Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Drucilla Modjeska’s Poppy: Like Wounded Mother, Like Daughter

With the illness and eventual death of her mother, Drucilla Modjeska looks back across vast waters (separating her home in Sydney from her childhood home in England) toward her mother in order to recover from multiple losses—the first loss of the infant, the second of the adolescent who watches as her mother is institutionalized and her family dispersed through the subsequent divorce, the third loss of the adult immigrant, and the fourth loss of the bereaved daughter. Casting a dutiful eye on old photos she experiences how vast the gulf is between herself, a feminist and exile in Australia, and the mother who lived her life elsewhere (Whitlock 245). In anguish, she realizes that “I did not know her,” realizes further that in not knowing her mother she “could not know myself” (5).

Intent on “knowing” her mother, the daughter seeks “evidence that would restore her to me” (12). On one wall of her writing room, she traces the family tree. The “names . . . tethered by straight lines drawn in ink” provide her with one kind of evidence, one kind of knowledge about her mother, the knowledge of bloodlines and relationships that are “straightforward and unambiguous” (9). On another wall she pins snapshots from the archive of her suburban middle-class family life, another kind of evidence. But, she laments, “the photos themselves explain nothing,” “make no sense.” The figures in them become phantasms, “grotesque” and “swollen.” There is nothing “straightforward and unambiguous” about these visual traces (9–10).

Scrutinizing family snapshots, the daughter concentrates on two photos in which “Poppy is not obscure, or obscured to me.” In one her mother is a “vulnerable” and “self-conscious” but hopeful child of six with her future ahead. In this photo the daughter reads “the restless energy of hope.” In the other, taken soon after Poppy’s lover has died, her mother is an older woman, grieving yet “calm,” not struggling. In both photos, brackets to the life lived in between hope and calm, her mother appears alone: child, old woman. The daughter triangulates these two photos with a third, typical of many other photographs in which Poppy is “embedded in the family. Hemmed in, surrounded” (10), obscured and obscuring. In fact, the first photo described in detail in the text is Poppy’s wedding picture, one that captures her in that defining ritual of bourgeois life and in that defining set of relationships, expectations, opportunities designed to give her life as a woman its meaning and its demesne. The daughter describes how Poppy, who has given her daughter the photo during one of their last talks, reads in the photograph “the vanity she’d spent her life denying she’d inherited from” her mother (8). But the daughter looks at the wedding photos and sees there, not the vanity her mother sees, but “intention, it’s not in her expression, not at all, but in the future that is prefigured by her body, and by the composition of the photos” (8). Arranged to both sides of her are all “the people who bordered her life, and would in the end prove impossible to escape” (8). In the middle is the new couple, flanked by the two families from which they have emerged to join in their own coupling; and the young woman of the couple is a mother who has willed herself into “an ordinary family” to “break the cycle of loss and sorrow she’d been born into.” “If the photos make me sad,” the daughter reflects, “it’s not because what she wanted didn’t happen, but because it did which confused the issue more thoroughly than any simple failure could” (9).

The casual residue of everyday life, the family snapshots “weigh” the daughter down with their “random images of a family past” (10); they hem her in just as her mother appears hemmed in by family life inside the frames of those photos. As she ponders them for what they reveal and conceal, she finds that the intransigent silences of images generate more questions than they seem to answer; multiply confusions; force contradictions. Even as they promise to provide documentary evidence about her mother’s life, to deliver an image of her mother’s past to her, they deliver primarily the sense of absence, loss, unfulfilled desire—loss of that earlier time, loss of the mother, loss of the “real” meaning of the life of the woman whose materiality is and isn’t there before her, in the frame. If Modjeska begins her “life-writing” project[4] desiring to know her mother by piecing together through bits of evidence the “real” story, she discovers that she cannot get to any “real” story through family documents; she can only get to her version of an unrecoverable story.

Yet the very insufficiency of photographs to “make sense” and thereby function as an archive of the real becomes imaginatively productive for the daughter. In their intimate silences, the photos solicit imagination. And in this way photographic muteness allies with the muteness of Poppy herself, that other evidentiary source that the daughter tries to mine for meaning (when her mother is still alive). Questioning her mother about what she “really” thought, felt, did, the daughter is “unable to pin her down to a clear view of her own history” (10). Poppy in effect refuses to become a documentary source, will not give her daughter her version. She resists her daughter’s will to pin her down or frame her up.

