Mrs Dance strikes the first cut: visual storytelling and girlhood
2010; Routledge; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14443058.2010.519311
ISSN1835-6419
Autores Tópico(s)World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
ResumoAbstract This paper takes its title from the oil painting by George Pitt Morison held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, called ‘12 August 1829. The Foundation of Perth. Mrs Dance strikes the first cut to mark the founding of Perth’. As a young girl in rural Western Australia I transformed Mrs Dance, the boat captain's wife, into the first West Australian feminist. My unsophisticated mind inexplicably linked the image of Mrs Dance with the feminist sticker my father had put on our refrigerator in the mid–1970s. This painting provides an example of how visual representations of historic moments work to both open out and close down thinking about history in a process that Martine Joly describes as ‘the force of the image’. In discussing my girlhood response to this image, this article will explore how visual representations impact upon the storytelling of history and on both individual and national identities. Keywords: Western Australian childhood1970sMrs Helena Danceracethe ‘force of the image’historical paintingvisual representation Acknowledgments would like to thank Prudence Black, Katrina Schlunke and Helen Idle for valuable thoughts on the ideas in this paper and Tom Carment for his attention to sentence details; also to the anonymous readers for their insightful reports and Melissa Bellanta for her editorial support. Notes 2. This is the title given the painting by the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Constitutional Centre of Western Australia. It is also known simply as ‘The Foundation of Perth’: Anonymous, ‘Arrival of the first settlers’, Constitutional Centre of Western Australia, Perth, undated. Accessed 15 May 2009 from: http://www.ccentre.wa.gov.au/index.cfm?event=arrivalOfTheFirstSettlers 3. Janda Gooding, ‘The Foundation of Perth: George Pitt Morison's persistent image’, in Leonore Layman and Tom Stannage (eds), Celebrations in Western Australian History: Studies in Western Australian History X, University of Western Australia Press (UWAP), Nedlands WA, 1989, p. 115. 4. Fifty years later the image was again taken up for the celebrations of the State's sesqui-centenary in 1979. 5. Gooding, ‘The Foundation of Perth’, p. 116. 6. Bevan Carter, Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850, Black History Series, Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2006. 7. National Native Title Tribunal, National Report Card, March 2010, http://www.nntt.gov.au/Applications-And-Determinations/Procedures-and-Guidelines/Pages/default.aspx#Report_Card, p.6, accessed 3 May 2010. South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, John Host with Chris Owen, It's Still in My Heart, This is My Country: The Single Noongar Claim History, UWAP, Perth, 2009. 8. Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970, Fremantle Art Centre Press, Fremantle, 2008. 9. Cygnet, Swan River Booklets, The Story of the Birth of Perth, Early Days in Western Australia Book 4, Paterson Brokensha, Perth, 1935. 10. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Tiddas talkin’ up to the white woman: when Huggins et al. took on Bell’, in Michelle Grossman (ed.), Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2006. In her discussion on white subjectivity, Moreton-Robinson writes ‘… the subject position ‘white woman’, has dominance in ideological constructions of womanhood in Australian society.’ 11. Catherine Driscoll, ‘Girls today - girls, girl culture and girl studies’, Girlhood Studies, vol. 1, no.1, 2008, pp. 13–32. Through de Beauvoir, Driscoll describes girlhood as something to be overcome that it is ‘the very site and performance of patriarchal imposition and gender conformity’. Here the concept of girlhood is both the site and that which requires ‘overcoming’. 12. Richard Wollheim ‘On the assimilation of pictorial art to language’, in Jon Thompson (ed.), Towards a Theory of the Image, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1996, p. 33. 13. David MacDougall ‘The visual in anthropology’ in Howard Morphy and Marcus Banks (eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology, New Haven and London, Yale, 1997, p. 276. 