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One People? A Visual Language of Australian Citizenship

2023; Routledge; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1031461x.2022.2099435

1940-5049

Jane Lydon,

Australian History and Society

AbstractAfter World War II the legal category of Australian citizenship was created through the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, but continued to overlap with British status. A ‘new language’ of photography actively constituted ideas about Australian citizenship through three interlocking discourses centring on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a new assimilationist policy for Australia’s Indigenous people, and a migration program which advanced a powerful visual language of whiteness. The universalising language of the ‘family of man’ took on distinctive vernacular forms as officials sought to define an ‘Australian way of life’ through new photographic formats, including pamphlets, highly-illustrated periodicals, and media stories. As mapped by these visual projects, the universalising and inclusive rhetoric of human rights shaped international aspirations as well as Australian assimilation policy during these postwar years, yet both featured notable ‘blind spots’, or exclusions, that define the limits of citizenship. AcknowledgementMany thanks to the reviewers and to Tim Rowse, Fiona Paisley and Annalisa Giudici for their advice. I am also grateful to the librarians and curators whose work makes this research possible.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 David Dutton, One of Us? A Century of Australian Citizenship (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002); John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, eds, Defining Australian Citizenship: Selected Documents (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999), 73.2 Ann Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous’, in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, eds John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000); Catriona Elder, ‘Immigration History’, in Australia’s History: Themes and Debates, eds Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005), 98–115, 98.3 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 11.4 Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2008); Tim Rowse, ‘The Post-War Social Science of Assimilation 1947–1966’, in Contesting Assimilation, ed. Tim Rowse (Perth: API Network, 2005), 151–68.5 Moreton-Robinson, 11.6 Tony Ohlsson, ‘The Origins of a White Australia: The Coolie Question 1837–43’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 97, no. 2 (December 2011): 203–19; Jeremy Martens, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018).7 Martens; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008); Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).8 Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012), 5.9 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981).10 For this growing body of work see for example Jennifer Telesca, ‘Preface: What Is Visual Citizenship’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 3 (2013): 339–43; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Mary Tomsic, ‘Sharing a Personal Past: #iwasarefugee #iamarefugee on Instagram’, in Visualising Human Rights, ed. Jane Lydon (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2018), 63–84.11 Gabrielle Moser, Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019); Safia Swimelar, ‘Visual Culture as a Pedagogical Tool toward Human Rights and Global Citizenship’ (20 August 2009), SSRN: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1463036 (accessed 4 July 2022).12 The United States provided an important precedent. Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).13 Sophie Couchman, ‘In and Out of Focus: Chinese and Photography in Australia, 1870s–1940s’ (PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2009), 124.14 Jane Doulman and David Lee, Every Assistance and Protection: A History of the Australian Passport (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2008), vii.15 Sophie Couchman, ‘Not So Mug Mugshots: Behind the Portraits of Series B6443’, Crossings 9, no. 3 (2004).16 Glenda Sluga, ‘UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley’, Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2009): 393–418.17 Tom Allbeson, ‘Photographic Diplomacy in the Postwar World: UNESCO and the Conception of Photography as a Universal Language, 1946–1956’, Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 2 (2015): 1–33.18 Edward Steichen, The Family of Man: ‪An Exhibition of Creative Photography, Dedicated to the Dignity of Man, with Examples from 68 Countries (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 4.19 For a recent (re)evaluation which emphasises the diversity of reception, see Shamoon Zamir and Gerd Hurm, ‘Introduction: The Family of Man Revisited’, in The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age, eds Gerd Hurm, Anke Reitz and Shamoon Zamir (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 1–22.20 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972 [1957]), 100–2.21 Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 19.22 Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly, Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848–2020) (Melbourne: Perimeter, 2021).23 UNESCO, Human Rights: Exhibition Album (Paris: UNESCO, 1950). For a more detailed analysis of the exhibition and its Australian reception see Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).24 Press Background Information 114 Paris, 15 February 1951, 342.7, UNESCO Archives, Paris.25 A further twenty were approved in February 1951, to be distributed through National Cooperating Bodies for UNESCO, and advertised in Education Department Gazettes; W. Farr to Gardner Davies, 12 February 1951; Gardner Davies to UNESCO Director-General, 16 July 1951, A146, UNESCO Archives, Paris.26 ‘Visual History at Its Best!’, The Courier-Mail, 27 July 1951, 2.27 ‘A Short History of Human Rights’, in UNESCO, Human Rights: Exhibition Album, 5.28 Douglas Schneider, Director, Department of Mass Communication, to Peggy Volkov, New Education Fellowship, London, 11 April 1952, MCF 299713/342.7, Exposition ‘Les Droits de l’Homme’, Musée Galliera 1949, Boites MC/36-54, UNESCO Archives, Paris.29 Lydon, Visualising Human Rights.30 S.M. Sharif, Educational Adviser and Ex-Offico Joint Secretary to the Government of Pakistan, to Ross McLean, Film and Visual Information Division, UNESCO, 27 February 1951, UNESCO Archives, Paris.31 S.M. Lee, UNESCO Office in Japan, to Director-General of UNESCO, 1 June 1951, Ref. UOJ/P51132. Among other suggestions, Lee proposed a supplementary commentary to be attached to the album in Japanese. India proposed an entire section within the exhibition to be devoted to non-violence. 