Contact prints by J W Lindt

In 2001 a small but interesting album of nineteenth-century photographs was presented to the Mitchell Library. Containing portraits of Fijian and Aboriginal people, it was compiled around 1870 by George Earngey, a surveyor and amateur anthropologist from northern New South Wales. Notable among the photographs are some arresting head-and-shoulder shots taken in JW Lindt’s Grafton studio. Lindt would later become famous for his photographs of ‘Aboriginals of New South Wales’, many of which are held at the Library.    

The discovery of these previously unknown portraits in the Earngey album sheds new light on the development of Lindt’s portrayal of Aboriginal people and the ways in which he responded to, and shaped, perceptions of race in the nineteenth century.

Lindt and Earngey both arrived at the frontier town of Grafton in 1868; Earngey as a Harbours and Rivers clerk and Lindt as a photographer to join the business of fellow German, Conrad Wagner. Grafton, in the country of the Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people, was one of the ‘rising towns’ of the north. Just 20 years before, the only white presence in this area had been the scattered bush camps of cedar-getters.

By the 1870s, the Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people had witnessed the growth of a settlement that boasted a School of the Arts, a newspaper, a gaol and several photographic studios. Earngey, proud of the town he would make his home, purchased photographs of its main street and picturesque river and, perhaps at the same time, Lindt’s unsettling portraits of its original inhabitants.

The portraits are mugshots, posed according to the dictates of the emerging science of anthropology, which aimed to measure and compare people of different races to establish the differences between them. This visual reckoning of difference, enabled by photography, was fundamental to the highly problematic nineteenth-century mapping of ‘favoured’ and ‘unfavoured’ races, and created an international trade in photographs of Indigenous subjects.

Portraits like these were sent from all corners of the world to museums in Europe, where they could be slotted into the prejudiced racial hierarchies of eugenics and Social Darwinism, which asserted the superiority of whiteness.

Motivated by this demand for images, Lindt photographed some local Aboriginal men and women in the mugshot format but soon abandoned the project. Perhaps he found them, as we do today, too dehumanising in the way they reduce individuals to a ‘racial type’. Indeed, if Earngey had not collected these images they may well have been lost forever, for the style of photography to which Lindt turned — the theatrical and romantic staging of ‘tableau’ photography — was the antithesis of the brutal mugshot.

These images are artistic rather than scientific, and borrow their aesthetics from the German romanticism of Lindt’s training. Despite their beauty, they are difficult to contemplate: they force us to confront the realities of the history of race relations in New South Wales, and to see that history within the equally confronting international context of nineteenth century racial discourse.

The handsome people captured in these powerful images were ‘well-known Aboriginals of the Clarence’. They were photographed in front of painted backdrops of romanticised Australian landscapes, in poses that showed off their fine muscular physiques, or suggested the tenderness of family affection. Lindt carefully arranged papier-mâché rocks and transplanted foliage, and constructed rough-hewn humpies to signify their homes.

The photographs look staged and unreal to today’s audiences, but at the time they were praised for their truthfulness. The Clarence and Richmond Examiner reported on 8 December 1874 that Lindt’s photographs ‘represent very faithfully aboriginals, male and female of all ages, as the traveller finds them in the wild, and not as if just prepared for portraiture’.