lilydale Express, the reporter’s respect for ‘‘King William’’ as ‘‘a fine-looking old gentleman, and as straight as an arrow’’ shading into a more playful contrast between Aboriginal ‘‘nobility’’ and the remoteness and grandeur of European royalty. TIME TRAPS

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He confided: ‘‘But this in a whisper. I was allowed just a glimpse of the royal bed chamber; the furnishing and decoration were most elaborate,’’ and he explained that he had kept a piece of wedding cake so that ‘‘in years to come I may show it to my children should I happen to be blessed with any, as proof of the high circle I once moved in.’’ He used the adjective royal just a bit too often: ‘‘At the entrance gate to the township the natives had made a beautiful arch, tastefully decorated with ferns and flowers, with the words ‘Welcome our King’ wrought in the centre. At the arch the royal carriage was met by a great number of the inhabitants, carrying lamps and torches, and conducted to the royal mansion, when feeling that their royal highnesses must be tired from their long journey they quietly left them.’’ Yet he was also moved by the Aboriginal tradition of public declamation as conveyed by Barak, impressed by traditional protocol, and perhaps Kulin notions of what constituted an authoritative demeanor: His Majesty stood up. Although not a tall man he is noble looking, and [manager] Mr Shaw informs me he is a nobleman in every sense of the word. After the loud applause with which he was received had subsided, perfect quiet reigned for fully half a minute. King Barak then, having looked around him, said in a most impressive manner, ‘‘I am here.’’ Another stillness for thirty seconds, during which a pin dropping might be heard, and he then gave a detailed account of his courtship and marriage.67 The journalist’s droll juxtapositions have their ironic visual counterpart in the album, in the contrast made between a European notion of royalty evoked by the captions and photograph titles, on the one hand, and images of traditional camp life, on the other. In The Kings and Queens of Victoria album, King Billy and His Two Wives depicts the three Aboriginal people, their very presence implying the practice of polygamy, sitting on the ground before their mia-mia and surrounded by traditional tools such as spears: all signs connote ‘‘savagery.’’ This is made most explicit by the inclusion of a loose grouping of ‘‘full-blooded’’ people in a motley assortment of dirty and shabby clothing standing outside their bark shelter, titled Mia Mia and Royal Family.This derisory attitude often came to be expressed on postcards when they became popular, as Catherine De Lorenzo has pointed out with respect to a Charles Kerry image of around 1906 that shows an Aboriginal woman with a hostile expression, captioned ‘‘Aboriginal Prin162

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cess.’’ Written on its back is the comment: ‘‘Do you notice the aristocratic mouth? She looks every inch a princess (I don’t think).’’ 68 More than a century after their production, such images appear to poke fun at the idea of Aboriginal kings and queens, concealing the violence and dispossession that underwrote the colonial relationship. This is what Greg Dening terms ‘‘the hegemony of laughter.’’ Seeing the other as a grotesque version of ourselves distracts us from our own inhumanity toward them. As he notes, ‘‘The Other is the same, only worse and inept, ugly or evil. The laughter in the theatre of the grotesque is the laughter of relief at discovering that the Other is not Other after all.’’ 69 Here the camera generated a theater of the grotesque that reduced the other to the merely ludicrous, defined against the normality of the observer; imperfect mimicry rendered Aboriginal people inferior, construing them as having failed to become white, rather than as exemplifying real cultural difference. Hegemonic laughter became an enduring discursive strategy: Oswald Robarts, son of the manager at the turn of the century, later recalled of Coranderrk that The attempted application of civilised customs to a primitive race had many curious consequences. Fashion had no greater devotee than a dapper young black who affected bowler hats and shoes in preference to the felt hats and sturdy boots provided by the Government. . . . One morning he occasioned a mild sensation by appearing mounted for his round in a Beaufort coat. On Sundays in the summer he often attended church dressed in white. Once his white coat, which was of more or less conventional design, was replaced by a heavily braided pyjama coat. At the conclusion of the service he inquired, with satisfaction: ‘‘what do you think of my new coat, mate?’’ When the purpose of the garment was explained his mortification was profound. The pyjama coat was not seen again in public. Another youth, for whom fashion had no appeal, disdained boots, but he was often seen wearing a spur on one foot, although he seldom appeared on horseback.’’ 70 We might wonder why this last-mentioned youth wore a single spur, but the complacency of the writer left him no room for questions of this kind. A range of competing and sometimes contradictory views of Aboriginal people, often represented by their leaders, were generated from Kruger’s images—sympathetic, curious, nostalgic, and mocking. Through techTIME TRAPS

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niques of displacement and juxtaposition, they created an understanding of Aboriginal people as different, inferior, and doomed; as memorials to a vanishing race, they allowed whites to possess the future.

‘‘H A W A I I A N R O YA LT Y, F R E A K S , E T C .’’

Two other albums show how Kruger’s portraits could be given even more derisive meanings. The State Library of Victoria holds an album of cartesde-visite that demonstrates how the Board images were recontextualized in private by Frederick William Haddon, editor of the conservative Argus between 1867 and 1898. There are nine volumes of Haddon’s private photograph albums, which he assembled himself.The last volume is summarized simply as ‘‘Hawaiian royalty, freaks, etc.’’ While the preceding volumes are sedate, displaying notable public figures of the day—mostly men and, significantly, including Barak—this one contains a wild mélange of subjects, many surreal or grotesque. The frontispiece shows two little girls and a dog, arranged so as to resemble a large skull. The first five pages are devoted to the Tichborne affair, in which an Australian butcher claimed to be heir to a wealthy English family, a scandal that greatly engaged Australian and English audiences between 1865 and 1874, generating vast quantities of publicity including photographs of all participants. There was enormous interest in the case in Australia, involving as it did themes of a prodigal son, mistaken identity, and the crossing of class barriers, all recurring topics in popular entertainment.71 Pages 6 to 8 show members of the Hawaiian royal family (figure 65), whose aspirations to Europeanness may have been of interest. (It is worth noting, however, that these images were also used to argue for selfdetermination against the US government, which finally claimed sovereignty over the island group in 1989.)72 The following pages display ‘‘Some of the Burus Murderers,’’ scenes from séances and spiritual gatherings (such as ‘‘Mrs Lincoln’’ and ghostly hands), a kitten, ‘‘Indian famine victims,’’ characters such as ‘‘Dr Peebles’’ and ‘‘Farrell the Assassin,’’ sporting heroes, ‘‘Views in Salt Lake City and Utah,’’ and a range of human ‘‘oddities’’ including ‘‘The Siamese Twins’’ and the ‘‘Two headed nightingale’’ (figure 66). Finally, on page 30, four of Kruger’s Coranderrk cartes-de-visite are displayed, with the words ‘‘Australian Aborigines’’ scrawled across the top (figure 67). These images have no captions, but can be identified as 164

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King William,Tommy Avoca, Rowan dressed as a cricketer, and the Phillips family in front of their hut, again contrasting a majority of traditional and royal figures with cricket, functioning as a symbol of modernity. The eclectic choice of theme in this album reveals an interest in current causes célèbres, not surprising in a newspaper editor, as well as a taste for the sensational in popular entertainment. Coranderrk was constantly in the newspapers from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, focusing intense debate regardingVictoria’s Aboriginal people.The appearance of Coranderrk identities in this context, alongside the Tichborne affair and the Hawaiian royal family, points to themes of pretence and social reversal. Together, they suggest that the public understood events at Coranderrk as a lurid diversion, a disruption of the social order. Haddon, representing the conservative, pro-Board political position, viewed these people with an unsympathetic eye, refusing to publish James Dawson’s pro-Aboriginal recollections of colonial violence.73 Like the ‘‘freaks’’ displayed beside them, the Coranderrk portraits, to Haddon, represented grotesque departures from the civilized norm.

THE LA TROBE LIBRARY ALBUM

Another Kruger album, Album of Photographs of Victorian Aborigines and Views of Victorian Coastal and Country Regions, reveals a more ethnographic interest, containing a range of Aboriginal portraits and scenic views. Assembled by Kruger, the first few pages show Aboriginal people, nearly all from Coranderrk, identified by tribal affiliation and name. The exception is the very first image to greet the viewer’s eye, Colac Tribe/Yammering, a woman with bare breasts and therefore almost unique among images of Victorian Aboriginal people at this time. Page 1 presents war implements and kings and queens, for example, Ballarat Tribe/King Billy and His Two Wives, Mia Mia/Yarra-Yarra Tribe, and Yarra Yarra Tribe/Queen Eliza (figure 68). The inclusion and placement of Yammering proves highly significant. She was not a resident of Coranderrk and so does not appear in the ‘‘bpa Album.’’ Like the lithographic and photographic albums, this page presents a set of linked ideas about traditional Aboriginal culture as primitive— characterized by nudity, animal skin dress, implements of war and subsistence, and bark dwellings, and overlapping with the concerns of The Kings and Queens of Victoria albums. TIME TRAPS

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65. ‘‘Hawaiian Royalty,’’ Frederick William Haddon, album of portraits c.1867–1898. 29.5 × 22 cm. Accession number h33789, ltaf 110. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. 66. ‘‘Siamese Twins and Dwarfs,’’ Frederick William Haddon, album of portraits, c.1867–1898. 29.5 × 22 cm. Accession number h33789, ltaf 110. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

Page 2 shows two views of the hop fields, Group of Aborigines in the Hop Gardens, Coranderrk Mission revealing this picturesque introduction into the residents’ lives, while page 3 collates traditional portraits of Coranderrk women with children carried in blankets, all identified as either ‘‘black’’ or ‘‘halfcaste.’’ The following pages include a sample from the Board album, as well as a number of views of Victoria. Unlike the smaller albums, this series more overtly contrasts tradition with change, although it places particular emphasis on the ‘‘savagery’’ connoted by the first page. While it lacks the cruel and dehumanizing edge of the Haddon album, it purports to present ethnographic truths regarding racial difference and the nature of Aboriginal culture within a framework broadly shared with the Board’s. 166

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67. Fred Kruger, ‘‘Coranderrk Portraits.’’ Frederick William

Haddon, album of portraits, c.1867–1898. 29.5 × 22 cm. Accession number h33789, ltaf 110. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

The primitive nature of Aboriginal culture at Coranderrk was also transmitted through newspaper engravings of the ‘‘real’’ natives at this time, such as A Native Canoe and Husband and Wives, for example, of which the public was told: ‘‘The gentleman with the two wives is Logan, from the Warrnambool district. They are all in full dress—opossum skin rugs, with boomerang, spears, shield, and dilly-bag.’’ The men are said to be ‘‘floating down stream’’ in a canoe, ‘‘simply a sheet of thick bark, curled up at the edges.’’ 74 These commercial products transmitted the conception of Aboriginal people as specimens of a race soon to become extinct to a popular audience, but ultimately such notions derived from contemporary ideas circulated through an international scientific network. TIME TRAPS

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68. Fred Kruger, opening images. Page 1 from Album of Photographs of Victorian Aborigi-

nes and Views of Victorian Coastal and Country Regions. 32.4 × 26 cm. Accession number *ltaf/87. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

O B J E C T S O F S C I E N C E : E D WA R D T Y L O R

Thirteen of Kruger’s portraits were sent to anthropologist Edward Tylor in England and are now held in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.75 The selection of portraits acquired by Tylor comprises the traditional figures identified by tribal affiliation and so overlaps considerably with the range that appeared in Kruger’s La Trobe commercial album. Tylor constituted a central figure in the establishment of anthropology as a science at Oxford in the early 1880s.76 While he is often said to have invented the anthropological concept of culture, the word at the time did not connote any sense of relativism, but rather posited civilization as the highest stage in a sequence of progressive human development; Tylor’s central purpose was to prove that savagery and barbarism constituted early grades of ‘‘civilization,’’ finally reached in the third stage of human development.77 As mentioned earlier, scientific debates conducted in the metropolis by armchair anthropologists regarding human difference fed on Australian ethnographic data, supplied by a complex local network of informants.78 Local ethnographers such as Alfred Howitt and Robert Brough Smyth also saw Coranderrk as a source of information.79 Metropolitan theorists regarded Aboriginal people as the first surviving rung on the evolutionary ladder. As was common among contemporary scientists, Tylor’s ideas were influenced by the displays of material culture and images mounted in the great exhibitions.80 For Tylor, photography held crucial importance in anthropological research by checking ‘‘rash generalisation as to race’’ through revealing ‘‘the real intricate blending of mankind from variety to variety,’’ as he noted in reviewing Carl Dammann’s 1873–76 AnthropologischEthnologisches Album, which assembled visual data from around the world. Dammann’s social-evolutionist approach created a hierarchical arrangement starting with the Australian Aborigines.81 The use of so-called type portraits was common among ethnologists, but following Darwin, anthropometric schemes for standardizing photographic portraits such as Huxley’s were devised in 1869.82 Photographic types allowed the possibility of systematic comparison, and as Tylor stated, most engravings and drawings were ‘‘worthless’’ as ‘‘race-types’’: ‘‘Now-a-days, little ethnological value is attached to any but photographic portraits, and the skill of the collector lies in choosing the right individuals as representatives of their nations.’’ He praised Dammann’s compilation as ‘‘one of the most important conTIME TRAPS

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tributions ever made to the science of man’’ and recommended the English edition’s accessible form ‘‘suitable for a drawing-room book,’’ which he predicted would ‘‘make new anthropologists wherever it goes.’’ 83 Tylor made use of Charles Woolley’s portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal people as exemplars of ‘‘the last remnants of Palaeolithic man’’ within displays mounted in the Pitt Rivers Museum. He and other English ethnologists also collected commercial photographs such as cartes-de-visite in albums during the 1870s and 1880s. Henry Mosely, for example, during the hms Challenger expedition of 1872–76, bought tableaux of Aboriginal life, produced by local photographers, which he collated in albums alongside the official expedition photographs of natural history.84 Hence, together with other Australian photographs—such as eleven examples of Lindt’s studio portraits also held by the Pitt Rivers Museum—Kruger’s Coranderrk series were regarded as useful comparative material, in Tylor’s words helping to ‘‘define a race-type’’ by making out ‘‘some of its dominant features’’ and representing the lowest stage in the gradation of human types.85 In this amorphous, inclusive approach to gathering data, late-nineteenthcentury scientists made use of the same images displayed to the public in newspapers or used by government officials in administration. Their local meanings as respectable portraits were lost as they moved through these networks of exchange.

D É S I R É C H A R N AY

Foreign scientists and photographers had visited Coranderrk, as a kind of ethnological archive, almost since its establishment—like Enrico Giglioli in 1867. In 1878 another European visitor arrived, the French ‘‘expeditionary photographer’’ Désiré Charnay. Charnay was one of the first French photographers, inspired by the invention of the new medium with the desire to explore and document lost civilizations. He traveled to Central America in 1839 and 1841, combining his firsthand accounts with history, archaeology, and ethnology, and helping to popularize Central American studies. He made several trips during his career, including to South America (1859), Madagascar (1863), and then Java and Australia in 1878–79. This latter trip was sponsored by the French government but probably had no directly political intent. Natural history and ethnology were his primary interests, and in both countries Charnay collected objects for shipment back to France. 170

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Like his contemporaries, he sought to define races and their physiological characteristics, temperament, and artistic skill, and his images conform to Huxley’s anthropometric scheme of 1869. Despite technological difficulties, Charnay had grand and confident plans for capturing his types: In Melbourne, I will have six boxes built to hold twenty-five sheets of glass each, to match those I already have, so that I will be able to prepare and carry two hundred sheets. These negatives remain sensitised for an indefinite time. I will simply expose them all, number each sheet, and we will develop them on my return to France. I will photograph the types here with the aid of an iron-tipped stake that I will drive into the soil; this will brace the models against the otherwise inevitable motion. He reached Melbourne in mid-September 1878, where ‘‘the most remarkable man in Victoria,’’ Sir Redmond Barry, directed him to Coranderrk. (It is also possible that French scientists and photographers had become aware of Coranderrk through seeing Summer’s busts and Walter’s portraits at the 1867 Paris Exposition, as well as through the European connections so enthusiastically forged by Barry.) Charnay wrote, ‘‘As for the views of Melbourne and types, I will content myself with buying a collection of them here; one of these very beautiful types has, I know, won a medal at the Exposition. I will save all my prepared plates for the north.’’ This account indicates that Charnay bought the work of local photographers in place of making his own records—possibly even Kruger’s, although perhaps Lindt’s Clarence River series, which won a gold medal at the Philadelphia International Exposition of 1876, is a more likely candidate. But as his portraits and views of the Yarra Valley make clear, Charnay did decide to work in the area himself. His views of the Aboriginal people were framed by the prevailing perception that they were doomed; he described his next photo stop, the Humpybong settlement at Brisbane, as a place where all the remaining original natives of the province are collected. There are sixty or seventy of them, watched over and provided for like the bison in the forests of Transylvania. This still doesn’t prevent them from dying off, however, and they will soon be extinct. I will be fortunate enough to be able to photograph them and take their measurements. These will be all the more precious since the colony is composed of both purebloods and half-breeds.86

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On 20 November Charnay traveled to Coranderrk, spending four days and making a series of ‘‘samples of types, front view and in profile, and weapons.’’ Despite his dehumanizing, exploitative approach to the people of the station (reminiscent of Mosely’s in 1872), and his assumptions regarding their passivity and eventual extinction, the modern reader is gratified to learn that ‘‘in my second day of work, the natives announced to me that henceforth five shillings per person would be required for posing. As I had need of them, I accepted the conditions. Then the fee was raised to ten, and next twenty shillings, so that I soon sent them to the devil.’’ 87 Only three Coranderrk photographs taken by Charnay exist, suggesting that the recalcitrance of the people and their demands for recompense successfully thwarted him (figure 69).88 These are portraits of young, bare-chested men standing in front of a veranda post, which presumably served to steady the subjects and to provide a scale. As we would expect, they have consented to remove only their shirts—at a price! The Frenchman from here went on to the temperate rain forest of nearby Blackspur, where he photographed the forest ashes, and then to Queensland. At Humpybong, Charnay had greater success at gathering the kind of data he sought, managing to arrange at least fourteen different individuals in frontal, side, and even, in the case of two men, naked rear views—presumably to display the ritual scars on their backs. The bodies of these ‘‘types’’ constitute the focus of Charnay’s regard; no artifacts or traditional dress have been added to the naked figures.The very specificity of his interest reveals that seven of the forty-six images the Musée de l’Homme lists as belonging to the Queensland leg of his trip were instead taken by Richard Daintree. A larger series of Daintree’s photographs held by the Anthropology Museum at the University of Queensland share the format, studio setting, and notably the painted backdrop of the seven Paris photographs. These are probably the images itemized as ‘‘seven small negatives, australian types from Queensland’’ sent back to France by Charnay.89 Daintree is noted for his work as a geologist and photographer, notably coproducing the 1857–58 album Sun Pictures of Victoria with Antoine Fauchery. His approach was less overtly ‘‘scientific’’ than the anthropometric method of Charnay, but his fighting poses bear some comparison with Kruger’s from the Board series, such as Sambo and Mooney. Throughout his voyage, Charnay regularly mailed progress reports to his superiors in France, and his activities were therefore recorded in schol172

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69. Désiré Charnay, Australien de Coranderrk. Accession number 199814020. Photothéque du Musée de l’Homme, Paris.

arly journals. On his return to France, in November 1879, he gave a lecture before the Geographical Society of Paris, illustrated by photographs ‘‘projected and illuminated by the electric light,’’ in which he spoke of ‘‘the aborigines [sic], their legends, strange customs, and traditions.’’ 90 Kruger’s and Charnay’s work demonstrates how the people of Coranderrk, as local data, entered European scientific circles. Charnay’s warm reception by Barry, his interest in the work of local photographers, and his subsequent dissemination of the material he had collected on his return to France show how ideas about race and civilization were developed through personal and institutional links, comprising a global network of officials, scholars, and photographers. In particular so-called anthropometric data allowed systematic comparisons to be made between human types. While the Coranderrk residents successfully resisted Charnay’s attentions, they had no control over the subsequent circulation of his or Kruger’s photographs among European scientists. Prevailing scientific ideas were predicated on a specific notion of Aboriginal people as primitive survivals, doomed to disappear, providing a rational disciplinary basis for colonial discourse during the later nineteenth century, naturalizing relations of inequality, offering a secular explanation of how they had arisen, and giving this schema ‘‘the accumulated weight of evolutionary processes in a greatly extended span of time.’’ 91 In a sense, evolutionary science made colonization respectable.

T H E FA L L

Over two decades, Kruger’s Coranderrk series map contemporary events and attitudes as visual meanings played their part in wider debates about Aboriginal people. Colonization was premised on Aboriginal dispossession, and this fundamental logic was expressed visually in nineteenthcentury Australian art, tending to show either untouched Aboriginal Arcadias prior to the arrival of white settlers or (more often) European possession of the land.92 Yet as Nicholas Thomas notes, an ‘‘uncertain combination of acknowledgement and denial’’ has characterized the colonial relationship, as ‘‘encounters were marked by moments of awe, respect and partial understanding, as well as misrecognition and hostility.’’ Settler misgivings are expressed visually in a movement toward and away from indigenous presence, an ‘‘interplay of dispossession and repossession that 174

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defines the history of settler societies’’ and was resolved through the ‘‘fatal impact’’ narrative.93 Kruger’s Aboriginal idylls represent a rare visual acknowledgment of indigenous claims to land and autonomy. The exigencies of invasion had perhaps already doomed the humanitarian-Aboriginal campaign to save the station and protect its community, but settler reactions took specific discursive forms: sympathy for the residents as a dispossessed people fighting for their heritage, represented in a picturesque pastoral aesthetic, was undermined by a perception that they were in fact divided by an essential biological difference, in turn grounded in miscegenation. As demonstrated by Kruger’s portraits—which revealed their visibly different skin color—their fall from grace marred the Aboriginal idyll, and the ‘‘half-castes’’ were expelled from their Arcadia. In linking the Coranderrk residents’ adaptation to colonial circumstances with a nostalgic vision of rural order, the guilt of the dispossessors flickered for a brief moment—before being extinguished by the logic of colonialism. As colonial attitudes respecting race became more rigid, images such as Kruger’s were appropriated by contemporary scientific and popular notions of race, disseminating ideas about biological difference and creating fixed visual types that stood for a race. These stereotypical meanings were to become the dominant way of understanding Aboriginal people over the following decades.

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t

It is a well-known fact, all missionaries will tell you, that the first element of success in civilizing is to keep the savages from the influence of the white men, for if you do not they acquire all the vices of the white man. Our stations are well or ill managed in the ratio of their distance from civilization—in this our experience is the common one. —Edward Curr, 1882

In February 1881 Coranderrk’s manager Frederick Strickland complained to his superiors that the Aboriginal man Punch had taken over a vacant hut and refused to give it up. A week later, the dispute had escalated, and Strickland relayed that Punch was threatening to put his belongings untidily outside his front door and ‘‘make the place as dirty as he could that it might be a disgrace to me when any visitors came.’’ Three days later the manager reported that ‘‘true to his threat, he [Punch] has erected a miserable mia mia in front of his house, where he has his pots kettles tubs etc scattered about in a most disorderly manner a disgrace to the whole place.’’ 1 Strickland was a feeble manager plagued by such insubordination, and the residents’ rebellion culminated in a parliamentary inquiry later that year. Like theTent Embassy erected by Aboriginal activists outside Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra in 1972, Punch’s protest was symbolic, a strategy of refusal designed to embarrass official claims to govern the Ab-

original people in the eyes of the station’s many visitors.2 The incident was typical in that Punch clearly understood exactly how the Aboriginal people of Coranderrk were perceived by whites, adroitly manipulating these attitudes for his own purposes. Such self-awareness seems unsurprising given the extensive experience the residents had acquired in performing the role of docile inmates for photographers such as Kruger. Punch’s resistance contrasts even more strongly with Nicholas Caire’s images of order, which represented the station around the turn of the nineteenth century. His representation of himself as untidy and lazy, and his dwelling as squalid, can perhaps be seen as an ironic comment on the expectations he transgressed; as many have noted, those on the social periphery occupy a powerful symbolic role despite or even because of their actual social marginalization, and many Aboriginal people continue to defy those arguing for greater control over their lives through such symbolic inversions. Punch’s skill was mimetic, structured by the mutual observation and imitation that characterized cultural exchange between Aboriginal and white people. Perhaps most important, his moment of rebellion underlines the central role of performance in colonial relations—the public, embodied, self-conscious enactment of a part according to tacit dramatic conventions, so often animated by the camera. The government’s public battle with Coranderrk’s politicized, astutely image-conscious residents created a unique problem for the colonizers, who more often managed to speak for the indigenous people. Today we might regret the rebellion’s eventual failure, but in the context of the gradual tightening of official control over the Aboriginal people of southeastern Australia during the late nineteenth century, it is surprising that their campaign existed at all. The outspoken people of Coranderrk were largely silenced when the so-called ‘‘half-castes’’ suffered expulsion into an unsympathetic society, although many settled nearby, as I discuss further in chapter 5. Those who remained on the station grew older under an increasingly authoritarian regime, a key objective being to maintain their seclusion from white society. This did not mean that there were fewer images produced of the residents, but rather that managers exerted greater control over their form and circulation. However, many members of the general public were curious about ‘‘the blacks’’ and insisted on seeing them for themselves—a visit to Coranderrk and other stations became a popular way to spend a day off, and by 1921, approximately four thousand visitors WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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passed through every year, with hundreds arriving on Christmas Day and other public holidays. The residents became ‘‘our Aborigines,’’ appropriated into new conceptions of a distinctive Australian nation. Overwhelmingly, encounters between visitors and residents became stylized performances—displays of boomerang throwing or postcard souvenirs of what white observers wanted to see. Aboriginal people always represented a small minority within colonial society, and at a time when they remained largely hidden from white view, photographs of Coranderrk assumed a metonymic status, embodying an acceptable vision of Aboriginality. Yet this heightened, ritualized visibility was also turned to account by Aboriginal people, providing a source of income, a shield against more invasive scrutiny, and even public status, as in the case of Lanky Manton, who traveled to Melbourne to throw the boomerang.

