Hard looking : a historical ethnography of photographic encounters with Aboriginal families in the Ngaanyatjarra lands, Western Australia

Abstract

The Ngaanyatjarra region of the Western Desert of Western Australia is one of Australia's most remote and enduring frontiers. The aboriginal people who call this country home have been encountering 'incomers' with cameras since the early 1890s. The images they created continue to influence how Aboriginal lives are imagined by unfamiliar audiences. Rarely, however, have Ngaanyatjarra people had an opportunity to view and comment on the films and photographs produced in these encounters. This study recognises the specific social values which accrue with a subject's recovery of their own social history through images, and confirms the evidentiary significance of filmic and photographic archives for Indigenous peoples. This research uses photographic objects as a methodological tool for understanding both historical moments of frontier sociality involving cameras, and the ongoing social value of films and photographs these moments produced. Th primary focus is on the lives of Aboriginal families resident in the area of the Rawlinson Range where the Giles weather station was built in 1956. Their experiences are examined through detailed case studies of three films and a collection of photographs in which Ngaanyatjarra people appear: William Grayden's activist film, Their Darkest Hour (1957); the Commonwealth Film Unit documentary Balloons and Spinifex (1958, directed by Ian Dunlop); Keith Adams' crocodile safari' film Northern Safari (circa 1958), and the photographic collection Native Patrol Officer Robert Macaulay. Through a process I call 're-documentation', these films and photographs were returned to individuals who appear in them (or others who are familiar with those who appear in them), and information about the people and places they depict was recorded. The narratives that were offered in response to these images provide considerable insights into historical sociality and significance beyond the original moment in which the image was taken. Aboriginal respondents' attention to intergenerational relationships of care and companionship associated with individuals in historical images has enabled a unique examination of frontier life in the Rawlinson Range in the late 1950s. The resulting historical ethnography demonstrates the remarkable flexibility and resilience with which Aboriginal family groups responded to a range of often unexpected and unprecedented events. Sequencing disparaate archival images of individuals photographed at different times into 'long pictures' provides additional evidence of the variability in people's circumstances from one moment to the next. The rich and complex accounts of people's lives that emerge from these 'long pictures' challenge and refute previous visual representations of Aboriginal agency and wellbeing during this period. Show more