Dear Friends and supporters,

Now that the date of the constitutional referendum has been announced and the final stage of campaign has begun, I am reminded of a column George Brandis published on 25 June 2023 in the Sydney Morning Herald (https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/yes-campaign-s-in-deplorable-territory-these-seven-ideas-can-save-it-20230621-p5di91.html) where he put forward ‘seven ideas’ that could ‘save the Yes’ campaign. He suggests that the ‘Yes’ campaign should ‘first, stop insulting [and/or shaming] the people [it needs] to persuade’; ‘second, quit the moral bullying’. Brandis, the former High Commissioner to the UK and former federal attorney general, like other campaigners opposing the ‘Yes’ vote, doesn’t want to be shamed or morally bullied; they also don’t want to face angry outburst from the supporter side.

But why is being shamed is considered offensive? Why should the moral and ethical aspect of the debate be ignored? 

In my opinion, collective shame is an important initial step if we wish to correct the mistakes of our history and achieve meaningful reconciliation. 

I am including with this post extracts from a piece I published in my book Incantations (Recent Work Press, 2014) which gives an account of my encounter with an old black and white photograph I saw in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra almost ten years ago. The photograph still haunts me. 

The Uluru Statement from the Heart considers ‘the truth-telling about history’ an essential part of reconciliation and recognition.  Therefore photographs and stories of people shown in the ones I discuss in the extract need to be seen and heard because only by exposing and confronting darker aspects of our history can we find the right path to peace, justice and consolation. 

With best wishes to you all,

Subhash

Shame 

(about the photograph Australian Aborigines in R.A. Cunningham’s touring company, Dusseldorf, Germany 1885 by Julius Schaar. Albumen silver carte de visite photograph. Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Purchased 2013. https://www.portrait.gov.au/people/ra-cunninghams-touring-company)

I could have easily missed it.

The photograph is small, the size of a postcard. It is placed in a display cabinet amongst other photographs. As soon as I saw it my heart skipped a beat.

Ten years earlier, a Russian friend had sent me a copy of a similar photograph. He is an anthropologist and was interested in writing a biography of Nicholas Mikloucho-Macley, the nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer. 

‘If this photograph makes you angry,’ he wrote, ‘it should rightly do so.’ But anger doesn’t help. Confronted with such images, nothing helps.

No, I don’t feel even a whiff of anger. Shame is what I feel.

The photograph that I see before me in the display cabinet in the gallery is called a visiting card (carte-de-visite). It was produced for mass consumption and sold to satisfy the cardo- mania that had swept through Europe and America in the late nineteenth century. Thousands of eyes looked at it with curiosity, wonder, and possibly fear. Fear, because the pamphlet of the showman, R. A. Cunningham described the Aborigines in the photographic card as ‘ranting man eaters’ and ‘veritable blood-thirsty beasts’. In his words, they were the specimens of the ‘lowest order of man.’ 

This albumen print was made by Julius Schaar, a German photographer, in a studio in Dusseldorf. I mention his name, not because I want to acknowledge the provenance of the photograph, but to express my shame in his endeavour.

Jenny is the name of the woman. Her son, Little Toby, stands next to her. He holds a large boomerang in his hands. To his left is Toby, his father. He has a small spear in his right hand.

The fourth man is Billy, who stands with two boomerangs. The two older men have bones thrust through their noses. Billy’s bare chest is marked with ceremonial skin scars. The men have no shoes, whereas Jenny wears knee-high leather boots.

Jenny, Little Toby, Toby and Billy. Four names, alien to them. Names they must have rarely used for each other. Names given to them by Cunningham. 

For the record, Jenny’s aboriginal name was Yarembera or Yerberi. She and her husband Wangong were probably from the Palm Islands. I haven’t found the Aboriginal names of Little Toby and Billy. I wish I had. Why? Simply because I naïvely feel that by uttering their real names, I may be able to restore some dignity to them. But I am wrong. It isn’t appropriate either to name them or to show their images. I should have kept silent.

But I can’t.

The reason is that it reminds me of the photograph I had received from my Russian friend, ten years earlier. It’s a terrible photograph to look at. That’s why I won’t include it here. 

But I will write about it, the photograph sent to me by my Russian friend. It has three of the four people shown on the carte-de-visite made by Julius Schaar in Dusseldorf. Wangong, Yerberi’s husband, is not in this photograph. He died in a Paris Hospital, most probably from tuberculosis.

Prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte, the President of Societe de Geographie, took this photograph in Paris. The Prince was a well-known man with wealth and reputation. 

The three people in the photograph are the last survivors of the group of nine Aborigines removed from Australia. Two of the original nine had tried to escape but failed. Six perished; Wangong was one of them. A famous anthropologist wanted to acquire Wangong’s body for a laboratory in Paris. He didn’t succeed.

There is one more figure in the photograph: a small stuffed dog. The dog is placed next to the bare feet of Billy and Little Toby. The presence of the dog unhinges something in me.

To go on looking and thinking about the image becomes unbearable.

Robert Cunningham was a showman. His motives were pragmatic. But the Prince was an enlightened man, a man of science, the grandson of Lucien Bonaparte, Emperor Napoleon’s cousin. He was a man of his times, some would say. He definitely was. But is this sufficient to absolve him? Those who want to do so will find one or another reason to do that. But I won’t.

It’s true that to claim a high moral ground is easy for me.

And it is easy for me to point the finger at the Prince. Easy and expedient.

But I also know that there is no guarantee that I would have behaved differently. In the name of science, I too could have taken similar photographs. I too could have measured heads and skulls and tested the skeletons and bones of the dead Aborigines. 

This is the source of shame I feel looking and thinking about the two photographs. This lack of belief in my resolve to remain humane in all conditions.

To fail oneself is easy but to find excuses is even easier.

I look at the sullen face of Yerberi and want to hide my face. To disappear from her sight is my first impulse. 

At first, I had assumed that the anger on her face was contrived, that she and her companions were just acting the role Cunningham wanted them to play. To some extent they were. But the look on their faces, I am convinced, isn’t forced. To make them smile would have been impossible, because taking photographs then was a cumbersome exercise. The photographer didn’t have time to shoot non-stop or to wait for the right moment.

‘Look what you have done to us,’ Yerberi says. I hear her words and begin to think of the uncanny power she and her companions have come to possess by being in these photographs.

As long as the photographs survive, they will live, looking at us.

‘Look, what you did to us,’ she says and waits to hear from us.

‘Look, what we did to you,’ I hope I am able to say to her.