Photos in Wiradjuri Biscuit Tins: Negotiating Relatedness and Validating Colonial Histories

Abstract

ABSTRACTTins, cardboard boxes and albums hold one of the most prized and jealously guarded of all Wiradjuri Aboriginal ‘material’ possessions, the family photos. They are used to tell and recall stories, introduce people to kin, as items of exchange and as important statements of identity and belonging in the spatial and temporal politics of kinship. In this ethnographic study of Indigenous photo collections in south‐east Australia, I argue that photos have the capacity to extend the face‐to‐face nature of kin‐relatedness through time and space; they are important in negotiations of sociality; and they validate the past in contexts in which recourse to both myth and history have been constrained.