Native Colonials: Violet Mace’s Australian Aboriginal-Inspired Pottery Designs

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, many Australian artists, such as the Tasmanian ceramicist Violet Mace (1883–1968), sought to find a distinctly Australian visual expression. Although Modernist aesthetics challenged Mace and her contemporaries to explore abstraction, in order to convey Australia’s specificity she turned to Australian history. Initially, her imagery touched on frontier conflict and the motifs of nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists such as Tommy McCrae. After tracing the sources of Mace’s imagery, this article asks to what extent her representations de-historicised the frontier past and enabled contemporary viewers a comfortable distance from what many Australians now see as a story of violent conquest. Perhaps Mace’s imagery can be read as an episode in a national history of slowly growing appreciation of Australian Aboriginal culture, increasing discomfort with the story of racial and cultural inferiority, and willingness to acknowledge that Australia is the product of invasion.