After 200 Years

After 200 Years was conceived by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies as a major Bicentennial project (funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority). It aimed to document, through photographs and texts, the diversity of Aboriginal and Islander life in Australia in the late 1980s. To achieve this, over twenty Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal photographers worked with communities all over Australia for periods of up to two months. The result is a vast archive of over 50,000 documented photographs which is lodged in Canberra. One hundred photographs from this archive have been selected for the collection of the Australian National Gallery and are presented in this exhibition.

The first white settlers arrived in Australia 200 years ago, beginning a process that threatened to extinguish Aboriginal life on this continent. It was not until the 1960s that all Aboriginal people achieved full citizenship rights; for most this has been at best a second-class citizenship as they struggle against entrenched racist attitudes and stereotypes. Most Aborigines therefore found no reason to celebrate Australia's Bicentennial year in 1988.

The complicity of photographic image-making in the creation and perpetuation of negative attitudes and stereotypes over the last 100 years was a critical point of departure for the After 200 Years project. The cultural bias of the photographic perspective has reinforced the two major mythologies of Aboriginal Australia: that of the 'noble savage' on the one hand, living a 'traditional', pre-contact pattern of life; on the other, the passive, broken 'victim', living on the fringes of non-Aboriginal society. This project has attempted to redirect the imagery of Aboriginal Australia in two main ways — both of which have been exploratory.

The principal objective was to represent the diversity of Aboriginal Australia and to move into everyday worlds of Aboriginal work, play, home and neighbourhood. These are the areas excluded from a photographic obsession which up until now has focused on the 'exotic', the 'authentic' and the 'traditional'. This approach demanded that the project address the actual distribution of people throughout the country to counter the widely held assumption that 'real' Aborigines live exclusively in remote Australia.

The second, more problematic, aim was to engage the maximum involvement of Aboriginal people in making a statement about their lifestyles, in their own terms. There is a growing body of literature on how photographs mislead, how they are fitted into cultural and political agendas to reinforce dominant power structures, and how people read photographs differently; this was all pertinent to the project. If Aboriginal involvement was to be more than a token gesture, a means had to be found to overcome both this photographic bias in favour of the dominant culture, and the rigid way in which the camera lens, in dividing the photographer from the photographed, epitomizes black — white relations.

The project participants relied on a combination of recent advances in theories of representation and photodocumentary ethics, and on certain understandings of the interests of the participants themselves. They therefore aimed for a genre of collaborative documentary photography in which the participants could control and direct the work of the photographer, the selection of images, and the texts that would accompany them. It was a method which attempted to develop a long-term model of co-operation between an institution and its Aboriginal constituents, between an archive and the people whose images would fill it, between photographers and their subjects, between different classes of people, between strangers and friends.

It is expected that these photographs will show themselves to be the product of collaboration; but will also reveal the struggle, tension, anxiety and self-doubt of people on both sides of the camera seeking to define a better way of making pictures. The aim was not to obscure the complexities and contradictions of that exercise, but rather to hold it up for view and examination as an essential aspect of the images themselves.

The project's most original contribution lies in the process of negotiation which attempted to find new positions in the unavoidable subject - object dichotomy inherent in photography and to ensure that the 'subjects' would control their own images. Briefly, the approach took into account the following factors:

The Selection of Communities

Attention was paid to the distribution of the Aboriginal population across the continent. As wide a range of community types as possible was included and communities of various sizes and histories participated.

The Selection of Photographers

A range of photographers of different ages and cultural backgrounds was sought. Well-established documentary photographers included Max Pam and Jon Rhodes, while others such as Emmanuel Angelicas are relative newcomers to the field. Eight Aboriginal photographers were employed — Kathy Fisher, Alana Harris, Ricky Maynard, Peter McKenzie, Michael Riley, Tess Napaljarri-Ross, Helen Napurrurla Morton and Polly Sumner. Five of these photographed in their own communities.

Community Consultation

Extensive consultation occurred between the communities, the project staff and the photographers. Communities were encouraged to suggest ways in which photography could assist their own aims and goals, and in several instances training programs were introduced to enable people to take and print their own photographs.

Community Concerns

People in Aboriginal communities were concerned about the negative public images of Aborigines which have become pervasive in Australia today. They wanted to let Aborigines in other parts of the country know about their lives and also wished to see images of life in the other communities. As well, they expressed a desire to communicate with non-Aboriginal Australians whom they felt were not given the right information, for example, by the popular media.

Finally, the culmination of the project was the book After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today that reproduced 500 photographs. The communities were involved in the selection of their photographs and the presentation of them; they also prepared the texts that accompany the photographs.

Penny Taylor
Co-ordinator After 200 Years Project
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies