Blackedout: the representation of Aboriginal people in Australian painting 1850-1900

Deposited with permission of the author. © 1999 Dr. Roderick Peter MacneilThis thesis examines the representation of Aboriginal people in Australian painting between 1850 and 1900. In particular, the thesis discusses and seeks to account for the decline in the frequency with which Aboriginal people were represented in mainstream academic art in the decades preceding Australia’s Federation in 1901. In addition, this thesis investigates the ways in which a visual discourse of Aboriginality was realised in mid- and late nineteenth-century Australian painting. The figures of Aboriginal people formed a significant presence in Australian painting from the moment of first contact in the late eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. I argue that in paintings of the Australian landscape, as well as in portraiture and figure studies produced in the second half of the nineteenth century, images of Aboriginal people were used to signify the primordial difference of the antipodean landscape. In these paintings, Aboriginality emerged as a motif of Australia’s precolonial past: a timeless, arcadian realm that preceded European colonisation, and in which Aboriginal people enjoyed uncontested possession of the Australian landscape. This uncolonised landscape represented the antithesis of colonial civilisation, both spatially and temporally distinct from the colonial nation. I argue that prior to Federation in 1901, Australian national identity was dependent upon the recognition and construction of a ‘difference’ that was seen to be implicit within the Australian landscape itself. This sense of difference derived from the settlers’ perception of the Australian environment, and became embodied in those objects which appeared most ‘different’ from settlers’ notion of the familiar. Colonial artists drew upon an iconography based upon this recognition of difference to signify the geographical identity of the landscape which they painted. Aboriginal people were central to these icons of ‘Australian-ness’. Further, the association of Aboriginal people with a precolonial Australia served to rationalise acts of colonial dispossession. Representations of Aboriginal people dressed in a traditional manner, as well as those in which they are portrayed in European costume as ‘white but not quite’, underwrote colonial assertions of Aboriginal ‘primitiveness’ and precluded Aboriginal participation in the foundation of the Australian nation. The strengthening nationalist movement of the 1880s and 1890s meant that a new iconography was needed, one in which the triumph of the white settler culture over indigenous cultures could be celebrated. As a result, Aboriginal people began to disappear from the canvases of Australian artists, replaced by ‘white Aborigines’, who symbolised a new depth in the relationship between setter-Australia and the landscape itself. As well and more broadly, they were replaced by the image of the white frontiersman, the leitmotif of settler culture. This exclusion of Aboriginal people from the conceptualisation of the Australian nation reflects not only their ‘disenfranchisement’ within Australian society, but more significantly reveals the effectiveness with which a visual discourse of ‘Australia’ painted Aboriginal people out of existence