The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights

THE FLASH OF RECOGNITION

The Flash of Recognition

Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights

JANE LYDON

For Tim

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Jane Lydon 2012

First published 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Lydon, Jane, 1965–

Title: The flash of recognition: photography and the emergence of indigenous rights/Jane Lydon.

ISBN: 9781742233284 (pbk)

9781742241227 (epub)

9781742246123 (epdf)

Subjects: Aboriginal Australians – Land tenure – Pictorial works.

Aboriginal Australians – Social condition – Pictorial works.

Dewey Number: 333.20994

Design Di Quick

Cover photograph Mervyn Bishop

Printer 1010, China

Warning: This book may contain sometimes confronting historical images of Aboriginal people, as well as photographs and names of people who have passed away. Where possible, their use has been discussed with the relatives concerned and permission has been granted. Nevertheless, the book should be used with care by Indigenous Australians.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1: Bearing witness

2: Behold the tears

3: A veil of convention

4: We are eagles

5: Aboriginal Overlanders

6: Looking is deadly

7: Gather round people, let me tell you a story

8: Out of sight and out of mind?

Photo Credits

References

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This has been a difficult book to write. I wish to express my gratitude and love to friends and colleagues who have responded honestly and kindly along this gruelling journey, even where they did not, perhaps, share my sense of its importance. In particular, I thank the many Aboriginal people who have generously responded to my questions and requests. Photographs are powerful and subjective objects and I have learnt a tremendous amount from Indigenous colleagues whose research has shown me how the personal and intellectual histories of these images are integrally entwined.

Research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and a Future Fellowship and has benefited from the research environment offered by the Monash Indigenous Centre at Monash University. I thank Sari Braithwaite for her imaginative assistance in locating archival evidence, as well as Zena Cumpston and Eve Vincent for their research assistance. Camille Nurka provided excellent editing skills at a crucial stage, and Alison Moodie oversaw the final stages. At NewSouth I thank Phillipa McGuinness for her support and encouragement, also Uthpala Gunethilake and Di Quick. Thanks to Richard McGregor for his meticulous indexing. I am honoured to have Mervyn Bishop’s specially commissioned photograph on the cover. For comments on chapter drafts, I am deeply grateful to Fay Anderson, Liz Conor, Isobel Crombie, Ann Curthoys, Neville Green, Melinda Hinkson, Melissa Miles, Roslyn Poignant, Sue Taffe, Mitchell Rolls and Deane Williams. For their support I thank my Monash colleagues John Bradley, Lynette Russell, Jane Carey, Beverly Thomson, Shannon Faulkhead, Gwenda Baker, Susie Protschky and Christina Twomey. For discussion and advice at various junctures I am grateful to Jock Given, Joanna Sassoon, Penny Edmonds, Heather Goodall, Lisa Milner, Mary Flynn, Donna Oxenham, Lawrence Bamblett, Richard Broome, Nicolas Peterson and Graham Smith.

For moral/cultural permissions and advice I acknowledge the great generosity of June Barker, Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Rachel Perkins, Brenda L Croft, Mervyn Bishop, Djon Mundine, Qawanji Ngurku Jawiyabba (Vincent Brady), the Northern Land Council (Victoria River Downs), Daryl Smith, Floyd Grant, Nancy Harrison, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre at Nhulunbuy, Agnes Abbott, Kevin Namatjira, Tiriki Onus, David Warapuwuy, Suzanne Ingram, Andy Tjilari, Arron of the Collarenebri Local Aboriginal Land Council. For copyright assistance and permissions I especially thank Robert McFarlane, Jon Rhodes, Ben Tweedie, Michael Aird, Brook Andrew, Roslyn Poignant, Rolf de Heer, Shaike Snir and Yosl Bergner, Chris Coomer, Peter Yanada McKenzie, Jason Wing, Will Stubbs, Thierry Thivisol, Perpetua Durack Clancy and Michael F Clancy, Dorothy Wiliyawuy, John Dallwitz, Dora Dallwitz and Linda Rive of the Ara Irititja Project, Roanna and Darin of Tranby Aboriginal College, Peter Tybingoompa, the Aurukun Shire Council and Esme Bamblett of the Aborigines’ Advancement League and Sony/ATV Music Publishing Australia.