Poppy’s persistent silence becomes a fascination for the daughter: “I am interested in the enigma, and therefore the power, of the silent feminine which I come up against time and again in this task” (24). But she comes to identify her mother’s silence with a larger generational silence. “Born to Edwardian mothers, mothers to feminist daughters,” writes the daughter, “Poppy’s generation slips out in silence” (90). For the feminist daughter, herself struggling with the emotional residue of “independence,” the enervating suspicion about familial constraints, and the pressure of undutifulness, Poppy needs to be released imaginatively as a subject of and in history instead of remaining a too familiar icon of the enduring, “wounded,” sacrificial mother held in the psychological timelessness of a daughter’s nostalgia, held as if in a single snapshot.

To release Poppy from the frame of the wounded mother, the daughter begins to turn a familial look to the family archive and to explore what the photos show and what they mask. In effect, she queries what Bourdieu describes as the “family function” of photographic practice, “the function conferred upon it by the family group, namely that of solemnizing and immortalizing the high points of family life, in short, of reinforcing the integration of the family group by resserting the sense that it has both of itself and of its unity” (19). The daughter reads the timeless ideogram of bourgeois familiality in early photographs in which “happy together at the side door of the cottage . . . . Richard and Poppy’s bodies appear to move in unison” (36–37). Yet rereading later photos she discovers tensions cracking the conventional surface of the bourgeois idyll, those, for instance, in an election flyer photo from the late 50s:

Reading the photograph against the grain of its conventions, the daughter sees the disjunction between the structural formality—designed to project condition and status, traditional values, stability, propositional relationships of husband to wife, parents to children, candidate to constituency—and the subtle, candid deviations from that formality that expose instability, contingency, emotional messiness, family discord. Underneath the posed surface of the family photos lies an unrepresentable story of mental instability, physical breakdown, institutionalization, shock treatment, separation, suicide threats, silence, recriminations, loneliness, divorce. “Get[ing] a grip on a picture of Poppy” (163) thus requires the daughter to find a way to understand her mother’s nervous breakdown which, coming during the daughter’s early adolescence, forces her own removal from her childhood home to a friend’s house when her mother is committed to an institution. The breakdown brings divorce, brings the end of what seemed the fulfillment of Poppy’s matrimonial intentionality. Such crises of the bourgeois family remain unphotographed, unimaged, unimagined, until the daughter finds the words through which to represent the formerly unspeakable.

Yet the story of Poppy’s childhood, marriage, and nervous breakdown takes up only the first third of the narrative. For the daughter continues past the time of the wounded mother to imagine Poppy’s life “as a woman” (90)[5] after the idyll of bourgeois family life comes to an end. She tracks how Poppy recovers, establishes new networks of friends, experiments with alternative living arrangements, goes to work counseling young working-class offenders, negotiates a long-term relationship with a Catholic priest, travels to India on a spiritual quest, dies of cancer; how her husband remarries and her daughters disperse around the globe. As she does so, she gives her mother to history and gives historical specificity to her mother’s struggle as a woman in time, rejecting the timeless icon of sacrificing motherhood by forcing history back inside the frame: the history of wars and consumerism; of middle-class consolidation and the rising rate of divorce; of new state practices affecting the family; of treatments for mental breakdowns; of countercultural experimentations with relationships and engagements with spiritual alternatives; of restless emigration from one global location to another; of generational differences in opportunities available to women. Poppy’s silence becomes not a spiteful gesture of maternal withholding but a gift of imaginative license, an imaginative license that sanctions another way of knowing. Released from the necessity of securing her mother’s version of her own story, the daughter can fashion her own narrative.

But if this is the picture the daughter gets of her mother; there is also the manner of framing the picture that becomes paramount. And this too is generated from and in silence. The daughter imagines that in her breakdown her mother’s “silence was a symptom and a cause” (83), a symptom of a specific historical condition: “The voice she needed hadn’t been invented, or if it had, it hadn’t been heard in the south of England” (83–84). The daughter assumes responsibility for inventing the voice of her mother, fabricating for her own narrative purposes imaginary diaries and letters written by her mother and by Marcus, her mother’s lover, imagining how her mother might have put together for herself new meanings, outside relationships of familiality—a life of work, independence, travel, unpublicized love, faith. Imagining her mother speaking and desiring outside the familial context, the daughter re-sites her mother, releasing her from a singular snapshot. And she resists the temptation to fix her own familial look, to site her mother in a static identity.

Assuming the voice of her mother, the narrator “thinks toward” something she calls a “third voice” (151–152), a narrative mode braiding together what she describes as the father’s tongue of academic learning, objectivity, and intellectual reflection upon the cultural meanings of her mother’s story as a woman, and the mother’s tongue of storytelling, a “blood and heart” tongue attentive to “the everyday, the unrecorded, the unsystematic . . . the ways of living that affected us quietly, their meanings accruing over years” (26). In the oscillations this third voice sets in motion, the daughter attempts to know the mother not through normative conventions of biography calling for final and authoritative interpretations of the meaning of a life—interpretations “straightforward and unambiguous”—but through an imaginary interpenetration of archival materials, actual and fictive—photographs and diaries, letters and pieces of personal conversations.