‘‘D I S TA N C E F R O M C I V I L I Z AT I O N’’

During the 1870s, Coranderrk’s contact with the outside world had created a problem for the Board in its struggle to assert control over the unruly residents. To white managers, the visibility of the station and its residents made for a tool that allowed the monitoring of behavior, but visitors to the station also became witnesses to the apparent success or failure of its administration. All residents, black and white, were therefore acutely aware of the settlement’s appearance to outsiders. Aboriginal resentment about being watched emerges from evidence given to the 1882 parliamentary inquiry into Coranderrk’s management, for example when indigenous residents complained of the manager’s wife: ‘‘She would send out one of her daughters to watch us, like watching for a mouse . . . if she knew that any visitors were coming up to this station, she would be on the look-out to see that all was clean, and also the big room, and the little children would be made to put on their best dresses.’’ 3 Women’s conformance to respectable domesticity served as the most visible index to successful management, but the state of the station’s buildings, crops, and stock was also open to inspection. Aboriginal man Thomas Dunolly said of Captain Page, who attempted to close the station: ‘‘He wanted to leave it open for every visitor to see it laying waste, so the visitors go to Melbourne and report it.’’ 4 But as Punch’s ‘‘miserable mia mia’’

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demonstrates, Aboriginal manipulation of this concern forappearances became adroit. General public contact was argued by the Board to constitute a serious impediment to good order up until the mid-1880s in ‘‘contaminating’’ and encouraging the Aboriginal people to vice. While all station managers faced this problem, officials noted ‘‘the exceptional condition of Coranderrk, which is situated in the midst of a white population,’’ close to both Healesville and Melbourne.5 Edward Curr, for example, chief inspector of stock and a member of the Board, argued that ‘‘the first element of success in civilizing is to keep the savages from the influence of the white men,’’ and claimed that the orderliness of each station was directly related to its ‘‘distance from civilization.’’ 6 At the time of the 1882 inquiry into the station, a picture of relatively free movement in and out of the station emerges from witnesses such as the Reverend MacDonald, who stated, ‘‘I think it is a bad thing for all the stations that people visit them in large numbers.’’ 7 Even the isolated Ramahyuck was besieged. In February 1880 Hagenauer wrote angrily to the Board that the local Bairnsdale steamer arrived every Sunday, bringing a ‘‘great number of people, most of the larrican [sic] kind,’’ who annoyed the residents so that they ‘‘locked their cottages and [went] into the bush to avoid the insults of those visitors.’’ He fulminated that the language of some of these people is of the most disgusting kind, that the Black woman [sic] are approached in a manner which is an outrage to their feelings, that the homes of the natives are entered rudely and that neither gardens nor buildings are safe from the entrance of some, and at the same time to ask for brandy and to put all manner of evil and real blasphemish [sic] notions into the minds of the natives and go even so far just to begin with their games, as if the place was a place of public resort and the day a common weekday, etc. Large placards were erected and notices placed in newspapers, stating that the ‘‘Aboriginal Reserves are set aside for the use of the Aborigines alone and not as public recreation reserves.’’ 8 Hagenauer was acutely aware of the value of influential visitors, having initiated the visitors’ book system in 1878 to record the mission’s impressive array of prominent visitors from around the world, but they all ‘‘had to get permission before they could visit the place, or they would be considered trespassers. I did not object to

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respectable ladies and gentlemen visiting the place.’’ 9 From his lakeside fortress Hagenauer continued to turn back groups of holidaymakers—such as a party that attempted to land from the Ethel Jackson in January 1886.10 It did not prove so easy to control Coranderrk residents’ interaction with white society, although the Board tried hard, even making hired white hop pickers work in separate parts of the field from the Aboriginal people. In 1882 Coranderrk was about the same size as the nearby Healesville, and residents had long been accustomed to forage for food and sell their fish and basketwork there. The Board had by now stopped this practice, but these two communities remained in close contact.11 While long-term Healesville residents spoke highly of the Aboriginal people, one claimed that the women had ‘‘tempted’’ the whites, while another spoke of the ‘‘artful’’ ways they obtained alcohol.12 The Aboriginal residents shopped in town, buying staples such as meat, but also clothes, and carter William Lalor commented that they were better clothed ‘‘than a great many selectors that I have seen.’’ A witness who ‘‘had once looked at the visitors’ book’’ noted that ‘‘in a very short space of time there had been forty distinct visits of ‘leisure parties.’ ’’ Casual passersby were welcomed too: Joseph Walker, a state school teacher caught by nightfall on the road, went to the station, where the manager invited him to stay overnight. He had ‘‘mixed up pretty freely with the men; made it my business to go out among them.’’ 13 All visitors were expected to sign the visitors’ book, and the manager Strickland kept a close personal eye on most visitors, as indicated by his failure to do so in the case of Richardson, who had arrived unannounced at 9 am one morning to find the Stricklands still asleep in bed (Strickland explained that they had had a party the night before). Richardson was critical of Strickland: ‘‘I was very much impressed with the entire want of management, and felt the management was only calculated to encourage indecencies of all kinds.’’ When Strickland emerged to guide him around, he introduced himself as being from Melbourne and began to ask a series of questions. After they had inspected the school, Strickland requested them to enter their names in the visitors’ book, but they refused. Strickland thought they ‘‘belonged to the Press, and had come to make inquiries, the results of which might be made known to the public.’’ While the commissioners suggested that Richardson’s interrogative line of attack might be considered ‘‘rather peculiar,’’ he was emphatic and detailed in his argument that as a ‘‘man in a public capacity,’’ Strickland ‘‘should be prepared 180

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to answer, and answer with civility. . . . If you go to a railway station and ask a porter a question and he answers uncivilly, you would report him; and Mr Strickland was in the same position as any other public servant.’’ 14 Similarly, a group of would-be visitors to Ramahyuck’s ‘‘last of the Mohicans,’’ argued that ‘‘we as taxpayers have a perfect right to see those whom we are taxed to keep . . . and judge as to the quality of work going on.’’ 15 This view was widespread, and it remained an important factor in the Board’s visitor policy, existing in tension with the objective of regulating outside contact as a ‘‘bad influence’’ on the Aboriginal residents.

‘‘P E R M I S S I O N T O V I E W’’

Once the Board began to implement its assimilation policy, it gradually relaxed its opposition to visitors, although it remained careful to maintain control over their contact with residents. In October 1886, Garnet Walch, editor of the Gem Guides, wrote to the secretary of the Board: Dear Sir, I am compiling a new ‘‘Guide to Melbourne’’ and am anxious to embody therein the latest particulars regarding our remaining aborigines [sic]—and especially hints for intending visitors to ‘‘Coranderrk,’’ means of reaching locality—formalities to be observed in order to obtain permission to view etc. I shall therefore feel extremely obliged if you will kindly cause me to be furnished—at your earliest convenience— with such information, of the above kind, as may fairly be given—in a condensed form—in a popular handbook of the nature indicated.16 A month later he sent an urgent reminder, on which an official scrawled a marginal note: ‘‘Doesn’t wish anything published as to best way of getting to Coranderrk—Visitors not refused but not invited.’’ Official policy had softened from the outright opposition expressed during the 1882 inquiry, although not to the extent of assisting Walch. Assimilation effectively weakened the Coranderrk community— through dispersal, but also through increased legislative control over Aboriginal peoples’ movement and punishments such as withholding rations. The Board had adopted the new policy on 1 January 1885, and it was enforced at Coranderrk immediately, despite the residents’ protests, even before the Aborigines Protection Act (1886) was passed the following year. The Board ensured the full implementation of the dispersal policy, and WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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under Hagenauer’s reign as inspector general between 1889 and 1906, administration became ‘‘entirely authoritarian and paternalistic.’’ 17 Once again, the Board was pleased to demonstrate its successful management to outside eyes, adopting a cautious admittance policy. From the mid-1880s onward, handbooks such as the Tourists’ Guide to Healesville District advised that ‘‘though the superintendant, Mr Shaw, naturally shrinks from allowing his institution to be made a ‘show’ place, he (on week days only) is gratified to allow interested visitors to study the arrangements of the little settlement.’’ This policy was maintained until the station closed down, in the early twentieth century.18

FA I R Y G L E N S A N D G I A N T T R E E S

In the Black’s Spur sombre ranges, Like a gem the hills between, Lies a vale whose sparkling waters’ Fern and musk keep ever green. ... You and I, O city toilers Could your tired feet find it, too, Here would dream, all care forgetting, And life’s olden joys renew. —Marion Miller Knowles, ‘‘Etta’s Glen’’

Visitors to Coranderrk were urban tourists seeking primarily to experience the exquisitely beautiful temperate rain forest of the Dandenong mountains. This region remains a major tourist destination from Melbourne, its towering ash trees forming natural cathedrals furnished with intricately patterned fern trees, receding in enchanting vistas of light and shade.Today one drives through the forest along its narrow, winding roads at a frustratingly rapid pace, unable to fully enjoy its sights and scents. This was also a problem for 1880s visitors, as one of many tourist guides advised: In the case of a party, the most enjoyable method of accomplishing the journey is to hire a pair-horse trap at Healesville, and do the trip in a leisurely and pleasurable manner. To the lover of scenery nothing is more irritating than to be whisked past a spot of peculiar beauty at which

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you long to linger and feast upon the lovely prospect. On the coach you are a victim of circumstances, for however great a regard for scenery the driver might have, he has to consider the punctual delivery of his mailbag.19 Tourism is always to an extent a search for something missing from one’s usual routine, a change from everyday experience, and during this decade, the population of swiftly growing ‘‘marvellous Melbourne’’ sought to escape its ugly boomtown rawness in day-trips to the Healesville district. As well as enjoying the area’s pristine natural beauties, tourists visited Coranderrk to see the equally emblematic Aboriginal settlement. Situated at the base of the Dandenongs, Healesville is still a major tourist destination for visitors seeking either the tiny mountain villages of Fernshaw and Marysville hidden away in the rain forests or newer attractions such as the wineries of the Yarra Valley and the famous Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, home to the platypus and kangaroo. The rain forests of the Dandenongs represented contemporary ideals of picturesque wilderness and specifically catered to the fern craze that had developed in Britain during the 1830s. In their primeval exoticism, the giant tree ferns of Victoria aroused intense admiration and were even thought a suitable symbol of the colony, as artist Nicholas Chevalier suggested in 1860. Local painters such as Eugene von Guérard depicted a pristine sanctuary, inhabited perhaps by a shy lyrebird, as in his famous 1857 Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges.20 The lush, cool, intensely green scenery of the rain forests contrasted with the more common open Australian bush, which to European eyes appeared ‘‘weird’’ and ‘‘melancholy.’’ Rain forest vegetation was associated with an earlier, edenic age; as Sydney poet ‘‘Australie’’ (Emilie Heron) pictured it, A line of sunlight pierces, lighting up A wealth of fern trees; filling every nook With glorious circles of voluptuous green, Such as, unview’d, once clothed the silent earth Long milliards past in Carboniferous Age.21 The Healesville area’s romantic landscape was promoted by the photographs of Nicholas Caire (based in Melbourne between 1876 and 1900) and his great friend J. W. Lindt (who settled on the Blacks’ Spur during the

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1890s).22 From around 1884, the new dry-plate process enabled Caire to work as a specialist landscape photographer, and his albums of Victorian views revealed the rain forests to a large urban market. Caire’s love of the bush was expressed in popular visual forms that paralleled the work of local nature writers, at this time beginning to extol the benefits of urban renewal in the bush.23 Caire illustrated the Victoria Railways handbooks, with the title Picturesque Victoria: How to Get There, and in 1904, he produced the Companion Guide to Healesville, Blacks’ Spur, Narbethong, and Marysville with Lindt. They described the district as ‘‘a veritable nest of fairy fern glens, nothing like it being known in the wide world, except in one portion of the Himalayas . . . the winding fern-bound road, and the innumerable fern gullies spreading as far as human sight can discern all over this vast hill, is calculated to give the visitor, on his first impression, a feeling of ecstatic bewilderment.’’ 24 Caire’s images of the lush ferny groves and somber glades of the Dandenongs place human, always white, figures intimately within the bush, showing human and nature in harmony and stressing the accessibility of these places (figure 70).25 From the late 1870s on Caire also became known for his series of idyllic genre scenes, showing selectors leading a life of seclusion and simplicity in the bush, their romanticism and nostalgia reflecting a contemporary consciousness of urban confinement and the passing of ‘‘pioneer’’ days. This is how Caire saw himself—as an intrepid explorer, existing simply, and harmoniously, with the land—as expressed in a view of his own camp, or midjourney, trekking through the ash forest (figure 71). As the caption commented, he was ‘‘searching for the Picturesque in his bush travel,’’ having ‘‘slept under the canopy of heaven in huts and tents, with and without blankets.’’ 26

‘‘G R A N D S C E N E R Y A N D A L I T T L E N AT I V E L I F E’’

Despite Caire’s long-term professional interest in Aboriginal life, he never populated his romantic fairy glens with black people: unlike Kruger’s Aboriginal idylls, Caire’s vision of a productive colonial landscape, explored and cleared by pioneer labor, held no room for contemporary indigenous inhabitants. Yet as early as 1865, at the beginning of his career and while still based in Adelaide, Caire had traveled to Gippsland to photograph the

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70. Nicholas Caire, Australian, 1837–1918. Fairy Scene at the Landslip, Blacks’ Spur, c.1878.

Collodion glass plate negative. 30.2 × 25.2 cm. Gift of John Cato, 1990. Accession number ph 111/1990. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

71. Nicholas Caire,Your Photographer at Work. Accession number h27519. LaTrobe Picture

Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

tranquil lake scenery, showing its indigenous inhabitants as an integral part of it. Here, they primarily represent an extension of his interest in nature: what drew his eye at Lake Tyers in 1886, for example, was not the human residents but the environment—he signed the visitors’ book, ‘‘A Professional tour in search of the Picturesque. I have visited most of the wild and romantic places in Victoria, and can conscientiously say that there are few spots to equal Lake Tyers for natural beauty, more especially so as the lakes are explored inland.’’ 27 While Caire showed Ramahyuck’s Aboriginal residents living harmoniously within the natural landscape, these photographs position the subjects in the past, fishing from bark canoes according to unchanging tradition (figure 72); here the people are secondary to the picturesque scenery, subsumed within it—literally at one with nature. Caire’s interest is echoed by other visitors to Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers, who recorded their desire to see ‘‘the grand scenery and a little native life’’ in the visitors’ books.28 Even the ‘‘Vagabond’’ ( journalist John Stanley James) admired the ‘‘landscape which, to my mind, lacks nothing to make 186

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it perfect,’’ and acknowledged the picturesqueness of Aboriginal life on the lakes. However, the Vagabond was not alone in anticipating the Aboriginal people’s imminent disappearance: his attitude was profoundly racialized and hostile, and he looked forward to the subsequent establishment of a national park on the site.29 Less hostile observers who admired the settlement and its air of cozy orderliness also conflated the people with the pristine landscape, aware of the destructive effects of colonization on both: as tourist guide Tanjil noted of the famous Lake Tyers, it was ‘‘one of the last haunts of the aboriginal, and the home of the lyre-bird.’’ 30 As humanity’s childhood, the original inhabitants were a ‘‘doomed race,’’ and visitors wanted to see them before they disappeared. The notion that the Aboriginal race was destined for extinction structured popular and scientific ideas about culture and change throughout this period, and the theme of transience constantly recurs in the tourist literature. Visitors were encouraged to go to the station to see the ‘‘rem72. Nicholas Caire, La Trobe Picture Collection [Lake Tyers Station], c.1885. Accession number h10712 ltaf 764. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

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73. Nicholas Caire, Aboriginals of Australia, Native Encampment River Murray. Album 397/2. By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

nants’’ of Aboriginal culture and to carry souvenirs—photographs and artifacts—away with them. Some critics have argued that the very notion of the picturesque is predicated on an expectation of destruction, as customs and objects, on the verge of extinction, finally become perceived as relics. At this time in the nineteenth century, a taste for images of disappearing cultures was developing internationally within Western society as a consciousness of the effects of modernity and imperialism enhanced the value and distinctiveness of the world’s seemingly disappearing cultures.31 Caire’s images helped the Australian (and international) public recognize what was unique about the Aboriginal people of Coranderrk, as well as drawing attention to their apparently imminent extinction. For example, in 1883 Caire was commissioned by the New South Wales Tourist Bureau to make a series at Maloga Mission on the Murray River, and he produced a small souvenir album titled Aboriginals of Australia, comprising twelve views. These open-air, documentary views show groups of people sitting around campsites, fishing from canoes, or hunting kangaroo (figure 73). They are witness to many changes in lifestyle of the Aboriginal people, including the annual distribution of blankets on the Queen’s birthday, but they reveal a less Europeanized existence than the one led at

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Coranderrk; Camp of Young Lubras, for example, shows unclothed women in a manner unthinkable at Coranderrk, where residents and management were united in their adherence to ‘‘respectable’’ dress. Caire’s interest seemingly lay in the traditional lifestyle: Native Weapons of War shows an arrangement of clubs, shields, spears, and boomerangs propped against a slab hut, on a possum skin backdrop, signifying war and savagery. The flyleaf inscription reads ‘‘To ‘Eva’ from ‘Gilbert’ wishing you a happy and prosperous new year, Melbourne November 19th/84.’’ To the white middle classes, Aboriginals of Australia, like Kruger’s commercial albums, served as an appropriate souvenir of a vanishing culture.32

C A I R E AT C O R A N D E R R K

Twenty years later, in 1904, Caire was commissioned to produce a series at Coranderrk as a result of a request from Takaoka, director of the Japanese Colonial Department, and subsequently, nineteen ‘‘beautiful photographs’’ were forwarded to Japan.33 Caire worked closely with the Board on this series and was pleased with his work, sending the manager a postcard with the message ‘‘The pictures have all turned out excellent except one or two bad plates, but unimportant ones. Mr Hagenauer delighted. Will send you a few.’’ 34 Caire also profited from this official commission by turning the images into postcards to be circulated in public, and he used one in his Companion Guide, published the same year. While Aboriginal people had been ousted from Caire’s forest and agrarian landscapes of the Healesville district, his Coranderrk images focus wholly on the residents and their orderly lifestyle. In their popular forms, they are framed by a nostalgic desire for souvenirs of a dying race, as well as by a nationalist interest in popular emblems of Aboriginality. Typically, tourist guides to the area gave a gloomy prognostication for the residents’ future, one stating that ‘‘the natives are yearly becoming fewer in number, and it is only a question of time when, in this colony, the native race will be extinct. The visit, therefore, to Coranderrk is one of special interest to young folks, who will be pleased to carry down to their wondering grandchildren reminiscences of what in half a century promises to be an extinct race.’’ These reminiscences would take a tangible form, as visitors would be able to take away souvenirs of their experience:

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The native men are very apt in making spears, boomerangs, and other implements of warfare, etc, which happily are now only regarded as novelties, and in working up rugs and mats with the skins of animals they trap and shoot; while the native women are very deft in manipulating grass, etc, with which they make up baskets, mats, and nets, which strangers are pleased to purchase as mementoes of their visit to the station.35 Caire’s images of Coranderrk also proved popular souvenirs, circulating widely as postcards, which came in vogue between 1902 and 1914, reaching a wide national and international audience.36 They vary considerably in content and stylewithin the series, one group in particular standing apart as overtly staged, self-conscious performances by the residents, enacting both traditional activities and the European routines of dairying and church attendance (figures 74–80). Caire’s account of Coranderrk provided in the Companion Guide intersects systematically with these images, configuring contemporary interest in the place. He stressed the discipline imposed by the Board, flattering the manager, Joseph Shaw, who ‘‘has proved what kindness and firmness will do,’’ and explaining that ‘‘the daily routine of the station works like a clock. At 7 a.m. rations are served out. At 9 a.m. the bell rings, and is the daily call to morning prayers. The call is not a compulsory one, as all are free to avail themselves of the benefits of the pastor’s spiritual services.’’ And he cautioned tourists that ‘‘the station is not by any means regarded as a show place, but the genial Superintendent is always pleased to grant permission for visitors to see around the place on their applying to him. Sunday is regarded as a place of rest, all work being suspended, and the usual church services are held in the building used for that purpose.’’ 37 Two aspects of the station were presented to visitors through these textual and photographic accounts. Primarily, they emphasized the discipline of station life, the regular routine said to work ‘‘like a clock,’’ leading the residents through the daily and weekly rituals of Christianity and industry. The Board was anxious to demonstrate that control over the residents was secure. It also retained control over their representation: as the Companion Guide informed visitors, ‘‘Permission to photograph must be obtained.’’ Government forms the subject of Caire’s two images of the station schedule, Call to Prayers and The Dairy at Coranderrk Station, Vic (figures 74 and

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75). Both show residents as if in the midst of these routines, many frozen in the act of taking a step, their rigid poses indicating careful arrangement. In each case, the manager Shaw, recognizable by his top hat and frock coat, stands prominently within the scene, symbolizing his pastoral relationship to the Aboriginal people. Pictorially, the rigidity of the subjects resonates with this textual trope of control: these images focus on regulated activities rather than individuals or their appearance. In Call to Prayers, for example, many of the people have their backs turned to the camera or are too distant to be clearly distinguishable, simply locating the residents within an everyday, orderly round of devotion and hard work.

R E L I C S O F S AVA G E R Y

The other trope that structures tourist discourse is the availability to the ‘‘numerous visitors’’ of souvenirs in the form of weapons or other artifacts such as baskets and rugs. These had always been seen as a profitable source of income, by now detached from the traditional practices such as hunting or warfare from which they had originated. These relics of ‘‘savagery’’ found their visual counterpart in a series of five posed tableaux showing supposedly traditional activities, one of which, Corroboree Men at Coranderrk, was reproduced in the Companion Guide (figure 76). It shows three men posed before a leafy backdrop, also the subject of Fun in the Camp at Coranderrk (or, Natives and Their Weapons, Coranderrk), Natives Making Firesticks at Coranderrk, and Natives Wrestling at Coranderrk, and similar to the women shown in Lubras and Children (figures 77–79). These photographs were taken at the same time, as indicated by their continuity of dress and setting. They have the same pictorial structure: in the center of the scene, at the back, spatially staked out by spears and an array of smaller weapons, an elderly man sits enveloped in a possum skin cloak, invoking a tradition originating in the earliest photographs of Australian Aborigines—such as Daintree’s and Fauchery’s of the 1850s—showing people sitting in camp. The natural setting has been emphasized by cutting gum-tree branches to augment the natural backdrop. Less a focal point than a starting place, the old man and the traditional weapons he holds animate the Aboriginal past, metaphorically overshadowing the Aboriginal present. Against this static background Caire created decontextualized pseudodocumentary ‘‘moments’’ illustrating key aspects of tradition, inWORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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74. Nicholas Caire, Call to Prayers, Coranderrk. Accession number xp 2198. Shaw Collection, Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

75. Nicholas Caire, The Dairy at Coranderrk Station, Vic. Accession number h96.200/908. Shirley Jones Collection of Victorian Postcards, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

76. Nicholas Caire, Corroboree Men at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Vic. (‘‘Aboriginal men dressed for a corroboree and brandishing weapons at Coranderrk Station, Victoria.’’) Accession number h96.200/905. State Library of Victoria, La Trobe Picture Collection, Melbourne.

77. Nicholas Caire, Natives and Their Weapons, Coranderrk, Vic. (‘‘Aboriginal men

with spears and boomerangs at Coranderrk Station, Victoria.’’) Accession number h96.200/904. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

78. Nicholas Caire, Natives Making Firesticks at Coranderrk, Vic. Accession number

h96.200/906. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

79. Nicholas Caire, Native Women and Children, Coranderrk Station, Vic. (‘‘Aboriginal women and children at Coranderrk Station, Victoria.’’) Accession number h96.200/901. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

cluding warfare and fire making, and the nomadism inferred by the line of women and children. Captions such as ‘‘Type of Corroboree Man’’ purport to represent the Aboriginal way of life; there is a superficial attempt to show the weapons, markers of primitivism, in active use. But the residents no longer performed traditional ceremonies, obtained food by hunting, or lived in camps. Caire’s reenactment of traditional activities reflected a popular rather than scientific understanding of traditional Aboriginal culture, signified by instantly recognizable objects and customs. Corroborees and boomerang throwing had quickly become standard performances by Aboriginal people for whites, and so to contemporary viewers, Caire’s postcard tableaux signified Aboriginality, albeit in a clearly artificial way. They are stereotypes, distancing and objectifying the Aboriginal people. At this time white society had no everyday contact with real Aboriginal people, so these images stood, metonymically, for Aboriginal culture as a whole. By now such representations had become a means of cultural communication: where earlier, official, representations of the station had sought to demonstrate the progress made by the residents, and the considerable changes made toward a European lifestyle, Caire’s photographs are the first to deliberately re-create tradition, with the cooperation of managers.The complicity of officials with commercial photography at this time reflects their acceptance of visual representations, and of the tourist industry that popularized them.

CORROBOREES

The performances or corroborees that formed an integral element of Aboriginal ceremony had from earliest contact fascinated white observers. Corroborees were commonly represented as violent, sexual, and unclean, simultaneously seductive and horrifying. Yet they were also understood as an integral and distinctive aspect of Aboriginal culture, and their recurrence in photography articulates a deep interest in this expression from the earliest outdoor views. During the 1850s, John Hunter Kerr had persuaded his ‘‘Aboriginal neighbours,’’ with whom he was ‘‘always on very friendly terms,’’ to perform a version for him—one modified, in being carried out during the day, with boys instead of women serving as an audience (figure 80). Kerr worked collaboratively with the performers, and it is likely that theyalso produced a bark etching depicting a corroboree specifically fordisWORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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80. John Hunter Kerr. A Corrorobby (Victoria), 1840 [sic]. (‘‘A Corroboree,’’ c.1851–1855.)

