|
May 22, 2011
The SA Museum has an exhibition entitled Images of the Interior, which is a selection of photographs by 7 photographers from its extensive archives. The photographers are Francis J Gillen, Samuel Albert White, William Delano Walker, George Aiston, Cecil Hackett, Ernest Kramer and Rex Battarbee.
Francis J. Gillen, Telegraph Station at Alice Springs, 1856
These exhibition photos document the frontier society and fragile environment of Central Australia during the half-century from the 1890s to the 1940s. Unfortunately not many of the images are online and not much text. Nor are the extensive photographic archives either.
The curation of the exhibition left a lot to be desired in that these are photographs of aboriginal people taken by by colonialists --the aborigines were objects of the powerful colonial gaze. They were primitives with little about the colonial dispossession of the aborigines from their lands and the poisoning of their waterholes or them becoming the prisoners of the brutal colonial regime.
|