In knowing Poppy through this imaginative impersonation and the hybrid practice it engenders, Poppy “is given back to me” (139). And if in not knowing Poppy, she could not “know myself” (5), then in writing Poppy back into history, the daughter comes to know something of herself. While she describes her mother’s story as “the safer ground of narrative” (192), and purposefully keeps her own secrets by not naming people and by not specifying relationships, the daughter nonetheless assembles her own narrative of loss, longing, and imaginative recovery of likeness as she pieces together a story of her mother. And as she releases Poppy from the ideogrammatic identity of wounded mother, she releases herself from the ideogrammatic identity of undutiful, rebellious, wounded daughter. For despite the geographical distance emigation to Australia placed between mother and daughter, perhaps even because of it, the daughter has been unable to escape her mother’s gaze, a sign of “vanity” that links her to her mother and the vanity her mother read into the wedding photograph.

Introducing Poppy’s trip to India with a journal entry in Poppy’s voice, the narrator imagines the mother commenting on discarding her camera, and by discarding her camera, refusing the social function of family photographs:

The daughter too has lived within this vanity, imagining herself as the object of her mother’s critical judgment. Contemplating her mother’s death and then confronting it, the daughter finds herself with “no one to see me.” Consequently she “doubt[s her own] existence.” This may explain Modjeska’s invocation of a phrase from Colette as the epigraph to the book: “To renounce the vanity of living under someone’s gaze.” If she can release her mother from ensnarement in her own familial gaze, as the daughter who sees Poppy as “wounded mother,” she can also release herself from the internalization of her mother’s critical familial look.

Conflating the narrative of her mother with her own narrative, Modjeska explores the way in which “the self is necessarily other to itself, but also . . . embedded in and constituted by multiple relations” (M. Hirsch 111). Perhaps this is why Modjeska names herself as narrating daughter “Lalage.” “Lalage” becomes the imaginary projection of the narrating subject as other to itself. And perhaps in distancing the narrating subject, she distances herself from her investment in a fixated form of relationship. In this way the narrative bears affinities to what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe describes as “allo-portrait” in an attempt to suggest the othering effects of self-portraiture (42). If the allo-portrait, as Marianne Hirsch argues, “allows us to perceive and to acknowledge the otherness embedded in the self-portrait” (111), then we might think of Modjeska’s text as allo-biography.

Thus while the daughter subjects the mother to her own knowledge-producing project, a potentially disempowering and silencing frame-up, she assumes what Caren Kaplan describes as “critical accountability” (119) by resisting the generic “truths” of biography “exposed in a single masculine climax” (Modjeska 26) and the evidentiary basis upon which they can be asserted. Impersonating her mother, the narrator calls attention to the constructedness of the biographical and the autobiographical process. Daughter and mother are mutually constitutive as one becomes the other becomes the one. In giving her narrator the name Lalage, Modjeska has already sited the narrator as patently other. In another layering of auto- and allo-biography, Lalage impersonates Poppy, yet again, as if in infinite regression, projecting the subject as the other. Yet she also cites the other as subject. Hers is a gesture of critical citationality.

The very process of imaginatively reconstructing the mother’s story sutures the gap between the time of the photos and the moment of narration, between the lost mother and the narrating daughter. And the critical reading of photos functions as a suturing practice in which the biographical and the fictive, the autobiographical and the biographical join so that unstraightforward and ambiguous meanings persist. Unlike the family tree on the wall in her room, a form of knowledge about “kin and progeny” that remains finite and fixed, and unlike the photos from the family album, photos composing her mother through the familial gaze, her imaginative engagement with the material archive of her mother’s life, including family photos, involves a form of knowing which is in flux, on-going, provisional, familially relational, a form of knowing in which time is multidimensional and the space of consciousness fluctuant.

Perhaps this is why Modjeska does not include any photographs within the text. She too has resisted framing herself and her mother in a series of conventional pictures. The only photograph to appear is on the paperback cover, and it pronounces itself as a frame-up of the conventional Madonna and child variety. For it is actually a photo of a photo of the mother and child, cropped uncomfortably, off-center, partially unreadable. Writing allo-biography displaces the constraining social function of the family album.

