Alexander Schramm (1813-64) and the visual representation of Aboriginal people in mid-nineteenth century colonial Australia
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Date
2017
Authors
Woodburn, Susan
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Speck, Catherine Margaret
North, Ian
North, Ian
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Abstract
This thesis investigates a body of representations of Aboriginal people by the little known German-born artist Alexander Schramm (1813-64), made in the fifteen years after he emigrated to South Australia from Berlin in 1849. In these works, which consist of paintings, drawings and lithographs, Schramm depicted large and small groups of Aboriginal people travelling through the land, in camps, and in their interactions with colonists in and around the recently established settlement of Adelaide.
At a time when artistic recognition of indigenous Australians was largely as a documentary record of ‘traditional’ life seen as inevitably in decline, as picturesque insertions into the landscape, or as an increasingly marginal element of daily life in colonial settlements, Schramm made them the focus of his works in their own right, seemingly without ethnographic or memorial intent, and with little suggestion of cultural and racial degeneration.
It was this unusual engagement, and Schramm’s seeming independence of prevailing preconceptions about Aboriginal people, that provided the initial impetus for this study of his works. A further survey of comparable works by Schramm’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries was undertaken in order to identify the elements that make Schramm’s engagement and representations distinctive. As most attention to Schramm has been within the framework of a new consciousness of the impact of colonial settlement on Aboriginal Australians and of broader post-colonial discourse that takes a particular stance on visual representation of Indigenous people by colonial artists generally, this study also traces in some detail the changes in the appreciation and interpretation of his works between the time they were made and their gradual re-discovery more than a century later.
The absence of Schramm’s own account of his reasons for making these works limits our understanding of the images he made and why he persisted in making them despite decreasing market appeal. There is no definitive evidence to support assertions of his personal or cultural sympathies with Aboriginal people, or whether he intended a critique of their situation under colonisation. Nonetheless, his works demonstrate that there were modes of artistic representation of Aboriginal people other than negative stereotyping or visual obliteration, and at the same time reflect not only the erosion of their numbers and traditional life with the expansion of colonial settlement but also resilience and adaptation in the face of dispossession.
School/Discipline
School of Humanities
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2018
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