Many individuals have been remarkably kind and helpful, above and beyond their professional roles. I thank the delightful Maggie Finch, Isobel Crombie and Jennie Moloney of the National Gallery of Victoria; Lindy Allen, Heather Gaunt, Jason Gibson and Philip Batty at Museum Victoria; Gael Newton and Nick Nicholson at the National Gallery of Australia; Richard Dodd, Jane Hodson, Rebecca Koser and David Avery of the Central Land Council; Denis French, Almaz Berhe and David Kaus of the National Museum of Australia; staff of the National Library of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

I also thank the Taylor & Francis Group for permission to draw from three articles, originally published as ‘Behold the Tears: Photography as Colonial Witness’, History of Photography, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010; ‘Photography and the Recognition of Indigenous Australians: Framing Aboriginal Prisoners’, Australian Historical Studies, 2012; and ‘Bullets, Teeth and Photographs: Recognising Indigenous Australians between the Wars’, History of Photography, 2012.

Most of all I thank my family, and especially Roy, Dash and Tim.

Author’s note: Technical issues

I use both ‘Aboriginal people’ and ‘Indigenous people’ to refer to the original inhabitants of this continent. The noun ‘Aborigine’ has fallen out of favour as being overly determinist, and I use the currently preferred adjective ‘Aboriginal’, denoting simply one aspect of a person’s identity. The spelling of ‘Indigenous’ follows the Australian federal government Parliamentary Counsel, Drafting Direction No 2.1 on English usage, which calls for capitalising ‘Indigenous’ when it refers to the original inhabitants of Australia but no capitals when used in a general sense to refer to the original inhabitants of other countries.¹ Where I have reproduced certain historical terms that are now deemed offensive in their original context, I have done so in order to make specific historical arguments. I signify their origin and my distance from them through the use of quotation marks.

1: BEARING WITNESS

Failure to bear witness may be even more

unendurable than the act of recollection.

WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994

Every Koori I know would kill for a photo of

their grandmother they lost. Ask a Koori

person: ‘What’s more important?

The photos or the diamonds?’

La Perouse photographer

Peter Yanada McKenzie

This book explores the role of photography in prompting recognition of Indigenous Australians and in campaigning for Indigenous rights. I want to start by considering an image I first encountered as a student, around 15 years ago, on the cover of Charles Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society.¹ It shows two Aboriginal prisoners chained to one another by heavy metal neck-chains. They look gravely at the camera and at us. This image had a profound impact on me. It showed me, beyond any doubt, that chaining Indigenous people by the neck was a historical practice – something I hadn’t known before – but it also affected me viscerally, emotionally. It aroused my pity and anger on behalf of those men.

_____

I realised a few years ago that I was not alone in my response. Photographs of neck-chained Aboriginal prisoners have, in recent decades, become a symbol of colonial injustice, used by white and Indigenous people as shorthand for a larger history of oppression. As mainstream Australia becomes more willing to acknowledge Indigenous experience, these images are seen as graphic evidence that colonisation’s impact was cruel and unequivocal. In these more recent uses the photograph of the chained Aboriginal prisoner has become a significant way of remembering the colonial past. To take just three examples: the image of the neck-chained prisoner features conspicuously in the film, The tracker, directed in 2002 by Rolf de Heer, to highlight the invincibility of the Aboriginal hero. Played by David Gulpilil, the chained prisoner ultimately escapes and defeats his captors, triumphing over colonial racism. The chains act to signify injustice and colonial oppression, thrown off at the film’s climax in a kind of parable of reconciliation.

_____

Similarly, a painted detail, based on a photograph taken in 1906 by Hermann Klaatsch, features in a large street mural at the Aborigines’ Advancement League in Northcote, Melbourne. Artist Megan Evans researched and designed this mural in 1984–85, in collaboration with members of the Koori community, including Les Griggs, Ray Thomas, Millie Yarran and Ian Johnson. Alongside a range of images from across Australia’s history that project Indigenous strength, here the chained prisoner has become a pan-Aboriginal symbol of injustice and identity.

_____

My third example comes from the 2008 historical documentary, First Australians, directed by Rachel Perkins.² Its fifth episode tells the story of assimilation policies in Western Australia, including the experience of men arrested for cattle-killing. As the camera moves slowly over a photo of a dozen neck-chained Aboriginal prisoners from Rottnest Island prison in Western Australia, we hear the voice of Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, narrating the scene. ‘Try to imagine the thoughts of one man, in one of these chained gangs, who walked thousands of kilometres across Western Australia, to an almost certain death. It must have been an absolutely terrifying experience.’

I have since looked at these images so often that it is hard to recapture exactly my initial feelings. But I am reminded of them sometimes when I show these images to others. Some viewers react as I did – they wince, or turn their heads away. The physical blow of this picture registers clearly on their bodies, as it did on mine. So, as a historian, I found myself wondering whether these images had been used to prompt such responses in the colonial past. I assumed that they would have provoked a reaction, similar to my own, of empathy and outrage on behalf of the prisoners.

