Historical Issues
Unit 3: Perceptions and Stereotypes
Cultural Aspects Historical Issues Race Relations Contemporary Issues
Unit 1: 18thC Britain Unit 2: Contact History Unit 3: Perceptions & Stereotypes Unit 4: Challenges & Injustices
The drawing of Gubbie Wellington has been identified (Toploss, 1985, Vol.1 - Text, p.116, 156) as being painted by Roberts in the Riverina at Brocklesby, near Corowa, on the station of Alec King and Alexander Anderson, while working on Shearing of the Rams around 1889. I sourced the image from Vol.2 - Plates, PLATE 74 (156).
STEREOTYPING CULTURE CLASH ABORIGINAL VOICES COLONIAL ART 19THC ABORIGINAL ARTISTS CULTURAL RESISTANCE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY
Growing up in Victoria in the 1950's, the belief in my family and society in general at that time, was that the Aboriginal people were a dying race. Tom Roberts had drawn Guppie Wellington, believing him to be 'one of the last Blacks of Corowa' (Roberts, c. 1889). His painting, along with other artwoks and photographs being made around that time, reinforced certain stereotypes of Aboriginal people. This is an example of the stereotype which I'll call the 'last of a dying race' stereotype.
SHEARING THE RAMS, 1888-1890
Oil on canvas mounted on board, 121.9 x 182.6 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Conscious that such scenes as blade shearing and bushranging would be rare as the new colony matured, Roberts wanted to capture for posterity images of colonial outback Australia. His Shearing of the Rams is one such image, which has become an icon, or sterotypical image, of colonial outback Australia, dominated by white male labour.
Believing that Aboriginal people were a dying race, he also wanted to depict them as part of Australia's history.
The Aboriginal portrait below, believed to be painted at Cooktown (Topliss, 1985, p. 116), reveals a dignified individual. As in all his portraits of Aboriginal people, Roberts captures the charactersitics of his subjects without subjecting them to the sentimentalised stereotype of the noble savage. He has bought into the stereotype of Aboriginal people as a dying race. Conscious of the technological changes that were about to change farming in Australia forever, he was also depicting the last of the colonial pastorialists. He depicts white colonialists and Aboriginal people with equal diginty:
left: Tom Roberts, 1893, Amehnam Oil on canvas.
Portrait of a 'Port Darwin' belonging to the 'Woolna' tribe. (Topliss, 1985, p.111)
right: Tom Roberts, 1891, S. W. Pring Oil on canvas.
August 30, 2006
Contrasting assumptions and sensibilities operated behind these studies of celebrities and Aborigines. To depict the newsworthy was a staple for black-and-white work in the illustrated weeklies. To seek out Aborigines as a subject for fine art was remarkable but not unique, and far from new. Another difference between the Aboriginal heads and the fashionable set is that Roberts had envisaged the former as a series from the start whereas his compilation of 'Familiar Faces and Figures' was more an after thought to enhance the appeal of these informal studies, a phrase to catch a purse.
McQueen, H. 1996.
September 14, 2006
Activity 3.1
Images and Realities:
The way people are presented is a key factor in the ways others relate to them and also in the way they see themselves.
Cavanaugh, P. & Fisher, L. 1999, Historical Issues A, Unit 3, p.9
Do Aboriginal people have a different approach from non-Aboriginal people, when presenting issues?
People tend to view issues from their own personal and cultural percpectives. Our understanding of the world and how it works springs from early childhood experiences. We learn what contributes to our state of personal well-being, and later, what we are told is necessary for the survival of our culture. Aboriginal and non-aboriginal people practise a form of ethnocentricism as a natural function of being human. It's a way of relating to the world, and presenting issues to the world, from the point of view of one's own cultural circle.
Ethnocentrism is not the same as Racism.
