Perry (2009) Sights of Invention: Deconstructing Depictions of the Earliest Colonisations of...

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Sights of InventionDeconstructing Depictions of the Earliest Colonisations of Australia and Oceania in the Academic Archaeological LiteratureSara PerryDepartment of ArchaeologyUniversity of [email protected]

Archaeological Imagery as Artefact

It is hardly a matter of debate today that visual representations are shifty, expressive devices which actively shape and create knowledge.1 An ex-

tensive visual anthropological literature testifies to the status of images not as simplistic factual representations, but as constructions that are powerful and seductive in nature (e.g. Banks and Morphy 1997, Devereaux and Hillman 1995, Pink 2001). Critical science studies now recognise imag-ery as a utensil that actually does a job, helping us along particular inter-pretative paths (Jones and Galison 1998, Lynch and Woolgar 1988). Visual culture research bears witness to the easy slippage of images between articulations of supposed reality and diverse cultural, political and ideo-logical interests (Bal 1996, Haraway 1989). Moreover, archaeologists them-selves now speak of pictures as theory-laden, knowledge-generating contentions which structure perceptions of—and archaeological prac-titioners’ engagements with—the past (Molyneaux 1997, Moser 1998, Smiles and Moser 2005).

110 Sights of Invention: Deconstructing Depictions of the Earliest Colonisations of Australia and Oceania

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These findings are important because, in archaeology, images are everywhere. They puncture language, texts, classrooms and sites. They give both archaeologists and non-archaeologists access to one of the only forms of physical exposure to the past available outside the exca-vation pit. They are a component of archaeology’s own material culture: traces of a science whose practices and lexicon are exceptionally visual in nature (see Fyfe and Law 1988 and Jay 1993 for similar interdisciplinary observations). Thus to disregard the capacity of images to communicate and manipulate would be to literally lose sight of some of the most mean-ingful artefacts in the field.

Problematically, a quick review of a majority of archaeological texts suggests that the evolving theoretical literature on visuality has had mini-mal impact on the everyday habits and reporting methods of practitio-ners. It is routine to encounter archaeological writings that are wallpa-pered with pictorial displays, yet almost completely lacking in engaged analysis of pictures and picturing practices. Archaeologists still tend to interact with visual representations as axiomatic windows on the world, myself included (see below). They often make little effort to clearly refer-ence images or to acquaint themselves with semiotic, media or communi-cation theory (see Ruby 2000 for a comparable example).2 Moreover, they have been seen to confess to a complete lack of technical visual training and, as a result, to an inexpert knowledge of visual transmission (Perry 2006, Struever 1995: 193).

Most commonly, however, archaeologists have been known to re-ject images as objects remote to the business of academic (as opposed to popular) archaeology (Moser 2001: 263). By dismissing them as vulgari-ties of science or entertaining diversions, some archaeologists have ex-iled pictorials to the province of the non-professional, thereby managing their unstable dimensions by blaming them on pop culture. Arguably, this reaction is a manifestation of a much larger academic anxiety over public involvement in, and commodification of, the past (e.g. Jameson and Ehrenhard 1997). However, such blame is a difficult value to assign when everyone—practitioners of archaeology included—participates in the popular, commodified world. Archaeologists write and illustrate aca-demic articles, which are then turned into standard textbooks, website

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entries, magazines and so on. As researchers, they frequently draw on public funding to support their studies and on non-archaeologists to illustrate their findings. As lecturers, they teach to undergraduate and non-specialist audiences using these same illustrations, and, in earlier times, were taught by their own predecessors using related imagery. Thus to relegate pictures to the realm of ‘the popular’, or to otherwise discount their agency, presence and history is to gravely misjudge their character. More severely, it is to revert to a conservative archaeological standpoint that looks at humans and their material productions (including images) in the most passive and uniformitarian of ways (Dobres 2000: 29–35).