Photograph: salted paper. Accession number h82.277/10. From the Lang Album of Views in Victoria, 1849–1861. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

play in the 1854 Paris Exhibition. A reviewer of the 1851 London Exhibition at the Crystal Palace had voiced criticism of the colonists for having ‘‘utterly destroyed’’ the Tasmanians, and Kerr collected a wide range of indigenous material demonstrating the survival and adaptation of the colony’s indigenous people.38 Like Walter’s collaboration with the Wurundjeri, traditional forms of representation were drawn on in communicating across cultures. However, Europeans understood little or nothing of the sacred dimension of performance, and its role in renewing links between land, people, and Dreamings. They enjoyed the realism of performances that reenacted events such as clashes with whites, or simply admired the outward form of the spectacle, understood in terms of the music hall. Traditionally, performance communicated with outsiders, but in performing corroboree for the camera, its fluidity and elasticity were stretched to their limit: the fleeting movement of bodies in space was frozen, and the unity of movement, music, and song that joined past and present was ruptured, revealing only the outer form of the event. The corroboree continued to communicate, but it had to accommodate increasing distance; the shared understanding 196

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of its inner meanings diminished until only its outer form and the delight in realist mimicry remained. The reenactment images signify loss because they reconstruct what is no longer there; only the surface appearance was left, preserved by the camera. Such images typify the increasingly ritualized form of exchange between Aboriginal and white during the late nineteenth century: they are doubly theatrical, as the traditional aim of communicating through impersonation intersected with European notions of theater and the photographic image focused the viewer’s attention on the event preserved within its frame. In a sense, reenactment photographs of a modified ceremony concentrated the ritual of cultural exchange as they moved into the sphere of popular entertainment. European fear of this powerful and uninhibited nocturnal performance was tamed through a strategy of appropriation and parody, and it quickly became a form of musical staged specifically for the benefit of white audiences. A corroboree was performed for Prince Alfred in 1867, for example, and eventually, a ballet version was staged in Sydney in 1950 by white dancers in blackface.39 Several writers have pointed out that the corroboree became a means for Aboriginal people to enter the marketplace, but their freedom to do so varied widely across the continent. The attitude toward performing corroborees appears to have been relatively relaxed in South Australia, for example, and in Adelaide during the 1840s the so-called Sunday corroboree was a regular event, a source of entertainment to many whites, and of profit for the performers; Adelaide corroborees continued to be staged into the 1880s, drawing crowds of up to twenty thousand people. As a source of income, the staged corroboree constituted a central element of tourism at missions such as Point Macleay well into the twentieth century, culminating in a performance at the Commercial Traveller’s Club Charity Fancy Dress Football Carnival of 1911.40 In Victoria, missionary influence on Victoria’s Aboriginal policy had long ensured that the pagan corroboree was forbidden on the reserves, and the ethnologist Alfred Howitt provoked the wrath of the Board in 1885 by prompting his informants to revive initiation ceremonies. Howitt gained access to sacred knowledge by pretending to be an initiated man, and he succeeded in persuading tribes from around theVictoria–New SouthWales border to perform a ceremony at Bega, New South Wales, in 1883.The ceremony was curtailed in a variety of ways to accommodate Howitt’s public service vacation, but he was delighted with the outcome and organized a WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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Jeraeil (initiation ceremony) near Ramahyuck early the following year. A photograph of the event shows the men, all dressed in European clothing but wearing particular ceremonial additions, in a line before the camera, with visiting elders William Barak of Coranderrk and another man from the Upper Campaspe River visible to one side. Howitt’s scientific purpose is reflected in the lack of theater evident here: the ceremony’s restricted content rather than its outward drama was his concern, and this could not be captured by the camera. Hagenauer wrote angrily to the Board about this project, which disrupted the mission routine, and matters reached a head the following year, when Howitt attempted to stage another Gippsland ceremony. A telegram from the Chief Secretary (also an unofficial Board chairman) halted proceedings at the last minute, but too late to prevent ‘‘drunkenness, fighting, and immorality,’’ according to Hagenauer. The Board won this protracted dispute, and even Governor Sir Henry Loch, who asked to see a performance in 1887, had to settle instead for a painting of one by Barak, safely relegating the practice to the past.41 By this time Aboriginal people themselves, many of whom were Christians, had mixed feelings about the tradition, and when a group of Gippsland men tried again in 1890 to hold a corroboree, they were prevented by Aboriginal women who petitioned the Board to halt this ‘‘heathen practice.’’ However, at Coranderrk in the same year, there is a reference to a ‘‘small corroboree’’ held after Barak’s wedding as part of a concert program, suggesting that a distinction was commonly accepted between the corroboree as religious ceremony and as popular entertainment.42 By the end of the century, images of corroborees reveal that a flickering ethnographic interest underpinned popular enjoyment of its exotic musichall aesthetic. In 1898, for example, professional photographer Charles Kerry took a series of images of a Wailwan camp and ceremonial ground in northwestern New South Wales, three years after the site had been recorded by surveyor and amateur anthropologist R. H. Mathews. Perhaps alerted by a police report in May 1898 of a gathering for ceremonial purposes, Kerry arrived to take ‘‘picturesque views.’’ He was given limited access to the ceremony, and these images circulated both as postcards and within anthropological texts. Although Ronald Berndt’s Australian Aboriginal Religion reproduced fourteen of the series, it did not relate them to their specific site or cultural context.The power and enigma of performance had 198

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been tamed, becoming, as the popular corroboree, a ritualized emblem of Aboriginality. Caire’s tableau (figure 76) reproduces the standard pose, legs apart, with quivering thighs, that always struck white observers; here, however, the drama and tension of early-nineteenth-century paintings such as James Wallis/Joseph Lycett’s Corroboree at Newcastle is completely lacking. The image’s artifice is indicated by its daytime setting, for example, and the formal postures of the people involved: their hearts are clearly not in it. This is unsurprising, given that the residents had been leading a ‘‘European’’ lifestyle for at least forty years. Caire has persuaded the corroboree actors to take off their shirts and don paint and trails of leaves, although they are still dressed in their everyday, Western clothes—even the old man, whose sleeve protrudes beneath his cloak.The array of spears, spear throwers, clubs, shields, and boomerangs, shown, for example, in Natives Making Firesticks at Coranderrk (figure 78), resembles a curio stall or museum display. This obvious staging is not due to a lack of skill on Caire’s part: his posed tableaux, which now seem so crude, can be understood as a stylized, stereotypical re-creation of traditional customs for a contemporary audience, unfamiliar with Aboriginal people, through the inclusion of material markers of Aboriginality, enhanced by photographic realism.The categorical ‘‘corroboree man’’ stands severed from any social context, a standard pictorial strategy to distance and romanticize the Aboriginal subject. Such visual and rhetorical devices unite in constructing a familiar symbol of Aboriginal identity.

THE YOUNG IDEA

Another prominent sign of Aboriginality was the subject of one of Caire’s most popular postcards, A Young Aboriginal Trying to Throw the Boomerang (figure 81). Here Caire stands as a tourist would have, looking over the clear space in front of the settlement, to watch a display of throwing the boomerang. A row of Aboriginal residents stand or lean against the fence in the background, suggesting their involvement in the spectacle. Lanky Manton, the boomerang expert, sits amid a range of artifacts. Sam Rowan is seated to the right, and a small boy stands beside them, also holding a boomerang aloft. In some incarnations, this image was given the titleTeaching the Young Idea, a reference to a poem quoted in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson and WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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81. Nicholas Caire, The Young Aboriginal in Training. Lanky Manton and Sam Rowan (seated). Accession number xp 2176. Shaw Collection, Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

familiar to many during the nineteenth century: ‘‘Delightful task! / to rear the tender thought, / To teach the young idea how to shoot!’’ 43 The child, as heir to an obsolete tradition, evokes a sense of nostalgia; the image combines the familiar—a child like children everywhere learning to mimic its elders—enacting the strange, the Aboriginal custom of boomerang throwing. The child’s presence challenges the ‘‘fatal impact’’ myth in depicting the reproduction of tradition from generation to generation. This image mimics the visitor’s actual experience of visiting the station. By now, the boomerang had become an immediately recognizable symbol of Aboriginality.44 Caire’s snapshots encapsulate familiar, fixed ideas about traditional Aboriginal culture. As stereotypes they vacillate between what is always already known and what needs to be anxiously repeated; in their simultaneous recognition and disavowal of difference, we see the operation of one of the key discursive strategies of colonialism, the play of metaphorical substitution (the familiar ‘‘savage’’), against metonymic incompleteness (figured as change).45 By conceding change, the postcards register a perceived lack, measured against the imagined pattern of authentic Aboriginality expected from these supposed relics of a disappearing race. Aboriginal exoticism was domesticated and softened. Transformation is signaled by the artifice of Caire’s tableaux, something clearly apparent to 200

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contemporary viewers: the title Fun in Camp, for example, adopted for the weapons scene in some usages, frankly draws attention to the gap between real and pretend (figure 77). Change is also indicated by the altered lifestyle it reveals, indicated by clothing, for example. As I have noted, white managers would not have sanctioned images that appeared to show the continued performance of corroborees at the station. Hence these tourist images constructed a widespread view of station or urban Aborigines as altered and domesticated, contrasting with images of ‘‘remote blacks.’’

EMPTY LANDS AND BOOMERANGS

These stereotypes—produced three years after the colonies had federated to form a new Australian nation—also played a role in forging larger narratives of identity. Within the nationalist visual discourse originating during the 1880s with the Heidelberg School, Aboriginal people occupied a specific place; Australian impressionism expressed an urban yearning for communion with the environment in a possessive relationship that displaced Aboriginal people from the landscape. However, this ‘‘Freudian blindness’’ 46 was also linked to articulations of local identity in indigenous terms through a systematic process of exclusion and appropriation that Nicholas Thomas terms a ‘‘native and/or national’’ identity characteristic of settler societies.47 In psychoanalytic terms, by repressing the history of genocide, Aboriginal people became ‘‘figures of the coloniser’s unconscious, from where they [were] articulated in art, wit and dreaming through mechanisms of displacement, reversal and indirect expression.’’ 48 As postcards, Caire’s tourist images of Aboriginal people participated in this ambivalent movement between acknowledgment and rejection, circulating as capitalist commodities ‘‘produced in a colonial context, by and for a European audience.’’ 49 Caire shared the concerns of the Heidelberg School, also expressed by contemporary nature writers such as Charles Barrett and a growing constituency of middle-class bush-seekers.50 Just as Caire’s landscapes are emptied of their indigenous inhabitants, making way for white pioneers, a desire to express a distinctive local identity saw the appropriation of unique cultural forms such as the boomerang as emblems of a vicarious native status. Where Victoria’s Aboriginal people had been removed from the complexity and contingency of everyday personal contact with white WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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settlers, they were understood in their absence through a range of visual emblems that were fixed, unthreatening, and easily consumed. At once souvenirs, physical objects, and relics of a supposedly dying race, they achieve their effect on several levels: as Susan Stewart points out, the souvenir metonymically stands in for what it represents, as well as signifying its absence; it is incomplete both because it is a sample of a larger whole and because it must always be supplemented by a narrative of insatiable nostalgia.51 In gently mourning these remnants of a doomed race, the postcard simultaneously drew the viewer toward and distanced her or him from what it depicted. This power to appropriate is effected through the images’ miniaturization, realism, and personalization, creating an intimate relationship with the body—the hands that grasp, angle, hold closer or away, then pocket this slim portable object; their size allows them to be enveloped by the viewer’s body, transforming exterior into interior. The subject is brought closer by the image’s indexical status as an apparent fragment of the real, making us think that we know the world it represents— enhanced here by Caire’s reference to the discourse of ethnography, the pictorial authenticity of his arrangement of the artifacts and people.52 The owner’s consumption of this mass-produced object is a private experience that individualizes—and often literally inscribes it with personal meaning. Yet simultaneously these objects create a voyeuristic, transcendent gaze that objectifies and distances, constructing the viewpoint of an outsider: we peer into the square frame of the embodied photograph as if into another world—a vignette that situates the viewer as spectator of a performance, outside the event. Grounded in popular notions of an Aboriginal other, the photographic image articulated the fixity of stereotypical knowledge, at the same time exposed as partial by the self-consciousness of its framing. Through a process of domestication enacted through simultaneous objectification and identification, the postcard enabled colonists to know and own Aboriginal people, enjoying these emblems of a distinctive indigenous identity.

PERFORMING ABORIGINALITY

By now performing for tourists and photographers would have become second nature to the Aboriginal actors, accustomed to dealing with colonial society through the medium of popular entertainment. Coranderrk’s 202

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residents themselves enjoyed public spectacles from childhood, when they were taken to see the sights of the day. For example, Strickland took a group of station boys to the 1881 exhibition in Melbourne, and in 1884, the children were conveyed ‘‘out to the gardens’’ and were given a ‘‘free ride on the elephant of which they all with no little pleasure availed themselves’’ before being showed ‘‘through all the Arcades, the Public Library and Picture Gallery &c. We also took them down to the wharf where they saw some of the large steamers and other vessels.’’ 53 Residents had been exported from the station to perform in public from at least 1888, when they became an exhibit in Melbourne’s zoo. The Zoological and Acclimatisation Society’s gardens trialed a variety of public entertainments during this decade, including a plowing match and ‘‘Continental concerts.’’ The Aboriginal display was described as the representation of a native encampment, with its mia mias of bark, and the rude carvings, weapons, &c., of the aborigines, whose original modes of life are fast being forgotten. The old time native bark canoe is a very interesting relic and a thing quite unknown to many thousands of native born Australians. There is some probability of a party of blacks being obtained from the Coranderrk station to throw the boomerang in the presence of visitors. This would be especially interesting to people from the old world.54 Indeed, boomerang throwing was so popular that director Albert Le Souef arranged a repeat performance, also noting that ‘‘the native method of producing fire by friction proved very interesting to many, and would also be repeated.’’ 55 A photograph was taken of this ‘‘native encampment,’’ showing two adults sitting wrapped in possum skin rugs—possibly Tommy Avoca and his wife Rose (formerly Rose Philips), married in 1882.The array of baskets, possum skin cloaks, spears, and boomerangs resemble a stage set, a diorama of Aboriginal savagery that like those of the international exhibitions, defined civilization by contrast with its primitive other.56 Given their long experience of representing themselves, especially for the camera and in forms of popular entertainment, it is clear that Aboriginal participants in the tourist experience were fully aware of the artificial nature of the contact and of what white visitors wanted to see. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a ready acceptance by black and white of the deployment of stereotypical, artificial representations of AbWORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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original people as a means of cultural communication within the colonial relationship. While the unequal and exploitative nature of this exchange broadly allowed white society to control Aboriginal people, the characteristically stereotypical forms of Aboriginality generated also allowed certain freedoms. For example, Aboriginal participation in sport has always been a performance, and a means of asserting a successful presence in white society. It is perhaps difficult for non-Australians to understand the passionate devotion to sport that prevails within many sections of Australian society, and especially the godlike status assigned its talented cricketers and football players. Across Victoria many Aboriginal people would leave the stations without permission to go to football matches in Melbourne, and it was noted that ‘‘of a Saturday afternoon in the summer time they may be seen of all ages flocking into Healesville to witness a cricket match, though the great attraction is the frequently recurring football match between the white boys of the town and the black boys from Coranderrk.’’ 57 Aboriginal skill in this arena was admired and respected. Again, historian Richard Broome has shown how in the years before television many Aboriginal men worked on the boxing circuit, a space of entertainment and spectacle in which the excitement of the performance prompted wild enthusiasm: ‘‘Up there on the line-up board were familiar yet dangerous sights. Here were men oozing quiet aggression, dressed in gaudy coloured boxing shorts. . . . Bare chests, plump pectorals and chest hair might be glimpsed as they strutted and posed.’’ They made aggressive use of eye contact before a fight, enacting roles of masculinity and dominance, and moving with relative freedom through white society.58 Like sport, performing traditional culture could also become a source of status and income, and therefore provide a measure of independence from white control: some Aboriginal men, like Lanky Manton, went to Melbourne ‘‘to throw boomerangs at the final football matches,’’ and even after the station closed, Manton and Billy Russell spent a great deal of time satisfying the continuing demand for boomerangs.59 Phillip Pepper tells the story of Kitty Johnson, an elderly Gippsland woman who covered herself with a rug, refusing to be photographed until visitors had given her enough money.60 Aboriginal people often left the missions, especially during their annual holiday around Christmas time, and in Gippsland were able to derive income and independence by performing for visitors to the 204

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lakes. Despite the exploitation associated with Aboriginal tourism, especially in ‘‘remote’’ Australia, Sylvia Kleinert argues that tourist art produced at Lake Tyers can be interpreted as a ‘‘form of opposition which countered the hegemony of such government institutions.’’ During the 1930s, given that the price for a boomerang or basket ranged between five and ten shillings, a man could earn half the monthly wage in a couple of days, subverting the ration economy.61 Many observers have been critical of the artificiality of communication between tourists and their hosts, especially where this is seen to hinder cross-cultural understanding. Visitors’ expectations are argued to shape their understanding of what they see, structuring their experience according to preconceived ideas—for example, of Aboriginal people as primitive, orderly, or doomed—impeding a more authentic exchange. However, the artificiality of the tourist encounter may also work on behalf of the Aboriginal performers: where the mode of contact comprises superficial and stereotypical communication between tourist and host, this may act to screen the latter from closer and potentially more damaging attention, leaving important values and customs untouched.62 Nonetheless, in the context of the administration of Victorian Aboriginal policy, the Coranderrk residents’ resistance to official control remained limited and must be seen within the larger context of the station’s final authoritarian years.

E R N E S T F Y S H , B Y R O YA L A P P O I N T M E N T

In September 1909, Natalie Robarts, the current manager’s wife, noted in her diary that ‘‘we had quite a pleasant little disturbance, Mr Fisk [sic] the photographer came to take several photos of the natives, and I proposed he should take one of the women at Raffia work, and so he did.’’ 63 Between 1909 and 1918, Healesville photographer and empire man Ernest Fysh took several photographs at Coranderrk, which he then turned into postcards, such as Raffia Workers at Coranderrk, Healesville (figure 82). Aboriginal women’s basket making was a tradition encouraged by white officials as a suitably feminine source of income. It was also seen as a sign of obedience and improvement: as Smyth boasted in 1871, ‘‘the women spend the time they can spare from the cares of their households in making baskets, nets, and bags. The forms of the baskets are good, and since I made designs for them they have improved rapidly, and are now capable of fashWORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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82. Ernest Fysh, Raffia Workshop at Coranderrk, Healesville. Reproduced from Aboriginal

Studies Department,Women’s Work: Aboriginal Women’s Artefacts in the Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Museum of Victoria, 1992), 16.

ioning quite intricate patterns.’’ 64 Despite the apparent continuity of Fysh’s images with earlier views such as Walter’s, the women are engaged in a new skill, raffia making, which Mrs. Robarts had recently begun to learn herself. This image expresses European perceptions of progress as embodied in the material culture of domesticity, which became an index of civilization. Fysh’s ladylike subjects sit indoors, dressed neatly, with tidy hair. Here the role played by Aboriginal women as bearers of respectability assumed great importance. Diane Barwick has argued that the status of Victorian Aboriginal women improved on the stations due to a shift to matricentred families, a new economic importance, and domesticity as ‘‘visible indices of good management.’’ Yet despite their successful representation of domesticity and respectability, this transformation was never as profound as

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whites assumed, as covert practices undermined the surface appearance of European gentility.65 Evidence for women’s resistance to control suggests that in less visible ways, women evaded restrictions as much as the politically active, higherprofile men. For example, in 1882, Bella Lee’s abortion became a scandal that conclusively ended Strickland’s management of the station. Bella and her lover Spider had requested permission to marry, but were refused on the grounds that there was no spare hut for them. When Bella became pregnant, the manager’s wife dosed her with salts, later claiming that she had believed Bella’s complaint was constipation.66 This incident also complicates Barwick’s assessment of the cordial relations that she suggests prevailed between white station staff and Aboriginal women, arguing that managers’ wives and daughters treated them as ‘‘friends and equals’’ and were ‘‘eagerly copied . . . with very little tuition or coercion.’’ 67 While companionship and cooperation may have characterized some associations, white women could also act as agents of colonial control, directly instructing and monitoring Aboriginal women within the domestic domain.68 As an important element of domesticity, basket making constituted evidence for Aboriginal women’s conformity to white notions of civilization, entailing respectability, tidy appearance, and usefulness. Like Caire’s ‘‘clockwork’’ views, Fysh’s raffia photograph shows them at work, safely ordered by white managers.

WHITE WEDDINGS

Fysh also produced a series of postcards showing Coranderrk weddings, such as the marriage of ‘‘full blood’’ Henry McRae and ‘‘half-caste’’ Lizzie Hamilton in August 1909 (figure 83).69 Mrs. Robarts wrote in her diary: Lizzie’s wedding day, and such a beautiful day, full of sunshine. . . . The church was a picture, the women decorated it with wattle blossom & white Cherry plum—it is the prettiest church decorations I have seen, these people seem to have a natural gift, it was artistic and graceful. The school room also looked nice. I have put pictures on the walls & it brightens the scene. All our people are very happy today. Lizzie looked very nice in her white muslin dress & veil & wreath which consisted of Cherry Plum blossoms.70

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83. Ernest Fysh, Liie McRae’s Wedding Day. Accession number xp 2183.

Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

84. Ernest Fysh, A Wedding at Coranderrk: Willie Russell and Julia Sherwin. Accession

number h42691. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

In material terms, these events were strikingly elaborate, carefully conforming to European ritual, including the handmade shoes, the goodquality formal clothes, the cake (iced by a specialist confectioner), and flowers. Lizzie’s father, Frank Blair, bought her a wedding dress. It seems that the participants entered with enthusiasm into the ritual of dress, food, and performance. Other weddings were also recorded by Fysh, including those recorded in A Wedding at Coranderrk: Willie Russell and Julia Sherwin (figure 84), Mr and Mrs Mullett’s Wedding Party, Coranderrk, Healesville 27/7/10, and again Mullett Manton Wedding, Coranderrk, Healesville. In all of the images, the subjects sit for formal portraits: man and woman, mother and child, either in front of the manager’s elegant brick residence or else seated on chairs in the garden. It is likely that the Aboriginal participants commissioned these photographs themselves. Historian Margot Harker notes that a photographic record was quickly made an essential part of the wedding ceremony, a souvenir that had the power to nostalgically recall the event, and offer proof of a working-class family’s respectability. In the context of Aboriginal women’s deployment of white gender to improve their lot within white society, and especially where marriage acted effectively to allow them to reWORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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main on the station instead of being sent away to work, these records would similarly have stood as evidence of their success and status. As Michael Aird, writing of studio portraits taken in turn-of-the-century Brisbane, has shown, such images express ‘‘a very real need to state their successes in the European community to ensure protection from the oppressive ‘protection’ policies.’’ 71 Evidence of the participants’ enthusiastic participation suggests that they embraced the values symbolized by the ceremony as a formal legal and religious statement. Of Lizzie McRae’s wedding, Mrs. Robarts noted that ‘‘Mrs Wandin (what should we do without her!) made all the sandwiches & six large cakes, the people also contributed £1 towards the supper.’’ 72 Produced with official sanction, Fysh’s series must also be understood as an expression of management objectives during the last and most paternalistic phase of the station’s operation. In this context, the series participated in a discourse of miscegenation obsessively concerned with controlling the sexuality, the ‘‘chasteness,’’ of Aboriginal women. Ann Stoler, for example, argues that ‘‘the discursive management of the sexual practices of coloniser and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things’’ and that a wider imperial context reveals how European sensibilities were defined through a language of difference that drew on images of racial purity and sexual virtue.73 As I have discussed with relation to the implementation of official assimilation policy, the connection between supposed immorality and the impurity of bloodlines made the ‘‘protection’’ and control of black women a central principle of Aboriginal administration. To managers, weddings provided evidence of their orderly regime, and Fysh’s ‘‘white weddings’’ effectively demonstrated the rigid routine that prevailed during the station’s last years, satisfying the white desire for control over the state’s last full-blooded Aboriginal people. Here, colonization and white progress have triumphed; the other has been subsumed into the cultural code.

‘‘D U S K Y B E A U B R U M M E L S’’

But these images also had popular interest, being turned into postcards for public sale, and there is evidence that Fysh’s images prompted laughter at Aboriginal difference. Imperfect mimicry defined the gap between civilization and primitivism, as revealed by the manager’s son Oswald Robarts’s 210

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account of ‘‘Dusky Beau Brummels and Picturesque Weddings.’’ He published this article in the Argus, accompanied by an image of ‘‘a wedding group at the old aboriginal settlement at Coranderrk, near Healesville.The blacks loved finery, and elaborate preparations were made for weddings.’’ Robarts recalled that the ‘‘attempted application of civilised customs to a primitive race had many curious consequences,’’ grounding his discussion in a contrast between a set of conventions he assumes are shared by his readers and supposed Aboriginal misrecognition or fraudulence. Fashion had no greater devotee than a dapper young black who affected bowler hats and shoes in preference to the felt hats and sturdy boots provided by the Government. He preferred cigarettes to pipes. His cigarettes were mostly prepared from shavings of the ‘‘twist’’ rolled in newspaper. The hats and shoes were customarily acquired by barter from the recipients of discarded clothing which occasionally made its way to the settlement. Collar and coat were regarded as optional, and a length of stirrup strap usually served as a belt.This native Beau Brummel excelled as a horseman, and frequently he joined in the periodic ‘‘roundups’’ of cattle. His appearance was delightful as, with bowler hat and billowing shirt, he bent low over his horse’s neck in full gallop after wild eyed bullocks who were trying to escape from a milling herd.74 Throughout its life, observers of Coranderrk were fascinated by the relationship between civilization as they knew it and station residents’ version of it; from the mid-1870s, an increasingly derisive laughter at their mimicry, construed as inferiority rather than difference, became a common response. Fysh exploited this attitude more explicitly in images such as King Anthony of Coranderrk, which shows an elderly and poorly dressed man wearing a gorget and holding a boomerang. In the upper corner of this postcard is a small trademark, reading ‘‘Ernest Fysh, By Royal Appointment.’’ The celebration of the residents’ apparent success in adopting a European lifestyle during the 1860s and early 1870s began to be displaced during the 1880s by an assumption that the subjects were inevitably limited by biological race. To outsiders, the very existence of the station, now home to people defined as full-blooded, marked the Aboriginal subjects as other, a difference signified most obviously by their black skin. Surely the selling power of Fysh’s white weddings to contemporary tourists lay in the frisson of seeing blacks almost (but not quite) metamorphosed into WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

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white? For some viewers, underlying assumptions of a fixed racial difference needed no demonstration beyond the subjects’ physical appearance, even where their mimicry was apparently perfect.

THE FINAL YEARS

During the station’s final years, its importance as a tourist destination only increased, in inverse proportion to its population’s steady diminution: in 1921 only forty-two residents remained, while another forty-seven ‘‘halfcastes’’ were living in the vicinity, camped in tents or huts to be near their old people. In 1909 tourists were permitted to visit on Sundays and holidays—‘‘open days’’ on which they were permitted to look around the station and buy curios from the residents. By 1914 Coranderrk had become a destination for eminent overseas visitors—such as members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, who were advised that ‘‘provision is made for many of the survivors of the natives of this country, who enjoy perfect freedom, and are well cared for.’’ 75 In 1918–20, the Blacks’ Spur Motor Service Garage took daily so-called Pleasure Drives to Coranderrk for two and a half shillings. By this time, ‘‘scores’’ of visitors came to the station on Christmas Day, in 1919, for example, ‘‘buying a number of weapons and baskets and listening to some of the children’s singing.’’ 76 In 1921 the manager Robarts noted that the tourist traffic had actually increased, reporting that approximately two thousand visitors had come to the station during the year and that this ‘‘demand[ed] constant road repairs and building of new fences.’’ 77 The same year the Board succumbed to pressure for abandonment of the station to allow its resumption for soldier settlement. Letters to the newspapers and petitions had no effect, although in December 1923 the Board decided to allow Annie and Lanky Manton, Jemima Burns Wandin Dunolly, Alfred Davis and his family, and Willie Russell to remain on fifty acres.78 By the time the station closed, tourism had almost become its raison d’être: when the Board notified Robarts that the station would cease operation at the end of January 1924, one and a half months away, he objected that this was too soon because ‘‘owing to the Xmas and New Year Holidays which extend to the end of January in this Tourist district, hundreds of visitors visit this Station during this period and are entertained by the natives.’’ 79 Nonetheless, Robarts left in Febru-

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ary 1924, and the station was officially closed. The last of the residents died in 1944. Over the station’s final decades, images produced under the Board’s authoritarian management expressed its successful imposition of order over the ‘‘last of their race.’’ Tourists were increasingly welcomed to the station to satisfy their curiosity and obtain souvenirs. These tourist representations moved between difference and sameness, the exotic and the domestic: Caire’s images reinvigorated the familiar idea of traditional Aboriginality, but they simultaneously indicated its abandonment; by contrast, Fysh’s wedding photographs proclaim an equivalence destabilized by key signs of difference. As they circulated in a range of public contexts, postcard images, like the residents’ displays of boomerang throwing, provided stereotypical souvenirs of Aboriginality that could be subsumed into larger narratives of nation and progress.The residents were domesticated, appropriated into conceptions of a distinctive local identity. The reserve system itself performed for white society a metonymic function: as a partial presence, Coranderrk stood for otherness, as well as for its recovery—a civilizing tool that both masked and defined Aboriginal difference. Cultural exchange had become a stylized, self-conscious staging, and these images, like tourist performances, stood in place of a more nuanced understanding of Aboriginality.