1 July 1949, UNESCO Archives, Paris.32 For example, the Australian UNESCO Committee for Museums resolved at its 1948 meeting to prepare from Australian museums a collection of exhibits illustrating Aboriginal life and customs which might be sent abroad as a touring exhibition. Australian Embassy to Director-General, UNESCO, 28 November 1951. Australia: Culture, Aboriginal, Exhibition 008 (94 + 1-81) A145. UNESCO, Bureau of General Services, Registry and Mail Division, Index of Inactive Corres Files, series 1946/1956. UNESCO Archives, Paris; this was the first UNESCO-plan exhibition to circulate. Australian Aboriginal Culture: An Exhibition, Australian National Committee for UNESCO (Sydney: V.C.N. Blight, Government Printer, [196–?]).33 A.P. Elkin, ‘The Rights of Man in Primitive Society’, 235–51. Some of the contributions were published in UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations, UN Doc. UNESCO/PHS/3(rev.), 25 July 1948, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000155042 (accessed 4 July 2022).34 Annemarie Devereux, Australia and the Birth of the International Bill of Human Rights: 1946–1966 (Sydney: Federation Press, 2005), 73, 95, 237.35 Key analyses I have drawn on here include Russell McGregor, ‘Wards, Words and Citizens: A. P. Elkin and Paul Hasluck on Assimilation’, Oceania 69, no. 4 (1999): 243–59; Tim Rowse, White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ben Silverstein, ‘From a White Australia to an Aboriginal New Deal’, in Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019); Rowse, Contesting Assimilation.36 Tim Rowse, ‘The Uselessness of “Race Thinking” to Settler Australians’, in Frontier, Race, Nation: Henry Reynolds and Australian History, eds Bain Attwood and Tom Griffiths (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009), 220–47, 418–21; Silverstein, 107–9; Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), 7.37 For an extended analysis see Jane Lydon, The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2012), 101–98.38 Australia, Department of the Interior, The Northern Territory of Australia. Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals. Issued by the Honourable J. McEwen, Minister for the Interior – February 1939 (Canberra: Department of the Interior, 1939), 1–3. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-52796146 (accessed 4 July 2022).39 For key studies of assimilation see Haebich; McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion; Rowse, Contesting Assimilation.40 Chesterman and Galligan, 119.41 Elkin, 235–51; McGregor, ‘Wards, Words and Citizens’, 243–59.42 Elkin, 237.43 Russell McGregor, ‘One People’, History Australia 6, no. 1 (2009): 1–7.44 Department of Territories, Our Aborigines (Canberra: Government Printer, 1957), unpaginated.45 Bob Boughton, ‘The Communist Party of Australia’s Involvement in the Struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People’s Rights 1920–1970’, in Labour and Community: Historical Essays, ed. Ray Markey (Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press, 2001), 263–94; Tom Wright, New Deal for the Aborigines (Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1939).46 Australian Mission to United Nations, inward cablegram to Department of External Affairs, 7 October 1960, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), A1838 929/5/3 Part 1; A1838 557/2 Part 1; A1838 557/2 Part 4, NAA; Lydon, Flash of Recognition.47 Hsinhua News Agency, Hong Kong, Press cutting, 6 August 1959, A1838 557/2 Part 1, NAA.48 A1838 929/5/3 Part 1, NAA.49 The AIAS (since 1989 the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) commenced in 1961 and was implemented by an Act of Parliament in 1964. Colin Tatz, ‘Memories Are Made of This’, paper presented to the AIAS 50th Anniversary Conference, Canberra, 8 June 2011.50 ‘Monsoonal Belt of Australia’, Advertiser, 15 November 1938, 21.51 See Minoru Hokari, Gurindji Journey (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2010); see also Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 57–8; Peggy Brock, ‘Pastoral Stations and Reserves in South and Central Australia, 1850s–1950s’, Labour History 69, no. 1 (1995): 102–14.52 Roslyn Poignant, ‘The Photographic Witness?’, Continuum 6, no. 2 (1991): 178–206. Oswald L. Ziegler, ed., Australian Photography 1947 (Sydney: Ziegler Gotham Publications, 1948), 80; Axel Poignant, Axel Poignant’s Exhibition Photographs, 1922–1980 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1982).53 Lydon, Flash of Recognition, ch. 5.54 Benjamin Thomas, ‘Darryl Lindsay and the Appreciation of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in the 1940s’, Journal of Art Historiography 4 (2011).55 Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston, Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia (London: Anthem Press, 2016).56 Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008); Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2005); Jerzy Zubrzycki, Arthur Calwell and the Origin of Post-War Immigration (Canberra: Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research, 1995).57 Arthur Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not (Melbourne: Lloyd O’Neill in association with Rigby, 1972), 103; for an excellent account see Jayne Persian, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (Sydney: NewSouth, 2017), ch. 2.58 Persian; Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015); Gwenda Tavan, ‘Leadership, Arthur Calwell and the Postwar Immigration Program’, Australian Journal of History and Politics 58, no. 2 (June 2012): 210; Andrew Markus and Margaret Taft, ‘Postwar Immigration and Assimilation: A Reconceptualisation’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 234–51.59 Border Morning Mail, 9 December 1947.60 Isobel Crombie, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Peleus Press, 2004).61 These tensions were more recently symbolised by the violent clash termed Cronulla Beach’s ‘race riot’ of December 2005: Moreton-Robinson.62 David Dutton, Citizenship in Australia: A Guide to Commonwealth Government Records (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2000); Nationality and Citizenship Instructions Policy, 1960–65 D399, 79/16492, NAA.63 Peter Nagle, Australia in Focus: Photographs in the National Archives (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2003).64 ‘Year of the Millionth Migrant’, cover, Pix Magazine, Australia, 3 December 1955, vol. 39, no. 13, Annual.65 A446 1955/67895, NAA.66 Rowse, ‘The Post-War Social Science of Assimilation 1947–1966’, 151–68.67 Haebich, 120; Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP200100088].