The archaeologies of Australia and the Pacific offer apt examples here, for their histories have long been marked by such passive approach-es—giving privilege to deterministic frameworks above sociality and agency (Gosden 1994: 20–22, Huchet 1991, Terrell et al. 1997). Although recent archaeological work in these regions has embraced a far more dy-namic commentary on the behaviours of the first Pacific Islanders and Australians, the graphic representation of this work (in scholarly contexts particularly) does not seem to have kept pace. While peopling research in the Pacific has increasingly come to engage with experimental studies that illuminate purpose and negotiation among colonisers (e.g. Finney 1996, Irwin 1992), and while Australian archaeology has largely untangled itself from its ‘unchanging people in an unchanging environment’ upbringing (Davidson 1999), the associated pictures speak differently. For if Australian theorising has truly advanced beyond a simple “archaeology of hunters and gatherers” (wherein founding populations were understood to devel-op “uninterrupted” into contemporary Aborigines; Smith 1999: 324), then what does it mean that academic archaeologists still frame their texts on Australian prehistory with representations of modern-day Aborigines (fig. 1)? And if it is now possible for scholars to critique others for attribut-ing to Pacific prehistory “a peculiarly timeless form of movement and no sense that any period of the past was radically different from the present” (Gosden 1994: 22), then what are the ramifications when such statements are directly juxtaposed with contemporary maps wherein time, land, sea and archaeological sites are made virtually indistinguishable (collapsed



into black triangles and lines on a blank plane) and movement is nonex-istent (fig. 2)?3

The remainder of this paper briefly reviews academic writings on the peopling of Australia and Oceania and compares them against both con-temporary and long-en-during visualisations of these peoplings.4 I argue that pictures produced in the context of such studies (like figure 1 and like typical archaeologi-cal maps such as figure 2) reflect neither decades of critical inquiry into vi-sual representation, nor recent theoretical revi-sions to the archaeologi-cal record. Instead, these pictures persist in cham-

pioning archaic perspectives that effectively render Australian and Pacific indigenous colonisers impotent and invisible. Indeed, these pictures are essentially the same as those produced for general audiences, suggest-ing that academic archaeologists need not only reassess their basic philo-sophical stances and visual habits, but also entirely reconceptualise their relationships with the non-academic world.

Australian and Pacific Peopling Studies

While practised within geographically distinct landscapes, archaeological studies of the first peoplings of Australia and the Pacific are marked

Fig. 1. Anachronistic imagery, I contend, is common in scholarly peopling publica-tions. Here nameless, posed and costumed modern humans are made to stand in for prehistoric Australians (Lourandos 1997: front cover; reproduced by permis-sion of Cambridge University Press).

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by comparable dialogues. Both are distinguished by relatively short professional histories (Murray and White 1981, Terrell 1986). Both regions are water-locked and could only have been colonised by sea (Erlandson and Fitzpatrick 2006). Both have been enmeshed in controversies over absolute dating of their initial peoplings (Graves and Addison 1995, Webb 1998). Both have intimate ties to European explorations and occupations, and their archaeologies are themselves principally the products of the descendants of European colonial regimes. Inevitably linked to the latter, both also have deep historical investments in theoretical paradigms that deny intentioned behaviours to prehistoric colonisers.

Australian archaeology has an especially unsettling pedigree which has been documented and debated at length (e.g. Murray and White 1981, Thomas 1982, White 1977). As Murray and White (1981: 258) contend, the prehistory of the Australian landmass (also known as Sahul5) is reminis-cent of “nineteenth-century ethnography retrodicting for 50 millennia”.

Fig. 2. Notice how the processes of Pacific colonisation are homogenised into 8 identical black triangles pasted onto a blank plane. Temporality and dynamic behaviours are thereby condensed into uniform particles (Gosden 1994: 23, fig. 2.1; reproduced by permis-sion of Blackwell Publishing).



Meaningful consideration of the depth of human life on the continent did not emerge until the 1960s (Jones 1989) and, prior to this, researchers seemed fully prepared to construe past—and present—Aborigines as a static population with a static technology (White 1977).