Sally Morgan’s Cultural Location: Reciting Aboriginal Likeness

Modjeska’s narrative engages the ways in which family photography functions as recitation of bourgeois familiality and bourgeois forms of biographical knowledge across the history of Australian immigration. With Sally Morgan’s My Place we turn to the complex relationship of family photography to the history of familial relations in Australia’s post/colonial contact zone.[6]

Part of the technological apparatus of Australian colonialism, photography was utilized by various colonial institutions, among them the church, the state, and anthropological research,[7] “to endorse and celebrate the establishment of the settlements” (King-Smith pamphlet) and to produce and circulate definitions of Aboriginality, document and police Aboriginal populations, and project their possible futures. In other words, photos became one means through which the formerly unknown, profoundly different and exotic other, could be catalogued, captioned, and domesticated within the frames of the colonizer’s lens.[8] Not only were Aboriginal peoples fetishized in the national album; they were often infantilized, represented as unruly children, naive in their systems of belief, not yet emergent from a state of nature, still unclothed, unmannered, uneducated. To the degree, then, that they could be encouraged or made to grow out of their Aboriginality and assimilate into settler society by adopting the appearance, the identities, and the values of the colonizers, they could leave behind their “primitive” Aboriginality and become modern subjects of history. They could become part of the Australian national family. Family photos projected this alternative future for Aboriginal peoples, circulating images testifying to the desirability of modernization through “uplift.” In this way photos registered the semiotics of identity formation and deformation, producing representations of the unassimilated and assimilated, the primitive and the modern.

Sally Morgan engages this history of the Australian family album in her corporative auto/biographical text, My Place, and in the “Family Album” appended to the 1989 “Illustrated” hardbound edition. Daughter and granddaughter of women of mixed Aboriginal and settler heritage, women who lived within systems designed to enforce assimilation by brutally separating children from mothers and kin, and who internalized the denigration of their Aboriginal heritage and the superiority of the white heritage, she discovers her mixed heritage only late in adolescence because mother and grandmother had purposefully kept it from her. “‘It was only a little white lie,’” her mother tells her, then recognizes the “unintentional humour” (135). In her turn Morgan rebuts the little white lie with a narrative of Aboriginal identity recovered and revaluated.

Unlike Modjeska, Morgan does not come to familial knowledge as she writes—she knows about her Aboriginal heritage already. But through the process of writing, she reconstructs the experiential context of a childhood and adolescence lived in a family in which this suppressed history functioned as both enforceable silence and uncanny presence. She exposes as well the experiential effects of discourses of assimilation: the complicity of parents in maintaining ignorance, the strategies of passing, the need of people outside the family to fix identity, the behavioral manifestations of dissociation, the confusions of mother-daughter relationships, the psychological distance exacted as the price of forced separation, passing, and imposed ignorance. Simultaneously the narrative tracks the process through which the assimilated daughter/granddaughter understands “becoming black” (see Millech) as it records “a conscious process of reentry into a culture whose traces had repeatedly erupted in inexplicable ways . . . without ever adding up to anything coherent until she found out about her Aboriginal origins” (Longley 377).

Family photos are critical in Morgan’s reconstruction of the extradiegetic search for family counter-history, as the photographable and the unphotographable become clues in her search for information. At one point she recalls how important the visits of her uncle Arthur became for her, one in particular during which Arthur brought along “some old photographs of Nan, taken in the nineteen twenties.” Morgan comments that her grandmother “had always refused to allow any of us to take her photograph, so it was exciting to be able to see her as a young woman. Nan, however, was not impressed” (147). The implication here is that her grandmother has not wanted her likeness revealed and circulated in photos that would materialize her “difference” as an Aboriginal woman. For when people of mixed heritage pass as white, as Nan and Gladys do, and censor evidence of an Aboriginal heritage, then photographs threaten to undo that disidentification by revealing identities and histories that have been concealed. Morgan opens the next chapter with “Sally’s” decision to write a family history. These fragments from Arthur’s family archive arouse the daughter’s desire for knowledge and inaugurate her historical re/search since they provide glimpses of a familial history unrecited for the next generation, glimpses of a puzzle in need of piecing. Imaginatively the narrator aligns the familial look directed at family photos, the will to know, and the writing of personal history.

This connection between writing/speaking and reading photos recurs when she describes how she used photos to try to solve the riddle of paternity (for both Daisy and Gladys) by looking for family likenesses (236–238). Standing her mother in front of the mirror she holds up one picture of a possible father, only to find no likeness. Then she holds up a picture of Howden Drake-Brockman, the white man for whom her grandmother worked as a domestic and whom they suspect is Daisy’s father. “We both fell into silence,” she writes, “‘. . . he’s the spitting image of you!’” (237). The photo of Drake-Brockman intimates familial genealogy, intimates also a profound secret of paternity denied, of rape and incest. This possible history cannot be written off the photographic image even if it has been written out of the white family history. Daisy goes to her grave with the secret of Gladys’s father’s identity[9]; but the granddaughter sees a likeness if she doesn’t name the unspeakable. And she connects Gladys’s shock at the paternity intimated in the photograph with her decision to speak, to tell her story, and in telling, to reconnect with a history suppressed and a heritage refused. The photos make imaginatively visible that which has been obscured in official family/national history.

