Maria Nugent

Brokers and boundaries: colonial exploration in indigenous territory

Overview Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise. Many of the authors provide biographically rich studies that carefully examine and speculate about Indigenous brokers’ motivations, commitments and desires. All of the chapters in the collection are attentive to the specific local circumstances as well as broader colonial contexts in which exploration and encounters occurred.

Shellwork on show: Colonial history, Australian Aboriginal women and the display of decorative objects

This article explores the exhibition history of decorative shell-art objects made by Aboriginal women in southeast Australia since the late Victorian era. Although produced for over a century, Aboriginal women’s ‘shellwork’ (as it is known) has only recently received sustained curatorial attention. During the last few decades it has been acquired by private and public collectors and exhibited in both small independent and major public art galleries and museums. The article uses the contemporary curatorial interest in Aboriginal women’s shellwork as an occasion to trace a longer history of its exhibition and display. A historical view reveals the ‘cultural’, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ work that these objects performed as they were displayed in ways designed to communicate messages about their makers and to mediate social relations under colonial conditions. Earlier histories of display and its rhetorical functions are often lost, ignored or downplayed when Aboriginal women’s shellwork is exhibited within contemporary exhibition spaces; but the author suggests that there is more continuity between old and new display cultures and practices than is generally acknowledged. In light of this, the article argues for greater recognition of earlier histories of display practices and visual rhetorics to inform the contemporary interpretation and exhibition of these objects. The article concludes with a recent installation of Aboriginal women’s shellwork that is suggestive of this approach.

'The queen gave us the land' Aboriginal people, Queen Victoria and historical remembrance

Across Victoria and New South Wales, Aboriginal people claim that Crown land reserves set aside in the second half of the nineteenth century were granted or deeded to them by Queen Victoria. This paper spells out approaches to interpreting this longstanding oral tradition, with particular reference to documentation and discussion of it within mid twentieth century ethnography and in the context of activist research as part of the fledgling land rights campaign in the early 1970s. In addition to recognising the claim’s tenacity over time, the paper suggests that greater consideration of the specific contexts within which it had currency and circulated can generate new insights into its meanings and uses. This article has been peer-reviewed

Sites of segregation/sites of memory: Remembrance and ‘race’ in Australia

This article considers the interplay between Aboriginal people’s remembrances about race relations in rural mid-twentieth-century Australia and the frames of remembrance provided by the American Civil rights movement. It takes as its focus two key Australian sites of racial segregation – country town cinemas and public swimming pools – to explore the ways in which since, and in no small part due to, the desegregationist politics of the 1960s they have become prominent sites of public memory. Drawing on three examples from a range of media – art, film and published memoirs – the article traces the ways in which different ways of narrating and remembering these ‘twisted spaces’ contributes to and makes possible alternative and at times unsettling interpretations of experiences and histories of relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people during what is commonly referred to as the ‘assimilation era’.

26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788–91

the present. Structurally the book has interweaving threads of chronologically-selected stories, each with strong and varying visual modalities: photography through and beyond ethnography, photojournalism and activism is the core medium, but so too are a few feature films and docu-dramas that have forged new ways of representing both Aborigines and cross-cultural relations in Australia. Well-known stories*including frontier massacres; Patten and Ferguson’s 1938 Day of Mourning campaign; Watt’s 1946 movie The Overlanders; Perkins’ Freedom Rides in the 1960s; the Tent Embassy of 1972; and the 2007 Intervention policy in the NT* are re-examined through visual data used to mis/inform and engage wide audiences. These images, it emerges, are anything but fixed in time. For example, pre-World War I photographs of neck-chained prisoners triggered anti-slavery debates about frontier brutality (chapters two and three), prompted an embarrassing exposé of Australia before the UN in the 1950s (186ff.), and served as a symbol of pan-Aboriginal oppression in 1972 (235 5); today those same images ‘bring those distant in space and time into the present’ (61), as images of loved ones and ancestors are valued despite the violent accoutrements. In the process of telling these complex stories of events and their aftermath, Lydon draws upon many historical and contemporary records as well as recent historiographies. Her nuanced writing deftly brings together fresh details and contested interpretations that ultimately provoke new insights*new flashes of recognition! However sometimes, as in chapter six on post-World War II activism, a coherent argument suffers from the inclusion of so many important issues. Rather than arguing for the strengths and weaknesses of visual methodologies favoured by social scientists (fieldwork records, photo elicitation), photo historians (visual analysis), Indigenous researchers and participants (photo elicitation, memory and recovery), and creative photographers, Lydon cuts to the quick by declaring her interest in the ‘testimonial’ (25) image used in the mainstream media. The strategy is effective and valid. Yet for a history that sets store by the photographic image, the book as a whole seems to undervalue the visual: happenchance proximity of discussion and reproduced image replaces normal scholarly conventions that fully and clearly integrate image and argument by way of enumerated figures. As a result, the reader is never quite sure whether an image discussed is reproduced, and the lack of a List of Illustrations does not help. Furthermore, captions are inconsistently placed and curiously incomplete, with many ignoring authorship, date and/or source. Minuscule and faint additional data, including moral/cultural permissions, can just be detected along the binding edge. Perhaps the publisher was coy about Lydon’s moral/cultural permissions, but the result is less than ideal. The minimal discussion on the materiality and contingency of photographs found in archives, newsprint, deluxe publications, activist posters and/or classy exhibitions works well for much of this history book, although artist photographers’ exhibited works, considered in chapter seven, would have benefited from some attention to the hang and the curatorial purpose, since these also impact on audience reception. Some curly issues, such as how to reconcile the claim that Aboriginal photographic practice centres upon co-authorship between image-maker and subject (262), with earlier accounts (236 41) documenting certain white photographers doing just that, remain unresolved. Nonetheless the book as a whole presents a strong and sustained ethical case for the ‘need to shift attention from the image itself to our responsibilities as viewers’ (283), making it a valuable addition to literatures on Australian history, Indigenous rights and visual history.

Botany Bay: Voyagers, Aborigines and History

Some time in the mid-nineteenth century a headland on the north side of Botany Bay was given the name La Perouse in honour of the French navigator Comte de Galaup de Laperouse. This memorial gesture was part of a long tradition, beginning in 1788, whereby the headland was made into a site of memory (lieu de memoire) to the French navigator and his expedition. Before officially acquiring the name La Perouse, the headland had been popularly known among the British colonists at Sydney Cove as the French Garden, a name that had likewise mapped the place in the colonial imagination through reference to its temporary occupation by the Laperouse expedition. This association between the site and the expedition, or more particularly its leader, had been enacted in other ways during the first half of the nineteenth century, namely through monuments, pilgrimages and the repeated telling in the metropolitan press of the story of the expeditions voyage and subsequent disappearance after sailing from Botany Bay in March 1788.