This basic prejudice [ethnocentricism] is not the same as racism. Indeed racism has not existed at all times and in all places in human history. It is a prejudice that contains more than just feelings of cultural superiority. Racism occurs where two groups see themselves as being physically and racially (as opposed to culturally) different and when one group claims the alleged inferiority of the other group is caused by the innate physical differences of its members.
Broome, (1982, p.87)
In the past, have historians played a large role in educating Australians about Aboriginal Australia and the great Australian silence?
Artists and photographers have written Australian history through images. A subtle example of how the great Australian silence on the subject of Aboriginal people, was promoted was through the 'last of a dying race' stereotype in white Australian art. Images and their captions depicting Aboriginal people as a noble, sad and dying race, promoted a silencing of thoughts of their existence in our minds.
What kinds of images of Aboriginal Australia have they presented?
In the documentation and titles of white colonial artworks, Aboriginal people are depicted as a 'dying race', with titles of Aboriginal portraits often captions "Last of the ... tribe". Tom Roberts never used the term 'dying race', however, to describe the dying culture of the white colonials. White people were here to stay. It was simply the methods of domination over land that were changing:
In addition to the city and harbour scenes that depicted pre-Federation Sydney in all its wild colonial glory, Roberts was equally driven by a personal goal to record the pastoral and rural methods that were fast disappearing and to describe with his brush the experience of 'strong masculine labour' on which the colony was being built.
McCrae, C. (URL: 2006)
What images of Aboriginal Australia has the media portrayed?
In 1688 William Dampier described the Indigenous people of Australia as "the miserablest people in the world who differ but little from brutes". His words reflect a his cultural arrogance and lack of knowledge of Aboriginal culture.
James Cook, however, recognised virtues in the little of Aboriginal life that he saw, and acknowledged that some Europeans might view the people as 'wretched'. Cook's words refelct a romantic stereotyping of primative cultures which was practised in European arts and culture at this time:
They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans...they live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inner quality of conditions: the earth and sea furnish them with all things necessary for life.
from Cooke's Journals (cited in Aboriginals in Australia's History, Director of Social Programs, New South Wales Department of Education)
The stereopype of the "Noble Savage":
In the nineteenth century, the emphasis on reason, which had not provided stability, meaning, and satisfaction in the 18th c., shifted to a dominating, romantic appeal to man’s emotions. Gothic, supernatural, fantastical, and eerie themes were popular. There was a fascination with self-expression. Beethoven's work reflected these popular interests. So did the work of poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Rosseau urged autonomous freedom and a return to the concept of the noble savage. He encouraged a return to nature. He promoted the idea that society corrupted man. Leading artists who tried to live according to this Bohemian ideal, however, despaired and ended tragically. Gauguin went to Tahiti to find and to paint the noble savage. He died in desperation, as did many of his impressionistic artist friends.(Schaeffer, 1984)
Howard, D. (URL: 2001)
What impact has this had on Australian society?
September 14, 2006
Activity 3.2-5
Different values:
This table lists differences between Aboriginal and European ways and values, with examples of misunderstandings caused through these differences. I will add to the table as I work through this section:
Aboriginal values |
European values |
Examples of misunderstanding |
Sharing |
Owning |
Confusion arose when Aboriginal people gave food from to the British when they needed it, but did not reciprocate. Instead, they took their land's resources for themselves only. |
Community |
Individualism |
Europeans gave steel axes to women and young boys, disrupting the cultural spiritual and social values of the stone axe. |
Spirituality |
Materialism |
|
Objectivity |
Subjectivity |
Emotional responses of the Gamaraigal:
Words used by Richard Broome ( Broome, R. 2001) when describing the emotional responses he supposes the Gamaraigal people might have had during their first encounters with the British at Port Jackson in 1877:
curious about the supplies they were offloading from the ship;
angry at having their land, water and food supplies destroyed, polluted and removed from them, at having their sacred objects 'souvenired' by them, and at having their burial sites interfered with;
astounded by the sight of sex-crazed convicts openly copulating with the convict women, on landing ashore at Port Jackson;
courageous in approaching them, in trying to understand them.
afraid, thinking they must be spirits, as they knew that Aboriginal corpses turn pale when they die;
bemused about what sex they might be, wondering what was beneath their clothes;
recognition of common humanity, when a sailor dropped his trousers to reveal his genitals.