However, when I examined their historical circulation and reception I found that this was not the case. In 1905, for example, at the time of the Roth inquiry into Aboriginal conditions in Western Australia, these images were seen by mainstream settler society as evidence for safeguarding progress and for a threat contained, as chapter 2 explores. So my question then became, how and when did these images assume their present power to confront and shock us? And more broadly, how did photographs of Aboriginal people come to be seen as evidence for a shared humanity, and to be used in arguments for the better treatment of Aboriginal people? The resulting story traces the development of mainstream Australia’s growing recognition of Aboriginal people as human beings, who are entitled to be treated that way.

I also pursue a number of related questions: How have photographs aroused empathy with Indigenous suffering and discrimination, and moved viewers to action on their behalf? What have been the limitations of these ways of seeing? And how have they changed over time? In our own generation, photography has come to hold a privileged place as proof of distant events – such as the death of a foreign terrorist, or the plight of victims of natural disaster. The power of the image, both to create empathy and to prove what is, has made it an essential tool in the hands of humanitarians and human rights activists attempting to intervene in distant wars or tragedies. Yet such visual strategies have drawn strong criticism for dehumanising their subjects, for effacing the abstract causes that lie behind a situation, for pretending that we all belong to a single human family, or even for inciting the violence they record.

One example of photography’s dual power to elicit or to halt violence comes from Bangladesh in 1971, during the war of independence from Pakistan. Two days after the Pakistani army surrendered, Bihari prisoners were paraded before a crowd at the Dhaka race track by the Bengali Liberation Army. A group of foreign journalists were among the spectators, including Magnum photo-journalist Marc Riboud, as the soldiers began to torture their prisoners in a most horrible way. Riboud felt that this spectacle was being performed for the benefit of the foreign photographers and found himself unable to take pictures. He later said, ‘I could not photograph such a scene behind the torturers, taking no risk.’ He left without taking any photographs, but instead arranged an audience with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in Delhi. In due course the photos of the event were published – on the front page of the New York Times, for example – and gained Horst Faas and Michael Laurent a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. When Riboud was ushered into Gandhi’s presence he sat quietly, unable to say anything, not knowing where to start: ‘I could not even tell the story of the blood or what I saw.’ But Gandhi herself finally broke the silence and told him that she already knew why he was there, because she had seen the photos; she said that they shamed India before the world and she assured him that something would be done.³

The photograph may prove oppression and arouse us to take action but may be profoundly complicit with injustice.

The pictures of torture at Dhaka were complicit in the violence – the presence of foreign photographers may even have incited the soldiers to cruelty – but they also served to reveal it to the world and so prompted intervention. This rather extreme example throws photography’s ambivalent powers into sharp relief: the photographic image may prove oppression and arouse us to take action yet, at the same time, it may be profoundly complicit with injustice. As I explore further, over the twentieth century the power of images of suffering to shock has steadily increased. At the same time, however, such uses have been criticised for their ambivalent powers – seeming to numb or, conversely, entertain us as often as they move us to act.

Visibility

For most non-Indigenous Australians, ideas about Aboriginal people have always been formed through images and narratives, rather than relationships with real people. This is a function of distance – both geographic and social – as well as the minority status of Indigenous people, who make up a little over 2 per cent of the population. As Marcia Langton famously argued in 1993:⁴

The densest relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors. Australians do not know and relate to Aboriginal people. They relate to stories told by former colonists.

She also pointed out that ‘Aboriginality’ is a ‘field of intersubjectivity’ that is ‘remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create Aboriginalities’.⁵ This shared space of meaning continues to determine intercultural relations, as Indigenous Australia for the most part remains inaccessible to non-Indigenous people.

In Australia, historians of photography have tended to emphasise the medium’s role in exploiting and distancing its Indigenous subjects. Quite correctly, they have shown how ideas of primitivism structured the ways that photos of Aboriginal people were circulated and viewed in Australia and around the world, particularly during the 19th century. Even before Darwinism became scientific orthodoxy, ideas that Aboriginal people were ‘humanity’s childhood’ were prevalent, and photography often argued for their status as living remnants of Stone-Age man, doomed to give way before Western civilisation. We all know these images: neatly dressed children lined up before the mission dormitory; naked bodies posed for the camera as if they were scientific specimens.⁶ Blinded by the logic of colonisation, settlers were often unable to recognise the experience of Indigenous people recorded in visual imagery.

