Abstract
In the late 1980s, a collection of photographs was forwarded to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies from the Australian Embassy in Berne, Switzerland. Donated by the grandson of Swiss architect and engineer Hans Buser, the collection documents his visit to Northern Australia in the late 1910s. Chronicling Buser’s contributions to the state capital, Darwin, the photographs provide evidence also of his interest in the local Aboriginal people, shown working in the trepang industry, playing cricket and performing ‘corroboree’ at the government’s Kahlin Compound.1 In one image, Buser appears as an intrepid colonial: wearing a white suit, he stands alongside three Aboriginal men adorned in body paint and carrying spears for the camera.2 Although not a settler, he was a white man in northern Australia, and he was eager to record his status as a civilizer on the fast-disappearing frontier.
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Notes
Aboriginal people expected payment for such staged photographs. See Jane Lydon (2005) Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press).
Heather Goodall (1988) ‘An Aboriginal Calls for Justice: Learning from History’, Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2:33, 4–6; and (1988) ‘When Anthony Fernando went to Confront his Colonisers’, Land Rights News 2:10, 32–33.
See also Fiona Paisley (2006) ‘An “education in white brutality”: Anthony Martin Fernando and Australian Aboriginal Rights in Transnational Context’, in Annie E. Coombes (ed.) Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 209–226.
Ravi Di Costa (2006) A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press), p. 4.
For example see Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus (1999) The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin);
Penny van Toorn (2006) Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press).
John Maynard (2005) ‘“In the Interests of Our People”: The Influence of Garveyism on the Rise of Australian Aborigines’ Political Activism’, Aboriginal History 29, pp. 1–22.
See for example Anna Haebich (2000) Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle University Press);
Heather Goodall (1996) From Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin).
Rosalind Poignant (2004) Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (Sydney: UNSW Press).
Erez Manela (2006) ‘Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East—West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919’, American Historical Review III:5, pp. 1–30.
Homi Bhabha (1990) ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London: Routledge), pp. 315ff.
Angela Woollacott (2001) To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Antoinette Burton (1994) ‘Rules of Thumb: British History and “Imperial Culture” in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, Women’s History Review 3:4, 488.
Sidonie Smith (1993) ‘Who’s Talking/Who’s Talking Back? The Subject of Personal Narrative’, Signs 18:2, 392–407, esp. 393.
Gillian Whitlock (2000) Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell), p. 6.
Holloway Sparks (1997) ‘Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women’, Hypatia 12:4, 1–39.
James Clifford (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p. 25.
See Cassandra Pybus (2006) Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers (Sydney: UNSW Press).
James Kohen (1993) The Darug and their Neighbours: The Traditional Owners of the Sydney Region (Blacktown: Darug Link-Blacktown and District Historical Society, NSW).
Marie M. de Lepervanche (1984) Indians in a White Australia (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin).
Anna Haebich (1988) For their Own Good: Aborigines and the Government in the South West of Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia).
G.C. Bolton (1981) ‘Black and White after 1897’, in C.T. Stannage (ed.) The New History of Western Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press), pp. 129–132.
Rozina Visram (1986) Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto Press), pp. 52–53.
See for example Antoinette Burton (1998) ‘A “Pilgrim Reformer” at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari in Late Victorian London’, in At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 152–187;
Laura Tibili (1994) ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press);
Carmen Faymonville (2003) ‘Black Germans and Transnational Identification’, Callaloo 26:2, 364–382.
Heather Goodall (1988) ‘Aboriginal Calls for Justice: Learning from History’, Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2:33, 4–6.
Bain Attwood (2003) Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen and Unwin), pp. 31ff.
Paul Lauren (1988) Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder: Westview Press), p. 112
Paul A. Kramer (2002) ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History 88:4, 1315–1356.
(1983) ‘Three Tributes to Pearl Gibbs (1901–1983)’, Aboriginal History, 7:1, 4–22; Marilyn Lake (2002) Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (Sydney: Allen and Unwin), p. 55.
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© 2010 Fiona Paisley
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Paisley, F. (2010). Resistance in Exile: Anthony Martin Fernando, Australian Aboriginal Activist, Internationalist and Traveller in Europe. In: Deacon, D., Russell, P., Woollacott, A. (eds) Transnational Lives. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_15
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