Why the culture clash?
According to Broome (Broome, p. 27-8, 2001), these were four main reasons:
1. the expected misunderstandings between two cultures
2. the fact that the colony was established as a penal one
3. the preconceptions of Aborigines held by the British
4. the British intention of taking possession of the entire continent.
1. The language barrier makes it hard for understandings between different cultures. Verbal, gestural and visual languages differ in how they signify meanings. A wink, for example, may mean one thing to one culture, and its exact opposite in another.
Governor Phillip mistook the marks on an Aboriginal woman's thighs and forehead as beatings from a domestic dispute, rather than the self-inflicted wounds of grief. His interpretation speaks more about his own cultural realities than of hers.
The Aboriginal people mistook Phillip's missing front tooth as a sign that he was part of their own group, because coincidentally, that tooth is removed from young boys during their initiation ceremony.
2. Convicts "were generally seen as inferior and useless by the gaolers and used as cheap labour...most were hardened criminals...produced by the savage conditions in England and brutalised by the penal system in Australia." (Broome, p.28, 2001)
It is a common ploy for people who have been brutalised by people with greater power should pass their brutality onto those who have less power. Convicts were brutal towards Aboriginal people, who they perceived as beneath them in value.
Also being a penal colony, and so far away from Britain, Australia did not appeal as a place "to which decent English wished to go... (and attracted only) generally poor material to undertake the delicate task of meeting and understanding a highly religious and complex Aboriginal culture." (Broome, p. 29, 2001)
3. Two stereotypes of Aborignal people dominated the preconceptions of the British: the "savage" and the "noble savage":
THE SAVAGE.The view of hunter-gatherers as 'savages' grew out of the contacts Englishmen had with Africans in the sixteenth century. Influenced by their definitions of 'black' as dirty and evil and 'white' as clean and pure, the English saw the Africans as unchristian 'savages' who were violent, lecherous, treacherous and akin to the apes of Africa...
THE NOBLE SAVAGE.However, during the eighteenth century, the French philosophers evolved the concept of the 'noble savage', which suggested that people who lived in untouched natural surroundings, free from the constraints of urban living, were healthier in body and mind, and in perfect harmony with their fellows and nature.
Broome, p. 29, 2001
4. The British had every intention of colonising the entire continent of Australia.
TERRA NULLIUS. When Captain cook sailed to the southern ocean he was ordered to take possession of any land there only "with the concent of the natives", if it was inhabited. However, consent was not necessary if the new lands were not being used in a European sense and thus were 'Terra nullius".
Broome, p. 30, 2001
19thC pseudo-scientific thoughts
What pseudo-scientific thoughts influenced the shift away from British belief in the Australian Aboriginal as racially the same as them but culturally inferior, towards a belief in their racially inferiority?
The Great Chain of Being ranked all living things in an order starting with God at the top, and downwards through all living things.
Phrenology was based on the idea that the physical shape of a person's head determined their intelligence and temperament:
Practitioners of this 'science' told colonial audiences that Aboriginal skulls revealed deficiencies in the so-called moral and intellectual organs of the brain, and excesses in those areas allegedly controlling passions, aggression and the observational instinct.
Reynolds (1975, cited in Broome, 2001, p.94)
Activity 3.7
What did Aboriginal people think then?
Conversations between Aboriginal people and missionaries have been recorded, revealing somthing of the attitudes of each.
Goongeen, 'Have you ever seen something like starts fall? That always come down when blackfellow going to die.'
Mr Watson, 'Pshaw! Not so, I think."
Goongeen, 'Hy, Hy, Hy! You won't believe blackfellow: blackfellow won't believe you.'
