Eye Contact:
Photographing Indigenous Australians
by
Jane Lydon
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2005
336 pp., 88 illus. (including 22 duotones),
1 map. Trade, $84.95; paper, $23.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3559-X; ISBN: 0-8223-3572-7.
Reviewed by Brook Andrew
Independent Artist
Melbourne, Australia
baandrew@bigpond.net.au
Jane Lydons study of the renowned
photographic portraits of the people from
Corenderrk Station tell a different story
to that expected by the usual colonial
gaze.
The Corenderrk Aboriginal Station, like
other missions, aimed to protect, destroy
or civilise Aboriginal people. The photographers
work documented this colonisation process;
picturesquely documenting the landscape
and the rapidly civilised
Kulin within it. In Eye Contact,
Lydon is both storyteller and historian.
Her telling of stories through these photographs
opens up a new journey of the Kulin people
and ways at seeing Aboriginal subjects.
We are exposed to an in-depth Australian
story through photographs during the period
of mission control and its concurrent
colonisation of the Kulin people.
Lydon re-lights moments of Kulin power
through their own proud shaping and influencing
of displayed photographs. Through this,
the Kulin secured a healthy dialogue with
non-Aboriginal people and the world outside
the Station. It reveals a Kulin viewpoint
for their own lifestyle and the part they
themselves played in the colonial process.
The Kulin further expressed pride and
protest by refusal to bare their bodies
for the collection through documentation
of anthropometric data. In spite and after
all, dominant historical and anthropomorphic
perspectives on the fate of the Aboriginal
in many colonised countries have been
extensively documented and challenged.
Through touching letters and stories Lydon
draw us into that world. A world where,
like today, human ambition and affection
influence and create relationships, a
state which today though, still challenges
the Aboriginal through representation
as a primitive subject. There is the noble
report of Baraks wedding in the
local Lilydale Express, and the
popular display of family photographs
in the homes of Kulin people. The same
photographs used as swap cards between
missionary and Kulin, a kind of
currency
and here communicating across
racial boundaries (p 31). Furthermore,
extensive investigation by Lydon includes
the Stations layout, and the corrosive
effects of urbanisation, industrialisation,
and the collection policies of cultural
and anthropological museum exhibits abroad.
Arguably, the people of Corenderrk Station
may have suffered similar fate as to other
disappeared people throughout
Australia and the world, and Eye Contact
reveals extraordinary stories of cultural
identity, persecution, racial discrimination,
history, and the human condition. Colonial
politics, activism and personal experience
in Australia have commonality with shared
experiences internationally, extending
to America, Canada, South America, Europe
and Asia and need to be raised in the
public domain. The documentation of writers
like Lydon have similarly recovered images
to be embraced by inspired artists, Aboriginal
communities and members of the public,
to keep these histories and memories alive.
Eye Contact will join the very
few publications in Australia on Aboriginal
subjects that do indeed inspire others.
Internationally, similar material is widely
accepted, discussed and visible and has
inspired artists such as Christian Boltanskis
portraits from Second World War, Marcelo
Brodskys photographic essays on
the disappeared of Argentina and portraits
from Columbian artist Oscar Munoz.
Eye Contact reveals the Kulin as
active participants in their own depictions
of family, cultural dignity and survival,
reluctant to be viewed as primitive peoples
during repressive colonial times. The
images available in the public domain
will assuredly lead to further inspired
storytelling of other family histories
within Australias vast history.