One hundred years later, this practice of attributing virtually no capacity for change or agency to the first Australians endures among some archaeologists who, among other things, insist on framing Sahul’s colonisation as unsophisticated and accidental (see references in O’Connell et al. 2008). Serious attention to the complex nature of the first Australians’ negotiations of unfamiliar landscapes is less common, and even when archaeologists have invested research into more situated, embodied issues (e.g. Davidson 1999, Smith 1992), their studies have of-tentimes been overshadowed by an enormous literature on prehistoric Australian peopling chronology. Indeed, a scan of the recent science suggests that Australianists have been fixated on dating, arguably to the extent that they have begun to mistake studies of chronology for mean-ingful inquiries into colonisation processes (e.g. Allen and O’Connell 2003, Turney et al. 2001, Turney and Bird 2002).6, 7

Peopling studies in the Pacific, too, are marked by a keen focus on chronology (e.g. Spriggs and Anderson 1993, Graves and Addison 1995), but here archaeologists have been obliged to contemplate the actual processes of colonisation, considering that it necessitated the traversal of millions of square kilometres of shifting sea space. As per Gosden (in Kirch 2000: 77), the Pacific is “a world without any ethnographic par-allel”. The apparent result of such an absence of analogues has been a long-standing sense of academic incredulity over the capabilities of the first Pacific Islanders. Arguably, this incredulity has made possible dubious accident-privileging hypotheses (e.g. Sharp 1956) that exploit ‘desperate scenarios’ (like pregnant women clinging onto floating vegetable mat-ter) to explain the peopling of the entire Pacific world (Bednarik 2003: 61). Where such hypotheses have proven flawed (for example, as established by Levison et al. 1973; see Avis et al. 2007 for rebuttal), parsimonious reasoning has credited Oceania’s peopling to island configuration (e.g. Keegan and Diamond 1987; cf. Keegan 1997), therein framing colonisation

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as a mechanistic reaction to biological needs or ecosystemic realities, rather than a knowledgeable affair.

Fortunately, shifting scholarly sensibilities have begun to reformu-late these readings, prompting a ‘contextualisation’ of Pacific peopling (Irwin 2000). Academic literature now speaks of first peoples’ social lives, futural sensibilities, choice, memory, skill, strategy and self-knowledge (e.g. Anderson and O’Connor 2008, Finney 1977, Irwin 1992, Kirch 2000). These studies finally allow insight into the actual ground-level processes of colonisation as they intersect with lived human practice.

Unfortunately, even as such studies work to reconfigure long-held but dubious perceptions of early Oceanic peoples, they have simultane-ously neglected to rethink the very (visual) artefacts that enable such per-ceptions to thrive. This is what, quite literally, draws research on the peo-plings of Australia and Oceania together: both visualise the colonisation process in conventional form—as exotic, static and ruled by nature. Coupled with the fact that some researchers persevere in trying to prove first peoples’ lack of either control or advanced exploration capabilities (e.g. Avis et al. 2007), it should come as no surprise that scholarly (and popular) publications continue to picture these peoples as naïve and im-poverished, timelessly cloistered by biology and geography.

De-Constructing Academic Sights

With a sizeable literature now bearing witness to images as tools which facilitate learning and reasoning, judicious attention to the content, composition and connotations of scholarly pictorials can no longer be avoided. As noted above, figures 1 and 2 already hint at the questionable subtexts of imagery produced for academic audiences. Conjuring up assumptions of cultural stagnancy, such imagery recollects a series of human photographic portraits reproduced in Terrell’s (1986: 17–19) scholarly text on the distant past in the Pacific Islands. Situated in a chapter on the prehistoric settlement of the Pacific, twelve contemporary men are here figuratively trapped in antiquity. Lined up in mug shot fashion across three pages and identified only in terms of their individual associations with specific geographies (for example “Fiji Islands”, “New Zealand” and the “Papuan coast, Papua New Guinea”), these men’s photos are made