As Bourdieu claims, the social function of family photographs is to provide evidence of the integration of the family. The presentation of family likeness, an affirmation of genealogy, is thus meant to register familial stability and legitimacy. In this scene, family photography begins, as it fulfills its social function, to unmask the instabilities in families, and in national family albums. In postcolonial locations such as Australia, family photos can thus become highly contested documents because disturbing questions arise about who’s in whose family. In such radical contexts family histories are difficult to organize into family albums. For the everyday realities of life in the contact zone make the family album a potential site of suppressed as well as commonly told histories.

Yet in this context, photos also become critical means to establish Aboriginal kinship networks among those dispersed and dis/integrated. In reconstructing her search, Morgan describes how she uses old photographs as a “weapon” in her attempt to reassemble family. She says of her return to Corunna Downs to locate kin members that she went to meet people “armed with the photographs” which she showed them, hoping they would see likenesses and recognize relationship. Photographs become a way for her to situate her grandmother, mother, and herself in a kinship network, a network that expands the notion of family out of its constricted bourgeois domain. Traces of the past through which people can remember and reconnect with sundered parts of their history, the photos, an alternative to written records for people excluded from literacy (Cohen and Somerville xiv-xv), facilitate the recovery of family and kin in the context of the purposeful dispersal of families and in the personal context of her mother’s and grandmother’s dissociation from an Aboriginal past. It is this connection with and acknowledgment by a wider community of Aboriginal people in various communities, particularly Corunna Downs, that Morgan posits as evidence of her own identity as Aboriginal.

For Morgan, then, family photographs provide necessary evidence of another history suppressed, an alternative identity affirmed. But I want to look further at the ways in which the photos assembled in the Family Album of the Illustrated Edition can be read through and against the narrative of My Place as three scenes of familiality.

The first half of My Place is a rather conventionally autobiographical narrative—linear, chronologically organized, focalized on the narrating “I” as the center of consciousness, dependent upon various narrative discourses prevalent in white Australian culture. Detective story, spiritual journey, Bildungsroman, Aussie battler story, confessional, these form the cultural discourses of Morgan’s “assimilated” education, her immersion in the literary conventions of the dominant culture. The first group of photos in the Illustrated Edition figure this assimilated subject. In the opening photo the young Morgan, sitting at a desk, looks up from her work, looks directly into the camera, smiles. The camera snaps the smiling, studious, emergent individual, the good assimilated child, an image reproduced in the other photos of the Milroy children. A photo of her mother and father presents a conventional bourgeois couple: Bill Milroy stands with his arm around his wife’s waist, pulling Gladys toward him with protective firmness; Gladys leans into her husband in a gesture of pliant and smiling dependency. Together these several photos of children and parents fulfill the social function, enforcing the hegemony of white Australian culture, reciting assimilated familiality. What remains unphotographable, of course, is the father’s violence, illness, and alcoholism; the mother’s desperate hard work; and the grandmother’s withdrawal from the world outside the home and her “strange” behaviors, all a part of Morgan’s narrative. And then there is the photo of the Milroy children and their grandmother, in which Daisy’s physical difference is simultaneously visible and invisible in the faces of her grandchildren. The image of the integrated family thus masks and unmasks the otherness within the family, the otherness within the individuals of the family.

The last photo in the first section of the album, a formal portrait of Morgan and her own husband, seems to play with this disjunction between formal ideogram and experiential history. In a thoroughly assimilated posture, Morgan and her husband pose formally as the young couple reciting the traditional relationships of bourgeois familiality. Yet while the pose is formal, the dress is hippie. In effect their presentation before the camera parodies the conventional bourgeois framing of the domestic couple. He keeps his hands in his pockets. She holds a dog in her lap, where a child would conventionally be placed. The dog, obviously uncomfortable in an unnatural position, strains within the parody. The camera registers a resistance to the assimilated lifestyle; but the form of resistance is historically specific to the early-seventies generation.

The woman who writes some ten years after this photo is snapped undermines the authority of assimilationist discourses in other ways. Detecting Aboriginality, confessing Aboriginality, battling for Aboriginality, educating oneself in Aboriginality, all these generic practices are counter-normative. Here the confession of Aboriginality is posited as something good; and the act of confessing it publicly becomes a political gesture in resistance to discourses of assimilation. It is a shape-changing assertion of difference within the genres assimilated children are taught to privilege, taught to smile upon.

