Jane Lydon

Imagining the moravian mission: space and surveillance at the former ebenezer mission, Victoria, Southeastern Australia

Colonization of Australia was shaped by a culturally specific, imagined geography that entailed a precise conception of what the indigenous landscape and its people were to become. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the southeastern colony of Victoria around 1860, this European worldview was expressed in the creation of didactic landscapes, designed to teach Aboriginal residents how to live like white people. Archaeological investigation of the former Ebenezer Mission, in northwestern Victoria, demonstrates how Moravian missionaries sought to establish a paternalistic relationship with the indigenous people, expressed through spatio-visual organization and embodied practices. This program was successfully inaugurated, as indicated by evidence for the settlement’s landscaping and for the function of the mission-house, especially in its role as hub and contact place, its central and commanding position, its regular extension and rebuilding, and the operation of European systems of domesticity within it. The missionaries’ apparent success in controlling aspects of mission-house operation must be viewed, however, in the context of the uncertainties and difficulties their evangelical program encountered as well as of Aboriginal strategies of mobility and evasion that undermined the spatial apparatus of the reserves.

Return: The Photographic Archive and Technologies of Indigenous Memory

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

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality, Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves, South‐Eastern Australia

European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creation of an individual subject – with its success measurable through observation and documentation, especially photography. Central to the administration’s conception of these settlements, and to its vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the indigenous population within modern settler society. But this regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the residents’ profoundly different cultural orientation, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition.

A Strange Time Machine: The Tracker, Black and White, and Rabbit‐Proof Fence

Historical films have become an important way of representing the past, and three films released in 2002 (The Tracker, Black and White, and Rabbit‐Proof Fence) express our current preoccupation with how the colonial past has shaped present Australian identity. These films use a range of cinematic techniques to construct particular relationships between past and present, Aboriginal and white. Distancing strategies of colonialism‐as‐violence absolve us, in the present, from responsibility for continuing inequalities, yet ironically more empathetic narratives have been accused of appropriating Aboriginality. These landmark films point toward the potential for broadening public debate about Australian history beyond its current narrowly forensic terms, and for using new narrative and visual techniques to construct a past which is linked to, rather than severed from the present.

‘Behold the Tears’: Photography as Colonial Witness

Photographs were a powerful means of communicating ideas about Indigenous peoples, despite their sometimes diffuse and ambivalent meanings. Only recently, however, has visual evidence begun to play a part in Australian debates about colonial violence and oppression. During the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, which in Britain marked a transition from an evangelical tradition of anti-slavery to a new discourse about human rights, campaigns against the ‘new slaveries’ of European imperialism in Africa, and especially the Congo reform movement, made highly effective use of photographs of colonial atrocities. Yet the campaign against the ill-treatment of Aboriginal people of Western Australia, waged at precisely this time, was limited in its capacity to arouse popular interest either domestically or in Britain. This paper explores the complex process of seeing and overlooking, remembering and forgetting, that characterised views of the northern frontier, through an investigation of photographs of Aboriginal imprisonment during the first years of the twentieth century. It also addresses their deployment within technologies of Indigenous memory and other more recent uses, where they have assumed a prominent symbolic place in books, films, art and political protests, invoking a longer tradition of appeal and rescue, with varying effects.

Driving by: Visiting Australian colonial monuments

The tempo of the long-distance car journey and the locales constituted by road-side monuments define the itinerary of this article, which visits four widely-scattered examples of (post)-colonial Australian placemaking: The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument near Mt Isa in Queenslands redneck ‘deep north’; Victorias Grampians/Gariwerd National Park; the site of the Blacktown Native Institution in western suburban Sydney; the Coniston Massacre Memorial in Central Australia. As Australian society attempts to come to terms with its colonial past, these places express public narratives structured by physical acts of remembering and knowing. They reveal a profound shift from settler assertions of the possession of landscape and history effected through practical techniques of inscribing the land, to the acknowledgement of the Aboriginal experience, opening new spaces for reconciliation through harnessing the inertia and insistence of place.

