Visualing Dispossession As a Mode of Reconciliation: An Australian Case Study

In the late twentieth century non-Indigenous Australians came face to face with the violent past of settler colonialism. During a decade of Reconciliation (1991-2000) they engaged (voluntarily or otherwise) with materials that informed them about the often ignored atrocities and everyday violence that had been directed at Indigenous peoples for the past two centuries. Thinking about a series of images of land and belonging, the paper addresses the question of violent representations and pedagogy. Using three different modes of the visualisation of violence directed towards Indigenous peoples – popular cultural (commercial television and film), documentary (public television), and government commissions (photography) - produced in the period of reconciliation or its aftermath, it asks the question what and who does it cost to re(member) a violent past.  Analysis draws on Anthony Moran’s (2002 1016) notion of non-Indigenous fantasies of Australia as empty space, which meant:

settlers could build their own utopias without hindrances. Such discourses [represented]  indigenous society… [as] not count[ing] as historical societies with their own traditions and historically sedimented relationship with the land. Therefore nothing stood in the way of the establishment of those new utopian societies.

It is this clearing of space – the elimination of Indigenous peoples through massacre, removal to reserves or ‘adoption’ as a cheap source of labour - that has been a key site of disruption to the ‘utopian’ vision of peaceful Australia. The paper explores how the three modes of visualisation address different audiences, and the how the subtly different logics that underpin each genre produce different affects for the intended non-Indigenous audiences, but also the Indigenous peoples who are the subject of the images. Making a distinction between a desire to right injustices and the needs for dominant groups to address their own problem, this paper considers the effects of remembering.