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A completely permitted view of Aboriginal Australia

Joel Gibson Indigenous Affairs Reporter

19 September 2008 - IN THE earliest photographs, indigenous Australians appear as unwilling subjects playing the noble savage for the anthropologists and eugenicists behind the lens.

In the most recent, they are as likely to be Olympic champions, judges and politicians - and the photographer a world-renowned purveyor of the craft.

From Truganini the "last Tasmanian", to "King" Murray Jack, Burnam Burnam, Bob Bellear, Cathy Freeman and Tracey Moffatt, only one man can say he has eyeballed them all.

Consumed by what he calls his "beautiful obsession", John Ogden has trawled public libraries, galleries and museums and private collections in every state and territory in the past four years, poring over more than 300,000 images taken from 1847 to today.

About 300 of them will for the basis for what he calls the first book of its kind: a pictorial history of indigenous Australia, and a history of indigenous Australians' relationship with the camera.

But perhaps Ogden's greatest achievement, and the reason his obsession took a year of unpaid labour, is that he did it the Aboriginal way, seeking permission from the subject in every image.

Where they were no longer alive, he followed bush tracks, byways and old- fashioned bush telegraphs to ask their family or community. It was an extraordinary task in a country as vast as Australia, whose indigenous people are so mobile and often unconstrained by Western deadlines and priorities.

"It hasn't been done before and the longer it takes, the more I realise why," he says. "But I think it just empowers the people in the photographs."

Planned for release in February, the book is timed to coincide with the first anniversary of Kevin Rudd's prime ministerial apology to the stolen generations.

With one more sponsor to cover production costs, he hopes the book will raise more than $200,000 for renal health programs run by the Jimmy Little Foundation. Five hundred copies will be sent to remote communities, "where some people can't read or write and they can look at it and say, 'Wow, that's my culture'," Ogden says.

Its working title - Portraits From A Land Without People - "is a little bit controversial", says the northern beaches photographer and filmmaker, who has made music videos for John Farnham and Jimmy Barnes. "But I think that's probably not a bad thing".

A fourth-generation Anglo-Australian, Ogden was driven to compile the book by the so-called "history wars", which debated the mistreatment of the first Australians.

"You only need to look at the pictures to see there were frontier wars. But it's not to make people feel ashamed. It's not a political rant  It's basically trying to show the richness, resilience and diversity of the culture".

see: Aboriginal Portraits http://www.aboriginalportraits.com/

see: Aboriginal Pictorial multimedia interview with John Ogden

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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