If the first group of photos offers images of the atomic and assimilated family, the second group of photos in the family album provides glimpses of her mother and grandmother as children and young women amidst life on the sheep station of Corunna Downs. Including images of the colonial settler family, gathered not only from members of her own family but from the archive of the Drake-Brockman family and other libraries,[10] these photos of life on the sheep station can be read against the three personal testimonies that make up the second half of Morgan’s text. For in the second half of the book, the writerly autobiographical narrative is interrupted as Morgan incorporates the collaborative life writing projects of Arthur, Gladys, and Daisy. The individualized focus attached to the western form of traditional autobiography is displaced by an orally based, collaborative, matrilineal project. To foreground their effects, I prefer to think of the three narratives not as oral histories but as ethnographic testimonies. Joining with members of her family in a solidarity forged across different histories and generations, Morgan facilitates the coming-into-history of Arthur, Gladys, and Daisy, who give testimony about the effects of colonial practices upon the lives of the colonized. Their narratives emerge out of equally heterogeneous discourses through which they identify themselves and understand their experiential histories. Here the ethnographic/testimonial “I,” a collaborative “I” (mutually produced through the “I” of the oral speaker and the transcription of the ethnographer/daughter), does not “invite us to identify with it” because “we are too different” (Sommer 108). Instead it counters the daughter’s more assimilated autobiographical “I,” dramatizing the generational differences even as it asserts familial kinship.

Given the narratives of Arthur, Gladys, and Daisy, we can read the photos in the second familial context against the grain of bourgeois family ideology as a story of economic and sexual exploitation and familial denial. The photograph of the three men of the Drake-Brockman family functions as an ideogram of the patriarchal settler family: assured, proud, sturdy, affluent, powerful, authoritative. The frontal presentation signals solidity, stability, and timelessness. The conventional V-shape organization of the photo with the patriarch in the cup of the V and the two sons standing behind and to the side of him provide the visual image of a family tree, of orderly succession. Howden Drake-Brockman leans against his father’s chair, asserting his identification with the bearded patriarch. The social stability of the settler community, and of official Australian national identity, is registered in this generational portrait of the pater familias and his successors.

The photos that follow this portrait provide more casual glimpses of life on the Drake-Brockman station, glimpses of functionaries, children, servants, including Morgan’s grandmother. In several photos Daisy is aligned with other Aboriginal women, all family servants, who stand rigidly behind lounging men. Or she is photographed relating to the children as nursemaid. One photo seems idiosyncratic: Daisy lies on a bank of grass in what seems like a canned pose, her hand on the back of her head with her elbow thrown into the air. Here she is not dressed in the standard garb of servitude; here she is not relating to children or to whites, but only to the camera that glimpses her vitality and her sexuality. Finally, there are photos of Gladys and June Drake-Brockman (Howden’s daughter) as babies and little girls; and two photos of Gladys as a girl at the orphanage and as a young woman.

In this assemblage of photos we get hints of a suppressed familiality. Children are not acknowledged as such, because their very existence testifies to fractures in the bourgeois settler family and to the practices of desire that breach the obviously unstable boundaries between cultural groups. Fathers are not identified, even if they remain palpably present. Children become mothers and mothers are separated from children and siblings separated from one another through state intervention and the official policies of assimilation.[11] The daughter/child is not recognized as family but kept on as a maid, an invisible domestic worker. And Gladys is not kept at home with her mother but sent to an orphanage where she can become “white.”

Morgan’s corporate narrative—autobiographical and testimonial—constitutes an alternative to the images gathered in the family album, a matrilineally-based narrative in which Aboriginal identification and history are spoken and reclaimed after long years of censorship and self-censorship. This counter album fills in gaps of the family album that cannot be assembled because family relations have not been acknowledged; because family members have been brutally separated; because heritage has been suppressed. Instead of photographs obsessively accumulated over time, here are subjects situated in their testimonial ethnographies as agents of counter-memory. Yet simultaneously this collection of snapshots works to hold together a family, some of whose members would not and will not be held together in relation, holds together complex histories of difference, identity, kinship, and disruption in the contact zone of settler and Aboriginal Australia.

Morgan’s family album closes with a series of photos of the elders Morgan visited in Port Hedland, Marble Bar, and the Shaw river settlement. Incorporating photos of her Aboriginal kinship network she re-sites herself in a familial network broader than the nuclear family and more incorporating than the settler family. Documenting her relation to community, the photos function as a discursive site for the production and circulation of her identification with and through a specific notion of Aboriginality.

