Conclusion

In my introduction to the preceding text, I proposed to examine the photographic representation of the Australian society as a device for making history and forming social opinion.

This enquiry began with the question: 'how we would write Australia's history if we relied purely on the extant photographic evidence of the past'?

I hypothesised that the extant photographic record would favour the interests of the white population and specifically the socially and politically advantaged groups.

Chapter One examined how and why the white settlers in Australia have used photography as a means to record moments of significance. This practice shared as it was at least in principle between the individual, the family, the social group, the state and the nation, has provided a mountain of photographs which, stored in private and public archives, makes up a significant testimony of Australia's 'history'.

This history is a monument to beginnings and outcomes but a black hole when it comes to the depiction of duration. Photographs of any event are simply snatches of time; incapable of informing the viewer of the grinding slowness of suffering, poverty, despair and dis-illusionement.

Impotent in front of such invisible signifiers of failure, the camera turns to the tempting offerings of success, by collecting evidence that shows what did happen. Even then, it rarely manages to tell us why or how.
My thesis that photographs must have their own history examined before we can employ them in any useful manner as a device to inform the construction of a "past"; a history based on fact and truth, was examined against specific categories of influence which could be shown to have a distorting effect on the outcome.
The assumption that the vast array of private and public collections of photographs of Australia's past contains something akin to "a collection of facts" was thus disputed from the onset of this discourse.
In Chapter One I demonstrated that the photographic record of Australia's white settlement was significantly affected by stylistic, technical, ideological and contextual conditions and considerations. This led me to conclude that these influences, these structures of production , as well as the changing social and political realities, present factors that prescribe the reading of the photographic record which informs Australia's national history.

Chapter Two provided additional evidence in support of this conclusion.
This chapter which analysed the changing photographic depiction of Australia's native population across a 150 year time span became a useful catalyst for the identification stages in a changing power - relationship and the consequent influence of such changes on the style and method of the evolving photographic record.
A record which was, until very recently, shaped by the ideology of white racial and economic superiority. De-constructive analysis of photographs from this category supported the conclusion that such a record informs a bipartite function. It speaks as much about the depicter as it does about the depicted.
Recent changes to the concepts and notions of history has now resulted in a growing interest by historians and curators towards the photographic documents of minority groups and events traditionally treated as marginal . A number of institutions have now begun the process of collecting and preserving photographs that make possible a broader and perhaps more intimate mapping and interpretation of the past.
In this light, the process of exposing and examining the influence of a range of factors that have affected the production of the photographic record of Australia's past discloses only half the picture. Just as important are the silent mechanisms which control the preservation and management of this body of information of the nations past.

My research began with a simple question: "If we only had extant photographs to inform us of the past, what kind of history would we write?".
The answer to this question supported the recognition that many possible interpretations could be substantiated, but that each one would be the outcome of a set of agendas and therefore incapable of revealing an objective "truth".
The collective effect of all the examples and issues which were examined in this thesis has presented us with an absolute negation of the possibility of a completely objective photographic record. Yet, once this is accepted, and any extant pre-occupation with objective history is shed, a photograph's content, be it of a national or individual/personal nature, can be explored and mined for meaning in a useful context. "It is ultimately because photographs are only traces , because they have this inadequate and tangential relationship to the real , that they are so productive in generating discourse that negotiates those discontinuous relationships between fantasy and reality, private and public, memory and history".
For the sceptical reader I have rephrased a popular adage into :
"don't look, and you'll be told no lies".