W. Watson, Journal, 26 April 1834, CMS Missionary Register, 1835, p.519
There's an unwillingness on the part of the missionary to respect the beliefs of the Aboriginal person. Goongeen points out that Aboriginal people have no reason to believe what the missionaries preach when there is no acknowledgement of their own traditional beliefs. Here is an example of social recpicrocity.
Philip Gidley King (attrib.) engraved by William Blake) A family of New South Wales, Mitchell Library, 1793
September 16, 2006
Activity 3.8-17
Colonial attutudes revealed through art and photography:
Cavanaugh & Fisher (Unit 3, p.23) identify three basic stereotypes that Colonial artists used to depict Aboriginal people:
Romanticised 'noble savages' (eg William Blake)
Civilized, cooperative individuals (eg Thomas Bock)
Culturally inferior and powerless (eg T.R. (Richard)Brown and Samuel Thomas Gill)
In his painting, Natives of New South Wales (1831), colonial artist Augustus Earl (1793-1838) shows us Aboriginal people living a debauched life in the streets of Sydney. Shown in the foreground of a rather large European hotel building, their casual, domestic appearance, contrasts sharply with the scene of high society beyond them. They are washing, eating, and drinking (with wine bottles strewn about), and are overseen what looks like a member of the Aboriginal police. Aboriginal people are depicted as the fringe dwellers.
Photographs of Aboriginal people, take 100 years later, still portrayed them as stereotypes, not individuals. Their captions very rarely told viewers their names, or where they lived:
...to give names and places would be to personalise. To personalise would have been to humanise. That may have made some viewers uncomfortable. Many still held the perception that Aboriginal people were less than human.
Cavanaugh, P & Fisher, L, p.62, Unit 3, Historical Issues A, OTEN, 1999
Philip Gidley King (1758-1808)
The National Gallery of Victoria website (NGV 1999) tells us that John Hunter was captain of the Sirius on its voyages to N.S.W., 1787-92 and that his journal "is one of the most important documents of early British settlement and exploration of Australia." Hunter's journal, reveals that Philip Gidley King was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Norfolk Island in 1790, and attributes the sketch, A Family of New south Wales to King. The English artist William Blake, according to the NGV writers, idealized the features of the figures, "giving them a dignity absent from King's plain sketch". Not having access to King's original 'plain sketch', it will be Blakes idealised image only that I can comment on.
When the image was first composed, it could have been to record a scientific curiosity about what made Aboriginal people different from the European observers. Today, in the same scientific spirit, the Australian Museum URL (2006) uses the same image to illustrate the division of labour in Aboriginal culture:
The division of labour can be seen in many of the historical images. In A Family of New South Wales, the man carries fishing spears while the woman carries a hook and line, some fish and a net bag in which she carries a variety of objects including fishing equipment. (A Family of New South Wales published in John Hunter, 1793) Shell fish-hooks were first used along the NSW central and south coasts around 900 years ago. Their introduction would have led to substantial changes in the food-gathering patterns of both men and women during this period. Watercolours from the period show women fishing in canoes, people eating fish around a campfire outside a bark shelter and a 'family' carrying the equipment they used in their daily lives.
Alongside this distance, scientific observance of aboriginal people however, is a deire to bring them closer, into the ideal of a Western nuclear family of father (leading), mother and their children. In reality however, Aboriginal people lived more communally that the Europeans, in larger extended family groups encompassing grandparents, aunties, uncles and cousins. This image is perhaps is a projection of European expectations of 'family life'.
