White Brides: Images of Marriage across Colonizing Boundaries

Images of "mixed-color" couples depicted in frontier settings could transform weddings into multilayered imaginaries of gender, conquest, and boundary-crossing fertility. The painted image of a bride marrying across colonized borders of "color" and culture suggests a cathartic but fleeting historical moment where representatives of the "Old" and "New" worlds appear to unite freely for mutual benefit. Although paintings of such weddings are not common, certain artists used the theme to depict marriages that, for both liminal nations and for later audiences reflecting upon past history, could be both "settling" and "unsettling" in equal measure.

This article concerns the art of two white artists who traveled to places distant from their usual studios in a search for unique "frontier" subject matter. They traveled to those destinations 104 years, 7,500 miles, and the vast Pacific Ocean apart. Invited by a Scottish adventurer patron Captain Drummond Stewart, Baltimore-born artist Alfred Jacob Miller departed in 1837 for the Rocky Mountains of the American West, along what is now known as the Oregon Trail. In 1951, Arthur Boyd, who lived at Murrumbeena on the rural outskirts of the city of Melbourne, journeyed to Central Australia, the southern part of Australia's Northern Territory—a little-settled region now perceived nationally as the "heart of Australia," "the outback," and as an ongoing frontier. Although representations of the transcolonial bride, whose marriage traverses the imagined boundary of frontier, are rare in both American and Australian art, both Miller and Boyd portrayed indigenous and non-indigenous persons formally uniting in marital relationships. These artists' paintings also projected their creators' displacement from more distant centers of Empire—particularly the lost lands of the Irish and Scottish aristocracy. My research into frontier relations in Australia and North America produced these two far-flung, disparate examples. While comparative research often assumes a comparison between like and like, my transnational juxtaposition allows very different examples to be adjoined and thus considered together. Although these two cases of visual symbolism traverse different centuries and very different frontier contexts, their common meeting and departure points suggest some new questions.

In the distinctive frontier mythologies developed by each nation, the trip West and the trip to the Centre represent formative journeys and formative spaces. Australia was invaded by the British relatively late, in 1788, and in the Northern Territory and Central Australia many Aboriginal people had their first contacts with white men in the 1890s and 1910s, with the Coniston massacre of Aboriginal people by settlers and police occurring at Central Australia in 1928. Although transport, communications, the violence and warfare of cross-cultural conflicts, and the epochs of the two frontiers contrast dramatically, each region constituted, in its way, "a last frontier." I define "frontier" as a living interface of indigenous and non-indigenous, where indigenous people still lived upon, if not officially held, their lands, and where the newcomers were still a minority who were forced to negotiate with host societies, albeit to different degrees. ¹ In both American and Australian contexts indigenous and non-indigenous people were sexually intermixing and a first generation of mixed-descent children and adults were evident. Furthermore, contemporaries considered the regions to which the artists journeyed to be "unsettled," "uncivilized," or frontiers.

Although their work and historical influences were vastly different, by representing transfrontier unions the two artists depicted the often-neglected theme of the human, social, and imagined boundaries of "frontier" and "settlement." Miller's horseback travels followed the trading posts and the trails of fur traders, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the Shoshone. Boyd's journey toward a twentieth-century frontier was made by train and in a beat-up Ford utility truck. He saw the temporary camps of itinerant miners, pastoralists, and the oldest residents, the Arrente people. ² Neither Miller nor his employer, Stewart, could converse with the Native Americans they encountered, which included Utah, Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, and Crow...