Out of the shadows: A photo-essay of antipodean colonisation, resistance and massacres

Landscape photography can be classic renditions of the natural environment within a picturesque tradition found in early English landscape paintings; however, culturally, it can also mean images of other types of environments involving humanity, including human interactions reminiscent of urbanscapes, industrial environments, cityscapes, sites of violent crime, engagement of war and others. Critically, landscape imagery within visual arts also functions within a rhetorical political context by forming concepts of national identity. While this photo-essay comprises of landscape images, the work is not about the landscape or the objects within the space framed by the camera. This work is about ‘place’ and the political and historical events that occurred at these sites. The places photographed in this work are an attempt to draw attention to the violence referred to as the frontier wars between the British military, settlers and Indigenous peoples during colonisation. The objective of the work is to enhance a contemporary consciousness and hopefully amend the collective historical narrative that suggests the British displacement and occupation of Aboriginal Nations was a peaceful transition. Australian history has a blind spot when it comes to the violence during this period that involved fierce resistance from the Indigenous people, the internment of families into missions and the hundreds of massacres by colonists across the entire country.