Historically, genres of photographs have produced “authentic” “aboriginality” in multiple registers—as a repertoire of “everyday” activities; a nostalgic reverie for a vanishing people; a catalog of the truly primitive (see Peterson). Ethnographers in particular, often complicit with certain colonialist practices, have drawn upon photography to present images of the pure and the impure, the authentic and the inauthentic. Morgan, piecing together her own history of becoming black out of the gaps in the family album, becomes the lay ethnographer, displacing and implicitly critiquing ethnography’s expertise and its white lies. Through her narrative construction of a counter-family history and the alternative family album she assembles, Morgan posits her Aboriginality as an identity originating in her matrilineal heritage and socially confirmed in her identification with and acknowledgment by the community of Aboriginal people in Corunna Downs, her communal filiation. Yet the radically different experiential histories of Sally, Arthur, Gladys, and Daisy reveal that there is no pure or authentic position of Aboriginality as such; that the subjects of these narratives are multiply positioned, and that they make sense out of their past through narratives woven of discourses of class, gender, national identity, and generational differences, as well as discourses of Aboriginality.[12] And so in both the autobiographical mode and the testimonial mode, and in the documentary record of three different familialities, My Place historicizes Aboriginal identities and differences even as it posits a fixed Aboriginal identity. “Texts such as My Place,” suggests Gareth Griffiths, “deny the myth of authenticity its authority over the subjected whilst simultaneously recognising the crucial importance of recovering a sense of difference and identity” (11). But, as the vigorous debate generated around the publication and broad distribution of My Place suggests, they also raise vexing questions about identity politics and about contested definitions of Aboriginality.[13]

As text and photographs document Morgan’s Aboriginality, they simultaneously document her persisting assimilated otherness and the forms of autobiographical performativity she inherits with that otherness (see Attwood 1992; Michaels 44–46; Newman; Narogin 14). From the photos of the smiling “assimilated” child, across the album’s divide of the history of settler families, to the “Aboriginal” woman smiling among her kin, Morgan remains both/and rather than either “white” or Aboriginal. The other always remains in the album.

Opening the Frame

The framing of every family photograph involves histories of photographic practices, their functions, production, and dissemination, as well as histories of families and their complex relationships to the larger culture. These histories coaslesce in every flash of light, every click of plastic. In this sense “this most private of collections is also thoroughly public” since “its meanings are social as well as personal” (Holland 3). Likewise, in every autobiographical utterance of an “I” lies a history of discourses of identity and truth-telling through which biographical and autobiographical lives materialize within specific cultural contexts. That is, the most personal of signifiers is saturated with public discourses.

Modjeska and Morgan write from very different cultural locations. Their families have radically different histories in Australia. Yet these women struggle to compose themselves auto/biographically out of family histories of dis/integration. And for both women, the pressure of the unspeakable, of the unknown and unknowable, is mediated by a complex engagement with the evidentiary surplus of family photographs. Taking up conventional images structured “to consolidate and perpetuate dominant familial myths and ideologies” (M. Hirsch 111), to provide evidence of integration, these women interrogate family histories and the histories of individuals within families. They interrogate as well the very ideologies of familiality that locate subjects in conventional poses, that solicit the unconscious performativity of subjects, and that negotiate the normative autobiographical recitations of identity. Focusing alternative likenesses and alternative narratives, Modjeska and Morgan use photographs as means to recontextualize the meanings generated in the familial gaze as it intersects the lived experience of a particular family member. Thus the autobiographically embedded incorporation of family photos becomes a semiotic component of identity formation in familiality, one that contributes to a posing and perhaps a certain solving of the mystery of identity as disidentification. Representations emerging from a “socially saturated” (Ruthrof 7) discursive site, the photos are re-sited in narratives engendered through other socially saturated discourses: for Modjeska the discourse of a critical feminism; for Morgan the discourses of individuality and Aboriginality.

In these disparate and hybrid texts, autobiographical subjects use the performativity of both family photography and autobiographical storytelling to dismantle their “construction in subordination” (Mouffe 382). Ultimately, as they turn affiliative critiques back upon the familial gaze, they turn the object/other in the photograph into the subject of a different kind of history. It is a shape-changing practice, one that moves the autobiographical subject back and forth across an unstable boundary: the intersubjective mutuality of mother/daughter; the in/authentic oscillation of assimilated individuality/ Aboriginality. Such visual/verbal autobiographical re-citations suggest the complex ways in which the auto/biographical subject becomes a continually negotiated site of identity and otherness.