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CHAPTER 5 CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

t

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. —King Duncan in William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Coranderrk was officially closed in February 1924, but Annie and Lanky Manton, Jemima Burns Wandin Dunolly, Alfred Davis and his family, and Willie Russell were allowed to remain in their cottages and to have the use of fifty acres. The reserve was sold, with the exception of the cemetery, to serve as a returned soldier settlement—although requests for land by returned Aboriginal soldiers were refused. The constable appointed as local guardian was instructed to ‘‘move on the coloured folk,’’ descendants of the old people camping on eighty acres outside the reserve fence line, but nearly one hundred people were living in the vicinity by the 1940s. The last of the permitted residents, Dunolly, died in 1944.1 White society was apparently ready to allow the reserve and its inhabitants to rest in peace. Some mourned the ‘‘passing of the Aborigines’’: in June 1934, Kulin supporter Anne Bon donated an Italian marble gravestone to a fund established by the Australian Natives Association, which was reinscribed with a memorial to William Barak. It was initially erected in the main street of Healesville, on the corner of Maroondah Highway and Badger’s Creek

Road, but it was vandalized in the early 1940s and removed to the local council storage. Seemingly forgotten, the station’s invisibility was breached in 1951 when the local literary society, the Bread and Cheese Club, held a working bee to clear and tidy the cemetery. The following year saw demands to construct a road that would provide public access to the cemetery, and subsequently Barak’s memorial was reerected there. In November 1962 the Reservation for Public Purposes (Protection of Aboriginal Graves) was declared, and a local, white committee of management formed to maintain the area.2 In a process of white forgetting and remembrance, these memorials stood for the death of a people. The Aboriginal community, however, always maintained its ties with Coranderrk. This discourse of attachment and meaning has only recently intersected with the European vision of Coranderrk, revealing a tension between constructions of Aboriginality produced at the public level and the more situational and heterogenous ways that people construct their own identity. Aboriginal people have recently shared their knowledge and memories with white society by means of oral history projects carried out by Aboriginal Affairs Victoria and the Museum Victoria. They have revealed a continuing connection to the place, to specific sites, and especially to each other, as family links are traced and debated, often through the process of looking at and talking about people in photographs.3 t

After closure, there were numerous instances of families settling down in the area, reenacting traditional patterns of activity across the landscape. Bill Jenkins’s family lived at Badger’s Creek, within walking distance of the station, and kept in close touch with the residents, especially Lizzie Davis, who Bill regarded as a grandmother. In the mid-1920s a family dispute caused his mother and uncle to move into a block of land on Steel Street, where they occupied several tents. During the 1920s, Lydia and Jack Fisher and their family lived in a tent at the traditional summer fishing camp near the old Yarra Bridge. This ‘‘Christmas holiday’’ probably dated back to the establishment of the station: Martha Nevin later remembered how ‘‘our parents used to get the old tip dray and we’d pack all the blankets and food and all the camping gear in—no tents, we used to make great

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big bough breaks—and we’d come down.’’ 4 Twenty years later, Dolly and Paddy Nicholson and their family also occupied this site, although they were labeled gypsies and eventually forced to leave. They traveled widely, but finally returned to Healesville in the 1940s. Some lived itinerant lives but would return periodically, like Peter Dunolly. It was a common pattern during the 1920s and 1930s for Aboriginal families to travel throughout Victoria and New South Wales following seasonal employment, although many returned permanently to Healesville in the 1940s.5 By the 1930s several Aboriginal families lived in Healesville, often in houses close to one another. From the 1950s onward, new Aboriginal families arrived in Healesville, taking advantage of the employment offered by a thriving timber industry.The Aboriginal community participated in local employment and social networks and maintained family ties through visiting, including grandparents still living at Coranderrk. This often meant crowded housing; as Bill Nicholson Sr. remembered, ‘‘All our relations would come to our house—like a bee hive—they would come for a visit or come to have a party. Our house would always be full of people.’’ 6 This helped women care for children and offered a source of support for relatives looking for work, as well as providing a rich social life. Camping and outdoor activities such as fishing feature prominently in reminiscences. Fishing and eeling along the Yarra River and Badger Creek caused tremendous excitement for the children, as well as being good eating. The Housing Commission began to build housing specifically for Aboriginal people during the 1960s, and during the 1970s many Aboriginal families moved to Dandenong, where industrial development offered employment to replace the diminishing timber work.7 Family links remained strong and prompted the formation of cooperatives such as the Dandenong and District Aboriginal Cooperative, covering Healesville and Drouin, in 1970.8 In 1981 the Aboriginal Housing Board was established, represented by Winnie Quagliotti until her death in 1988. Quagliotti was regarded as a leader of the Wurundjeri people in a genealogy extending from Billibellary, the first to encounter whites, to Simon Wonga to William Barak and Robert Wandin (Wandoon).9 She also proved instrumental in establishing the Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council in 1985, which in 1987 was made responsible for cultural heritage management in the Melbourne area. She was buried in Coranderrk ceme216

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tery, prompting its formal expansion to allow two hundred more burials. In 1991 formal responsibility for the cemetery passed to the council. The Coranderrk co-op was given cultural responsibility for all land within a fifty-mile radius (except for Coranderrk cemetery and the Army School of Health), and in 1996 was able to open a cultural center, Galeenabeek.10 The eight-one-hectare property known as Coranderrk had been in private ownership by the (non-Aboriginal) Tan family, but in January 1998 it was sold at auction to the Indigenous Land Corporation (ilc), following an application by the Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council through Mirimbiak Nations Aboriginal Corporation. The ilc came into existence in June 1995 in recognition of the fact that many indigenous peoples dispossessed of their lands would not be able to regain ownership to land under the limited provisions of the Native Title Act of 1993. It is committed to recognition of prior Aboriginal ownership, to restoring an association to land wherever possible, and aims to ensure that traditional owners become the title-holders under a corporation.11 An Aboriginal management committee took title in March 1999. When it acquired Coranderrk, the ilc recognized its great importance to descendants of residents as well as of owners and requested that the title-holding body, alongside Wurundjeri membership, include people descended from former residents as associate members. Clearly, for Aboriginal people, ties with Coranderrk and a private, local understanding of its importance as home and traditional land were never relinquished, despite white memorialization. Aboriginal memories and cultural survival testify to that. Yet Coranderrk’s invisibility was not purely repressive, even though the recent reemergence into public space of an Aboriginal discourse might seem like breaking a silence.12 The Aboriginal community’s assertion of its experiences and cultural heritage, and the broader population’s receptiveness, should rather be seen in a broad context of political and discursive transformation during the late 1960s, and the development of white interest in Aboriginal culture and history. At this time a ‘‘re-emergence of ethnicity’’ occurred in much of the developed world, and ‘‘people of color’’ and indigenous people within former colonies became politicized, prompting the rise of influential movements such as the Black Panthers in North America and the Maoritanga (Maori Renaissance) in New Zealand. The formation of immigrant communities forced governments to develop policies based on ‘‘multiculturalism,’’ which acCORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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knowledged ethnic difference.13 Since the early 1970s Aboriginal policy has moved away from assimilationism toward self-determination, and the growing political power of Aboriginal people has forced closer proximity on white Australians. Within intellectual disciplines such as anthropology, views of Aboriginal culture have also changed. Once characterized by the reification of unique social forms, particularly languages, religion, and kinship, concepts of biological race were ostensibly abandoned by anthropologists by the 1950s, although an ‘‘implied definition of Aborigines as a race’’ continued to shape research.14 Traditionalist conceptions of culture produced idealised past representations of indigenous peoples, but in the earliest colonized, most densely settled regions of southeastern Australia, analysis necessarily focused less on precolonial tradition. From the 1940s, as well as recording cultural vestiges, anthropologists also attended to social and cultural transformation, especially in studying Aboriginal communities in New South Wales.15 It is only from the 1980s that scholars have explicitly attempted to describe and theorize the transformation experienced by Aboriginal people and the way they participate in contemporary sociocultural formations.16 Diane Barwick’s investigation of Melbourne Aboriginal communities, beginning in 1960, constituted an important step in the intellectual acknowledgment of cultural transformation and survival. As a newly arrived Canadian, Barwick examined issues such as how, despite assimilationism, ‘‘part-Aborigines’’ living in Melbourne maintained group ties and developed new ‘‘forms of organised interaction,’’ examining the persistence of Aboriginal forms of sociality, regional antecedents for different subgroups, and the ways in which historical experience shaped education and employment, marriage choices, and household organization. Group identity was strengthened by independence from government control once off the reserves, as well as by patterns of seasonal movement, the deprivation of resources, and collective protests. Regional factions and ties to ‘‘home places’’ such as Coranderrk remained strong.17 Barwick’s comprehensive study Rebellion at Coranderrk was published posthumously in 1998, pursuing the historical antecedents of the Melbourne community to examine the residents’ battle for their land in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In this account she explains meeting descendants in 1960 who still spoke warmly of manager John Green a century after the station’s establishment, and 218

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who ‘‘taught’’ her that ‘‘past decisions had present consequences.’’ Modern campaigns to regain land and protesting forced dispersal from Lake Tyers were grounded in historical experiences she decided to investigate. Her then-unfashionable interest in the politics of policy formulation was encouraged by the work of anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner and historian Charles Rowley, and her perception that present-day Aboriginal policy was being formulated on the basis of poor history. She cited ‘‘urgent practical reasons’’ for a detailed historical account of the processes shaping modern Aboriginal administration, including a reliance on ‘‘false stereotypes,’’ the bowdlerization of the role of white government, and a lack of awareness of the damage caused by assimilationism during the late nineteenth century.18 Barwick showed that historical conflict over Aboriginal land had generated partisan documentary records, then used in the 1960s by officials to support claims that Aboriginal people were incapable of successful agriculture, and traced a strong historical trajectory from the injustices of the nineteenth century to 1972 Commonwealth policy that denied Aboriginal title and rights to land.19 Barwick broke new ground in recognizing the relationship between past and present, as well as in her explicitly political purpose, and her sympathy for the Aboriginal community she worked with always underlay her intellectual interests. Conceptually, her acknowledgment of the role of historical process in anthropological analysis also anticipated more recent developments within the discipline, and she made Coranderrk’s historical importance evident to a white academic audience. However, in arguing for successful Aboriginal land management and white oppression, her goal was to boost our modern views of nineteenth-century living conditions, and this shaped her use of visual sources: in 1972 she claimed that ‘‘contemporary photographs and visitors’ comments’’ confirmed the Board’s assertions that the residents’ ‘‘standards of dress, housing and education were equal to or better than the majority of European farmers living in their vicinity’’ and refers to the women dressing with ‘‘quite remarkable elegance’’ on the basis of Fred Kruger’s 1877–78 portrait series. A more nuanced analysis of this imagery must acknowledge that it was produced in specific circumstances for particular reasons: as I showed in chapter 3, Kruger’s subjects were dressed in their Sunday best and carefully posed to argue for the Board’s good management of the station. The tendency to view nineteenth-century representations, particularly visual imagery, CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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with a credulous eye, is characteristic of a historiography that has relied primarily on documentary sources and that relegates past visual regimes to a subsidiary role. As I have suggested, visual knowledge about Aboriginal people was produced systematically within particular colonial power relations; as Barwick notes more generally with respect to her sources, these representations were shaped by conflict and could serve as ‘‘propaganda.’’ 20 Changing political contexts since the 1960s account for the recognition of Coranderrk as an important site in Aboriginal and cross-cultural history. Within a historical anthropology exemplified by Barwick and later writers such as John Mulvaney, its history has been presented both as a morally ascendant struggle against oppression and as the story of a ‘‘loyal peasant community’’ that adopted the canny option of accommodation (acculturation) in adjusting to colonialism.21 Yet in attending to the strategic visual constructions of Aboriginality deployed in this process at different times, it becomes evident that a complex language was developed to represent ideas about Aboriginality that survives into the present.

A P I C N I C D AY

During the time that Coranderrk was privately owned, several events were staged there that drew on visual tropes first defined during the nineteenth century. In October 1978 the Committee of Management of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Cemetery held a so-called Picnic Day, producing a pamphlet for public distribution that recapitulated the station’s history and reiterated the trope of memorialization in noting that ‘‘over 300 former residents are buried in the Cemetery. Perhaps the most famous was William Barak, the respected last chief of the Yarra Tribe. As a boy Barak saw the elders of his tribe enter into the Treaty with John Batman which resulted in the transfer of that vast area of land where Melbourne now stands. In later life Barak won fame and respect variously as a Mounted Trooper, Artist, and tribal elder and spokesman for his people.’’ Because these ‘‘facts of the development of Coranderrk have been forgotten,’’ it was ‘‘hoped that this Picnic Day will stimulate some interest in the history of Coranderrk which is also part of the history of Victoria,’’ thus subsuming the place’s specific local attachment to the Aboriginal community into a larger assessment of state significance.22 A display of artifacts was mounted, loaned by the MuseumVictoria, which included stone tools such 220

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as axes and scrapers, bone implements, a basket and shields, as well as ‘‘four display panels of portraits of Goulburn Valley Aborigines and uprights.’’ 23 Photographs taken during the course of the day show Aboriginal people in traditional or ceremonial dress giving displays of boomerang throwing, as well as tables with information and artifacts for sale. This public representation of Aboriginality and Coranderrk was staged by and for the local white community, rather than the Aboriginal descendants. The event was orchestrated by the cemetery committee, several members of which also belonged to the Healesville Historical Society. By now the site was seen as an important aspect of the area’s local history, and the event was well attended by the white community. Aboriginal culture was presented through an interesting mix of research and popular stereotype: a serious interest in Aboriginal culture was demonstrated by the scholarly element—the museological display of artifacts and the short history, presented according to standard historiographic methods. Yet the Aboriginal performers were not local, and they gave a generalized performance of a pan-Aboriginal culture. The site’s specifically Aboriginal values were incorporated into a national heritage framework, emphasized as having importance for the whole community. By acknowledging its shared importance, this sympathetic and well-meaning interest in Coranderrk undoubtedly had political benefits in bolstering subsequent Aboriginal claims and in providing political support for the site’s conservation. Yet the effects of representing Coranderrk as a showplace are less certain. In repeating the stereotypical forms of Aboriginality, also symbols of a national identity, characteristic of Nicholas Caire’s postcards, this event marked a particularly ambiguous and problematic situation. Essentializing constructions of Aboriginality continue to play a role in cultural politics, representing Aboriginal people either as authentically traditional or else as altered and inauthentic, leaving their identity open to question. Because Aboriginal demands are grounded in prior occupancy, Aboriginal people have been required to show evidence for continuity in the form of blood descent and culture. Their opponents have tended to sever the past, and the remote, ‘‘real Aboriginal’’ from the present, signified by contemporary, ‘‘inauthentic’’ urban Aboriginal people, with the effect of denying the lasting effects of dispossession.24 While organizers of the Picnic Day sought to provide an accurate, informative presentation, they also re-created stereotypical images of a temporally and geographically remote, pan-Aboriginal CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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authenticity, without reference to the complexity of local cultural identity. Since the 1980s Aboriginal demands for cultural and commercial control over their own heritage have asserted the right to represent themselves and rejected the right of the non-Aboriginal community to represent them.

‘‘T H E R E A L T H I N G’’

The broad political shifts that have seen Coranderrk acknowledged as an important site in the history of Aboriginal people and of colonial relations have also marked the growing power of the Aboriginal community to reclaim it as their own. The purchase of the station by the Aboriginal community in 1998 constituted an important historical development, marking the changing context for consumption of the nineteenth-century photographs.These images of Aboriginal people, produced by whites, often with exploitative intentions, are today used in very different ways as descendants make creative and effective use of the photographs in their work and family lives. Ironically, where bloodline was used in the nineteenth century against Aboriginal people, to define them as either ‘‘full blood’’ or inauthentic ‘‘half-caste,’’ today it is deployed as a source of Aboriginal authority and status. In the 1880s, the admixture of white blood was used to define a person as non-Aboriginal, but today the presence of Aboriginal blood proves equally crucial to their descendants in defining Aboriginality and, consequently, rights to represent a community, benefit from resources, or have a say in cultural politics. Photographs—both nineteenth-century and recent—play an important role in this process. Descendants of the Wurundjeri, the traditional clan owners of the region surrounding Coranderrk, claim rights to ownership and control of their heritage, most obviously constituted by the Coranderrk property, traditional knowledge, and the right to perform or represent traditional culture. Descent from known Wurundjeri ancestors—especially William Barak (figure 36) and his sister Boraat (figure 39)—is claimed through genealogies and photographs. The figure of Barak looms large in historical accounts because of his status as rightful Wurundjeri leader, or ngurungaeta, according to traditional kinship organization (see chapter 3). During the nineteenth century, this depended not merely on bloodline within Kulin organization but also on strength of character. Although Barak did not 222

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85. Murrundindi throwing the boomerang, Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, 1998. Photo

by Jane Lydon.

have any children who survived to adulthood, his sister Boraat did: by a European she had a son, Wandoon, or Robert Wandin (figure 41), of whom Barak told the anthropologist Howitt in 1882: ‘‘I am ngurungaeta from my father. When I go I shall leave the word that my sister’s son shall be ngurungaeta with him two others. Beside each of the ngurungaeta there was the man to whom he gave ‘his words.’ . . . Beside me are Robert Wandin, Tom Mansfield [Bamfield]’’ (figure 37) who gets ‘‘ ‘the word’ from me, and Tom Dunolly.’’ 25 Wandin and his wife Jemima Burns had ten children: Martha, James, Jemima Jessie, William, Frank, Joseph, Mary, Ellen, Robert, and Nina, all of whom had numerous descendants who today comprise a large proportion of the Coranderrk community. Genealogies and photographs are used to demonstrate—even enact— these ties in performative and embodied ways. For example, Murrundindi’s (Gary Hunter) performances at the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary comprise dance, music, and talk, and he always explains his own direct descent from Boraat (figures 85 and 86). Murrundindi performs for a wide range of audiences, including school groups, winning a Reconciliation Award CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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86. Murrundindi explaining geneaology through ‘‘the family tree in photos,’’ Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, 1998. Photo by Jane Lydon.

in 1997.26 As he talks about Boraat, Barak, and other family members, Murrundindi points to each person’s photographic portrait, mounted on a wall display encompassing five generations. The exhibition begins with Walter’s 1866 series, moves on to Kruger’s 1878 portraits, and ends with more recent family snapshots, including of himself and his daughter. Just as in his cultural performance, Murrundindi carefully distinguishes between traditional Wurundjeri practices such as the use of clap sticks, and the use of the imported didgeridoo. This identification legitimates his authority to speak on behalf of the place’s traditional owners. Similarly, Murrundindi’s brother Ian Hunter (whose traditional name is Warrend-badj), is also a professional educator, speaking to schools, community groups, and institutions within the Kulin territories about Wurundjeri culture. He focuses on issues of identity and reconciliation and identifies several roles photography plays in his work. He explained to me that ‘‘my line of the Wandins were the original people from the Melbourne area . . . it was granny Boraat—my great-great-grandmother—whose father was one of the Batman signatories of 1835.’’ 27 His father Colin was Scottish, and ‘‘we grew up knowing that we had Aboriginal blood and also learning and playing the bagpipes,’’ but his Aboriginality comes from his mother Jessie’s side of the family. 224

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As he talked to me, Ian produced a photograph of each person he spoke of, laying each one out on the nearest flat surface so that we were soon surrounded by well-thumbed prints, with the effect of bringing tangible presences into the room, evoked by these solid objects.28 Here the colonial relationship between white photographer and black subject has been profoundly destabilized, as this new context brings each person to life, remembered, in Aboriginal terms, as family. The nineteenth-century white emphasis on collectivity, reading individuals as standing for a category or group, is reversed as the types instead are read as portraits, their subjects transformed from specimen to whole personalities. The Aboriginal subjects and their families have undoubtedly always viewed the images in this way, but it is only now, in a new context of receptivity and acknowledgment, that these meanings have become public. Where intermarriage with the white population has blurred the visible difference between Aboriginal and white Australians, the photographs prove indigenous identity. Because he has blue eyes and pale skin, Ian notes that he is often asked whether he is a ‘‘real Aborigine.’’ ‘‘So with the use of the photographs,’’ he states, ‘‘I can then explain how the generations of the Indigenous peoples of Melbourne changed in appearance . . . people can appreciate that this is how the line of Aboriginal people look like they are today.’’ 29 Similarly, Judy Wilson, who worked for a while at Galeenabeek Cultural Centre at Healesville, described the way she draws on photographs on display there to explain to foreign tourists how she can identify as Aboriginal, even if she might ‘‘look white.’’ She believes that because her children are also fair, she has an important role to play in explaining their heritage to outsiders.30 Some have chosen to understand the use of blood in Aboriginal discourse as merely metaphorical, a trope serving to define identity ‘‘in terms which transcend history.’’ 31 But in the context described here it also operates literally, as descendants appeal to the family tree, embodied in genealogy and photographs, to establish their identity as Aboriginal people before a public audience. The photographs have assumed such significance because of the particularly severe dislocation suffered by Victoria’s Aboriginal people: the very process of surveillance and control that produced the images has now become the means through which descendants may reclaim their heritage. Images stand for known historical individuals who represent an important genealogical link, seeming to prove blood and kinCORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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ship through making biological relationships visible. Thus, for the Coranderrk community, the photographic archive facilitates a notion of identity, with its very literal emphasis on blood, created by the colonial relationship itself. Aboriginal identity is still bitterly contested in Australian society. Some critics, including indigenous scholars, have criticized an essentializing notion of identity as a fixed quality passed on by inheritance, pointing rather to the ways that subjectivity is constructed situationally in dialogue. Anthropologist Marcia Langton, for example, points out that essentialism is based on the assumption of an undifferentiated other, stemming from a fear of difference. For Langton, Aboriginality is not a concrete set of ideas or knowledge, but ‘‘arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue . . . [it] is not a fixed thing. . . . It only has meaning when understood in terms of intersubjectivity, when both the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal are subjects, not objects.’’ 32 Her critique of monolithic and opposed categories such as Aboriginal and white instead advocates a more heterogenous and contingent understanding of collective identity that lays analytic emphasis on their mutually interdependent character. Yet in practice, intellectual trends that emphasize the mutability and contingency of identity have sometimes been perceived as undermining indigenous assertions of culture, especially in postcolonial states. Just as identity is fluid and processual, a self-aware balance between rhetorical repudiation and a strategic use of essentialist discourse may be politically necessary, suggesting a distinction between the specific, hybrid identity available to an individual artist or theorist, for example, and the collective representations demanded by cultural politics. This tension emerges from debates about Coranderrk as a spiritual place.

WHITE INTEREST IN THE ABORIGINAL SACRED: C O R A N D E R R K A S A N ‘‘I S L A N D O F L I G H T’’

The development of the Coranderrk community’s creative uses of the photographic archives can be understood in terms of both public processes and private practices. Ian Hunter and Murrundindi both state that they came to an appreciation of their Aboriginality late in life, having always

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been more involved in their father’s Scottish heritage despite their mother’s status in and knowledge of Aboriginal culture. When I asked how that happened, Ian positioned his personal experience within a developing public interest in Aboriginal culture, both as a source of ‘‘intrigue’’ or relief from ‘‘humdrum life,’’ and because its spirituality proves attractive in an increasingly nonspiritual world. At Coranderrk a New Age interest in the place’s spiritual dimension came into conflict with Aboriginal views when the non-Aboriginal owners sought to represent it as a new kind of tourist destination. Following the 1978 Picnic Day, Coranderrk played host to a number of events drawing on the site’s spiritual power, initially related to its Aboriginal history. In 1993 a leaflet announced that the property had opened to visitors and that Coranderrk is an ‘‘island of light,’’ a gateway to the Age of Aquarius, or an inter-dimensional door-way. Call it what you may, ‘‘Coranderrk’’ is a place where the 3rd, 4th and 5th dimensions meld as earth, sky and heaven. It has similar energies to Avalon and Glastonbury, and is a point of intersecting ley-lines or energy grids, some of which emanate from three main vortex’s on the property. ‘‘Coranderrk’’ is a place of attunement and healing for the body, mind and soul, a sanctuary and retreat for those looking for fun, entertainment, love, harmony and tranquillity.33 But these plans were halted by the actions of the Aboriginal community, which publicly expressed its ‘‘very real disquiet.’’ The local Mountain News reported that its concerns related to the host’s ‘‘great interest in an American-based spiritual group which practises trans-channelling or contact with the dead. And, in particular, Aboriginal groups are deeply concerned that Mrs Tan claims to have ‘contacted’ the great Aboriginal chief, Barak, who was an inspiration to white and black alike when he lived at Coranderrk station. Mrs Tan has taped the female voice who is said to be the medium or channeller of Barak.’’ A group of Aboriginal people provided a formal response to the newspaper, stating that The basis of Aboriginal culture is the Law (Aboriginal Law and the Land). The Law prescribes the responsibility of individuals within their own clans and tribal groups as well as in the wider community. An individual who acts without the endorsement of his or her clan or tribal group transgresses the Law. The promotion of Aboriginal culture as a

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commercial activity is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, sections of the Aboriginal community are opposed to it entirely. . . . The Aboriginal belief in totemism, spirituality and connectedness with the land is a concept of which many non-Aboriginals seek a deeper understanding and which many try to emulate. In Aboriginal culture it is not appropriate to speak the name of a deceased person. The concept of using a medium to channel a connection with the deceased is disturbing and most unacceptable to Aboriginal people. The statement concluded that local harmony should be addressed before global harmony, adding that ‘‘the promotion of Aboriginal culture and spirituality by non-Aboriginal people (especially if it is, in part at least, to generate income from a commercial activity) is not acceptable to Aboriginal people.’’ The Mountain News concluded by acknowledging that Barbara Tan owned the land and was legally free to pursue her plans, but pleaded with her not to do so for the sake of reconciliation.34 The Aboriginal statement grounded its authority in a notion of cultural difference, contrasting European with Aboriginal tradition. By creating a version of Aboriginality that opposed a collective structure of consensus to Tan’s individual rights, as well as by invoking traditional religious belief, the Aboriginal community asserted its control over Coranderrk’s representation on moral rather than legal grounds. This control encompassed cultural but also commercial rights over the station’s heritage and use of the property. The community’s success is bizarrely indicated by the complete absence of any reference to the property’s Aboriginal history when it was put up for sale in 1998. A large illustrated advertisement appearing in the local newspaper described it as ‘‘historic,’’ classified by the National Trust, and noted that it was ‘‘once the showplace of Victoria for overseas and interstate visitors. Dame Nellie Melba was a frequent visitor in bygone days, when Coranderrk was renowned for its hop-growing and won prizes at major exhibitions’’—yet no mention is made of its Aboriginal past, the basis for its significance in heritage terms.35 Aboriginal people also invoke notions of the sacred and ‘‘connectedness to land’’ in expressing Coranderrk’s significance: a 1993 tourist promotion recounts Murrundindi’s experience of seeing a cloud of mist moving from the cemetery down to the Yarra River and back while he was sitting beside a campfire one night. It passed close enough for him to see sev-

