Eye contact : photographing indigenous Australians / Jane Lydon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lydon, Jane, 1965-

Series:

Objects/histories

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography--Australia--History--19th century.

Photography.

Aboriginal Australians--Australia--Coranderrk Aboriginal Station (Vic.)--Pictorial works.

Aboriginal Australians.

History.

Australia.

Genre:

Pictorial works.

Illustrated works.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 303 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2005.

Summary:

An indigenous reservation in the colony of Victoria, Australia, the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station was a major site of cross-cultural contact in the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth. Coranderrk was located just outside Melbourne, and from its opening in the 1860s the colonial government commissioned many photographs of its Aboriginal residents. The photographs taken at Coranderrk Station circulated across the western world; they were mounted in exhibition displays and classified among other ethnographic "data" within museum collections. The immense Coranderrk photographic archive is the subject of this detailed, richly illustrated examination of the role of visual imagery in the colonial project. Offering close readings of the photographs in the context of Australian history and nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographic practice, Jane Lydon reveals how western society came to understand Aboriginal people through these images. At the same time, she demonstrates that the photos were not solely a tool of colonial exploitation. The residents of Coranderrk had a sophisticated understanding of how they were portrayed, and they became adept at manipulating their representations.

Lydon describes how the photographic portrayals of the Aboriginal residents of Coranderrk changed over time, reflecting various ideas of the colonial mission-from humanitarianism to control to assimilation. The station closed in 1924 and disappeared from public view until it was rediscovered by scholars years later. Aboriginal Australians purchased the station in 1998, and today they are using the Coranderrk photographic archive in new ways, to identify family members and tell stories of their own.

Contents:

Introduction: Colonialism, Photography, Mimesis 1

1 "This Civilising Experiment": Charles Walter, Missionaries, and Photographic Theater 33

2 Science and Visuality: "Communicating Correct Ideas" 73

3 Time Traps: Defining Aboriginality during the 1870s-1880s 122

4 Works Like a Clock 176

5 Coranderrk Reappears 214.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [271]-293) and index.

ISBN:

082233559X

0822335727

OCLC:

60373925