14. Ann Stephen, On Looking at Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 220. 15. Ken Wilder, ‘Negotiating painting's two perspectives: a role for the imagination’, Image [&] Narrative [ejournal], vol. 18, 2007, http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/thinking_pictures/wilder.htm, accessed 8 May 2009. 16. Wilder, ‘Negotiating painting's two perspectives’, p. 2. 17. Richard Wollheim, ‘On pictorial representation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3, 1998, pp. 217–26. 18. From 1951–1954 my father Don Idle played Australian Rules Football for Claremont Football Club. On making the state team in 1953 he was given a pair of black woollen serge shorts and a voucher for the local hardware store where he purchased a wheelbarrow and shovel. 19. In his autobiography, Eric Hayward describes the experience of growing up Indigenous in Western Australia. ‘Through footy, and through our effort, interest and ability in it, we have slowly become an important part of the mainstream.’ ‘My father and his brothers played community football seventy five years ago; my sons still play it; and my daughters are ardent fans’: Eric Hedley Hayward, No Free Kicks, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2006, p. 351. 20. Alison Mackinnon, ‘Girls, school and society: a generation of change?’ Clare Burton Memorial Lecture, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, 2005, p. 4, http://odu.curtin.edu.au/atnwexdev/past_lectures.cfm, accessed 18 January 2010. MacKinnon writes that the Girls, Schools and Society report ‘heralded a whirlwind of activity in the education of girls over the next decade – activity in which many of you, many of us, were intimately involved, whether as beneficiaries of the changes or in teaching courses on girls and education and in women's studies, shaping educational curricula and policy and arguing for affirmative action in teacher promotion and in employment’. 21. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of The Miniature, The Gigantic, The Souvenir, The Collection, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1984. 22. John McDonald, Art of Australia, vol. 1, Pan-McMillan, Sydney, 2008, p. 534; Belinda Cobby, Curator, Perspectives in Time, Exhibition catalogue, Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery, Perth, 2005, http://www.cityofperth.wa.gov.au/documentdb/1139, accessed 25 February 2010. 23. Janda Gooding, ‘The Foundation of Perth: George Pitt Morison's persistent image’, p. 19. 24. Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories, Berg, Oxford 2001, p. 149. 25. Gooding, ‘The Foundation of Perth’, p. 19. 26. Martine Joly, ‘Believing (in) the image’, in Jon Thompson (ed.), Towards a Theory of the Image, Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1996, p. 42. 27. Katrina Schlunke ‘Captain Cook's eye-patch’ Art Monthly, August 2008, issue 212, pp. 5–9. 28. W. J. (William John) Huggins, ‘Captain Stirling's exploring party 50 miles up the Swan River’, Western Australia, March, 1827, Art Gallery of Western Australia Collection, reproduction courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2260474, accessed 25 February 2010. 29. Terry Smith, ‘Visual regimes of colonisation: Aboriginal seeing and European vision in Australia’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Cultural Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 1998, pp. 483–494. 30. Schlunke, ‘Captain Cook's eye-patch.’ As research assistant for Katrina Schlunke's ARC Discovery Grant, ‘Voyages of myth: Captain Cook in the popular imagination’, I am indebted to Katrina's extensive writing and thinking about Cook, Indigenous sovereignty and national mythmaking. 31. Marcia Langton, ‘Yagan’, Settling with Indigenous People, Federation Press, Sydney, 2006, p. xi. 32. Jeannette Hoorn, ‘Julie Dowling's strange fruit’, Third Text, vol. 19, no. 3, 2007, pp. 283–96. 33. Julie Dowling, ‘Yagan’, Art Gallery of Western Australia Collection, 2006. 34. Robert Havell, ‘Portrait of Yagan, chief of the Swan River’, Art Gallery of Western Australia Collection, 1834. 35. Ruth Marchant James, ‘The foundation of Perth’, Celebrate West Australia website. Accessed 25 February 2010 from: http://www.celebratewa.com.au/files/generic_sidebar/The_Foundation_of_Perth.doc 36. James, ‘The foundation of Perth’, p. 3. 37. Cygnet, Swan River Booklets. 38. Gooding, ‘The Foundation of Perth’, p. 119.
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