However, another aspect of this history has been overlooked; that is, the ways that the medium has been called upon specifically to argue on behalf of Aboriginal people to reveal Aboriginal suffering to mainstream Australia, to demonstrate Aboriginal humanity, and to urge their treatment with respect and equality. Visual evidence has much to offer historians as Australians have in recent years become increasingly prepared to examine our colonial past. By understanding past visual cultures, and the ways that photographs and other visual media were given meaning within particular historical and cultural frameworks, we may better understand how ideas about Aboriginal people, white people and the nation were disseminated among large audiences. We gain insight into the relationship between ‘expert’ views of Aboriginal people, such as those advanced by anthropologists, missionaries and government officials, and popular attitudes. Was reform triggered by individual humanitarians – obsessives and outsiders – as has been suggested by some historians, or was it the more complex effect of global and local cultural changes, including in the visual sphere, with the dissemination of new ideas and images? More fundamentally, was mainstream white Australian ignorance of Indigenous suffering a matter of not knowing, or not caring? Ultimately, invisibility is the easiest form of racism.⁷

This question of the visibility, or mainstream acknowledgment of Aboriginal conditions, was framed by historian Henry Reynolds as ‘why weren’t we told?’⁸ – a question criticised by some as masking the more accurate formulation, ‘why didn’t we want to know?’. In 1968, anthropologist WEH Stanner argued that white disregard of Indigenous experience was ‘a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’.⁹ His powerful visual metaphor captured the role of interpretive frameworks in shaping what a society allows itself to see, or rather, how it understands what it sees. ‘Recognition’ denotes a process of comprehension that relies upon visibility, and which conflates knowledge and vision in a fashion typical of the Western tradition.¹⁰ Stanner’s ‘window’ evokes the importance of recognition as a process that is profoundly visual, yet his metaphor was also literally true – even today it is hard for most Australians to see what goes on in ‘remote’ regions. This is one of photography’s contributions to our understanding of the colonial past; despite the complex and sometimes destructive ways that photographs have been interpreted and deployed, they have also allowed urban audiences to virtually witness the treatment of Indigenous people, and enabled stories of injustice to take hold of the popular imagination.

Nonetheless, as I show in this book, recognition is never transparently beneficial for Indigenous people, and may require them to comply with impossible ideals.¹¹ To be considered authentically Indigenous, they must be exotic and ‘other’, as signs of transformation are perceived as evidence for loss of identity. Yet by the same token, such difference is often construed as primitivism and incapacity, becoming the rationale for intervention and control. Recognition requires that Aboriginal people assume specific forms of culture and identity that are acceptable to mainstream Australian society.

Empathy and me

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

The story of how Aboriginal people have come to be recognised by settler Australians is also relevant to international debates about the development of a visual language of human rights. For centuries, observers have noted that to feel empathy with distant suffering we must somehow be brought into proximity with its victims. By empathy I refer to the recognition of another’s emotional state and, to a degree, identification with it. (Empathy overlaps considerably with sympathy, but entails a greater depth of emotional involvement. Given the endless debate about these terms, I prefer to use them broadly and more-or-less interchangeably.)

Humanitarian narratives emerged during the late 18th century as part of a culture of sentimentalism and the growing moral expectation that one should care about others. Such narratives often relied on detailed accounts of the suffering body, in an attempt to move the viewer from feeling to action. By the late 19th century, the term ‘humanitarian’ had come into use.¹² Historians of human rights have shown that in many contexts humanitarians successfully deployed graphic scenes of distress as a powerful prompt to sympathy – contributing to the abolition of slavery, for example – yet the very intensity of such images often became suspect for their titillating and anaesthetising effects, serving to distance, rather than embrace, the subject.¹³

Ultimately, some have concluded, humanitarianism itself relies upon a notion of the human that is partial, limited and exclusive. Lynn Festa, for example, argues that ‘[t]he subject produced by sentimental antislavery is granted only a diluted form of humanity grounded in pain and victimhood, a humanity that lasts only as long as the recognition of the metropolitan subject who bestows it’, creating a divide between viewer and the imagined object of sympathy.¹⁴ Marcus Wood’s analysis of the imagery deployed by the anti-slavery movement also concludes that slaves were represented as passive beneficiaries of white compassion, reflecting abolitionist perceptions of black men and women as human, but not equals.¹⁵ These scholars suggest that humanitarian narratives have acted as a potent mechanism for the distribution of power, including the power to justify when and where to intervene, and who is deserving of the ‘gift’ of rights.