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eral figures of Aboriginal people walking along inside it, which reminded him of ‘‘how the first members of the Wurundjeri tribe came to Coranderrk, led across the Blacks’ Spur by their old chief, Simon Wonga, and his cousin, William Barak.’’ The feature concluded that ‘‘Coranderrk is a natural dreaming place, especially on a cool, misty morning sitting by the river and listening to the birds. You can almost hear the words of Kath Walker whispering through the branches of the trees: ‘We belong here. We are the people of the old ways.’ ’’ 36 The growing appeal of Aboriginal spirituality to white New Agers forms part of a discourse of primitivism that powerfully shapes current cultural politics, with sometimes dubious benefits for Aboriginal people. Andrew Lattas argues that nationalist discourses position Aboriginal people as primordial and ‘‘supremely spiritual beings,’’ part of an environment alien to whites, therefore denying the latter ‘‘a means of giving form to a spiritual sense of themselves.’’ This identity crisis has assigned a ‘‘redemptive function’’ to Aboriginal people, while ‘‘Aboriginal beliefs and practices are being ascribed a western sacred quality . . . which comes not so much from Aboriginal beliefs but more from the significance of spirituality for a western soul.’’ 37 As a result, mainstream Australian society’s increasing interest in indigenous culture has begun to find expression in a series of ‘‘mimetic shifts’’ as certain supposedly traditional Aboriginal ways are adopted, and expressions of the Aboriginal sacred, with its central attachment to land, spiral out beyond specific sites and claims.38 In southeastern Australia, one effect of the native title process, demanding demonstration of unbroken connection to place and culture, has been to ensure that such images of the sacred remain a key element of Aboriginal identity. The problem is that primitivist discourse defines Aboriginality according to a fixed set of attributes, bad as well as good, which are ultimately perceived as incommensurable with modernity. In practice, the effects of claims made within this framework on Aboriginal people are mixed, often exploiting Aboriginal beliefs without recompensing the community or considering their real social and political needs.39 During the 1980s the attempt by a group of Central Australian Arrente women to protect the Welatye-Therre site near Alice Springs resulted in some political gains but also in the loss of exclusivity and control.40 Where Western versions of indigenous culture mirror indigenous images, some suggest that Aboriginal demands for control constitute mere ‘‘political correctness,’’ as if considerCORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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ations of power could be divorced from analyses of meaning, or are somehow subordinate or irrelevant.41 Rather than assigning specific forms of Aboriginality a fixed status and assessing them as positive or negative, what is important is to understand ‘‘the play between essentialist and hybridized identities in a field of affirmations and contests.’’ Intellectual critique of indigenous representation is often ethnocentric and irrelevant, failing to see that specific political contexts determine the meanings and effect of such representations, and that these, too, are mutable and fluid.42

SPECIFICS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND MABO

Coranderrk descendants also emphasize factual accuracy and specific local links between people and place in articulating identity, prompting an explicit reliance on the photographic archive. The Hunters only gradually felt the need to be more accurate in their performances, and to use the photographs to define themselves after the Australian High Court’s 1992 Mabo judgment, which overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullius and opened the way for the acknowledgment of native title. Photographs play a part in establishing specific, accurate definitions of traditional Aboriginal identity and the continuous relationship of a definable group of people to a particular area of land. Wurundjeri elder Bill Nicholson Sr. speaks of the images as ‘‘factual proof, we are there, on the land.’’ 43 Ian Hunter notes that ‘‘when I show the photograph of my great-great grandmother, who was born, oh, only about five or six kilometres from here, five generations ago, and her father, and her father’s father’s father, for another 2,000 generations were born and lived in this area here, that’s when people suddenly realise ‘maybe there is something to native title’ . . . it’s all part of this getting across identity, and one of the things that’s evolved from these photographs.’’ 44 For non-Wurundjeri, the photographs also represent a continuing resource for establishing the presence of ancestors at Coranderrk. Many residents were moved around the state following the Aborigines Protection Act (1886), for example, and again during the early twentieth century, toward the end of the station’s life. Hence visual evidence of their life on the station has become very valuable to descendants. For those such as Judy Monk, who identifies as Taungurung because of her descent from greatgrandmother Lydia Edmonds, Coranderrk is significant to all descendants 230

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of the Kulin nation, and the continued residence at Healesville of families moved off the station in accordance with assimilation policies underlines that connection. She states that the photographs are a record of the different tribes and clans who passed through this property, during the Board of Aboriginal Protectorate, and it’s got that major historical significance for Aboriginal people, and for the connection to the land here. Not as native title, but as people who have strong connections to the land because of the relocation and the dispossession era of our history. And I suppose it’s that recognition then that yes, we did come through here, and we did suffer the same as other Indigenous groups, in the sense of some of the treatment by some of the managers, of our ancestors. Hence Monk defines the significance of her historical association on the basis of her ancestors’ experience of life on the station, and especially their oppression. She also argues that her ancestors’ traditional affiliation with the Taungurung tribe, within the Kulin nation, constitutes a compelling link to the place: her uncle ‘‘was Tommy Bamfield who was a spiritual leader and elder of the Taungurung. And I know that he was prominent within Coranderrk and also he in a sense was an advisor with Barak.’’ As Walter’s images show, there are traditional precedents for establishing alliances across clan or tribal boundaries. The photographs again prove a historical presence; they are objects that metonymically stand in for an otherwise more diffuse, longitudinal narrative of dispossession. And they have political effects: some feel that their strong historical link to Coranderrk has been damaged by the emphasis on blood descent from the Wurundjeri. For Monk, speaking before the hand-back in 1999 and before the title-holding body had been established, one implication of this historical significance, she believed, was ‘‘that the descendants of those families that resided here should have a say in what happens to the land here because of that connection. And if that sort of leads then on to the development of this place for the ilc or whoever is going to take title to the land, that the homestead itself becomes a monument and a museum, and recognising the Indigenous inhabitants of this land here.’’ She argues that the management committee has a responsibility ‘‘to the Aboriginal people who were dispossessed and were re-located here to Coranderrk’’ because ‘‘without their suffering this homestead would have CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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no significance in that effect for the traditional native title holders to lay claim to.’’ 45 Acknowledgment of historical, rather than precolonial or traditional, connections to Coranderrk caused the ilc to require the titleholding committee of management to include such a representative, who was Bill Jenkins until his death in 2002. Others do not express such overtly political desires, instead defining the value of their photographs primarily in terms of the personal and family memories they capture. Dorothy Peters is another Healesville resident whose mother, Daisy Davis, lived at Coranderrk; she treasures photographs of her taken at the station when she was a small child, showing her swimming in Badger’s Creek.46

CLUES

The photographs also establish a temporal relationship between the past and the present, creating a sense of scale. As Ian Hunter explains, for students, ‘‘when you talk five generations they don’t comprehend 150 years. In their minds, 150 ago was maybe when the Romans were about, riding in chariots, but when you actually show a photograph of the way people were dressed, and then relate it to, say, that Robert Wandin was born in the 1850s they understand the historical link.’’ Accounts that focus on William Barak’s life, for example, are often used this way. As Ian Hunter states, photographs help in establishing the fact that he was someone like these kids, that he’d never seen a white person. So . . . you’ve got a photograph to show him as an old man, you say, well, when he was your age to bring him backwards, he’d never seen a chook, or a goat. . . . And in his lifetime, he also sees the annihilation of his people. He’s there when the first whites come but also, he doesn’t die until 1903. And when you hear those sort of things, they’re really realising it . . . it’s helping the kids to realise a sense of time and a sense of reality of the people so the photographs are this great aid, yeah.47 As I have noted, this is how Barak and his life have been represented since the nineteenth century—as a link between an Aboriginal past and a shared present, invoking nostalgia for a precontact way of life that disappeared with his death. The photographs of Barak concretize this link; as ‘‘the real

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thing,’’ a slice of reality, they objectify and distance their object, Barak, locating him in another time and culture and allowing the viewer to physically enact the difference between past and present. At the same time, however, the tangibility of the photograph brings Barak into the viewer’s world, establishing a narrative and temporal continuity. The photographs also function as a source of information regarding the traditional Aboriginal way of life. For those learning about their heritage, they provide a wide range of valuable information. Mick Harding, for example, who works for Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, takes a great interest in photography, and since discovering his Aboriginality twenty years ago, he has studied the Coranderrk photographic archive, interested in the information the images reveal about nineteenth-century lifestyle, traditional culture, and individuals.48 The photographs reveal technological developments, for example, in housing, and in this capacity are also of use in teaching.They suggest that the traditional possum skin cloaks were turned inside out to show their incised decoration as a response to whites. Ian Hunter pointed out that while in the Walter photographs people wear possum skin cloaks with the incised skin turned out, he believes that it would have been ‘‘worn the other way out with the fur on the outside, because if it was raining, and you had the other skin on the outside, the skin would get wet. . . . But there’s also a lot of photographs you see where the Aboriginal people are just sitting down there, with their cloaks, with the fur, on the outside.’’ Hunter also first recognized his great-great-grandmother Boraat in one of the Sun Pictures of Victoria group portraits, resolving the disagreement between Aldo Massola, who stated that some of these people were Wurundjeri, and Carol Cooper, who had found no evidence for such a claim.49 Judy Monk has used the panoramas of Coranderrk, such as Kruger’s, within Aboriginal cultural awareness programs to show how the landscape used to appear, and how it changed. The images reveal details of the techniques of weaving, of boomerangs, and other artifacts. As she explains, ‘‘Even unwittingly, when these photographs were being taken, you can then look at specific forms of implements, and even have a closer look at baskets and other things that the women made and so forth, for how our people used those particular implements—quite apparent and different then, if you look at photographs, from the same era, of Central Australian

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people.’’ 50 As she notes, the photographer unintentionally preserved these clues contained in the images now taken up by descendants.

THE ARNOTTS BISCUIT TIN

The Hunters began to communicate their cultural heritage to the wider public in response to a widespread popular interest that generated professional opportunities. On a private level, it seems that Ian Hunter’s use of the photos to assert a kin-based identity developed out of his family’s use of photography. His mother Jessie Hunter, now passed away, remembered her grandmother Jemima Wandin’s home at Coranderrk being furnished with photographs on the walls, including a portrait of Jemima’s husband Robert Wandin in an oval frame, and a large photograph of ‘‘Tommy Wall, the last jump at Tarrawarra.’’ Her own home is the same, with family portraits thickly layered around her lounge room, ready personifications of her rich family memories (figure 87). Jessie had multiple copies of some images, and gave them to relatives and friends as gifts, a kind of family currency. Many, if not most, Australians, of course, share these practices. Photographs are a family record, and a means of establishing likeness, convergence, between generations; they define the family in outside eyes. As Ian Hunter says, ‘‘There was always a brownie box camera and wherever we were there was always someone taking photographs of what was going on with the family . . . mum’d bring photographs out to show people that this was the kids doing this or this was us when we were involved with the Scottish society or so forth, so that people would appreciate us as a family.’’ 51 The images were exchanged to flesh out family history and cement ties between family members—the genesis for using the images in comparable ways on a larger scale, in public. Wedding photographs have continued to hold importance. When Jessie and Colin Hunter were married, they spent their honeymoon in Healesville and commemorated the event with photographs, recording their relationship to a place special to them. More recently, Vicky Nicholson and Maurice Brown’s wedding was held at Coranderrk, where they have spent a lot of time camping, and a photograph showing the couple with ‘‘tribal elders’’ outside the manager’s residence appeared on the front page of the local paper.52 This pattern of private family use of photographs is widespread in Australian society generally, often referred to as keeping the 234

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87. Jessie Hunter in her home, Melbourne, 1998. Photo

by Jane Lydon.

images in the ‘‘Arnotts biscuit tin.’’ Judy Monk explains how she lost many photographs when the family home burned down, and how she has systematically collected archival images such as Kruger’s portraits, sent to her by the Museum Victoria, for example. She incorporates them into her genealogical research and explains: ‘‘I’m doing my family tree and I’m hoping to have photographs of all the members alongside their names to make a good presentation, whether it goes into a book form or whatever I don’t know but that’s the ultimate aim to have a photograph beside each of the family members.’’ Monk participates in regular family reunions and explains how ‘‘we’ve always had photo albums and we’ve always sat down and gone through photos and shared photos or got copies of photos that other family members hadn’t got, shared them around.’’ 53 Similarly, Vicky Nicholson, who has always taken a strong interest in photography, has many family porCORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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traits around her home.54 Bill Jenkins’s daughter, Ros Fogley, has an interest in the family history and likes to see what people looked like (‘‘Who’s who in the zoo’’).55 Such family albums trigger stories and give people a sense of connectedness to the past. Literary critic Subhash Jaireth says, ‘‘When I see my mother in a photograph, my own presentness becomes more real. I measure my time through her time.’’ 56 It is interesting to think about the symmetry between the original use of Walter’s 1866 portrait series, mounted in the Green family album, where doubtless it served to prompt stories and links between the Greens, but perhaps also with their Aboriginal friends, and its current incorporation by the subjects’ descendants into their own collections. Galeenabeek Cultural Centre operated between 1996 and 2001 and was curated by consultants through the Museum Victoria. It incorporated an extensive display of historical and newly commissioned portraits of the community, as well as material culture and a detailed historical account. Although it was executed by professional designers rather than community members, it focused cultural activities and jobs for local Aboriginal people. Its display of images was complemented by an informal notice board with old and new snapshots pinned to it in a changing record of community events and people. More recently, the permanent exhibition Koori Voices has opened at Melbourne Museum’s Bunjilaka Centre, exploring the experience of Victoria’s Aboriginal people since colonization and featuring huge, permeable walls comprising photographic portraits drawn from the archives mixed with new images of the present-day community. (Koori is the current designation for the Aboriginal people of Victoria.) Curator Tony Birch tells how visiting Kooris trace their genealogy through the images, leading down to the present; some even talk to the subjects, their family.57 This installation forms a major visual resource for Melbourne’s Koori community. The Aboriginal people of Coranderrk have undoubtedly always made use of photographs, whatever role they played in their production and despite their sometimes exploitative purpose. In the creative uses now being made of the nineteenth-century archive we can see continuities as well as newly emerged public ideas and practices. Consumption and manipulation of these visual representations have moved out from private family use into the public domain. 236

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Images of Coranderrk are tied to this place and its community, although their forms owe much to wider social and political currents. Over the past few decades, the Wurundjeri have drawn on a range of nontraditional oral, documentary, and anthropological sources to represent their culture and past. From the 1960s on, Diane Barwick and linguist Luise Hercus provided the community with the results of their work, the value of which is demonstrated by its continued use by the Aboriginal community today. The Museum Victoria’s staff has been diligent in supplying photographs to Aboriginal people across the state. Many Coranderrk descendants have been highly successful in creating representations of their Wurundjeri heritage for popular consumption. In these accounts, photographs originally produced within the colonial relationship have assumed a new purpose, for example, standing for ancestors who prove relationships between the past and the present. In producing these new representations through dialogue with whites (officials, anthropologists, historians, the public), the Wurundjeri are continuing a long tradition; the play of Aboriginal and white representations is characteristic of Coranderrk’s history, as at various historical moments it has suited Aboriginal people to appropriate, imitate, or acquiesce in white versions of their culture. The intersection of these white and Aboriginal systems of meaning, including the use of the family tree in photos, has been shaped by a new political power to assert cultural ownership and a new popular interest in Aboriginal culture.

CONTEMPORARY ABORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHY

How do the Coranderrk community’s uses of photographs fit into the wider context of Aboriginal people’s practice, as evidenced by the professional and academic domains? Coranderrk’s descendants contest the often exploitative objectives of colonial photography through a range of strategies, some shared with contemporary Aboriginal visual practice more broadly. Since the 1980s there has been a growing body of work by Aboriginal photographers and critics. Curator Kelly Gellatly locates its emergence within the documentary tradition, noting its sharp political edge, culminating in the 1988 bicentennial commemoration.58 One effect of this

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development has been to call into question the unequal nature of the relationship between photographer and subject that usually prevailed within colonial relations. Challenging the rhetorical stance of colonialism proves less a matter of content or the formal qualities of the image than an approach to production that is cooperative and collaborative; as Eric Michaels points out, ‘‘then at least the photographer has a choice of positions, to be behind or alongside the subject, rather than locked into frontal shots as a member of the advancing party.’’ 59 This was the goal of the After Two Hundred Years project, which attempted to rupture the ‘‘largely unbroken [colonial] visual rhetoric that has persisted to the present day.’’ Instead of showing Aboriginal people as exotic or romantic ‘‘noble savages,’’ or as passive victims of a superior culture, the project organizers decided to ‘‘address the subject-object dichotomy inherent in the act of photography itself . . . to initiate a process that would allow the subjects to become major players in the act of photography.’’ Their ‘‘collaborative documentary photography’’ sought to ‘‘give control of the image-making to the community members who were taking part.’’ Photographers were encouraged to see themselves as ‘‘recorders for those involved in the events photographed. It was a process that aimed for a form of co-authorship between photographer and subject, a dynamic interaction between the two actors.’’ The result is a vitality and exuberance that stands in marked contrast to many nineteenth-century studio portraits as people ‘‘interact with the photographer and with one another; they respond, challenge, laugh and perform for the camera.’’ By making the presence of the photographer apparent, and showing her or his role to be just one element in the image’s collaborative production, the Aboriginal communities involved in the project ‘‘subverted the authoritarianism of the lens: Each photograph may indeed carry the signature of its author, but as a group, they transcend authorship.’’ As in the case of the Coranderrk community, Aboriginal rhetoric becomes most clearly evident in the ‘‘idiom of the family album’’: produced without commercial intent, by insiders, the images are given meaning by their context, the memories they evoke, and the relationships they trace between individuals and generations.60 Since 1988, Aboriginal practitioners have taken more diverse paths toward exploring Aboriginal experience and identity, as well conducting a rigorous critique of colonial visual discourse. In 1993 Marcia Langton called 238

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for an ‘‘anti-colonialist cultural criticism of representation and visual art forms,’’ focusing on video and film that would try to ‘‘find ways to undermine the colonial hegemony’’ and tracing the increased involvement by Aboriginal people in film and video making since 1979, when Essie Coffey directed My Survival as an Aboriginal. For Langton, racism is not the central problem—rather, it is ‘‘the need to develop a body of knowledge on representation of Aboriginal people and their concerns in art, film, television and other media and a critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics, drawing from Aboriginal world views, from Western traditions and from history.’’ 61 One such perspective was the 1994 collection titled Racism, Representation, and Photography, showing how contemporary representations of Aboriginal people perpetuate their naturalization through stressing setting and a connection to land.62 A major goal of indigenous photographers such as Brenda Croft has been to produce images that challenge stereotypes such as the ‘‘romantic native of the land,’’ ‘‘the radical in the city,’’ or ‘‘the drunk.’’ 63 For example, Tracey Moffatt’s films and photographs explore postcolonial identity in subtle and ambivalent ways. Moffatt has become famous for her new, hybridized forms, as in her 1989 Something More series, where she presented herself in an Australian landscape, among a cast of vaguely familiar white trash characters, seeming to tell a mutable story of escape and recapture. Again, where the colonial studio portrait imposed the white photographer’s meanings on his or her decontextualized subject, Moffatt’s 1986 Some Lads series gave its young male subjects space to enjoy and perform for the camera.64 Moffatt explained that here she was responding to images of black Australian people she continually saw around her, usually produced within the ‘‘realist documentary mode usually reserved for the ‘ethnographic subject.’ . . . Here I encourage my subjects to enjoy the staring camera . . . to intentionally pose and show off.’’ 65 Moffatt is now based in New York and works in an international contemporary art context. She repudiates the essentializing label Aboriginal artist and states that her work is not political: I want to say that if people want to read my art that I’m making now from a political perspective then they are welcome. I just get a little exasperated because this reading usually comes from the ‘‘left’’ and they are most of the time ignoring how I strive for poetry and make statements

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about the human condition. They can’t see that I’m trying to play with form and be inventive. I think that the fact that I’m trying for a ‘‘universal’’ quality, not just ‘‘black Australian’’ is the reason why my work is getting attention.66 But the perceived relationship of her work to colonial visual discourse ensures that this disclaimer remains an apologetic footnote in art-historical commentary, as reviewers continue to reclaim her. Moffatt’s 1998 series Laudanum, shot at a colonial Sydney villa, depicts ‘‘the barely contained hysteria and swooning desire between a white colonial mistress and her Asian maid.’’ 67 I heard one viewer say disapprovingly, ‘‘But they never had maids at Elizabeth Bay House!’’ yet this aspect of her work accounts for much of the appeal of Moffatt’s re-creations: she conjures up a historical fantasy, achieving the immediacy and anachronism of the dream you had last night. In Moffatt’s vision of the Australian past, ambivalent, multiple subject positions undercut monolithic historical categories. Hence certain sequences within Moffatt’s work are formed in intimate relationship with colonialism, although she does not deal with nineteenth-century material, dreaming up her own instead.

THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE

More explicitly, a growing number of indigenous artists have attempted to reinscribe the colonial archive through recontextualization. Of course, many of these nineteenth-century images have a value to family members that has always existed, and this remains a primary role for such material—for example, the Museum Victoria and some local communities have mounted several exhibitions revealing its richness, such as the 1994 Daughters of a Dreaming.68 Similarly, the 1993 Brisbane exhibition Portraits of Our Elders showed that some photographs were explicitly produced for Aboriginal purposes, such as early-twentieth-century studio portraits; as curator Michael Aird noted, ‘‘The more recent photographs are obviously of paying customers with total control over the situation. They display the absolute confidence and dignity of people who have succeeded, who have earned the respect of the community.’’ 69 These have their parallels in the Fysh wedding photographs produced at Coranderrk, serving as statements of legitimacy for their Aboriginal

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subjects. As Aird notes of the Brisbane portraits, in the context of restrictions imposed on Queensland Aboriginal people following the series of so-called protection acts passed from 1897 onward, and especially of the control exerted over those resident on missions and reserves, ‘‘Aborigines felt a very real need to state their successes in the European community to ensure protection from the oppressive ‘protection’ policies.’’ The production of these images, of people in expensive clothes, ‘‘indicates a degree of success within the European economic system. At the same time, it tells the wider community that they were exempt from the Aboriginal legislations.’’ 70 In a more self-conscious and overtly political move, many colonial images are now often recontextualized in ways intended to counter earlier meanings. This is the idea that underlay the design of the 1997 Portraits of Oceania exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, presenting a series of portraits of indigenous people from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, originally taken with ethnographic or commercial intent by several different photographers. The exhibition was intended to recuperate their subjects’ ‘‘individuality and humanity.’’ 71 But this exhibition underlines the importance of contextualization: it could be argued that the photographs’ arrangement, in a single line and with little or no accompanying information, reproduced the original exploitation of their subjects by focusing attention on their naked flesh, reducing them to bodies, specimens of the category indigenous. No doubt the curators relied on a popular sensibility that has changed since the images were produced—a shared public awareness that naked black bodies do not necessarily signify other/servant/sexual object. But where the exhibition was intended to rehabilitate, in a society in which cultural politics are powerfully contested, inherited conventions continue to shape the viewer’s perceptions. Unless one bought the excellent catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, the lack of framing risked re-creating the subject-object relationship and reinscribing the images’ colonial meanings. For those who did read the catalogue essays, it appeared that the force of the subjects’ often angry or distressed expressions was expected to rupture the colonial visual code.

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E Y E TA K I N G

But how do we account for the power that many viewers feel emanates from colonial portraits? One reviewer of the Portraits of Oceania exhibition, for example, described the ‘‘sense of compressed rage, fear and impotence on many of the subjects’ faces [which] is continually disturbing.’’ 72 For Aboriginal viewers, this emotion can resonate with their own experiences of loss or exclusion. Aboriginal photographer Brenda Croft writes of the ‘‘inexplicably sad and immediate’’ gazes of Bunnitj and Larrakia people photographed by Paul Foelsche; several young women, she writes, ‘‘ ‘take my eye’ with their belligerence, their determined individuality, their anger resonating from their portraits. They are pissed off and I like them for it, these young warrior women.’’ The lack of information about these people is a source of pain to her: ‘‘A heady combination of anger and grief almost overwhelms me. I want to know who they were, where they were from, what became of them.’’ For Croft, the returned gaze of the photographic subject is powerfully disruptive, fighting back against the erasures of colonialism, and she argues that Their gaze subverts the officially sanctioned opinion that these people were members of a race, of many nations, on the verge of extinction. The joke is on whom? This same gaze, the same stance, the same resistance is echoed in images of Indigenous people from every place and of every time. The collective pain, anger, resignation, tired patience, sense of loss and displacement is reflected in contemporary ‘‘shots’’ of angry, urban Indigenous people and people of colour in their determination to continue resisting.73 The exploitative subject-object relationship characteristic of colonialism is here argued to be vulnerable to attack from within the image itself. The notion of the returned gaze originates with critics such as Ann Kaplan, who distinguishes between the gaze as an expression of desire for an imaginary other, and a mode of seeing that she terms the ‘‘look,’’ which rather connotes a process or relation.74 Kaplan argues that recognizing the subject’s gaze empowers the colonized by awarding them subjectivity, and interrogating white subjectivity; for Kaplan, such a look represents empowerment and control. For those seeking to recover indigenous subjectivity in the past, signs of 242

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dissent or simply another agenda at work in these overwhelmingly exploitative images are eagerly sought. But determinist reading strategies deny the historical inequalities and exploitation of colonial power relations, as well as the effects of cultural difference, in shaping ‘‘looking relations’’: traditionally in Aboriginal culture, for example, circumstances existed in which it was not polite to make direct eye contact—hence a direct gaze from an Aboriginal person might signify hostility and extreme social distance, without the implication of challenge or engagement. Looking relations are determined by historically and culturally contingent circumstances, and formal pictorial elements cannot be interpreted mechanically without addressing these specific contexts, both in an image’s production and in its subsequent consumption. Facial expression can be read according to various local conventions, concealing as much as it conveys, despite the beliefs of nineteenth-century physiognomists: as King Duncan notes in Macbeth, there is no reliable means of ‘‘reading’’ the face. Just as it has been conventional at times to assume that Michel Foucault’s panoptical gaze simply controlled and subordinated, more recently a substantial body of literature has shown the complexity of ‘‘mutual regard,’’ or interactive looking relations.75 Underlying a determinist looking strategy is a conceptualization of the cultural relationship as a fixed binary opposition, one term (the viewed) subordinate to the other (the viewer). While colonial photographs were indeed often structured by such a relationship, static, ahistorical interpretation precludes analysis of historical shifts in meaning or attitude, or acknowledgment of successful adaptation, communication, or alliances established by Aboriginal people across race lines.76 Power relations were enacted through complex and changing cultural schemes, producing specific representations according to contingent circumstance. Yet there are strategic advantages inherent in Croft’s suggestion that ‘‘Indigenous people from every place and of every time’’ share the same spirit of resistance to colonial exploitation, ‘‘bonded/banded together by our shared experiences of displacement.’’ 77 While this notion of a fixed Aboriginality might appear to risk effacing historical and cultural heterogeneity, confining Aboriginal people to a category opposed to white modernity, the effects of essentialism vary according to political context. Croft’s historical approach to the colonial archive as critic and curator must be understood in contrast to her own photographic practice. In her 1998 series CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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In My Father’s House she tells the intensely personal yet emblematic story of her father’s removal from his family as a child, and his subsequent reunion as an adult with his mother, just once, shortly before she died. She writes of her love for her family and her grief following the deaths of her father and brother, prompting a search for ‘‘that which I had missed . . . that which had long since vanished, not only my own family, but also the original peoples before me.’’ She says Aboriginal people who were taken away from their communities often travel vast distances in a subliminal, as well literal search for themselves and a place to belong. . . . This work is about chasing and catching those memories as they fall. Dad, Mum, little Brother, this is for you. You’re not looking to ‘‘document’’ in some scientific, linear, orderly, factual way where we came from, how we got here; you are uncovering these details, but also the gaps, the spaces in the shadows that facts don’t allow us to see, the mystery. Croft maps her father’s, and her own, experience of loss onto the wider damage experienced by most Aboriginal families as a result of assimilation policies—‘‘the stolen generations.’’ Her expression of the hurt and trauma of this private dislocation magnifies the longer-term dispossession effected by colonialism, bringing the distant historical injustices of colonialism into the present. These works are palimpsests of family snapshots, Croft’s own photographs of childhood home, and official images, including a eugenicist lineup of women grading from ‘‘white’’ to ‘‘black.’’ This image recurs, functioning like a brand or tattoo—for example, stamped across a photograph showing her father briefly reunited with his mother. In this work, titled She Called Him Son (figure 88), the conflation of historical (colonial, assimilationist) and family images, inscribed with remembered scraps of hearsay (‘‘they said she had given him away’’; ‘‘they told him that she was dead’’) summons up a tragic story of yearning and waste. Croft uses this technique of multiplicity and simultaneity to prompt other family narratives that illustrate widespread tales of discrimination. Some images in these montages are faded, barely visible, suggesting receding memory or temporal distance. This technique recalls Leah KingSmith’s popular Patterns of Connection series, where historical images of Kooris in mission garb are reflected over her own bush landscapes, assuming a ghostly, ethereal quality. Anne Marsh likens these essentializing 244

