Head librarian William Ifould rejected reliefs on arts and sciences in favour of panels illustrating scenes from the lives of Australia’s indigenous peoples, against opposition. Some wanted a display of portraits of governors.
‘The enlightened idea of using Aboriginal figures was very unusual for the time and came under much criticism.’ Graham Clifton Southwell.[i]
To his credit, Ifould sought authentic images of Aboriginal people from remote areas of central and northern Australia from the newspapers and universities, nevertheless the representations are stereotypes, the men naked. There’s no image of Aboriginal activists like Fred Maynard, who founded the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) in 1924. A photograph of him in the Rocks from 1927 shows a man in a white shirt and dark trousers with a hat perched jauntily on his smiling head. His sister smiling next to him.
No sign of William Cooper, who established the Australian Aborigines’ League (AAL) in 1933 and gathered signatures for a petition to the King seeking Aboriginal representation in parliament, and who, with Jack Patten and William Ferguson, organised the Day of Mourning in 1938. William Cooper was a Yorta Yorta elder who wore a suit and tie.
These images in bronze are offspring of the ‘noble savage’ concept first used by the poet John Dryden (‘The Conquest of Granada,’ 1672), then popularised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
‘In myth-making about Australian Aborigines there has been a consistent paradigm of opposing poles – noble and savage, good blacks and bad blacks, primitive and civilised, real and unreal. Oscillating between these two poles are all kinds of imaginings of Aboriginal identity, politics and desires for truthful representation.’ Frances Peters-Little[ii]
‘Nakedness can only be pure if cultural and non-sexual. White male photographers, artists, cameramen, and other image-makers photographing black men and women are supposedly non-sexual . . . Black skin is more often than not associated with and framed within natural landscapes and exteriors. If we see black skin in the cities they are in demonstrations or performances.’ Frances Peters-Little[iii]
[i] Graham Clifton Southwell. MA thesis, Department of Art History, University of Sydney, 2018, p103.
[ii] Frances Peters-Little, Abstract, ‘The Return of the Noble Savage By Popular Demand: A Study of Aboriginal Television Documentary in Australia’, MA thesis, Australian National University, 2002.
[iii] Frances Peters-Little, 2002, p84.
