Monday, August 06, 2012
The
invisible vitrine – mid-20thC Central Australian child pornography
Currently engrossed in a research
project/article on the Indigenous-white frontier in Central Australia in the
mid-20th century, I am digressing to ponder a curious, common sideline
to books published about remote Australian Aborigines in the 1950s and 60s – a
photograph or two of naked Indigenous children, usually as “colour” only; i.e.
apropos of nothing in the narrative.
It is problematic, in several ways, to
unpick these images from their face up, art-critic style – unlike, say, nude images of adults from my own time and culture.
So, contra to this post’s title, I have
a somewhat open mind as to whether these images should/could be considered child
pornography. Most have an initial winsomeness,
a la Anne Geddes but with older children, although the five photos of
just-pubescent Indigenous girls in Charles Duguid’s No Dying Race (1963)
would, on the Bill Henson test-barometer, almost certainly would be considered child
pornography today.
Duguid’s repetition – or gratuitousness – is
also a factor here. Although the five
photos from 1963 pale against contemporary reports of child-pornography
arrests/convictions that always seem to feature thousands of offending items,
it is the collector or assemblage factor that perhaps best indicates the
photographer’s/collector’s intent for the image – the more, the pervier, you
might say.
My own rule of thumb is that to be
considered prima facie “innocent”, images of naked children should be created
by, and only circulated among, persons who are related to, or at least know on
a prior and ongoing basis, the child-subject.
Images of naked, outback Indigenous children, taken by non-Indigenous
photographers for mass/urban non-Indigenous circulation, are therefore intrinsically
troubling.
A corollary here is that Otherness in naked
children is too easily used as a shield by the accommodating assumptions of
what I’ll term Tourist Art, as opposed to high art. The 2008 Bill Henson controversy hinged largely
on the dividing line between child pornography and high art, but the
questionable images I am concerned about actually find apparent refuge at the
other end of the spectrum, in the artless family or holiday snapshot. There is no doubt that comparable images, if
of naked white children, would never have been published in such a genre and medium. Otherness,
and perhaps also higher production value, thus takes these Indigenous child-subjects
out of the “aw-cute!” everyday, and puts them inside a vitrine – and so
potentially, a collection.
The 2007 Northern Territory Intervention explicitly
started as anti-child abuse measure; it now seems high time, given its lukewarm
results at-best to date, to turn the blowtorch on white Australians by doing a
historical audit/round-up of questionable images held for and in our own domain. Some of the child-subjects (who are almost
never named) would still be alive, and even if they aren’t, their descendants
and other relatives may well be doubly haunted by these decades-old images of
the dead, that are, ironically or not, possibly banned from their own
communities under the “No Pornography” rule of the Intervention, but are freely
available elsewhere, for a few dollars in a second-hand bookshop.
At the time these images usually were taken
(pre-1964), the Northern Territory
* Presumptive wardship for all “full blood”
Northern Territory Aborigines was abolished in 1964. Some of the questionable images would have
been taken in South Australia and Western Australia
