‘Behold the Tears’: Photography as Colonial Witness

Abstract

Photographs were a powerful means of communicating ideas about Indigenous peoples, despite their sometimes diffuse and ambivalent meanings. Only recently, however, has visual evidence begun to play a part in Australian debates about colonial violence and oppression. During the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, which in Britain marked a transition from an evangelical tradition of anti-slavery to a new discourse about human rights, campaigns against the ‘new slaveries’ of European imperialism in Africa, and especially the Congo reform movement, made highly effective use of photographs of colonial atrocities. Yet the campaign against the ill-treatment of Aboriginal people of Western Australia, waged at precisely this time, was limited in its capacity to arouse popular interest either domestically or in Britain. This paper explores the complex process of seeing and overlooking, remembering and forgetting, that characterised views of the northern frontier, through an investigation of photographs of Aboriginal imprisonment during the first years of the twentieth century. It also addresses their deployment within technologies of Indigenous memory and other more recent uses, where they have assumed a prominent symbolic place in books, films, art and political protests, invoking a longer tradition of appeal and rescue, with varying effects.