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88. Brenda Croft, She Called Him Son, 1998. Ilfachrome digital print. Reproduced from In My Father’s House, exhibition catalogue, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney 1998.

ghosts conjured up by King-Smith, which stress a New Agey spiritual relationship to the land, to the ‘‘magical,’’ ineffable qualities of photography celebrated most notably by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. In the present, they ‘‘perform as phantoms haunting the collective imagination,’’ showing Aboriginal people living on the missions in mimicry of European farmers and appealing to nostalgic, romantic conceptions of the indigenous.78 But Croft’s subjects are real, and their message unmistakably political: here, this visual doubling-up links different moments from the past, indicating past policy and its effects; the superimposed words pass judgment. From personal loss she constructs a pictorial metaphor for Aboriginal people’s historical loss of identity, land, and culture; her images constitute a kind of temporal synecdoche, where her present pain is amplified backwards to represent the injuries of assimilation sustained by a generation. Politically, this work of remembering and reconstruction fights back against the version of colonialism promulgated by the current, conservative Australian government, which has resisted acknowledgment of the harm caused Aboriginal people by past policy. The Australian public was shocked to learn of the practice of removing pale-skinned Aboriginal chilCORANDERRK REAPPEARS

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dren from their families in pursuit of the goal of assimilation, causing longterm damage to individuals and families across the country. Following the release of the report Bringing Them Home in 1997, the minister for Aboriginal affairs rejected its findings, stating that many indigenous people had in fact benefited from assimilationism. In April 2000 he rejected the term stolen generations to describe this policy because only 10 percent of children were removed—a semantic equivocation that neglects the policy’s wider effects.79 Where Aboriginal and official views are so clearly at odds, Croft’s grief and search for her past necessarily foregrounds absence. For Croft, as for many Aboriginal people, the loss caused by assimilation constitutes the central, undeniable issue: where context for these images is lacking and their subjects’ identities are lost, where these gaps form part of a larger story of dispossession and bereavement, Croft has chosen to reach out past what ‘‘finally is absent.’’ 80 Perhaps we can see Croft’s return to her parents’, and her own, childhood home as motivated by a desire to reenact and recuperate, to ‘‘restitute life and worth.’’ Like Sally Morgan’s best-selling autobiography, My Place, Croft’s images are testimony of trauma. Morgan’s grandmother teaches ‘‘that there is no possible going home, that there are no authentic natives, that the past is not something to celebrate,’’ but her granddaughter does not listen, and her history is recuperative, her testimony written in a ‘‘spirit of reconciliation, recovery and healing.’’ 81 Croft’s conflation of a personal and a wider indigenous bereavement is paralleled by her conflation of present and past in approaching the colonial archive. As an Aboriginal person searching for ‘‘the spaces in the shadows that facts don’t allow us to see,’’ she experiences these images as ‘‘fragile ‘mirrors,’ reflecting every indigenous person who views them’’; memories of her father project themselves, ‘‘shadow-like,’’ behind all nineteenthcentury portraits.82 Intellectual critique that assesses such testimonies on historiographic grounds as inaccurate or essentializing seems, as Eric Michaels suggests, ‘‘epistemologically sleazy.’’ 83 Like the Coranderrk residents who have reclaimed nineteenth-century images, Croft searches for her own identity, not that of her ancestors. t

In the southeast of Australia, where the effects of dispossession have been most severe, images offer one of the most tangible surviving links with 246

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the Aboriginal past. As a result, since the 1960s, Aboriginal people across the country have been demanding control over their visual representation with increasing force, creating new images that subvert an exploitative subject-object relationship or that challenge restrictive stereotypes. Some, like Moffatt and King-Smith, draw on the colonial archive in techniques of reinscription or parody to create new hybrid or elemental identities. Practitioners such as Croft attempt to reverse historical loss by seeking within the images a spirit that resonates with present-day political force. For the descendants of indigenous people confined on Victoria’s Aboriginal reserves during the nineteenth century, the photographic archive has assumed great relevance in current debates over identity and representation. Rather than seeing the colonial camera as an inevitable tool of exploitation, they have developed strategies of reading that yield more complex meanings, as the practice of the Coranderrk community shows. For their descendants, the subjects of these photographs embody vivid historical personalities: the figure of Barak in particular has come to assume tremendous symbolic power as leader and cultural mediator. Their creative uses of these historical images—as in their family-oriented emphasis on specific kinship ties—have given them new meanings, blurring the apparent clarity and realism of the colonial vision. In the growing importance of the Coranderrk archive we are seeing the emergence of new ways of understanding photographic images, ways that try to counter the decontextualizing, abstracted mode of vision characteristic of colonial photography, reversing the colonial flow of specimen collecting, and bringing their subjects to life again.

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EPILOGUE

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Victoria’s Aboriginal reserves were predicated on a notion of difference between black and white, and the camera was deployed in white attempts to efface, chart, or exaggerate this divide. Despite invasion and dispossession, places like Coranderrk became refuges for the survivors, and its remarkable history of political struggle has implications for our interpretation of the very large number of images of the station produced during its operation—the most substantial body of nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury photographs from an Australian site.The Aboriginal reserves constituted places of cross-cultural exchange, but white perceptions of culture and place were brought into sharp focus through the lens of the camera, in representations that became increasingly stereotypical during the nineteenth century. An ideal of the Aboriginal stations established during the early 1860s in Victoria was a panoptical apparatus characterized by the inculcation of work discipline and self-mastery, embodied in an ordered physical environment and monitored through its appearance and the inmates’ demeanor. Within this schema, photography could act as a tool of surveillance, a refined form of the impulse to know and control. Yet the Coranderrk community’s collaborative and consensual origins enabled the persistence of traditional social forms, as well as the adoption of new customs ranging from Christianity and expressions of political protest to literacy and photography. In the complex intersection of these two visual regimes, we can

perceive a contestation and ambivalence that configures the colonial relationship, revealing that at a fundamental level, the residents’ participation in the photographic performance shaped its outcomes. Acknowledgment of an Aboriginal role in producing photographs of Coranderrk does not, however, deny these images’ power to facilitate the colonists’ management of indigenous people. The Victorian government’s role in commissioning photographic records of Coranderrk emerges as a significant factor in shaping this visual language, as the Board periodically turned to the medium as an effective means of knowing and controlling its charges. The resulting images circulated within a range of increasingly distant contexts, their relationship to Coranderrk realities diminishing as they were called on to create ‘‘truths’’ about the Aboriginal race as a whole. This systematic, if shifting, discourse enacts the colonial relationship, clearly reflecting white concerns and attitudes: we can see how, initially, a sympathetic curiosity existed concerning the changing lifestyle of the Kulin and the success of what was called ‘‘this civilising experiment’’; we can understand European satisfaction at what was perceived to be successful mimicry, evaluated according to outward appearance and performances such as a solemn bearing in church, wearing one’s Sunday best, or tidy domesticity. In Charles Walter’s 1860s views and portraits, we can also sense a mutual regard, preserved in the residents’ performative engagement with the camera, as in the collaborative Man Climbing a Tree, the Kulin-inspired Setting Off for the Acheron, or the intimate regard between photographer and the Aboriginal subjects in his powerful portrait series. Yet the medium’s open-endedness enabled these images to be used in a range of different contexts that gave them other meanings; as ‘‘correct portraits’’ they represented facts about a race, creating a narrative of displacement and extinction that determined how Aboriginal people were governed. Swept into the currents of European science, photographic portraits such as Walter’s, Giglioli’s, Kruger’s, and Charnay’s became data used in developing contemporary notions of biological difference and fixity, equating Aboriginal people with humankind’s origins. These series were viewed across the Western world, mounted in exhibition displays, and classified among other ethnographic data within museum collections. The photographs were used locallyas well. Despite the Board’s attempts to discipline the station residents, their sophisticated awareness of the political importance of playing to a general white audience enabled their EPILOGUE

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effective contestation of this regime and, especially, their opposition to the planned closure of the station during the 1870s. The performative dimensions of this rebellion emerge through the range of public representations produced at this time, including newspaper accounts, arguments made in European political forums, and encounters between Aboriginal residents and white visitors to the station: Punch’s ‘‘miserable mia mia’’ countered Board propaganda such as visitors’ books, a landscaping program, and Kruger’s photographs. Kruger’s earliest views of the station registered his perceptions of harmonious transformation; in a singular moment of acknowledgment, some even express a modernist nostalgia for an idyllic way of life and a perceived Aboriginal harmony with nature. Kruger’s later portraits, in arguing for the efficient management of the station by the Board, showed the ‘‘civilized,’’ well-dressed residents, whose ‘‘bearing and demeanour form[ed] a contrast with those of the natives on all other stations,’’ and contrasted with images of those residents still following a traditional way of life. Links between Board policy, contemporary political struggle, and larger ideas about the nature of Aboriginal people also shaped Kruger’s second 1883 series, which sought to reveal biological differences between so-called ‘‘full-blooded’’ and ‘‘half-caste’’ people as a basis for assimilation and as a means of controlling this seemingly intractable community. During these decades, Kruger’s images also became a means of popularizing ideas about Aboriginal people, construing difference as inferiority or the grotesque. Until assimilationism was implemented in the mid-1880s, the Board had unsuccessfully sought to control the unruly residents and isolate them from a potentially subversive white audience. Once control was achieved, however, Coranderrk became a showplace where the remaining ‘‘fullblooded’’ residents were preserved as the relics of a dying race. Nostalgic souvenirs were produced—such as stereotypical postcards bearing signs of Aboriginality, performances of an exotic other that circulated within an emerging nationalist discourse—and were subsumed into a distinctive local identity. In showing compliant, transformed subjects, they reassured white society about the domestic status of Aboriginal people. Yet Aboriginal people had come to share certain values with the wider community, for example in celebrating marriages with full material pomp and circumstance. After the station closed in the early twentieth century, non-Aboriginal 250

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society tried to pretend that the Aboriginal people of Victoria had disappeared. Memorials were raised to Coranderrk, implicit epitaphs reading ‘‘rest in peace.’’ Aboriginal people, however, continued to survive and flourish, leading lives often anchored to traditional country and places of living memory and significance such as the former reserves and missions. As political currents shifted, indigenous experience became an important aspect of national identity, and Victoria’s Aboriginal people began to be seen with fresh eyes. Today Aboriginal people represent themselves, drawing on the mimetic visual discourse inherited from the past to create new ways of asserting their presence in Australian society. Continuities between nineteenth-century and modern representations of Aboriginality point to photography’s capacity to create and condense meanings of enduring significance. In a nation wracked by uncertainty about its identity, and especially about the status of its indigenous peoples, photographs still speak eloquently of oppression, but also of collaboration and intimacy.

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NOTES

t

P R E FA C E

1 Illustrated London News, 26 January 1850, 53. Crombie, ‘‘Australia Felix’’; Crombie, ‘‘The Sorcerer’s Machine.’’ 2 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 9–15. 3 The quotation is taken from William Thomas’s Quarterly Report of November 1844, qtd. on 60. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria; Barwick, ‘‘A Little More Than Kin,’’ 27–38; Rowley, Destruction of Aboriginal Society, 53–63. 4 Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines, iv. 5 Barwick, ‘‘A Little More Than Kin,’’ 73–74. 6 Parker, ‘‘The Aborigines of Australia,’’ 28. 7 Qtd. in Walker, Come Wind, Come Weather, 212. I N T R O D U C T I O N : C O L O N I A L I S M , P H O T O G R A P H Y, M I M E S I S

1 Imperial College London, Special Collections, Huxley Manuscripts, vol. 15, Notes and Correspondence, Anthropology, vol. 1, f. 117, copy, letter from Robert Brough Smyth to Chief Secretary, 17 May 1870, Office of the Central Board for Aborigines, Melbourne. Difficulties of photographing naked natives—will only photograph willing subjects; his own forthcoming book on Aborigines; etc. 2 Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria. 3 Charnay, ‘‘Rapports sur une mission,’’ 148–49. The Musée de l’Homme in Paris today holds thirty-nine images: accession numbers 1998-14020-29 and 14038-39. 4 Ibid., 148.

5 All quotations from Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 14–19. See also Jay, Downcast Eyes, 8; Bryson, Vision and Painting, 106–7. 6 See, for example, Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians; Snyder, ‘‘Territorial Photography.’’ 7 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170–71. 8 Ryan, Picturing Empire; Ryan, Cartographic Eye. 9 Faris, Navajo and Photography, 11–12, 33–34. 10 Poignant, ‘‘The Making of Professional ‘Savages,’ ’’ 56. 11 Wright, ‘‘Supple Bodies,’’ 164. 12 See, for example, Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity; Smith, American Archives; Grimshaw, Ethnographer’s Eye. 13 Tagg, Burden of Representation, 11. 14 A classic example is Alloula, Colonial Harem. 15 Batchen, Burning with Desire, 117. 16 Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians; Pinney, ‘‘The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography’’; Pinney, ‘‘Underneath the Banyan Tree.’’ 17 Bryson, ‘‘Art in Context.’’ 18 Jay, ‘‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’’; See, for example, Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 57–80. 19 Holmes, ‘‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,’’ 75. 20 Russell, Savage Imaginings, 38–72. See also Edwards, Raw Histories, 32–40. 21 Benjamin, ‘‘A Short History of Photography,’’ 203. 22 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 25. See also Bate, ‘‘Photography and the Colonial Vision.’’ 23 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 86. 24 Young, White Mythologies, 148. 25 Parry, ‘‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,’’ 29. 26 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 67. 27 Merlan, Caging the Rainbow, 166–80. 28 Binney and Chaplin, ‘‘Taking the Photographs Home’’; City Group, ‘‘Photographs as a Meeting Place,’’ 5. 29 Oguide, ‘‘Photography and the Substance of the Image’’; Sprague, ‘‘Yoruba Photography.’’ 30 Pinney, ‘‘Piercing the Skin of the Idol.’’ 31 Pinney, ‘‘Notes from the Surface of the Image.’’ See also Batchen, Each Wild Idea. 32 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xiii–xiv. 33 Ibid. 34 For example, see Haebich, For Their Own Good. 35 See, for example, Orser, ‘‘Toward a Theory of Power for Historical Archaeology’’; Leone, ‘‘Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archaeology.’’ 36 Attwood, Making of the Aborigines, 7–19. 254

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

37 Ibid., 29–31. 38 Rowse, After Mabo, 34–41. See also Morris, ‘‘Dhan-gadi Resistance to Assimilation’’; Read, A Hundred Years War, 114; L’Oste-Brown and Godwin, Living under the Act. 39 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Fourth Report, 5. 40 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Fifth Report, 4. 41 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Sixth Report, appendix 2, ‘‘Report of Brough Smyth.’’ 42 Howitt, ‘‘The Kulin Tribe,’’ Howitt Papers, 25–27; Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 118–19 n. 40. 43 Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, 352, 177. 44 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Sixth Report, appendix 2, ‘‘Report of Brough Smyth.’’ 45 naa, crs b312, item 9, 28 July 1865. See also Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, 81–88. 46 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 136. 47 Heller, ‘‘The Power of Shame,’’ 59. 48 Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, 86. 49 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 131. 50 Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, 87. 51 Ibid., appendix 1, 7. 52 Fels, Good Men and True, 30; Byrne, ‘‘Deep Nation,’’ 86. 53 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Seventh Report, 11, 14. 54 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 98. 55 Ibid., 114. 56 Report of the Royal Commission on the Aborigines, 78. 57 Ibid., x–xi. 58 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 9, 13, 17. 59 Ibid., 115. 60 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 163. 61 Scott, ‘‘Experience’’; Hall, ‘‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’’; Bhabha, Location of Culture, 2. 62 Dow’s report, 3 July 1878, qtd. in Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 163. 63 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights. 64 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 165. 65 50 Victoriae, no. 907 (1886), qtd. in Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 197. 66 Barwick, ‘‘A Little More Than Kin,’’ 59–60, 100–43. 67 Trigger, ‘‘Blackfellas and Whitefellas.’’ 68 naa, crs b313, item 204, 13 March, 1883. 69 Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, 105. 70 naa, crs b312, item 9, 28 July 1863; Report on the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, x. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

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71 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Tenth Report, 10. 72 Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, x–xi. 73 Rose, Nourishing Terrains; Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human; Morphy, ‘‘Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past.’’ 74 Watson, Piercing the Ground, 46. 75 Morphy, ‘‘Inner Landscapes’’; Morphy, Ancestral Connections, 75–99; Taylor, Seeing the Inside. 76 Langton ‘‘Well, I heard It on the Radio,’’ 9; Sutton, ‘‘Personal Power.’’ 77 Evans and Wilkins, Knowing Ear, 37. 78 Hansen and Hansen, Pintupi/Luritja Dictionary, iii. 79 Walsh, ‘‘Conversational Styles and Intercultural Communication’’; Hallam, ‘‘A View from the Other Side of the Western Frontier’’; Trigger, ‘‘Blackfellas and Whitefellas.’’ 80 Hallam, ‘‘A View from the Other Side of the Western Frontier’’; White ‘‘Birth and Death of a Ceremony,’’ 35. There are many instances of the role of performance in early encounters with whites. See, for example, Hordern, Mariners Are Warned! 163–69; Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers. 81 Tamisari, ‘‘Body, Vision, and Movement.’’ 82 slv, A. W. Howitt Papers, ms 9356, 57, qtd. in Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 18. 83 Michaels, Aboriginal Invention of Television, 63–65. 84 T. L. Mitchell, qtd. in Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, 175. 85 Ibid., 171. 86 Michaels, Aboriginal Invention of Television, 61. 87 Carter, Living in a New Country, 161–65. 88 As indicated, for example, in an account that appeared in the Argus, 1 September 1876, 7. 89 Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, xliii. 90 Trial at Bar vol. 6, 106; vol. 5, 222. 91 Qtd. in Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, 171. 92 See, for example, Cooper, ‘‘Traditional Visual Culture in South-East Australia.’’ 93 Matthews, An Appeal on Behalf of the Australian Aboriginals. 94 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 136. 1

‘‘T H I S C I V I L I S I N G E X P E R I M E N T’’

1 Simon Wonga, Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 13. 2 ‘‘The Aboriginal Settlement at Coranderrk,’’ Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865, 9. See, for example, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 24 March 1866; Australian News for Home Readers, 25 August 1865; Illustrated Australian News, 25 September 1865, 1, 10; Illustrated Australian News, 11 June 1866, 8.

256

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

3 Newton, Shades of Light, 50; Crombie, Victorian Views, 1; Gaskins, ‘‘Walter, Carl’’; Gillbank, ‘‘Charles Walter.’’ 4 Illustrated Australian News, 10 October 1866. Walter used albumen silver, available from c. 1858 and the most common form of print between 1857 and 1895. In March 1868 an article accompanying an image of Victoria’s Niagara Falls described how he ‘‘scrambled for days over rocks and ravines, through tangled undergrowth and swollen creeks, in order to get the nearest and best views.’’ One important outcome of his work was said to be ‘‘to direct lovers of nature to places hitherto unknown, where they will be able to gratify their admiration to the full.’’ Illustrated Australian News, 3 March 1868. 5 Illustrated Australian News, 31 December 1873, 212. 6 ‘‘A Bush Photo,’’ Australasian Sketcher, 18 April 1874, 6; Gaskins, ‘‘Walter, Carl.’’ 7 Illustrated Australian News, 7 August 1869, 160. 8 Report of Board inspection on 22 July 1865, in Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Fifth Report, 4. 9 Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865; quote from ‘‘Country Sketches: The Blackfellows’ Home,’’ Australasian (Melbourne), 5 May 1866, 135. 10 Reverend Hamilton’s evidence to Royal Commission on the Aborigines, 23; Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Fifth Report, 5. 11 Attwood, Making of the Aborigines, 89. 12 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 66–67. 13 Illustrated Melbourne Post, 18 June 1863. 14 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Third Report, 11. 15 Despatches from Duke of Newcastle to Governor Sir Charles Darling, 18 September 1863 and 17 November 1863, reprinted in Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Third Report, appendix 6. 16 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Third Report, 12 17 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 23–24. 18 Ellen makes three archival appearances: in the newspaper engraving reproduced in the Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865; in the aauc album; and attached to Walter’s letter to the commissioners of 8 May 1866, prov, vprs 927, unit 3. 19 Rowse, After Mabo, 13–14. 20 Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 146. 21 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 66. 22 Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 103. 23 Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, 15. 24 Barthes, ‘‘The Photographic Message,’’ 26. 25 Partos, ‘‘The Construction of Representation,’’ 101–3. The Ramahyuck engraving appeared in the Illustrated Australian News, 1 January 1869. 26 The Reverend R. Hamilton, of Fitzroy, served as the newspaper’s informant: Illustrated Australian News, 25 August 1865. NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

257

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, x. Morrison, ‘‘Reading Victoria’s Newspapers,’’ 136–38. Dowling, ‘‘Aborigines of Australia under Civilisation,’’ 36–38. Age, 17 May 1869, 2. Attwood, ‘‘Space and Time at Ramahyuck,’’ 10. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 74. Massola, Coranderrk, 7; Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, First Report, 1; Fels, Report on Some Aspects of the History of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station. Gen. 45:10; Exod. 8:22, 9:26. Also see Metzger and Coogan, Oxford Companion to the Bible, 619–20. Thomas to Brough Smyth, 20 July 1860, naa, crs b312, item 3, 6/912. Curthoys, ‘‘Whose Home,’’ 32. Binney and Chaplin, ‘‘Taking the Photographs Home,’’ 437, fig. 7. Edwards, Raw Histories, 162; Davies and Stanbury, Mechanical Eye in Australia, 78–79. Poignant, ‘‘Ryko’s Photographs of the ‘Fort Dundas Riot,’ ’’ 32. Tamisari, ‘‘Body, Vision, and Movement,’’ 249–70. Michaels, Aboriginal Invention of Television, 48. Quote from Cooper, ‘‘Traditional Visual Culture in South-East Australia,’’ 105– 7. See also Morphy, Aboriginal Art, 355–68; Cooper, ‘‘Art of Temperate Southeast Australia.’’ Cooper, ‘‘Remembering Barak,’’ 15–38. Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, 170. Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, 19. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 1987. Thomas, ‘‘The Beautiful and the Damned.’’ ‘‘The ‘Peculiar Institution’ Illustrated,’’ Weekly Review and Christian Times, 17 October 1863, 7. See also Jenkins, ‘‘The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa.’’

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

2

SCIENCE AND VISUALITY

1 slv, h17247, Exhibition Commissioners’ Letterbook, ‘‘Intercolonial Exhibition 1866–7,’’ 85. 2 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, 9–10. 3 prov, vprs 927, unit 3, Notes and Letters, Oct–Nov 1866. 4 University of Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, Album prm.al.56, Photograph Collection. 5 The second list includes only the eighty so-called ‘‘full bloods.’’ Photograph Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. These two lists appear to have been sent to the Pitt Rivers Museum, but copies are also accessible through the Museum Victoria’s files. 258

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

6 Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, 92–93. 7 Photograph Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 8 Spencer, ‘‘Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry.’’ 9 Edwards, ‘‘Photographic ‘Types.’’ 10 Huxley, ‘‘Miscellanea,’’ 513. 11 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia, 102. 12 Hayes, ‘‘London, Paris, Philadelphia . . . .’’ Following Barry’s resignation the Australasian could not ‘‘help stigmatising this hasty proceeding as a most ungraceful exhibition of ill-temper and bad taste.’’ Australasian, 6 October 1866. A week later, the ‘‘excitable knight’’ was said to have arranged ‘‘a sort of private opening on his own account,’’ having ‘‘rendered himself sufficiently ridiculous by his petulant and ill-timed resignation of the presidency of the commission, and the ungraceful—to say the least of it—and persistent manner in which he has aired his own importance at the expense of his colleagues and the public.’’ Australasian, 13 October 1866. Barry does not appear in subsequent reports on the exhibition. 13 Ryan, Redmond Barry, 19–20. 14 Quote from ibid., 39; see also Smith, ‘‘Sir Redmond Barry,’’ 16; slv, Redmond Barry Papers, ‘‘Unpublished biography,’’ 603/1, 12. See also slv, Redmond Barry Papers, ‘‘Notes on the Language of the Aborigines,’’ 1866, 602/2. 15 Barry, ‘‘Inaugural Address,’’ 5–6. 16 Ibid. 17 See, for example, Rupke, Richard Owen. 18 Moyal, ‘‘A Bright and Savage Land,’’ 144–47. 19 Australasian, 4 August 1866; see also Australasian, 20 October 1866. 20 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 47–50. 21 Barry had first proposed the casts in 1861, so Hayes suggests he originally intended them for the London 1862 exhibition, but that it was not until 1866 that the casts were prepared: slv, h17247, Exhibition Commissioners’ Letterbook, fb6, 93, 5 April 1861; and 162, 27 August 1861. However, a newspaper comment reading that ‘‘it was Simon who addressed Sir Henry Barkly in the Exhibition Building, on the day of the levee, when the address and presents from the blacks were sent to England, on the occasion of the marriage of the Prince of Wales. A cast of his head was sent to the exhibition in London,’’ suggests that Summers had begun the project earlier, presumably visiting Wonga at his camp at Yering prior to the establishment of Coranderrk. Illustrated Australian News, 8 August 1865. 22 Downer, ‘‘Noble Savages or Ourselves Writ Strange,’’ 27. 23 Australasian, 21 July 1866. 24 Turnbull, ‘‘ ‘To What Strange Uses’ ’’; Petrow, ‘‘The Last Man.’’