to embody—across time and space—all Pacific Islanders, including the original colonisers of the region. They are formulaically assembled and exposed in black and white, with half of the subjects making no eye contact and more than one third arranged in front of a canvass-like backdrop. Not only do these pictures leave Oceanic peoples colourless, vacant and unengaged, but they imply thousands of years of non-change and give the sense that, at a regional level, one individual can be taken to represent the whole. Indeed, their display engenders a “relation of similarity” (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996: 43) between icons, wherein each person is made symmetrical, placed equidistant from one another, similarly gendered, cropped, posed and hued, consuming a similar proportion of space and thus made basically interchangeable.

This indiscriminate engagement with modern-day indigenous peo-ples in prehistoric research contexts has been critiqued by archaeologists since at least the 1970s (e.g. White 1977), nevertheless it is repeated time and again in archaeological images. It is evident, as previously seen, in fig-ure 1—the cover of a University of Queensland scholar’s Australian prehis-tory textbook (Lourandos 1997). It is evident, in modified form, in Flood’s (1983: 37, 1995: 33) Australian archaeology textbook wherein a photograph taken in 1916 (fig. 3) of a single modern male on a crude raft stands in for all prehistoric colonisers (the “first boat people” as per the adjacent heading). And it is evident in Clark’s (1969: Plate XIII) scholarly review of world prehistory, which summarises the entire antiquity of Australia in one photo of an expressionless, partially obscured man placed—artefact-like—above the caption “Aboriginal hunter, Australia”.

Portraits are not the only connotatively significant media employed by academics to illustrate the first peoplings of Australia and Oceania. Take figure 4 (Irwin et al. 1990: 35; see variations in Irwin 1989, 1992), a diagram-matic map depicting the so-called “easy voyaging corridor” that facilitated the peopling of the Pacific. Especially manifest here is the manipulative void of the sea, overlain with arrows which reference complex and disori-enting natural forces (i.e. wind and current systems). These arrows (over 180 in total) are perhaps the image’s richest, most versatile signs. Drawn at different lengths, different widths, some solid and some perforated, the arrows arguably embody a sort of inescapability: the unavoidable

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presence of an all-controlling environment. Such inexorableness is but-tressed by the fact that figure 4, although illustrative of peopling, is people-less. This absence should not be surprising, for just as the repro-ductions in Lourandos (fig. 1), Flood (fig. 3.), Terrell (1986: 17–19), and Clark (1969: Plate XIII) are able to eclipse the existence of real people through their anachronistic and comatose portraiture, so too does figure 4 make

Fig. 3. Man on mangrove log raft, Western Australia, Herbert Basedow Collection, National Museum of Australia. Reproduced and cropped close to the human figure to remove surrounding environmental detail in both Flood 1983: 37 and 1995: 33. Here one modern man is equated with all prehistoric Australians under the section heading “the first boat people”. In displaying this image at the 2004 conference of the Australian Archaeological Association it was dubiously argued to me by an audience member that the figure would have been an acceptable synecdoche for the first Australians if only he had agreed to remove his shorts (reproduced by permission of the National Museum of Australia).



first peoples invisible behind a ferocious ecosystem. Humans are stripped of presence and agency as colonisers. They emerge as a foil to the natural world—seemingly insubstantial and manipulated—while, paradoxically, they can also be seen as the exact equivalents to this natural world given their indecipherability from the geography. Such representations are im-portant because they speak to the mythology of Otherness (Said 1978) that I believe underlies most archaeological depictions of Australian and Oceanic colonisation. Within this myth, the first Australians and Pacific Islanders are conceived as both natural and unnatural (part of nature and slave to it) and therefore as subservient artefacts ripe for exploitation.