Such limitations also reveal that despite the close historical and intellectual relationship between ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human rights’, these are distinct and sometimes incommensurable concepts.¹⁶ Human rights are conceived as those rights all human beings have just by virtue of being human, while Indigenous Australians have argued for distinctive rights as the original peoples of this land, including the right to a distinct status and culture, the right to self-determination, and the right to land.¹⁷ While rights are often secured through an appeal to the humanitarian principle of ending unnecessary suffering, these orientations may exist in tension, as exemplified by the slave owner who campaigns for the kinder treatment of slaves or, conversely, the abolitionist who nonetheless submits to the apparatus of slavery in order to buy and free the enslaved.

Such concerns have only multiplied in an intensified global visual culture that places ever more weight upon photographic evidence for distant suffering. Photos excite empathy. Photos bring their subject closer and allow the misrecognition of ourselves in another’s suffering – a form of visual recognition that is central to a concept of humanity. Yet just as with humanitarianism itself, visual narratives of suffering may act to reduce and distance the sufferer or appropriate their pain. Many argue that such identification effaces racial difference, denies agency to the sufferer or gives the viewer a feeling of benevolent largesse that never actually changes anything. For centuries, the balancing act of empathy has been viewed with suspicion for straying too far toward sensationalism, even pornography or, alternatively, for blunting sensibility and allowing us to consume suffering as spectacle … and then put it aside. Since the 1970s in particular, critics have scornfully termed images of suffering ‘victim photography’, and judged them to have shored up the status quo. This hostile interpretive tradition has emphasised photography’s tendency to distance its subjects, providing titillating visions of another world and its alien inhabitants.¹⁸

Over recent years, an interpretive shift has occurred in ways of seeing documentary images of violence or suffering, as a renewed interest has emerged in the ways that images can move us, through creating empathy and a sense of ‘common humanity’. Despite the anti-humanist critique of such notions, we continue to believe in the idea of a universal humanity that forms the basis for empathy. This was the rationale for The Family of Man, Edward Steichen’s 1955 blockbuster photography exhibition depicting the common experience of humankind through themes such as birth, work, family, education, children, war and peace, privation, illness and death. Yet Roland Barthes criticised the exhibition for effacing difference and naturalising the status quo, and suggested, ‘[W]hy not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?’ Where their son had been tortured and murdered because he was black in the Jim Crow south, how could they not see the differences and inequalities that divide humanity? But more recently Courtney Baker has argued with respect to the lynching of Emmet Till, now acknowledged to have been a key event in prompting the African–American civil rights movement, that the mechanics of visual recognition are central to a concept of humanity. When Till’s mother courageously insisted that images of her mutilated son be shown around the world, they generated feelings of shock and sympathy that had concrete political effects.

Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that empathy is produced within networks of power relations that enmesh both viewer and image. Images of Indigenous Australians frequently express the white photographer’s preoccupations and desires even as they appear to record Indigenous experience. Continuing inequalities are bolstered by assumptions of benign whiteness, where a supposedly universal human experience is in practice defined by the privileged white.¹⁹ Sara Ahmed has recently explored the politics of affect, or emotions, with respect to past national wrongs, arguing that empathy and other emotions may have the unfortunate effect of allowing citizens to draw a line between past and present, victim and self; that is, to once again distance the victim and sustain the ‘violence of appropriation’. For Ahmed, forms of ‘fellow-feeling’ such as charity and compassion involve fantasy in that ‘one can feel for or feel with others, but this depends on how I imagine the other already feels’.²⁰ What is dangerous, however, is that feeling bad about the other’s suffering allows the West to forget its complicity in creating the conditions that caused the suffering. Australians’ expressions of shame about the past – such as the ‘Sorry Books’ that followed the public revelation of the history of the Stolen Generations – are acts that Ahmed argues align one with other well-meaning individuals and transfer bad feeling to the subject of shame, quickly allowing one to move on, absolved. Expressing shame becomes evidence of the ‘restoration of an identity of which we can be proud’.²¹ Where structural disadvantage continues, this closure is troubling; instead we must acknowledge that historical injustice lives on in present suffering.

Despite the mistrust many have expressed toward imagery, feeling sympathetic does not inevitably entail distancing the image’s subjects, nor closing off the past. The politics of these emotions depend upon how they are experienced and deployed. Guiding questions for my research have therefore been: Who benefits from the production of empathy and in what circumstances? Who should feel empathy for whom? What change has such imagery brought about?

While empathy may do little but make the viewer feel benevolent and shore up inequalities, conversely it may also be radically unsettling. It may entail action and intervention. As I show through historical examples throughout this book, it may lead to acknowledgment of past and present inequalities, with the effect of bringing about change.

Bearing witness

As a middle class, white academic, I am wary of either distancing or appropriating the experience of Indigenous people through the identification afforded by photography, but I also consider that photos provide a means for the radical interrogation of white privilege. I believe we should acknowledge