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

259

25 Downer, ‘‘Noble Savages or Ourselves Writ Strange’’; Bonyhady, Burke and Wills, 195–96; Russell, ‘‘ ‘Well nigh impossible to describe.’ ’’ 26 Herschel, Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry, iii. 27 Ibid., 440–41. 28 slv, h17247, Exhibition Commissioners’ Letterbook, 93, 162. 29 Galbally, and Inglis, First Collections. 30 Commission Impériale, Exposition Universelle de 1867 à Paris, 322. 31 Downer, ‘‘Charles Summers and the Australian Aborigines’’; Downer, ‘‘Noble Savages or Ourselves Writ Large,’’ 27–29. 32 Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 203. 33 prov, vprs 927, unit 3, Exhibition Notes and Correspondence. 34 Vocabulary of Dialects Spoken by Aboriginal Natives of Australia; prov, vprs 4366, unit 3. 35 Victorian Exhibition, Catalogue of the Victorian Exhibition, 7. 36 Hayes, ‘‘London, Paris, Philadelphia . . . ,’’ 3. 37 List of awards, Argus Supplement, 14 February 1867, 2; slv, Newspaper cuttings ms slv 13/8/99, 12900 ms Folio Intercolonial Exhibition; Poignant, ‘‘Surveying the Field of View’’; Rae-Ellis, ‘‘The Representation of Trucanini.’’ 38 Çelik and Kinney, ‘‘Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles’’; also see Russell, ‘‘ ‘Well Nigh Impossible to Describe.’ ’’ 39 Quotation from Bennett, ‘‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’’ 59, 63, 79; see also Davison, ‘‘Festivals of Nationhood,’’ 158. 40 Partos, ‘‘The Construction of Representation,’’ 60. 41 The Flower Collection was transferred to Pitt Rivers Museum in the early 1880s from the University Museum. Yet it appears that although the presence of the album had been noted, it was never properly accessioned and therefore probably ‘‘drifted off ’’ to the Department of Human Anatomy, housed in the University Museum building (to which the Pitt Rivers Museum was also attached). It reentered the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1945 (accessioned as 1945.5.96). Pitt Rivers Museum, Photograph Collections, catalogue details; Elizabeth Edwards, e-mail correspondence with the author, 25 June 1999. 42 Bennett, ‘‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’’ 79; Russell, Savage Imaginings, 38–72; Morphy, ‘‘The Original Australians and the Evolution of Anthropology.’’ 43 Elizabeth Edwards, e-mail correspondence with the author, 25 June 1999. 44 Gillbank, ‘‘Charles Walter.’’ 45 aiatsis, Barrett, Russian Resources for Australian Aboriginal Studies, 14–21. 46 Objects from the 1867 exhibition subsequently formed the Dashkov Ethnographic Museum and are now part of the Moscow Public and Rumiantsev Museum. aiatsis, Barrett, Russian Resources for Australian Aboriginal Studies, 14–21; aiatsis, Barrett, Russian Contributions to Victorian Aboriginal Studies, 10–15. 47 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Fourth Report, 5. 48 Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences, Bulletin 41, no. 4 (1868): 111; and 260

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

49

50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 3

Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences, Bulletin 42, no. 2 (1869): 17, both qtd. in Barrett, Russian Contributions to Victorian Aboriginal Studies, 10. The accompanying catalogue noted that section 4, on photography, displayed these portraits on board number 17 and, puzzlingly, that they were donated by noted Warsaw photographer Ivan Mieczkowski, titled Native Types of the Colony of Victoria (Australia). Antropologicheskaia Vystavka 1879 goda: Opisania predmator (1879), 4:10, qtd. in Barrett, Russian Contributions to Victorian Aboriginal Studies, 10–20. Perhaps Mieczkowski donated another set? AlsoWomen Weaving Baskets; Girls of the Tambo Tribe; Fisherwomen on Lake Tyers; A Camp of the Tambo Tribe in Gippsland; Capital of the Gippsland Chief, Glengarry Tribe; Divine Service in a Gippsland Church (Ramma-hanga). Giglioli, Note intorno, 774. The translation was provided by a National Library of Australia typescript; I thank Mary Eagle for sharing this manuscript with me. Massola, Coranderrk, opposite 49. There may be more material in the Museo Nazionale di Antropologia e Etnologia, Florence, Italy, but my inquiries have brought no results. Giglioli, Note intorno, 777. First published in his I Tasmaniai cenni storici ed etnologici: Di un popolo estinto (1871); Giglioli, Un viaggio intorno al globo, 795. Turnbull, ‘‘ ‘To What Strange Uses,’ ’’ 249. Downer, ‘‘Noble Savages or Ourselves Writ Strange,’’ 27. prov, vprs 927, unit 3, Barry to Summers, 10 November 1868. prov, vprs 4366, unit 2/374-569, Barry to Treasurer, 15 May 1867. Quatrefages, Human Species; Hamy and Quatrefages, Crania Ethnica. For example, a translation and summary of Quatrefages’s ‘‘Craniologie des races australiennes’’ was presented by Ralph Tate to the Royal Society of South Australia: ‘‘Ordinary Meeting, September 21, 1880,’’ Royal Society of South Australia Transactions and Proceedings and Report, 3:xxx. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 55. Reverend Hamilton’s History of the Presbyterian Church, qtd. in ibid., 71 n. 4. Giglioli, Note intorno, 778–84. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 25. Cooper, ‘‘Traditional Visual Culture in South-East Australia,’’ 93. TIME TRAPS

1 Fox, ‘‘Kruger, Johan Friedrich Carl (Fred).’’ 2 Croft, ‘‘Laying Ghosts to Rest,’’ 13; also see Poignant, ‘‘Surveying the Field of View,’’ 54. 3 Argus, 24 April 1876. 4 Mosely, Notes by a Naturalist, 262. 5 Illustrated Australian News, 1 January 1878, 10. NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

261

6 Crombie, Victorian Views, 4. 7 Illustrated Australian News, 18 April 1876, 52. See also the Museum Victoria’s image (accession mv xp 1932), which shows Hop Gardens at Coranderrk, a similar scene to accession xp 1933. 8 Illustrated Australian News, 31 March 1886. 9 Wood, Paradise Lost; Payne, Toil and Plenty, 27–28. 10 Quotation from Davison, ‘‘Gold-Rush Melbourne’’; Goodman, ‘‘Making an Edgier History of Gold’’; Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne. 11 Goodman, Gold Seeking, 105–48. 12 See, for example Tanjil, Our Trip to Gippsland Lakes and Rivers. 13 ‘‘Hop Picking in Gipps Land,’’ Illustrated Australian News, 8 August 1872, 201–2. 14 ‘‘The Hop Picker,’’ Illustrated Australian News, 31 March 1886, 1. 15 James, ‘‘Converting Half-Castes into Aborigines,’’ 158–65; James, Argus, 20 March 1886; Argus, 27 March 1886; James, ‘‘A Peep at the ‘Blacks.’ ’’ 16 Eliot, ‘‘The Natural History of German Life’’; Williams, The Country and the City. 17 See, for example, Payne, Toil and Plenty; Janowitz, ‘‘The Chartist Picturesque.’’ 18 Pinney, ‘‘The Lexical Spaces of Eye-Spy’’; Batchen, Burning with Desire. 19 Holmes, ‘‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.’’ 20 Krauss, ‘‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces,’’ 133, 136–37. 21 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 99. 22 Gibson, South of the West, 112. 23 Morrison, ‘‘Black Wednesday 1878’’; Macintyre, Colonial Liberalism. 24 See, for example, Australian Sketcher, 5 September 1874, 90, which in discussing the hop industry at Ramahyuck gives all credit to hired white supervisors. Illustrated Australian News, 18 April 1876, 52. 25 Illustrated Australian News, 18 April 1876, 52. 26 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Fourteenth Report, appendix 12, 13. The careful work of observation of the individuals within these photographs has been largely carried out by Alan West and Sandra Smith of the Museum Victoria, whose meticulous genealogical research has allowed family connections between people to emerge, in many cases linking the subjects with their descendants. 27 Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, xii. 28 naa, crs b314, item 3, Board for the Protection of the Aborigines Minute Book, 4 September 1878; Attwood, ‘‘Reading Sources in Aboriginal History.’’ 29 Dow, ‘‘ ‘In search of the Picturesque.’ ’’ 30 Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, x–xi. 31 Orchard, ‘‘J. W. Lindt’s Australian Aboriginals (1873–74)’’; Johanson and Jones, ‘‘John William Lindt.’’ 32 Johanson and Jones, ‘‘John William Lindt,’’ 167; see also Quartermaine, ‘‘Johannes Lindt.’’ 262

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

33 Poignant, ‘‘Surveying the Field of View,’’ 54. 34 Imperial College London, Special Collections, Huxley Manuscripts, vol. 15, Notes and Correspondence, Anthropology, vol. 1, f. 117 (copy), Letter from R. Brough Smyth, Office of the Central Board for Aborigines, Melbourne, to the Chief Secretary, 17 May 1870. 35 Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria. 36 Quantification of this collection demonstrates that of a minimum of ninetynine staged portraits, sixty-six (or 66 percent of this subseries) were taken ‘‘outdoors,’’ with the background of fern trees. But within this group, forty portray people dressed in European clothes. Similarly, of the ‘‘indoor’’ series, numbering thirty-three prints, twenty-eight are indeed of people wearing European clothes, but five (15 percent) show people in a mixture of European and traditional attire. Of the eleven close-ups, where it is not always possible to distinguish between stagings, five show people in traditional garb, six in European dress. 37 Charnay, ‘‘Rapports sur une mission,’’ 148–49. 38 Ogilvie’s evidence, qtd. in Report of the Royal Commission into the Aborigines, 3. 39 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 166. 40 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Seventeenth Report; naa crs b314. box 1, item 1, July 1881 Minutes of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, 6 July 1881. 41 Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 194–98, 199–201. 42 naa crs b313, item 201, 15 December 1882. A conference in August 1882 aimed to formulate such a policy: naa, crs b313, box 13, item 229, 18 August 1882, Report of the Managers’ Conference. 43 naa, crs b313, item 204, undated, unsourced newspaper clipping. 44 prov, vprs 3991, item z4777, 12 May 1883. 45 See, for example, prov, vprs 1226/P, unit 77, Paris Exhibition 1878, 26 September 1878. 46 prov, vprs 3991, item z4777, letter from Calcutta Commissioners to Page, Secretary of the Board. 47 naa, b313/1, item 207, letter from Kruger to Board. 48 naa, b313/1, item 207, headed ‘‘Geelong July 24, 1883.’’ 49 Partos, ‘‘The Construction of Representation,’’ 60. 50 prov, vprs 3991/1103, item 79/q9676, letter from J. W. Lindt to Chief Secretary, 20 October 1879. 51 Beckett, ‘‘The Past in the Present,’’ 191. 52 Argus, 19 November 1881. 53 Boddington and Otto, Fred Kruger. 54 For a discussion of this issue, see Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights; Barwick, ‘‘Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga’’; Van Toorn, ‘‘Authors, Scribes, and Owners.’’ NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

263

55 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard)/Parliament of Victoria, Legislative Council, vol. 53, 15 December 1886, 2913. 56 Qtd. in Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 197. 57 Copies are held by the National Library of Australia, Rex Nan Kivell Collection, pic Album 30c nk4165; and the Australian National Gallery (ang), in the ‘‘Illustrated Books’’ section of the Art Collection, described as ‘‘Souvenir. Album of Victorian Aboriginals. Kings, Queens, etc,’’ 1866–77, 81.2444.1-12; also ‘‘Album of Kings and Queens of Victoria,’’ illustrated book, 81.2285.1-12. Also see mv file notes regarding a private copy viewed and photocopied by mv staff some years ago, which contains the same images. 58 Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, 4–23. 59 ang Art Collection, ‘‘Album of Kings and Queens of Victoria,’’ 81.2285.1-12. 60 Fabian, Time and the Other. 61 Hart, ‘‘The Rise and Progress of Photography,’’ 269; see also Bann, Clothing of Clio, 15; Sontag,On Photography, 15–16; and Barthes, ‘‘Rhetoric of the Image,’’44. 62 The captions read: ‘‘King David—Warrnambool tribe’’ (leaf 1), ‘‘Gellibrand—Cola tribe’’ (leaf 2), ‘‘Queen Mary—Ballarat tribe’’ (leaf 3), ‘‘King William—Mount Cole tribe’’ (leaf 4), ‘‘Queen Eliza—Yarra tribe’’ (leaf 5), ‘‘King Tom—Derrinallum tribe’’ (leaf 6), ‘‘Queen Rose—Ballarat tribe’’ (leaf 7), ‘‘King Billy and his two wives’’ (leaf 8), ‘‘Family of Civilized Natives’’ (leaf 9), ‘‘Tom William—Echuca tribe’’ (leaf 10), ‘‘Dick—Goulbourn tribe’’ (leaf 12); leaf 11 is incomplete. 63 See the mv database, xp 1792. 64 Troy, Kingplates, 5–38. 65 Prochaska, ‘‘The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire.’’ 66 Kerr, ‘‘Florence Fuller.’’ I thank Joan Kerr for drawing this work to my attention. See also Maynard, ‘‘Projections of Melancholy.’’ 67 ‘‘A Royal Marriage Feast,’’ Lilydale Express, 14 June 1890. 68 De Lorenzo, ‘‘An Interpretation of Some Photographs of Australian Aborigines.’’ 69 Dening, ‘‘Laughing into Empire,’’ 158. 70 Robarts, ‘‘At Old Coranderrk,’’ 82. 71 Annear, Man Who Lost Himself. 72 Buck, Paradise Remade. 73 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 113. 74 Australasian Sketcher, 7 April 1886, 53. 75 Described as ‘‘13 prints, accession no. B.49.42, A-N. Carte de visite portraits, studio ‘types’ (a, b, e, f, i, k). Largely in traditional clothing. Field photos (c, d, g, h, j, l, n). Showing clothing of kangaroo skins, baskets, shelter etc taken in and around Coranderrk. Date of photo: 1860? Documentation ‘srdf.’ Donor: E. B. Tylor, acquired 1917. Group: Camperdown, Timboon, Colac, Goulbourn, Dandenong,Westernport.’’ Pitt Rivers Museum, Photograph Collections, Oxford, UK. 264

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

76 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 265. 77 Stocking, ‘‘Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention,’’ 72. 78 See, for example, Mulvaney, ‘‘The Anthropologist as Tribal Elder’’; Mulvaney, ‘‘Gum Leaves on the Golden Bough’’; Turnbull, ‘‘ ‘Savage Fossil and Recent.’ ’’ 79 See, for example, Mulvaney, ‘‘The Ascent of Aboriginal Man.’’ 80 Griffiths, ‘‘On Reflective History,’’ 405; Davison, ‘‘Festivals of Nationhood,’’ 158. 81 The English edition was titled Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Man. Tylor had intended a section on photography to appear in the first edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology in 1874, but it was not produced in time for publication. Poignant, ‘‘Surveying the Field of View,’’ 55. 82 Huxley, ‘‘Miscellanea.’’ 83 Tylor, ‘‘Dammann’s Race-Photographs.’’ 84 Edwards, ‘‘Representation and Reality.’’ 85 Orchard, ‘‘J. W. Lindt’s Australian Aboriginals,’’ 170; Tylor, ‘‘Dammann’s RacePhotographs,’’ 185. 86 Charnay, ‘‘Rapports sur une mission,’’ 148. 87 Ibid. 88 There are thirty-nine images held today by the Musée de l’Homme in Paris: 1998-14020-29 and 14038-39, comprising Coranderrk, Queensland, and Richard Daintree’s views. 89 Musée de l’Homme, Paris: accession series 1998-14004-14019. 1998-13997 to 1998-14003. This difference is apparent on the basis of technical quality and format. Aird, Portraits of Our Elders, plates 5, 8, and 9; Charnay, ‘‘Rapports sur une mission,’’ 120. 90 Davis, Désiré Charnay, 24. 91 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 234–37. 92 Bonyhady, Images in Opposition. 93 Thomas, Possessions, 11–12, 65–68. 4

WORKS LIKE A CLOCK

1 naa, crs b313/1, item 191, letters from Strickland to the Board, 15, 21, and, 24 February 1881. 2 Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, 338–51. 3 Evidence of Miss Eda Brangy, qtd. in Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 69. 4 Letter from Thomas Dunolly, qtd. in ibid, 98. 5 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, vii. 6 Ibid., 120–21. 7 Ibid., 39. 8 prov, vprs 3991, unit 1138/80, item r3189. 9 Evidence of Hagenauer, qtd. in Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 47. 10 Green, Gippsland Lakes, 22. NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

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11 Evidence of June Hall, qtd. in Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 97. Evidence of Constable Michael Tevlin, qtd. in ibid., 108. 12 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 97. Evidence of John Morrison, qtd. in ibid., 102. 13 Evidence of Thomas Harris, qtd. in ibid.,86; evidence of Edward Curr, qtd. in ibid., 121, 100–101. 14 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 109–11. 15 Letter to the Gippsland Times, 3 February, 1892. 16 naa, crs b313, unit 220, letter from Garnet Walch to the Board, 6 October 1886. 17 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 284–301; Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights. 18 Tourists’ Guide to Healesville District; Caire and Lindt, Companion Guide. 19 Tourists’ Guide to Healesville District, 22. 20 Allen, Victorian Fern Craze, 35–55; Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 104–6. 21 Heron, ‘‘From the Clyde to Braidwood.’’ 22 Davies and Stanbury, Mechanical Eye in Australia, 140. 23 Griffiths, Secrets of the Forest; Griffiths, ‘‘ ‘The Natural History of Melbourne’ ’’; White, Inventing Australia. 24 Caire and Lindt, Companion Guide, 33–34. 25 Crombie, Victorian Views. 26 Millar, Nicholas John Caire. 27 slv, ms 11934, Lake Tyers Visitors Book, ‘‘2 Feby 1886, N. J. Caire Photographer Toorak Road Sth Yarra.’’ 28 slv, ms 9556, Papers of Friedrich Augustus Hagenauer, Visitors’ Book, Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission, first entry 23 and 24 November 1878; slv, ms 11934, Lake Tyers Visitors Book, 14 January 1882. 29 James, ‘‘Converting Half-Castes into Aborigines,’’ Argus, 20 March 1886; Dow, ‘‘ ‘In Search of the Picturesque.’ ’’ 30 Tanjil, Our Trip to Gippsland Lakes and Rivers. 31 Prochaska, ‘‘The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire,’’ 387. 32 Pitkethly and Pitkethly, N. J. Caire. 33 naa, crs b314, 5:189, 191. 34 The card is headed, ‘‘21st June 1904. 4 Darling Street South Yarra, Victoria.’’ Museum Victoria image, accession mv xp 2186. 35 Tourists’ Guide to Healesville District. 36 Peterson, ‘‘The Popular Image.’’ 37 Caire and Lindt, Companion Guide, 43. 38 Kerr, Glimpses of Life in Victoria, 11–13; Willis, ‘‘Exhibiting Aboriginal Industry.’’ 39 Bruce and Callaway, ‘‘Dancing in the Dark,’’ 79–80. 40 Parsons, ‘‘The Tourist Corroboree in South Australia.’’ 41 Mulvaney, ‘‘The Anthropologist as Tribal Elder,’’ 215; Argus, 12 February 1887; Age 4 March 1887; Telegraph (Melbourne), 4 March 1887. 42 Board Archives, Secretary’s Letter Book, 10 December 1890, qtd. in Barwick, 266

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68

‘‘And the Lubras Are Ladies Now,’’ 62, n 11; ‘‘A Royal Marriage Feast,’’ Lilydale Express, 14 June 1890. Boswell cited these lines in ironic allusion to Johnson’s dislike of teaching. Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 15. Jones, Boomerang, 108. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 66. Bernard Smith was an early critic of this trend, which he termed ‘‘Freudian blindness.’’ Smith, Spectre of Truganini, 17–30. Thomas, Possessions, 11–12; McLean, White Aborigines, 54–60. Quotation from McLean, White Aborigines, 59; see also Thomas, Possessions, 87–93. Prochaska, ‘‘The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire,’’ 179. Burn, ‘‘Beating about the Bush,’’ 21–23; Griffiths, ‘‘ ‘The Natural History of Melbourne.’ ’’ Stewart, On Longing, 134–40. Prochaska ‘‘The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire,’’ 407; Schor, ‘‘Cartes Postales,’’ 237. naa, crs b313, item 191; evidence of gardener John Norris, qtd. in Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, 115–16; naa, crs b313, item 213, Shaw to Board, 22 February 1884; prov, vprs 3992, item d11820. Age, 3 August 1888. Quotation from Argus, 31 October 1888; Argus, 17 October 1888; Le Souef, ‘‘The Development of a Zoological Garden at Royal Park.’’ Massola, Coranderrk, 19; Russell, Savage Imaginings, 38–72. Tourists’ Guide to Healesville District. Broome, ‘‘Professional Boxers.’’ naa, crs b313, item 223, ‘‘Report on Board Visit to Coranderrk 23/6/21’’; Twigg, Further Assessment of the Cultural Heritage Values, 32. Pepper, You Are What You Make Yourself to Be, 80. Kleinert, ‘‘Jacky Jacky Was a Smart Young Fella,’’ 131. For ‘‘remote’’ Australia, see Altman and Finlayson, Aborigines,Tourism, and Sustainable Development; and Finlayson, Australian Aborigines and Cultural Tourism. Craik, ‘‘Is Cultural Tourism the Answer’’; Craik, ‘‘Interpretive Mismatch in Cultural Tourism.’’ Massola, Coranderrk, 43. Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Seventh Report, appendix 2; Aboriginal Studies Department, Women’s Work, 13. See also Sculthorpe, Guide to Victorian Aboriginal Collections, 60–ff. Barwick, ‘‘And the Lubras Are Ladies Now,’’ 56. naa, crs b313/1, item 193. Barwick, ‘‘And the Lubras Are Ladies Now,’’ 56. See, for example, Grimshaw and Evans, ‘‘Colonial Women on Intercultural Frontiers’’; and Huggins and Blake, ‘‘Protection or Persecution.’’ NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

267

69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Massola, Coranderrk, appendix 11, 42; Robarts, ‘‘At Old Coranderrk,’’ 82. Mrs. Robarts’s diary, qtd. in Massola, Coranderrk, 42. Aird, Portraits of Our Elders, 46. Massola, Coranderrk, 42. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 11. Robarts, ‘‘At Old Coranderrk,’’ 82. Laughton and Hall, British Association for the Advancement of Science Australian Meeting 1914 Handbook to Victoria, xv. prov, vprs 926, unit 1. naa, crs b313, item 223, Robarts to Board Recd., 15 July 1921. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 310–11; Fels, Report on Some Aspects of the History of Coranderrk Station, 42–55; Twigg, Further Assessment of the Cultural Heritage Values, 64; Pride Integrity and Honour. naa, crs b313, item 223, Robarts to Board Recd., 12 December 1923.

76 77 78

79 5

CORANDERRK REAPPEARS

1 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 310–11; Fels, Report on Some Aspects of the History of Coranderrk Station, 42–55; Pride, Integrity, and Honour. 2 Fels, Report on Some Aspects of the History of Coranderrk Station, 81–82. 3 Twigg, Further Assessment of the Cultural Heritage Values. 4 Martha Nevin, interview by Alan West of the Museum Victoria, Coranderrk, 12 March 1969. 5 Twigg, Further Assessment of the Cultural Heritage Values, 22–26, 5, 56; compare Beckett ‘‘George Dutton’s Country.’’ 6 Ibid., 30. 7 Twigg, Further Assessment of the Cultural Heritage Values, 29–31. 8 Ibid., 65. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 67–69. 11 ‘‘Coranderrk Is Returned to Its Rightful Owners.’’ Robyn Bishop, ilc, personal communication with author, 1998. 12 See Muecke, Textual Spaces, 119–38. 13 Beckett, introduction, 5; Cowlishaw, ‘‘Studying Aborigines,’’ 26. 14 Cowlishaw, ‘‘Studying Aborigines,’’ 20–31. See also Cowlishaw, ‘‘Colour, Culture, and the Aboriginalists’’; and Cowlishaw, Black, White, or Brindle. 15 See, for example, Beckett, ‘‘Marginal Men’’; Beckett, ‘‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backward’’; Beckett, ‘‘Kinship, Mobility, and Community’’; Bell, ‘‘Some Demographic and Cultural Characteristics’’; and Bell, ‘‘Assimilation in New South Wales.’’ 16 Merlan, Caging the Rainbow, 3, 241–42.

268

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

17 Barwick, ‘‘Economic Absorption without Assimilation?’’; Barwick, ‘‘A Little More Than Kin.’’ 18 Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, 1–5. 19 Barwick, ‘‘Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga,’’ 14. 20 Ibid., 12–13. 21 Mulvaney, Encounters in Place, 147. 22 Committee of Management, Coranderrk Aboriginal Cemetery, ‘‘Picnic Day at ‘Coranderrk.’ ’’ 23 Invoice of loan material, private possession of Barbara Tan, 1978. 24 Beckett, ‘‘The Past in the Present,’’ 209–12. 25 slv, Howitt Papers, ms 9356, ‘‘The Kulin Tribe.’’ 26 Australians for Reconciliation, Reconciliation Award, private possession of Murrundindi, 1997. 27 aiatsis, Ian Hunter interview; aiatsis, Murrundindi interview. 28 Warrend-badj, One Wurundjeri Talking, 9–11. 29 aiatsis, Ian Hunter interview. 30 Judy Wilson, interview by the author, 16 October 1998, Melbourne. 31 Rowse, ‘‘Sally Morgan’s Kaftan,’’ 468. 32 Langton, ‘‘Well, I Heard It on the Radio.’’ 33 Leaflet, undated, private possession of Barbara Tan. 34 Lambert, ‘‘Koori Disquiet over Coranderrk,’’ Mountain News, September 1993, 1–2. The Aboriginal response came from Lois Peeler in consultation with Phyllis Ugle-Harrison, Brian Patterson (cultural officer at the Coranderrk Koori Cooperative), Joy Murphy (cultural officer at the Healesville Shire Council), and Norman Hunter. 35 Real estate advertisement, Mountain News, September 1998, 15. 36 Mary Clark, ‘‘The Ghosts of Coranderrk,’’ Age, 14 August 1993. 37 Lattas, ‘‘Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism’’; LangtonWell, I Heard It on the Radio,’’ 30–32; Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 244–46. 38 Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, 18; Bhabha, Location of Culture, 9–18. 39 Marcus, ‘‘The Journey Out to the Centre’’; Merlan, Caging the Rainbow. 40 Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, 121–24; Maddock, ‘‘Metamorphosing the Sacred in Australia.’’ 41 Hiatt, ‘‘A New Age for an Old People.’’ 42 Quotation from Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 172–89; Thomas, ‘‘Cold Fusion’’; Spivak, ‘‘Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution.’’ 43 Bill Nicholson Sr., interview by the author, October 1998, Coranderrk. 44 aiatsis, Ian Hunter, interview by the author. 45 aiatsis, Judy Monk interview. 46 Dorothy Peters, interview by the author, 14 September 1998, Healesville. 47 aiatsis, Ian Hunter interview.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

269

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

270

Mick Harding, interview by the author, November 1998, Warragul. Cooper, ‘‘Early Photographs of Aborigines.’’ aiatsis, Judy Monk interview. aiatsis, Ian Hunter interview. ‘‘Maintaining Cultural Links,’’ Mountain Views, 4 May 1999. aiatsis, Judy Monk interview. Vicky Nicholson-Brown, interview by the author, 10 October 1998, Melbourne. Ros Fogley, interview by the author, 8 October 1998. Jaireth, ‘‘Photos of a Young Boy in My Mother’s Trunk,’’ 60. Bunjilaka; Tony Birch, interview by the author, 11 November 2004, Melbourne. Gellatly, Re-take; De Lorenzo, ‘‘Delayed Exposure.’’ Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art, 199. Taylor, After Two Hundred Years, 161–64. Langton, ‘‘Well, I Heard It on the Radio,’’ 8–28. Phillips, Racism, Representation, and Photography, 39. Brenda Croft, qtd. in Phillips, Racism, Representation, and Photography, 124. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 194. Tracey Moffatt, qtd. in Ennis, Australian Photography, 28. Moffatt, interview. Quotation from Turner, ‘‘Trace Element,’’ 34; Moffatt, Laudanum. Daughters of a Dreaming; Visions of Australia, Good Times Koori Times; Pride, Integrity, and Honour. Aird, Portraits of Our Elders, vii. Ibid., 44. Annear, ‘‘Permission to Look,’’ 6. Robert Macfarlane, ‘‘White Mastery, Black Misery,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 22 September 1997. Croft, ‘‘Laying Ghosts to Rest,’’ 13–14. Kaplan, Looking for the Other; Kaplan, ‘‘Aborigines, Film, and Moffatt’s ‘Night Cries—A Rural Tragedy.’ ’’ Jay, Downcast Eyes, 381–84, 414–16; Bell, ‘‘Looking at Goldie.’’ Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 13–17. Croft, ‘‘Laying Ghosts to Rest,’’ 14. Marsh, ‘‘Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-Century Archive,’’ 117; KingSmith, ‘‘The Nineteenth Century Photographs in Patterns of Connection,’’ 41. Bringing Them Home; Herron, ‘‘Inquiry into the Stolen Generations,’’ ii–iii. Croft, ‘‘Laying Ghosts to Rest,’’ 8. Kennedy, ‘‘The Narrator as Witness,’’ 240. Croft, In My Father’s House, 8–14. Michaels, ‘‘Para-ethnography,’’ 43.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

