Eye contact: photographing Indigenous Australians

Australian Aboriginal Studies, Fall, 2006 by David Jeffery

Eye contact: photographing Indigenous Australians

Jane Lydon

Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2005, xxvi 303pp, ISBN 0822335727

I begin this review with an admission. Not versed in the arcane language of postmodernist theory or any of its various offshoots, I found large slabs of this book beyond my powers of comprehension. Take the following: 'In [Charles] 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' (p.118). There is more of this sort of stuff peppered throughout the book. Much more. This is unfortunate. The book is obviously aimed at a select band of fellow travellers, but beneath the layers of jargon Jane Lydon reveals glimpses of a fascinating story.

Coranderrk, an Aboriginal station near Melbourne which was established in 1863, is the focus of Lydon's attentions. More correctly, it is the way in which the residents--made up of various groups forming the Kulin nations--were portrayed through the medium of photography, and how at different stages they influenced and indeed used the images for their own political ends. Throughout the book Lydon goes to some length in questioning the common perception of Aboriginal peoples in the nineteenth century as being helpless subjects of photographers who exploited them either for academic or commercial ends. Coranderrk provides fertile ground for Lydon's ruminations. As she points out, it was visited regularly by local and international photographers throughout the 60 years of its existence, and it was through this medium that Western society formed an understanding of Aboriginal Australians. Her central argument is that the resultant images 'also reflect indigenous objectives and values, and configure an intimate form of cross-cultural communication' (p.xiv).

Lydon cites the collaborative nature of the work undertaken by the photographer Charles Walter, the Kulin people and the station's Superintendent John Green. She posits an interesting hypothesis regarding the staging of the famous photograph, The Yarra Tribe starting for the Acheron. Briefly, the Aboriginal subjects were not only subjects of the picture, but also had a key say in its composition: 'the conception and execution reflects an Aboriginal perspective' (p.60). Further, 'the form of this image derives directly from Kulin practice' (p.64). The difficulty I have with this, as with many photographic 'readings' proffered by Lydon throughout the book, is that, as she herself admits, there is no documentary evidence to support such claims. In the absence of diaries or field notes, such arguments belong more in the realm of speculation, something no amount of opaque theorising can disguise. But perhaps that is the essence of 'photographic theory'. I could likewise argue that the final image is a product of the photographer's eye for composition and the limitations of the technology of the day.

Nevertheless, Walter does indeed come across as an enlightened and sympathetic figure. In an attempt to exercise some control over the reproduction of a series of commissioned photographs for the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866, he states: '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' (p.75).

Perhaps more representative as products of their time, are photographers like Desire Charnay, Nicholas Caire, Redmond Barry, Enrico Hilyer Giglioli and Frederick Kruger, all of whom took photographs at Coranderrk on commission or with a particular market in mind. Lydon tells of Charnay's attempts at anthropometric portraiture being thwarted by the Coranderrk residents who insisted on inflating their sitting fees to the point where he gave up in exasperation. A good story indeed; however, it loses much of its impact by page 172 where it makes its third appearance in the book.

Lydon discusses Kruger's work in some detail and there are some nice reproductions including one of his better known images, Aboriginal cricketers at Coranderrk, c1877 (p.125). In analysing this image within a post-colonial theoretical framework, Lydon states: 'as mimicry it fixes the colonial subject, both colonized and colonizer as a "partial" presence', and then positioning the photograph within the same context as an account of a cricket match by visiting English naturalist Henry Mosely: 'our [sic] 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' (pp.125-6). Yet she relates the story of the same naturalist bemoaning the fact that he couldn't find any men to assist him in his search for platypus as they were too engrossed in their cricket game. There appears to be more than 'mimicry' at work here. To use a sporting cliche cricket was the winner on the day.