Redmond Barry Fellow 2004

Leonarda Kovacic
From "lubras" to "belles": representations of Aboriginal women, 1850–1950

The original title of my project was 'From "Lubras" to "Belles": Representations of Aboriginal Women in Photography, 1850-1950'. I identified and analysed (mostly colonial) photographs of Aboriginal women in the La Trobe Picture Collection. Towards the end of my time at the SLV, I became aware of three sets of images of Aboriginal women in the nude and semi-nude, taken by different photographers from the 1890s through to the late 1930s. The interpretation of these images from aesthetic and artistic (rather than purely historical or anthropological) perspectives has come to form the basis of my first academic monograph, Aboriginal Nudes, which is now nearing completion (as at July 2007).

Other research outcomes include three conference papers: 1) 'Aboriginal Nudes', presented at the 'Sex in History' Symposium at the University of Melbourne in 2004; 2) 'Strewn Beauty: Clara Phillips and La Perouse in the Early 1900s', given at the 'Narrative Research' Symposium at Victoria University in 2006; and 3) 'An Aboriginal Belle of La Perouse', delivered at the 2006 annual conference of the Australian Historical Association at the Australian National University in Canberra.

The project further developed into a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian National University in 2005-2006, and turned into an investigation of the lives of some of the Aboriginal women who posed for these photographs. This has resulted in the findings and discoveries that—once published—will undoubtedly enrich the knowledge base of the La Trobe Picture Collection (not much is known about these images) as well as that of Australian colonial scholarship in general. In 2006 I presented a seminar paper at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU, entitled 'Beauty, Passion, Sex and Desire Across Borders: Writing Women's Lives from a Transcultural Perspective'. The paper, which crossed and explored the (fluid) boundaries between local and national history, transnational biography, oral history, photography and creative writing, linked lives of two—otherwise unrelated—women from the opposite sides of the world: a Croatian woman from the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia and an Aboriginal woman from La Perouse.

The Redmond Barry Fellowship was invaluable in that it provided me with financial and physical resources to conduct my research and granted me unlimited access to the otherwise restricted areas of the State Library.