2025/11/19 by S. Guha · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Australian History and Society #Photography and Visual Culture #Participatory Visual Research Methods
paper · doi:10.3828/labourhistory.2025.30
This article analyses digitised photographs of Aboriginal women and girls employed in domestic service in Queensland and New South Wales from the 1880s to the 1930s. My key argument is that digitised studio and family portraits that include Aboriginal domestic workers reveal the complexities and anxieties of a white colonial power operating at home. I also suggest that this form of visual culture contains traces of Aboriginal self-assertion and “self-fashioning” in an historical context in which there was an active effort to forget, overlook, and exclude Indigenous presence. As well as analysing these photographs in their own right, this article considers the afterlives of images in terms of how they function as a form of Indigenous memory and have been reclaimed and reinterpreted by contemporary Aboriginal Australian artists and descendants.