Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (review)

This is a well written book, intelligently conceived and well argued. It is theoretically sophisticated while remaining accessible. The title of the book is a little misleading as it suggests a wide focus of study, Photographing Indigenous Australians, while the book is actually narrowly focused on one Aboriginal community at Coranderrk in the Dandenong Ranges not far from Melbourne in Victoria. Lydon uses photographs as a means to understand the cross-cultural encounters at this mission-run reserve from the mid-1860s to the closure of the station in 1924. She then jumps to the present and recent past to consider how descendents of Coranderrk people use the historical photographs to assert their Aboriginal identity and make claims to land and cultural authenticity.

The book is not only about how photographs reveal attitudes and assumptions of the photographers towards their Aboriginal subjects, but the dynamic and interactive relationship between subject and observer. These photographic conventions and the racial ideologies which underpinned them between the 1860s and the early twentieth century unfold through four chapters arranged chronologically. Each of these chapters analyses in some detail the work of one or two photographers with reference to others who may have visited the Coranderrk community. Lydon starts with Charles Walter, a German immigrant who seems to have taken up photography in the early 1860s. I found this chapter the most interesting, perhaps because Lydon takes her argument beyond the boundaries of Coranderrk to consider the intellectual developments in the wider colonial society of Victoria. She suggests that Walter’s early photographs defined how Aboriginal people were to be represented in future along paradigms of civilised- savage and cultural authenticity-inauthenticity. At the same time she recognizes that the Wurundjeri (one of the language groups based at Coranderrk) were complicit in many of the shots taken by Walter and initiated some of them. There is a fascinating discussion of one photograph, The Yarra tribe Starting for the Acheron 1862 which is a staged tableaux of Aboriginal people on the march in heavy winter clothes, the men with guns over their shoulders and carrying swags (rolled bedding or clothes) accompanied by the missionary as they go to settle at Coranderrk. This is the founding moment of the mission with strong Biblical connotations.

In this chapter Lydon also considers the early influence of Charles Darwin’s ideas of evolution and the strong anti-evolutionary views of many intellectuals in colonial Victoria. Charles Summers, a sculptor, was commissioned to make life-cast busts of Coranderrk Aborigines for the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866 which were displayed along with Walter’s photographs. These later toured through parts of Europe where some remained.

Chapter three analyses photographs from the 1870s and 1880s, particularly those of Frederick Kruger. Lydon traces a hardening of attitudes towards Aboriginal people in this period which is reflected in Kruger’s photographs. She argues that Kruger juxtaposed people in traditional garb (obviously posed) against the same people in European dress, a narrative movement from uncivilised to Europeanised. By chapter four Coranderrk is becoming depopulated as people of mixed descent are forced off the reserve and then in 1924 the community is closed down by the government. But ironically during this period Coranderrk becomes a tourist attraction. By 1921 4,000 people were visiting annually. In this chapter images by Nicholas Caire and Ernst Fysh are considered. Many of Caire’s images became souvenirs and circulated in various formats between 1902 and the beginning of the First World War. There was a growing interest in Aboriginal artefacts such as weapons, rugs and woven baskets which were also photographed. Fysh’s photographs were turned into postcards and sold. Lydon suggests that some became the butt of jokes as Coranderrk people pose in European traditional wedding attire and in other ways imperfectly mimic the society into which they must try to assimilate. This imperfect mimicry defined the gap between civilisation and primitivism.

Interwoven into this discussion of representations is the history of Corranderrk from its idealistic beginnings through increasing biological racism in Victorian...