The figures in the picture are portrayed with dignity, actively engaged in traditional life, preparing to fish. They are positioned in a landscape evoking the idealised world portrayed by French painters such as Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) , with its soft edged foliage and muted tones:
Claude Lorraine, Jacob with Laban and his daughters , Dulwich picture gallery, London
In line with the traditional western art practice of the time, Gidley King positions the viewer into a single point of view – his own perspective (or in many cases the point of view of the person commissioning the work). Here, Australian Aboriginies are portrayed through an idealised window into an arcadian world, where there is harmonly between man and nature in a very Western sense. We are positioned as voyeurs into an other-worldy place. The Lorraine landscape and the Gidley King image are in perfect tonal and compositional balance, where the positive (dark) shapes balance the light, to create an artists's individual (subjective) idea of landscape. The fact that the figures are walking into the left hand side of the picture fame could be read to mean that they are walking backwards into the past, rather than forwards into the present or future, as that is the direction of Western writing/thinking. This could reflect something of the artists view of people race returning into an idealised past.
How might such imagery contribute to cultural conflict between Aboriginal and European people? Stereotypes create certain expectations. If the reality of Aboriginal people conflicted with European stereotypes, there would have been conflict. In other words, when behaviour of Aboriginal people did not conform to the stereotypes imposed upon them by others, there would have been conflict.
William Blandowski (1822-1879)
William Blandowski came to Australia from Poland and worked mainly as a scientist in Victoria in the 1850's. He caused a scandal by naming the fish Cernua eadesii in 'honour' of Philosophical Institute member Dr Eades. It was described as ‘a fish easily recognized by its low forehead, big belly and sharp spine’.
William Blandowski, Cernua eadesii, 1855.
This image has the detail and objectivity one would expect of a scientist. However, when Blandowski painted his Corrobboree, his focus shifts:
William Blandowski, Corrobori or Native Festival, Mitchel Library, NSW., 1855.
What is oberved is not objectively rendered. Blandowski evokes instead a group of classical Roman styled figures in the foreground of a similarly idealised landscape. He observes and presents his view through the traditional European picture frame, from a subjective, personal perspective.
According to Blythe (1991:210) 'to name is to own, and to own is to forget origins...to be named is sometimes to take the name bestowed by an Other...' Just as Blandowski upset Dr Eades in naming him after a fish, colonialists naming the flora, fauna and landscape of Australia would have upset the Aboriginal people, but far meore deeply. Dr Eades could maintain his identity and dignity. Chika Anyanwu (2004), talks about how the new hegemony of technology based communication dismpowers the elderly, (who may never use the internet). Parallels can be seen between what is happening now to older people, and those without access to technology, and in the way Europe conquered indigenous peoples through language dominance:
It is a system where senior citizens who were once in control of their lives are now denied identity and participation and instead made to see themselves as disabled or an 'Other'...The psychological trauma of such alienation and forced sense of incapacitation can create a sense of self-denial and physiological disorder on those affected.
Barak (c1824-1903), Ceremony, Musee d'Ethnographie, Neuchatel
William Barak (c1824-1903
Barak was a Wurundjeri man from Victoria. The website of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery (URL, 2006) tells us that he is said to have witnessed the signing of John Batman's Treaty with the Aboriginal people. He was "an authority on the tribal lore of his people, and produced artworks in charcoal and ochre of items and activities considered to be important to the Aboriginal people such as this corroborree".
The perspective in this image is schematic, flat, or map-like, in contrast to the perspectival treatment of the Family of New South Wales image. As viewers of the Ceremony we are nolonger positioned outside the picture as spectators (or voyeurs), but are invited into a more active participation with the action, the Ceremony itself.
"Perspective", write Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T., (1967 p. 37) "puts a barrier between the viewer and the represented participants, even in the case of a frontal angle: the viewer looks at the represented participants and has an attitude towards them, but does not imaginarily engage with them."
In Ceremony, however, Barak's images aim to fully engage his viewers to participate in a ritualistic passing on of knowledge. His paintings aim to actively engage viewers with stories and symbols. The links between animals and humans in this image is clear, all sharing the space and dancing together.
Barak's perspective was from inside the event. Barak did not show the surroundings because he was not drawing an exotic scene against an exotic background. He was recording the familiar.