The colonial children cry: Jo the crossing-sweep goes to the colonies

In this article I explore the affective power of Charles Dickenss character Jo, the crossing-sweep from his novel Bleak House, and his broader cultural significance. Contemporary audiences were deeply moved by Jos tragic death, sparking a vast popular, and especially visual, culture around the homeless white child. Yet, by establishing an affective and moral opposition between white waif and black ‘heathen’, in a relationship Dickens termed ‘telescopic philanthropy’, audiences were directed to care about the white poor with the inference that black people were not a proper object of compassion. Jos touching story circulated widely across the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and was put to work in transmitting inherited British values and making sense of local political and social circumstances. By the late nineteenth century the emotional regime symbolized by Jo the crossing-sweep effectively consolidated racial exclusions.

H.G. Wells and a shared humanity: Photography, humanitarianism, empire

This article explores the role of the 1904 report of the Roth inquiry into Aboriginal administration in Western Australia in defining metropolitan-colonial relations and in shaping debates about imperial humanitarianism. The debates prompted by the Report invoked not only a contrast between imperial shame and colonial independence on questions of the ‘new slaveries’ of imperial labour but also competing notions of humanity. Aesthetic experience was a crucial element of this story, as literary and visual forms created a sense of proximity between peoples across the globe and generated perceptions of a shared humanity. The article focuses on one of the many British commentators in this debate, the popular writer H. G. Wells, whose cosmopolitan vision of humanity questioned contemporary views of the categorisation of humanity itself. Many years later, Wells’ work on the Sankey Declaration laid the groundwork for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. This article has been peer reviewed

Australia and Anti-Slavery

This Special Issue of Australian Historical Studies sets out to investigate Australia’s relationship with the history of human rights by critically examining anti-slavery discourse and its various mobilisations in Australian humanitarian politics from the 1890s to the present. Originally these articles were papers presented to a Griffith Centre for Cultural Research workshop in Brisbane in December 2012 at which Professor Ann Curthoys was our insightful commentator for the day. This collection of articles emanating from that workshop shares a concern with the longevity of anti-slavery discourse (that is, not only its representation, but material practices) in Australia and, in particular, with the ways that the accusation of ‘slavery’ and the advocacy of anti-slavery as its antidote have been invoked in Australia where no formal history of ‘slavery’ has existed. A slave is typically defined as a person who is the property of another and who is forced to obey them, while the institution of slavery is generally understood as a condition or system of subjection based on inhumane conditions of life and coercive work practices. Today we think of slavery and its abolition as a nineteenth-century process. But the Atlantic slave trade had begun in the sixteenth century and thus lasted almost three hundred years. Over this period, millions of African men, woman and children were captured and shipped across the Atlantic to work as slaves in the Americas, an economy in human life driven by European demand for work in the sugar, tobacco and rice industries that helped to shape the modern world and define what we have understood as ‘slavery’ ever since. Slavery did not end with abolition. For one thing, despite the AngloAmerican abolition of their slave trades in 1807–8, demand for imported Africans continued until the 1860s. For another, the American slave population became self-sustaining, and on the eve of the Civil War there were almost four million slaves in the United States. Furthermore, not only did abolition not end slavery; it prompted a proliferation of myriad new forms with dynamic transnational and imperial trajectories. Similarly, anti-slavery continued as a movement beyond achievement of Emancipation in 1833. As the historian of slavery James Walvin points out: ‘The

From Moorundie to Buckingham Palace: Images of “King” Tenberry and his son Warrulan, 1845–55

Abstract This paper explores the representation of Tenberry, a Ngaiwong man from Moorundie on the Murray River in South Australia, and his significant place in the colonial discourse of European settlement and race relations over the first decades of settlement. From around 1845, when he made his first public appearance in the engraved frontispiece to Edward John Eyres journals of exploration, his image was circulated through explorers narratives, pioneer reminiscences, evangelical propaganda, the developing colonial art scene, scientific collections, and popular press accounts. Producing and circulating stereotypes such as “King” Tenberry and his “manly” and “amiable” son Warrulan systematically defined Indigenous Australia for British colonists; with all the power, clarity and seeming truth of visual imagery, these allowed them to see Tenberry as guardian of tradition and the past, in counterpoint to visions of Warrulans future, whose “capacity for improvement,” once removed from his people, gave settlers cause for hope. As these images travelled from Moorundie to the centres of Empire, they mapped a global visual economy that told the colonisers’ story of progress, displacing the Indigenous people in imagined but powerful ways.