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Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story

Queen Mother in Canberra in 1958 and then “back in her native hovel” (183). “Poverty pornography” was undoubtedly among the reasons for the “No Photography” movement – if one may call it that – in Aboriginal communities in the 1970s and 1980s. But Lydon also reports on the obverse danger: the “conspiracy of silence” that results from mechanically applied political correctness. Here is the only point at which Lydon’s book skirts the huge importance of photography in the emergence of “history” as a category in Aboriginal culture. Maybe this will need an Aboriginal historian. What Lydon’s book provides is the other side: a history of the increasing recognition from White Australians, which is by no means triumphalist and may not be expressible in a coherent argument. Here the book’s hybrid form – somewhere between classic bookish argument and PowerPoint presentation, where page after page we are held at bullet point by quotations and images at the same time as we are trying to read – may be an advantage. It puts together a range of voices and points of view without any overall false attempt at reconciliation. For me, the best qualities of the book lie in its bringing together so many details of a well-known history into focus by means of photography: from the shocking revelations of living conditions in Outback “camps” associated with the mission of Doug Nicholls to the very different imagery of activism associated with the Aboriginal Embassy, where Aboriginals become “sexy” in a way that Lydon, perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly, relates to the Black Panthers. To me, it looks more like “the Summer of Love”. I see nothing Black Pantherish in Robert McFarlane’s portrait of Charles Perkins riding home on the bus, which seems more to provide a bridge between the “humanist” photography of Overlanders cameramen Axel Poignant and Geoffery Collings and the contemporary indigenous photographers like Mervyn Bishop, Penny Tweedie, Tracey Moffatt, and others, whose images, for all their levels of irony and historical memory, do not seem antior post-humanist.