(Cavanaugh, P & Fisher, L. 1999, Historical Issues A, Unit 3, p. 42)
Such paintings as these would have enlivened Aboriginal people's dignity in their culture, and helped to maintain their connection with it, in the face of the oppression of their culture by the Europeans in missions and reserves.
William Barak was an elder. As such, it was his responsibility to record, preserve and pass on traditional culture. Although he lived at the Coranderrk government reserve, "where expression of traditional ceremonies through ceremonies was officialy censored," (Cavanaugh, P & Fisher, L. 1999, Historical Issues A, Unit 3, p. 41), he passed on knowledge through his art.
Activity 3.18-19
The figures in Barak's painting Ceremony are flat, 2D and together make an overall interconnected pattern. This technoque sybolises the interconnections between people. The dancing figures are larger than those seated, representing what is important to be looking at here: the Ceremony. As with European early Christian art (pre-Rannaissance), the 2D style evoke a more spiritual response from the viewer of the picture. Rather than presenting a subjective, single person's point of view, the artist encourages the viewer to move into the details and 'dance' to the rhythmic patterns with the figures.
Tommy McCrae (c1835-1901
Tommy McCrae lived in the region of the upper Murray of New South Wales and Victoria. He lived with his family on the shores of Lake Moodemere near Cowra. His work documents many aspects of daily life.
The work of Tommy McCrae was also a statement of continuing cultural identity. However, unlike Barak, McCraw also chose to depict the European squatters and occasionally Chinese workers newly occupying the country.
Cavanaugh, P & Fisher, L. 1999, Historical Issues A, Unit 3, p. 45
One of the things McCrae is remembered for are his representations of the story of the white man, William Buckley, who lived with Aboriginal people in the Victorian bush. He draws him amongst them, dancing in a line, as part of the 'pattern'.
McCrae's Squatters shows a goup of well dressed white people interacting with each other forcable, perhaps even violently, with some figures clearly dominating over others. Their behaviour interested the artist enough for him to draw them, suggesting this was a sight unfamilair to him but perhaps typical of Europeans. Perhaps he is graphically stereotyping white people as antagonistic.
What did McCrae learn about traditional Aboriginal painting and What did he learn, through observation perhaps, about Western image making conventions? His pictures seem to be a synthesis of both. The illusion of a 3D space is balanced by more traditional 2D patterning and symbolc rather than perceptual representation.
Oscar (c1877-?)
Notebook by Oscar (left), with a photos and a map of Cape York, and a letter which was sent (accompanying the notebook) from Glisson to Dr Charles Bage in 1899.
In 1887 Property Manager, Augustus Henry Glissan, obtained Oscar from the Police at Cooktown, when Oscar was about nine or ten years old. In 1898 Glissan gave Oscar an exercise book which the young Aboriginal man used to record his life in drawings.
National Museaum of Australia UR (date unknown)
Oscar drew what he saw of white men interacting with Aboriginal people, from an Aboriginal perspective. He shows the Europeans as taller, gesturing aggressively to Aborigines. His drawing, Dispersing the usual way shows four men dominating the page, aiming rifles at the tiny figures of Aboriginal people on the left, and moving towards them.
Through their art, Oscar, Barak and McCrae all managed, to maintain their personal individuality and Aboriginal identity. In their different ways, they were able to pass down to future generations images revealing the continuance of Aboriginal culture, as well as a critical examination of the overt cultural repression practised by the colonials. They maintained their identity by:
keeping ceremonies alive through their art
expressing themselves through their art
portraying their perception of 'others'
recording memories of their people in earlier days
achiveing a degree of independence
Cavanaugh, P & Fisher, L. 1999, Historical Issues A, Unit 3, p. 65
The are good questions to ask of contemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists everywhere.
Activity 3.25-26
Art as cultural survival:
Just as stereotypical images of Aborigines had been forming in the European community, so too were Aborigines developing their own opinions and stereotypes of the white people.
Aborigines began to view the white men as untrustworthy, lustful and incompetent.
