‘Real Photos’: Transforming Tindale and the Postcolonial Archive

Main Article Content

Jane Lydon
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3083-4084

Abstract

When the Transforming Tindale exhibition opened at the State Library of Queensland in September 2012, there was much excitement and goodwill. This landmark exhibition was curated by Michael Aird and featured Ah Kee’s drawings and enlarged prints of anthropologist Norman Tindale’s photographs of 1938-1940, as well as extensive archival information and stories from the subjects themselves and their relatives. The transformations of the exhibition’s title refer to the way Tindale’s ‘data’ was given both new physical form, as well as engendering and renewing social meanings. Scholars such as Elizabeth Edwards have argued that we should explore the materiality of images and the diverse forms they assume, attending to the ways their form and vitality shape us as much as we imbue them with meaning. Digitisation constitutes a major transformation of photographs’ historical accumulation of materiality. It also enables the return of historical archives from European museums to Indigenous relatives in Australia. In this article I explore the relations and narratives that emerge from this process, focusing on their Indigenous significance, and using the example of an enigmatic cardboard panel held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on which are mounted thirteen photographs from South Australia. For Indigenous descendants of the people recorded in these photographs, their physical form is less important than the way they embody missing relatives, lost through invasion and assimilation. This process is slow and often awkward, but the rewards are great, in challenging foundational national histories, re-connecting family networks, and telling the truth of Indigenous experience.

Article Details

Section
Articles (PEER REVIEWED)
Author Biography

Jane Lydon, University of Western Australia

Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia, and currently serves as the Chair of History (2016-2018). Her research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present. Her books include Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Duke, 2005), The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights (NewSouth, 2012), which won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ History Book Award, and (ed.) Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014) which brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars to explore the Indigenous meanings of the photographic archive. Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire was published by Bloomsbury in July 2016, exploring photography’s importance to debates about colonization, Indigenous peoples and empire in the gradual development of humanitarianism, and ultimately human rights.

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