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INDEX

t

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aboriginal culture, xiv, xvii, xx, 21, 25, 26, 132, 154–55, 189–90, 191, 195, 200, 218, 224, 227–28, 230; art, 24, 32, 67, 68, 119–20; control of, 227– 29; cultural heritage, 222, 224–25, 228, 233, 234; and eye contact, 25, 26, 243; language, 24–25; mimicry, 27, 30–31; and narratives, 28, 66, 67; non-Aboriginal attitudes to, 155–56, 159, 161, 165, 166, 187–88, 217, 221, 227–29; and performance, 24, 26, 27–30, 66, 67, 102–3, 195, 196, 204; recording of, 89–90; relationships between clans, 60, 67, 231; shaming, 15, 25; and visual practice, 24, 28, 39, 237, 251 Aboriginality, 52, 178, 189, 222, 225, 226, 228, 243; debates over, 19, 50, 137, 174–75; non-Aboriginal constructions of, 122, 151, 154, 215, 220, 229, 230; stereotypes of, 199–200, 221, 250; and theories of race, 54, 93–94, 100

Aboriginal knowledge, 24, 27 Aboriginal missions and reserves, xiii, xiv, xvii, xix, 171, 172, 213, 241; attitudes of Aboriginal residents, xx; colonial intentions for, xx, 10–12, 248; and traditional culture, 12; see also Coranderrk Aboriginal Station; Lake Tyers Aboriginal Mission Aboriginal people: children, 47, 55, 58, 199, 200; conflict between Aboriginal people, 20; dispossession of, 133–34, 140, 174; as ‘‘dying race,’’ xx, 90, 96, 124, 139, 155–56, 164, 167, 171, 187, 189, 250; ‘‘half-castes,’’ xxi, 18, 20–21, 75, 76, 123, 138, 147, 149– 50, 151, 153–54, 177, 212, 218, 250; and identity, xxii, 4, 8, 11, 20, 58, 147, 199, 218, 229, 230; impact on and responses to European settlement, xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, 12, 32, 43, 63, 64, 124, 133–34, 159, 188, 201, 220, 241, 244, 245; ‘‘kings and queens of Victoria,’’ 154, 155, 156,

Aboriginal people (continued ) 157, 159–60, 161–63, 165; lifestyle of, xvii, xix, 16, 46, 118, 120, 233; links to country, 22, 228, 229, 251; and mainstream society, xiii–xiv, xix, xxii, 8; misunderstood, 42–43; scientific interest in, xix–xx, xxi, 32, 83, 86, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 121, 156, 169, 198; supporters of, 18, 34, 45, 50, 62, 101, 122, 137; Tasmanian, 52, 91, 170; and transformation, 124, 134, 151, 159, 218, 250; women, 62, 66, 149–50, 205–7, 209–10; See also photography; Victoria; visual representation Aboriginal policy, 219; See also colonial governments Aboriginals of Australia (Caire), 188, 189 Aborigines of Victoria, The (Smyth), 1, 76 Aborigines Protection Act 1886, 21, 153, 181–82, 230 Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry, 87, 90 After Two Hundred Years, 238 Aird, Michael, 210, 240, 241 Album of Kings and Queens of Victoria, 155 Album of Photographs of Victorian Aborigines (Kruger), 165 Alfred, Prince (Britain), 197 Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches Album (Dammann), 169 anthropology, 64, 76, 94, 99, 169, 218, 220 Anthropology Museum (University of Queensland), 172 Anuchin, Dimitri, 95 art, 174, 239–40 assimilationism, 19, 20, 123, 147, 153, 181, 218, 219, 244, 245; and loss, 246 Attwood, Bain, 11 Australian Aborigines under Civilisation (Walter), 34, 54–55, 58, 59, 69, 70, 72 296

INDEX

Avoca, Rose, 203 Avoca, Tommy, 141, 147, 165, 167, 203 Bamfield, Tommy, 66, 111, 223, 231 Barak, Annie, 14 Barak, William, 20, 27, 66, 110, 151, 161– 62, 164, 165, 167, 198, 216, 222, 231, 232; drawings and paintings by, 67, 68, 120; memorial to, 214, 215 Barber, Samson, 147, 148 Barkly, Sir Henry, 39, 41 Barry, Sir Redmond, 34, 98–99, 171, 259 n.12, 259 n.21; interest in Aboriginal people, 73, 74, 83–84, 85–87, 88, 89–91 Barthes, Roland, 45, 135 Barton, Francis, 4 Barwick, Diane, 18, 20, 43, 44, 206, 207, 218–19, 220, 237 Benjamin, Walter, 6 Bennett, Tony, 92 Berry, Graham, 18, 20, 138, 150 Bhabha, Homi, 7, 124 Billibellary (Wurundjeri man), 216 Birch, Tony, 236 Bisson, Auguste-Rosalie, 88, 89 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, 1, 40; and Coranderrk station, 12–13, 17, 18, 19–23, 42, 101, 123, 136–37, 147, 150, 151, 153, 190, 210, 231, 249; policies of, xix, xxi, 10–12, 19, 22, 138–39, 149, 150, 179, 180, 181, 210 Boddington, Jennie, 153 Bon, Anne, 137, 161, 214 Boraat (Aboriginal woman), 113, 222, 223, 233 Bringing Them Home (report), 246 Brown, Maurice, 234 Bryson, Norman, 5 Bulmer, Reverend, 67 Bunurong people, the, xiv, xvi, 41 Burns, Jemima. See Wandin, Jemima

Caire, Nicholas, 45, 129, 130, 177, 183, 184, 185–87, 201; photographs of Aboriginal people, 188, 189, 190, 192–94, 199, 200, 202, 207 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 245 capitalism, 131 cartes-de-visite, 154, 164, 170, 264 n.75 Cartesian perspectivalism, 2, 9, 26 Charnay, Désiré, 1–2, 123, 147, 170–72, 173, 174 Chevalier, Nicholas, 183 churches, the; and Aboriginal missions, 15 colonial governments: and policy on Aboriginal people, xiv, xvii, 17, 18, 20, 32, 34, 43, 122, 149, 177, 205, 241, 249. See also Board for the Protection of the Aborigines; Victoria colonialism, 4, 125, 174–75, 184, 210, 244; and cultural practice, 8, 9, 103, 238; and disappearing cultures, 188; documentary accounts of, xxii; and violence, xvii, 163, 165, 196, 201. See also photography; visuality Companion Guide to Healesville (Caire and Lindt), 184, 189, 190 conflict (settler–Aboriginal), xiii, xvii, 29, 52, 220 Coniston massacre, 29 Cooper, Carol, 67, 120, 233 Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, xiv, xvi, xxi, 20, 21, 34, 62, 122, 138, 169, 220, 248; Aboriginal ties to, 215– 17, 220, 222, 223–28, 230–32, 234, 247; and Christianity, 69, 70, 72, 134; ‘‘civilizing’’ project of, 47–49, 52, 53, 54–55, 58, 60, 63, 69, 72, 82, 118, 126, 127–29, 130, 140, 163, 207, 250; closure of, 182, 212, 214, 249; commemoration of, 220–21, 227; and control, 12–16, 22, 26, 190–91, 207, 210; establishment of, 12, 23,

33, 34, 49, 60, 63, 67, 69, 248; and Kulin culture, 14, 15–16, 21–23, 24– 26, 32, 56, 57, 58, 82, 102–3, 233, 248, 249; and land ownership, 44, 60, 72, 217; official inquiries into, 19, 138, 139, 147, 149, 151, 178; rebellion at, 17–20, 123, 136–37, 138, 176, 250; as rural idyll, xxi, 126, 127–28, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136; as ‘‘showplace’’ of Aboriginal people and culture, xx– xxi, xxii, 23, 170, 172, 177–78, 191, 195, 199–200, 212, 221, 250; visual representations of, xxi, 38–39, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54–55, 56, 58, 59, 73, 77, 78–81, 82, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 104–17, 122–24, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135–36, 138, 140–41, 142–46, 151, 152, 166, 190–91, 192–94, 233, 237; and white settlement, 22–23, 39, 42, 92, 102, 141, 165, 175–81, 249–50. See also Board for the Protection of the Aborigines; Green, John; Kulin nation Coranderrk Cemetery, 215, 216–17, 220 Cornell, Frederick, 19, 88, 139 corroboree. See Aboriginal culture; performance Corroboree at Newcastle (Wallis/Lycett), 199 Crary, Jonathan, 2 Croft, Brenda, 124, 239, 242, 243, 245, 246, 247 Crombie, Isobel, 35, 129 cultural difference and exchange, 12, 23, 39, 102, 177, 178, 195, 196, 204, 205, 213, 228, 243, 248 Curr, Edward, 19, 176, 179 Daintree, Richard, 172 Dammann, Carl, 169 Darwin, Charles, 76, 84, 169 Davis, Alfred, 212, 214 INDEX

297

Davis, Daisy, 232 Davis, Lizzie, 215 Dawson, James, 165 De Lorenzo, Catherine, 162 Dening, Greg, 163 dispossession, 63, 163, 187, 225, 231, 244, 246, 248 Doomadgee Aboriginal reserve, 21 Dowling, Peter, 52 Dunolly, Jemima, 212, 214 Dunolly, Peter, 216 Dunolly, Thomas, 178, 223

Fisher, Lydia, 215 Flinders, Matthew, 27 Flower, John Wickham, 93 Flower, William Henry, 98 Foelsche, Paul, 242 Fogley, Ros, 236 Foucault, Michel, 3, 243 Framlingham station, xvi, 22 ‘‘freaks,’’ 164, 165 Fysh, Ernest: photographs of Aboriginal people, 205, 206, 207, 208–9, 210, 211, 240

Edmonds, Lydia, 230 Edwards, Elizabeth, 64, 76, 94 Eliot, George, 133 Ellen (Aboriginal girl), 40, 42–43, 44, 49, 55, 69, 71, 114, 257 n.18 environment. See landscape ethnography, 74, 76, 169, 202, 249 ethnology, 87, 169, 170; and skulls of Aboriginal people, 88 Evans, Nicholas, 24 evolution, 84, 85, 93, 169 exhibitions, 91, 92–93, 98, 150, 169, 196, 203, 249, 259 n.21, 260 n.46; and civilization, 92, 95; Ethnographic Exposition of all Russia (1867), 94; Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (1866), 34, 73, 74, 82, 83; Moscow Anthropological Exhibition (1879), 95; Paris Exposition (1867), 85–86, 88, 92, 171; Portraits of Oceania (Sydney), 241, 242; Portraits of Our Elders (Brisbane), 240; Victorian Exhibition (1861), 91 exploitation, 3–4, 31, 205, 242, 243

Galeenabeek Cultural Centre, 225, 236 Garrak-coonum (‘‘Timothy’’), 106, 117, 118, 119–20 Gellatly, Kelly, 237 Gellibrand (Aboriginal ‘‘king’’), 155, 156 genealogy: and Aboriginal people, 223–25, 235, 236, 262 n.26 George, Hugh, 37 Gibson, Ross, 135 Giglioli, Enrico Hillyer, 95–96, 97, 98, 170 Goffman, Irving, 11 gold rushes, 84, 91, 131; impact on Aboriginal people, xvii Goodall, Heather, 44 Goodall, William, 22 Green, John (and family), 31, 33, 34, 48, 49, 55, 56, 63; and Coranderrk station, 12–16, 17, 19, 24, 58, 59, 60, 62, 69, 73, 100–101, 103, 136–38, 147, 218 Grove, William, 85

Faris, James, 3 Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges (von Guérard), 183 Fisher, Jack, 215 298

INDEX

Haddon, Frederick William, 164–65, 166 Hagenauer, Friedrich, 11, 19, 139, 147, 179, 180, 182, 198 Hamilton, Reverend, 45, 63, 101, 137

Harding, Mick, 233 Harker, Margot, 209 Hart, Ludovico, 156 Hawaiian royal family, the, 164, 166 Hayes, Gerard, 259 n.21 Heales, Richard, 40 Healesville, 179, 180, 183, 216 Hercus, Luise, 237 Heron, Emilie (‘‘Australie’’), 183 Herschel, Sir John, 87 Hobson, Tommy, 98 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 5–6, 32, 134 hop cultivation, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 166, 262 n.24 Howitt, Alfred, 132, 169, 197 Howitt, Anna Mary, xix–xx Howitt, Mary, 131 Howitt, William, 131 human difference, xiv, xxi, 7, 17, 32, 70, 72, 85, 88, 92, 99, 125, 126, 212; and photography, 34, 76, 96, 100, 122, 166, 174, 200, 210, 248–50. See also race humanitarians: and concern for Aboriginal people, xvii, 45, 50, 52, 99–100, 138, 149 Hunter, Colin, 224, 234 Hunter, Ian (Warrend-badj), 224–25, 226–27, 230, 232, 233, 234 Hunter, Jessie, 234, 235 Huxley, T. H., 1, 77, 84, 141 identity, 123, 201, 213, 215, 221, 229, 251; and Aboriginality, 224, 225–27, 230, 239–40, 246, 247; and colonialism, 93; and images, 4, 9, 58, 233; and individualism, 4, 58; postcolonial, 239 Illustrated Australian News, 45–49 Illustrated Melbourne Post, 40 Indigenous Land Corporation (ilc), 217, 232

In My Father’s House (Croft), 244 invasion, xiii, 3, 161, 175, 248 irony, 162, 163 Jaireth, Subhash, 236 Jajowrong people, the, xiv, xvii, xviii, xix, 39 James, John Stanley, 133, 186–87 Jenkins, Bill, 215, 232 Johnson, Kitty, 204 Kaplan, Ann, 242 Kerr, John Hunter, xvii, 29, 195, 196 Kerry, Charles, 162, 198 Kilburn, Douglas, xiv, xv King, Mr. (Aboriginal elder), 41, 50, 51, 53, 69, 103, 108 ‘‘King’’ David, 155, 156 Kings and Queens of Victoria, The, 159, 162, 165 King-Smith, Leah, 245, 247 Kleinert, Sylvia, 205 Koori Voices (exhibition), 236 Krauss, Rosalind, 135 Kruger, Frederick, 31; photographs of Aboriginal people, xxi, 19, 20, 54, 106, 122–24, 125, 126, 127, 129–30, 133–41, 142–46, 148, 150–51, 152, 153– 54, 157–58, 163, 167, 168, 174–75, 219, 250 Kulin nation, xiv, xvi, xxi, 12, 27, 64; culture of, 67, 82, 217, 222; and place, 60, 230–32, 234; political activism of, 37–39, 40, 41, 43–44, 72, 123, 147, 207. See also Coranderrk Aboriginal Station; land ownership Lake Condah reserve, xix Lake Tyers Aboriginal Mission, 20, 45, 133, 186, 187, 219 Lalor, William, 180 Land, Labour, and Gold (Howitt), 131 INDEX

299

land ownership, 18, 27, 43–44, 62, 174, 175, 217, 218–19, 222; and photography, 35, 69, 72, 230. See also native title landscape, 257 n.4; and Aboriginal people, 184, 186–87, 201 Lang, Gideon, 29, 31 Langton, Marcia, 226, 238–39 Lattas, Andrew, 229 Laudanum (Moffatt), 240 Lee, Bella, 207 Le Souef, Albert, 203 Life of Johnson (Boswell), 199 Lindt, J. W., 64, 129, 183; photographs of Aboriginal people, 106, 139, 151, 170 lithographs, 159, 160 Lizzie (‘‘Little Lizzie,’’ Aboriginal girl), 116 Loch, Sir Henry, 198 ‘‘looking relations,’’ 243 Mabo case. See native title Macbeth (Shakespeare), 243 MacDonald, Reverend, 179 Malcolm (Aboriginal elder), 107 Maloga Mission, 188 Manton, Annie, 212, 214 Manton, Lanky, 178, 199, 204, 212, 214 marriage, xiv. See also weddings Marsh, Anne, 244, 245 Mathews, R. H., 198 Matthews, Daniel, 31 McRae, Henry, 207 McRae, Lizzie (nee Hamilton), 207, 208, 210 Melbourne, xvi, 131, 183; Melbourne Zoo, 203 Merlan, Francesca, 7, 8 Michaels, Eric, 28, 67, 238, 246 Mieczkowski, Ivan, 261 n.49

300

INDEX

mimesis, 65, 118, 177, 251; and colonial notions about Aboriginal people, 6, 7 mimicry, 210–12; Aboriginal, 8, 27, 118, 245, 249; and colonialism, 7, 124, 163 miscegenation, 149, 159, 175, 210 missionaries, 70, 72, 197 Mitchell, Thomas, 28 Moffatt, Tracey, 239–40, 247 Monk, Judy, 230–31, 233, 235 Mooney, Edward, 141, 146, 156, 158 Mooney, Edward Jr., 156, 158 Mooney, Matilda, 140, 144–45, 156, 158 Morgan, Sally, 246 Mosely, Henry, 124–26, 170 multiculturalism, 217 Mulvaney, John, 220 Murrundindi (Gary Hunter), 223, 224, 226, 228 Musée de l’Homme (Paris), 172, 253 n.3 (Introduction) My Place (Morgan), 246 My Survival as an Aboriginal (Coffey), 239 native title, 8, 229. See also land ownership Native Title Act 1993, 217 Navajo peoples, the, 3 Nettleton, Charles, 88 Nevin, Martha, 215 newspapers: representation of Aboriginal people in, 18, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54, 124, 128, 132, 133, 136, 137, 149, 161–62, 165, 167; and settler–Aboriginal conflict, 52 Newton, Gael, 35 Nicholson, Bill Sr., 216, 230 Nicholson, Dolly, 216 Nicholson, Paddy, 216 Nicholson, Vicki, 234, 235

nostalgia, 131, 133, 134, 184, 202, 232, 250 Nyungar people, the, 27 Ogilvie, Edward, 147 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 83 Page, Captain, 150, 178 Partos, Louise, 46 Patterns of Connection (King-Smith), 244 penal colonies, 133 Pepper, Phillip, 204 performance, 190, 221; in colonial relations, 177, 178, 195, 196, 197–99, 202–5, 213, 250, 256 n.80; and education, 223; and photography, xiii, 29, 30, 65–66, 68, 121, 190, 249 Peters, Dorothy, 232 Phillips family, the, 165, 167 photography and photographs, 72; and Aboriginal identity, 230, 246; by Aboriginal people, 234–38, 244– 47; Aboriginal responses to and uses of, xiv, xx, xxi, 1, 27–28, 29, 30–31, 35, 38, 55, 60, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 102, 120–21, 141, 147, 172, 209, 222–26, 230–34, 236, 237, 240–42, 248, 249; and colonialism, xiii, xxi, xxii–xxiii, 2–3, 5, 8, 10, 136, 220, 225, 237, 240–42, 246, 249; and exploitation, 31; indigenous photographic practices, 8–9; and links with the past, xxiii, 156, 232–33, 236, 245–47; meanings of, 30, 35, 45, 62, 63, 69, 72, 100, 121, 123, 137, 140, 154, 156, 159, 164, 170, 202, 213, 225, 241, 244, 247, 250, 251; mimetic impulse of, 134; and movement, 134–35; and the other, 6–7, 35, 163; realist, 3, 161; and reconstruction, xxiii, 60, 61, 62–

66, 70, 156, 197, 199, 245; as record of Aboriginal people, xx, xxii, 2, 8, 36, 69, 70, 75, 94–95, 121, 139, 155, 171–72, 215, 219, 233, 235, 236; relationship of photographer and subject, 5, 238, 241–43, 249; tactile properties of, 5–6, 9; and ways of seeing Aboriginal people, xiii, xix, xxi, 1, 22, 34, 50, 51, 54, 91–92, 93, 100, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161, 163– 64, 188, 189, 191, 199–201, 213, 225. See also Coranderrk Aboriginal Station; performance; science; visual representation phrenology, 87; and skulls of Aboriginal people, 86 Picturesque Victoria (Caire, illus.), 184 Pinney, Christopher, 9 Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford), 93, 123, 169, 170, 260 n.41 Poignant, Roslyn, 3–4, 65 popular entertainment, 164, 165; and Aboriginal culture, 197, 202–3 Port Phillip Protectorate, xvii postcards, 190, 195, 199, 201, 202, 205, 210, 211, 213, 221 Pritchard, James, 85, 87–88, 100 Punch (Aboriginal man), 176–77, 178, 250 Quagliotti, Winnie, 216 Quatrefages, Armand de, 99 Queen Mary, 157 race: and photography, 77, 99, 169–70, 249–50; theories of, xxi–xxii, 17, 54, 72, 77, 96, 171, 175, 211, 218. See also ethnography; human difference Racism, Representation, and Photography, 239 rain forests, 183, 184

INDEX

301

Ramahyuck Aboriginal mission, xvi, 11–12, 19, 139, 179, 181, 186 Rebellion at Coranderrk (Barwick), 17, 218 Reece, Annie, 140, 142–43 Reece, James, 140, 143 Regel, Edward, 94 Reynolds, Henry, 43 Robarts, Natalie, 205, 206, 210 Robarts, Oswald, 163, 210–11 Rowan, John ‘‘Sambo,’’ 141, 146, 165, 167, 199 Rowley, C. D., 219 Rowse, Tim, 12, 43 Russell, Billy, 204 Russell, Lynette, 6 Russell, Willie, 209, 212, 214 Russian Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences, 94, 95 Ryko (Edward Reichenbach), 65 Said, Edward, 63 science, 76–77, 84–85, 187; and information exchange, 93–95, 98, 174; and photography, 5, 88, 95, 96, 98, 100, 121, 123, 169–70, 249. See also Aboriginal people Select Committee on the Aborigines (1859), 84 Selwyn, Alfred, 88 Shaw, Joseph, 190, 191 Sherwin, Julia, 209 Smith, Bernard, 267 n.46 Smith, Sandra, 262 n.26 Smyth, Robert Brough, 1, 14, 18, 30, 41, 76, 77, 94, 136, 141, 169, 205 Sohier, Philmore, 86 Some Lads (Moffatt), 239 Something More (Moffatt), 239 Souvenir: Album of Victorian Aboriginals (Kruger), 154, 161 souvenirs, 189, 190, 202, 212, 213, 250 302

INDEX

sport and Aboriginal people, 204; cricket, 124, 125, 126, 148, 165 Sprague, Stephen, 9 Spurling, S., 91 Stanner, W. E. H., 219 stereotypes, 200, 239, 248 Stewart, Susan, 202 ‘‘stolen generations, the,’’ 244, 245–46. See also assimilationism Stoler, Ann, 210 Strezelecki, Paul, 76 Strickland, Frederick, 19, 176, 180–81, 203, 207 Summers, Charles, 83, 85, 259 n.21; busts of Aboriginal people, 88–89, 98–99 Sun Pictures of Victoria (Daintree and Fauchery), xvii, xviii, xix, 172, 191, 233 Syme, David, 18 Syme, George, 18 Tagg, John, 4 Tan, Barbara, 227–28 Tanjil, 187 Tate, Ralph, 261 n.59 Taungurung people, xiv, 39, 60, 62–63, 64, 230, 231 Taussig, Michael, 6, 118 Tent Embassy (Aboriginal), 176 terra nullius, xvii, 230 Thomas, Nicholas, 72, 174,201 Thomas, William, 41, 49, 62 Tichborne affair, the, 30, 164 tourism, 23, 182–83, 186; and Aboriginal people, 187, 189, 190, 195, 197, 205, 212–13 Tourists’ Guide to Healesville District, 183 Trigger, David, 21 Troy, Jakelin, 159 Tylor, Edward, 169–70, 265 n.81

Victoria: Aboriginal people in, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 84, 201, 210, 220, 236, 250; establishment of, xiii; growth of, 84, 92, 131; political issues in, 18; settlement of, xiii, xvii; settler– Aboriginal relations and exchange in, xix, xxii, 32, 42 Victoria (Queen; Britain), 42; and Aboriginal rights, 43, 44 visuality, 2–3, 4, 24, 92, 219–20; colonial visual discourse, 7, 200, 201, 238–41, 249; modernist, xxi, 5. See also photography; visual representation visual representation, 162, 220, 237; Aboriginal control of and responses to, xx, 2, 17, 30, 31–32, 37, 38, 98, 178, 239, 247; and Aboriginality, 18–19, 50, 52, 54, 83, 85–86, 91, 93–94, 100, 122, 140, 195, 202, 203–4, 239, 247; and appropriation, 202; casts and sculptures of Aboriginal people, 88, 93, 259 n.21; and identity, xxii, 7, 8; order and regularity in, 45, 160; role of the museum in, 6; traditional Aboriginal, 67; Western systems of, 3–4. See also Coranderrk Aboriginal Station; photography von Guérard, Eugene, 183 von Mueller, Ferdinand, 35, 77, 94

Walter, Charles, xxi, 15, 28, 35–36, 74, 75–76, 77, 94, 99–100, 196, 257 n.4; photographs of Aboriginal people, 32, 34, 36–37, 43, 44, 45, 48, 54–55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 68–69, 70, 72, 73, 78– 81, 82, 88, 91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100–101, 102, 104–17, 118, 120, 231, 236, 249 Wandin, Jemima, 31, 115, 223, 234 Wandin, Robert (Wandoon), 115, 216, 223, 232, 234 Warlpiri people, the, 67; and filming, 28, 29 Wathaurung people, the, xiv, xvi weddings, 207, 208–9, 210–11, 250 West, Alan, 262 n.26 Wilkins, David, 24 Wilson, Judy, 225 Woiworung people, the, xiv, xvi, 41, 100. See also Wurundjeri people, the Wonga, Simon, 33, 39, 41, 42, 49, 60, 62, 63, 66, 85, 109, 161, 216, 259 n.21 Woolley, Charles, 91, 170 Wright, Christopher, 4 Wurundjeri people, the, 27, 64, 196, 216; and Coranderrk, 60, 61, 63, 217, 222, 229, 237; culture of, 224; political activism, 39 Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council, 216, 217

Walch, Garnet, 181 Walker, Joseph, 180

Yammering (Aboriginal woman), 165

INDEX

303

JA N E LYD O N

is a postdoctoral fellow

at the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University.

t

L IB R A RY O F C O N G R E SS C ATA L O G IN G - IN -PUBLICATION DATA

Lydon, Jane. Eye contact : photographing indigenous Australians / Jane Lydon. p. cm. — (Objects/histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3559-x (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3572-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Photography—Australia—History—19th century. 2. Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Coranderrk Aboriginal Station (Vic.)—Pictorial works. i. Title. ii. Series. tr121.l73 2005 779'.9994'0049915—dc22

200501139