Cavanaugh, P. & Fisher, L. 1999, Historical Issues A, Unit 3, p.51
Aboriginal attempts to establish reciprocity between themselves and white people were bound to fail because of cultural differences. Many of their actions would have been misinterpreted to reflect badly upon them morally, thus further reinforcing the white stereotype of Aboriginals as 'uncivilised'. For example:
The Aborigines offered the Europeans their women which was a traditional way of creating friendliness, obligations and thus repayments between kin, or establishing good relations between groups in potential conflict.
Broome, R. 2001, p. 57
How could Aboriginal people maintain their dignity in the face of the deliberate cultural oppression practised by the Europeans? Broome (2001, p. 66) cites the voice of Derrimut, one of the Yarra people, speaking to a European in the 1840's, as an example of the understandable fatalism felt by some Aboriginal people at that time:
You see...all this mine, all along here Derrimut's once; no matter now, me soon tumble down...Why me have lubra? Why me have piccaninny? You have all this place, no good have children, no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now.
Albert Namatjira (1902-59) - another great favourite and one of our best (if not the best) Australian landscape artist. He was born on 28th July 1902 near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. He was a full-blood Aboriginal and a member of the Aranda tribe. Albert exhibited in Melbourne, Adelaide and most other states. He is represented in all Australian State galleries and has many admirers both here and overseas.
Because of some conflicting laws in Australia (both tribal and civil) effecting the treatment of Aboriginals he had a rather sad life. The traditional Aboriginal laws required that he support numerous relatives, and unfortunately the civil law allowed access to alcohol which up until 1957 was not allowed to be purchased by Aboriginals.
He was constantly in debt and he began to drink heavily. However in spite of this he managed to keep painting until he was moved to Alice Springs Hospital where he died on 8 August in 1959 just 57 years of age.
Images of Australia URL, 2006
Roberts, T. Guppie Wellington - one of the last Blacks of Corowa, 'On reverse in Roberts's writing (ink): 'Last of the Murray river Tribe(s)...'(cited in Topliss, H., Tom Roberts - A Catalogue Raisonne, Vol. 1, Text)
Images of Australia, 2006 http://www.imagesaustralia.com/shearingoftherams.htm [Online accessed 30 August 2006]
Humphrey McQueen, Tom Roberts, Macmillan, Sydney, 1996, pp. 552-3, 567, 633 & 678. and http://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/roberts/roberts_panels.htm [Online accessed 30 August 2006]
Toplss, H., Tom Roberts Australian Aboriginals, in Donaldson, I. & Donaldson, T., 1985 Seeing the First Australians, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, London, Boston
Broome, 2001, Aboriginal Australians, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Mc Crae, Camilla, 2006, Tom roberts Festival/Background, http://www.tomrobertsfestival.com.au/Background.htm [Online accessed 14 September 2006]
Howard, Dianne, 2001, Light in 18thC & 19thC Darkness, http://www.dianehoward.com/Light_18thc_19thc_Darkness.htm [Online accessed 14 September 2006]
Cavanaugh, P & Fisher, L, Historical Issues A, OTEN, 1999
National Gallery of Victoria, 1999 http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/collection/international/print/b/blake/ipd00047.html [Online accessed 16 september 2006]
Australian Museum, 2006 http://www.amonline.net.au/exhibitions/catching/labour.htm [Online accessed 16 september 2006]
Ballarat Fine Art Gallery URL, 2006 http://www.balgal.com/?id=barakwilliam [Online accessed 16 september 2006]
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T., 1967, Reading Images, Deakin University
Anyanwu, C. School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, 2004, UNZCA04 Conference, Sydney, Australia
Blythe, M., 1991, What’s in a Name: Film culture and the Self/Other Question, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 13/1-3 (1991): 205-215.
National Museum of Australia, date unknown, http://www.nma.gov.au/play/oscars_sketchbook/ [Online accessed 17 september 2006]
