ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century, white Australians perpetuated a belief that our history started with European settlement, ignoring 65,000 years of Indigenous occupation and instead dutifully conjured the stories and images of a white frontier conquest, both fearless and masculine. Nineteenth-century representations of Anglo-Australian identity have been core to celebrating the conquests of white colonial masculinity. The uncomfortable truths that lie beneath the veneer of these highly gendered narratives are rarely exposed or challenged. A powerful system of visual semiotics—simultaneously gendered, spatial and racial—have for over a century, distorted, changed or obliterated the colonial realities of frontier women and Indigenous People. This chapter explores, through the examination of two nineteenth-century photographs, an alternative reading of the colonial narrative.
