Helen Ennis' new text, Photography and Australia (London, 2007), is part of the Exposures series from Reaktion. The texts in this series address the questions of place, time and hegemony in photograph, investigate the cultural mores of significant nationalities, and juxtapose these with parallel studies of how photography became a successful ingredient in the national culture.

You could argue that Australia's national narrative can be told through our visual culture. It is filed under national identity, since the connection between landscape and national identity figures prominently in discussions of Australian experience.

From the start of white settlement, the dense bush and the immense spaces of the land, the intractable wilderness and the repose of the pastoral landscape have brought forth paintings of power and originality. This connection between landscape and national identity is filed under the Australian legend.

Ennis's text is both a history of photography in Australia, and part of the ongoing conversation about the way images have captured Australia as a nation, and the way they reflect our colonial and imperialist roots. Ennis argues that the colonial experience is a central element of these visual testaments, and embedded within this experience are the tumultuous relations between white settlers and Aboriginal peoples.

In the early colonial period the emphasis was on documenting the building of new cities and communities through realist photography and later more picturesque and panoramic vistas of the Australian land as settlers sought comfort in familiar surroundings and a sense of ‘belonging’ to the land (for example day trippers and photographers travelling to the Blue Mountains).

Her analysis explores how the photographs reveal the racial, social and political tensions woven throughout Australian history, ranging from modern works by Aboriginal photographers to archival photographs of desolate mining towns and the peoples who eked out their living from the brutal terrain. Since colonial settlement there has been a rich history of photographing the Australian landscape. In her chapter “Land and Landscape” in Photography and Australia Ennis comments:

… landscape photography has been the practice of settler Australians and the expression of a settler-colonial culture … The viewpoint in landscape photography has therefore been almost exclusively European