Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors. Jennifer Debenham
culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2010), 3.
5 Nichols, Representing Reality, 3.
6 Smaill, The documentary, 5.
7 Smaill, The documentary, 5.
8 Smaill, The documentary, 6.
9 Dennis Cali, Mapping Media Ecology: introduction to the field, New York: Peter Lang (2017), ix.
10 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books & University of Otago Press (1999), 7.
11 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 8.
12 Daniel Little, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History, Dordrecht: Springer (2010), 19.
13 Frances Peters-Little, “The Return of the Noble Savage By Popular Demand: A Study of Aboriginal Television Documentary in Australia”. Submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy of the Australian National University, April 2002, 72–3.
14 Cali, Mapping Media Ecology, 25.
15 Cali, Mapping Media Ecology, 25.
16 Romaine Moreton, “Curator’s Notes”, <http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/my-survival-aboriginal/notes/> [Accessed 30 August 2016].
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The people of Melbourne have never before had presented to them such a vivid picture of aboriginal [sic] life in Central Australia as given last evening in the Town-hall by Professor Baldwin Spencer to an overflowing audience. It was much more than a lecture – it was a diversified entertainment, in which an intensely interesting descriptive account of the nature of the lives of the people was freely interspersed with lantern slides, cinematograph pictures, phonograph records, and other material secured by Professor Spencer and Mr F. J. Gillen during their recent expedition.1
This breathless account appeared in The Argus the morning after Spencer and Gillen presented their cinematic films in Melbourne’s Town hall. It conveys the excitement about the first screening of a documentary film featuring Aboriginal people. The acclaim was indicative of the fascination with not only the novelty of the new technology of cinematic, or moving photography, but with the allure of the Aboriginal image; an exotic image that simultaneously threatened and titillated Anglo Australian audiences.
Spencer and Gillen’s films ushered in a new dimension to the relationship between Aboriginal and Anglo Australians. Although visual representations of Aboriginal people in the form of paintings, drawings and still photographs were widely available, moving films added another platform to the media environment of the day. It was rare that many urban-dwelling Australians had seen Aboriginal people in their traditional environment. Understood as “the last of their kind”, the screening of the films confirmed the construction of Aboriginal people as apolitical beings, hopelessly primitive; the moving images effectively distanced them from the rest of the Australian population. The introduction of moving film into the early twentieth-century media environment profoundly affected ←13 | 14→how Aboriginal Australians were understood. In a new century, Anglo Australians were intent on projecting a progressive and positivistic image of their country, celebrating the pioneering spirit of its white settler history and the achievements made in its industrialisation and technological developments. The Aboriginal population represented the antithesis of this conception and early documentary films presented a set of images that demonstrated this contrast. To Westerners, Aboriginal society appeared static, engendering the development of attitudes and policies that ensured their aggressive marginalisation; after all the doctrine of progress was unique to Western society.2 On film, Aboriginal people were exposed visually to a wider audience. The moving images fed a Western imagination about primitivity, expressed through the intertwining of two discourses. One was the Doomed Race Theory which, as historian Russell McGregor points out, persisted in Australia from the middle of the nineteenth century and well into the early decades of the twentieth century.3 The other was Social Darwinism, which insisted upon the hierarchy of races. Both doctrines placed Aboriginal people at the “nadir of evolutionary development”, deemed to inhabit the position on the evolutionary ladder as the missing link between apes and humans.4 The discourses guided the imperative for scientists in the early twentieth century to produce films about Aboriginal people based on their concerns about race and the progress of humankind. They had lasting implications for the representation of Aboriginal people in documentary films.5 Together, their understandings of scientific racism offer an important intellectual, social and political context for the production of early documentary films about Aboriginal people.
Growing evidence of the rapid demise of Aboriginal people gave an urgency to collect as much knowledge about them as possible.6 Indeed, Gillen’s ←14 | 15→observation about the lack of children on their travels to Oodnadatta, recorded in his diary on 3 April 1901, led him to conclude that in a “very few years the race will be extinct over a wide area”.7 Framed by contemporary discourses, his observations were firmly embedded in the ideology of scientific racism and biological determinism, providing a scintillating rationale for the investigation of the “Other”. It made the collection of artefacts and importantly the recording of Aboriginal people on film an urgent matter for those studying the diversity of human races in the first half of the twentieth century.
The importance of procuring the display of primitivism on film reveals ethnographic film’s close allegiance with Western knowledge production processes in the search for the “authentic” Aborigine. Capturing the tangible visual evidence of primitivism on documentary film enabled Western scientists to demonstrate the clear separation between “primitive” Aboriginal people and a Westernised modern and technologically progressive Australia. This visual “evidence” made it much easier for Anglo Australians to be ambivalent about dispossessing and marginalising Aboriginal people across the continent. Together with their impending extinction, the importance of maintaining their ancient cultures was relegated to the lowest priority in the national imagination.
But for a number of scientists, the quest to study and record the authentic Aborigine, unsullied by Western influences, was for most of the twentieth century, the “holy grail”