Photography and the Recognition of Indigenous Australians: Framing Aboriginal Prisoners

Abstract

This article explores the role of photography in the recognition of the oppression of Indigenous Australians in the interwar years. Today, photographs of conflict and suffering are crucial evidence that make these phenomena real to us, but the interpretive frameworks that determine photographic meaning offer profound challenges to historians attempting to understand past visual cultures. During the 1920s and 1930s, images of Indigenous ill-treatment were framed by narratives of injustice, facilitated by photographic images that allowed events in remote places to be witnessed by mass audiences across the British Empire. I argue that while such imagery popularised reform and mobilised international support, recognition of Indigenous suffering was also heavily conditional upon its representation within conventional interpretive frameworks, as popular moral sensibilities allowed certain images, scandalous but familiar, to become the visual battleground of injustice.