Notes

1. Many theorists of photographic practices have elaborated this connection between photographic discourses and the history of the family in the industrial West. Sontag notes that widespread access to photographic technology occurred at the very historical moment when the extended family began to vanish (8–9). In the history of family photography can thus be read the formation and consolidation of an atomized nuclear family functioning as the central site of consumer culture and as the organizing center of personal identities and relationships. The reproduction of images of happy families through family snapshots continues to “reassure us of [the nuclear family’s] solidity and cohesion” (Holland 1). And yet Jeremy Seabrook muses that, “as photography becomes a leisure pursuit, its function as a cohesive social force is forfeited” (185). The excessive accumulation of disconnected images may signal a new technology of perception and a change in cultural notions of the human subject.

2. M. Hirsch describes “the familial look” as “an engagement in a particular form of relationship, mutually constitutive, mediated by the familial gaze but exceeding it through its subjective contingency” (114).

3. M. Hirsch describes this site of intervention by means of Jacques Lacan’s third diagram schematizing perception and Kaja Silverman’s reframing of Lacan’s description through the exploration of the image/screen. “Subjects are constituted and differentiated in relation to a variety of screens—class, race, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, and familiality—and they can attempt to manipulate and modify the functions of the image/screen” (120).

4. For discussions of “life writing” as an alternative name for hybrid practices joining auto/biographical and fictive practices, see Neuman (333) and Whitlock (243).

5. The narrator uses this phrase in relationship to herself, as when she talks of “my life as a woman” (90).

6. I leave the slash in the term post/colonial to signal the on-going effects of colonial discourses and practices. The phrase “contact zone” comes from Pratt’s Imperial Eyes.

7. For discussions of the uses of photography in anthropological research and ethnographies that attend to the practices in the Australian context, see Edwards.

8. The colonizers and the colonized became conscious of something identified as Aboriginality only after “discovery,” conquest, and settlement, only after confrontations with otherness and with othering discourses through which difference was domesticated, on the one hand, and installed as superiority, on the other. See Attwood (1989), Rowse (esp. 83–103), and Reece.

9. Daisy remains silent to the end about certain experiences, refuses to speak—in a gesture of resistance to expectations of confession? or in continuing victimization? or in complicity with the moral standards of the dominant culture (Levy 227)? The daughter and her reader remain in a state of unknowing.

10. Morgan reveals to her reader that she used various archives during her search for information about her family. In entering the archives, she enters various institutions that have utilized the colonizing capacities of photography to position Aboriginal people in discourses of race, nation, and empire. But for Morgan the archive enables her to do other cultural work. Taking up the materials produced by and in the archives, materials that have been used to write the settler history from which she wants to release the complexity of her family’s narrative, she pieces together counter-histories.

11. Aboriginal children of mixed heritage presented the camera and various colonial institutions with evidence of the instability of official family life as they put the face on “illegitimate” alignments of desire in the contact zones of settler and Aboriginal cultures. Children of mixed settler and Aboriginal heritages became “problems” in need of a national solution. One solution was the forced removal of such children from their mothers and their resettlement in camps or orphanages where they were educated out of their Aboriginal heritage. An exhibit at the Araluen Gallery in Alice Springs, entitled “Between Two Worlds: The Commonwealth Government and the Removal of Aboriginal Children of Part-descent in the Northern Territory,” documents, through archival photographs and texts, the motivation for and organization of such institutions and the effects of such deracination upon the children and the adults they became. Personal histories of children so removed have become important counter-histories to the official narratives of Australian settlement. See for instance, Women of the Centre.

12. Notions of Aboriginality have gone through complex transformations as individuals, communities, and generations of people respond to the ways in which specific contact zones exact articulations, negotiations, and/or denials of behaviors, practices, beliefs defined as and associated with Aboriginality.

13. There are radically different readings of Morgan’s My Place circulating through Australian cultural studies communities and Aboriginal communities. See for instance, Attwood (1992), Huggins, and Griffith. Critiques from the cultural studies community question the grounds upon which Morgan, so assimilated into white Australian culture, posits what Attwood describes as an essentialist notion of Aboriginality as blood relation and communal recognition (1992).

For Aboriginal commentators the critique of Morgan questions the way in which she posits Aboriginality as an identity that need only be affirmed. Huggins, for instance, claims that Aboriginal identity is not only something fixed in “blood and spirit,” and in various ways of perceiving, thinking, and organizing knowledge; but that it must be earned over a period of time in the everyday participation in Aboriginal community and politics, in “protocols and ethics,” and that there is “an expectation that some recompense will be given back to our mob from those who have now become famous. . . .” She also objects to the text’s “proposition that Aboriginality can be understood by all non-aboriginals . . . it reeks of whitewashing in the ultimate sense” (460–461). For others more closely related to Morgan there is criticism that her title page does not acknowledge corporate authorship, that she gathers the stories of her relatives under her name, in a gesture of assimilationist authority and authorship.

Works Cited