Zoe Holman speaks to author Liz Conor about her new book 'Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women' (UWA Pubilshing). They discuss how industrialised print helped enshrine understandings of aboriginal sexuality, motherhood and domicile and the role these images played, and continue to play, in Australia.
ZH: Your analysis of images from the archives is presented in this book in specific categories—early encounters, gender status, maternity, domesticity, sexuality, appearance and elders. Why did you choose these themes? LC: This is a book about European perceptions and for print culture at that time it was predominantly—or overwhelming—men who were writing. So it is really about examining what the organising fields of perception were for European men of women. I found that the same organising fields applied to European women as to Aboriginal women. I started with early impressions because these were foundational. They laid the groundwork and what I try to show is that because they were recurring and repeating from early accounts, they were not challenged and stayed prominent in the print for a long, long time. In each field, I quantified what the dominant trope was. For example, on the status of women, which is very important to defining aboriginal women (and men) as primitive, it was the notion of bride capture—the idea that aboriginal women would get clonked on the head and dragged off by the hair. There is no evidence in the colonial archive that aboriginal men routinely abducted women and yet it goes on being a very popular trope in cartoons right up until recently. Settler cultural producers, cartoonists and authors really clung to this trope, as they did to many others. ZH: You cite Nicholas Thomas’ suggestion that ‘the business of simultaneously exhibiting and exterminating the native is consistent with the enduring, invasive logic of a settler-colonial nation.’ What role did these images play in the Australian colonial project, in Australia itself or abroad? LC: In this case, it is about filling an absence that we created and feel responsible for. These objects—cute little ceramics, tea-towels and photographs—are comfort objects as they fill an absence with some kind of presence that is pleasing, or non-threatening: one that doesn’t evoke colonial dispossession or trauma. Instead, we can say ‘aren’t they lovely to look at and isn’t this delightful?’ So they become fetishes, really, as the function of a fetish is to disavow something unpleasant. They allow us to disavow the ugliness and unsightliness of privation, disease and impoverishment that are the most confronting part of the colonial encounter. In the same register as the notion of ‘terra nullius’, this disavowal gives us a comforting distance from the unease that comes with knowledge of the foundational act of the nation—which is theft, the theft of land.
‘Courtship in Australia. Contracting an alliance with a neighbouring family’. 1849 image by a New South Wales settler. Credit: State Library of New South Wales.