Arguably it is unfair to critique Irwin et al. (1990) for not picturing people in figure 4 when I have otherwise denounced those who have (e.g. figs 1 and 3). Moreover, given that the primary author of the article containing figure 4 is a scholar who has worked attentively in written word to highlight the dynamism and self-determination of the earliest Pacific peoples, to pass judgement on this image may seem problematic.

Fig. 4. Depicting the “easy voyaging corridor” used by the first Pacific Islanders, this image actually seems less suggestive of easy travel than of unstoppable domination by the Oceanic wilderness (Irwin, Bickler and Quirke 1990: 35, fig. 1; reproduced by permission of Antiquity Publications Ltd, and Geoffrey Irwin).

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However, it should be of concern to archaeologists that questionable practices of representation are going unnoticed at the same time as theoretical orientations are being revised. The same author is also af-filiated with an online encyclopaedia entry (Irwin 2008) illustrated with a photograph of a group of recent people (“Torres Strait islanders on a bamboo raft”) who are again reduced to mere prehistoric remnants via their positioning in a section entitled “Ancient voyaging in Near Oceania”. Irwin, too, is the author of a printed encyclopaedia article (Irwin 1980: 326) illustrated with a map of Oceania wherein the environment continues to have visual primacy while the colonisation processes of first peoples are homogenised into a few coloured lines. These images follow a long tradition of disreputable characterisation of prehistoric peoples. Indeed, just as the photo in Irwin (2008) is reminiscent of figures 1 and 3 (as well as the shots of Terrell (1986: 17–19) and Clark (1969: Plate XIII)) in its focus on contemporary photographic captives, so is the Oceanic map in Irwin (1980: 326) akin to that of figure 2 in its reduction of ancient human move-ments to uncomplicated and unvarying marks.

Such pictorial parallels are particularly significant because the fig-ures in Irwin (2008) and Irwin (1980: 326) are produced for general audi-ences in popular reference books using the same conventions as in schol-arly images. There is no separation here, therefore, between public and academic visions. In fact, children’s books on Australian peopling (e.g. Trezise 1988: 8–9) can be seen to erase active humans from prehistory by rendering all bodies virtually indecipherable against an overwhelm-ing geography.8 Likewise, academic articles on Australian peopling (e.g. Allen 1998: 51) eclipse human manoeuvrings via photographs of archaeo-logical sites that reveal not process, not peopling movements, not vary-ing behaviours but little more than an impenetrable geography.9 Youth reference books (e.g. Grant 1988: 63) welcome European explorers onto the landscapes of Australia’s early colonisers, in turn obliterating dynamic life-ways.10 Likewise, academic texts (fig. 5) welcome European geopo-litical constructs (e.g. contemporary borders) onto the landscapes of Australian prehistory, in turn erasing features (e.g. topographic, material or temporal) that might actually speak to the meaningful movements of first peoples. To argue, then, that there is a necessary distinction between



pictures printed for general audiences and those printed for specialists is imprudent; they are each mutually reinforcing and suspect.

An illustration in White and O’Connell’s (1982: 89) expert text on Australian prehistory offers further insight. Similar to the subtexts of both figure 4 and various related graphics noted above, White and O’Connell’s image of “reconstructions of some extinct Australian megafauna” de-picts the coloniser as, once again, indistinct against his surroundings.

Fig. 5. Here, as is common in scholarly publications, it is assumed that contemporary geopolitical constructs (state borders) are the most meaningful means through which to contextualise prehistoric sites. Connotatively similar to an illustration in Grant’s (1988: 63) encyclopaedia for young readers (in which a small group of indigenous Australians appears to be warmly welcoming European sailors onto the landscape), this image may also work to license European occupation of the continent (Roberts, Jones and Smith 1994: 612, fig. 1; reproduced by permission of Antiquity Publications Ltd, Richard Roberts and Mike Smith).

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Here a black and white line drawing of man is posed amidst various late Pleistocene creatures (Sthenurus occidentalis, Zygomaturus trilobus, Procoptodon sp., etc.). Seemingly just one more mammal to be found in the environment, the human figure is left unclothed, eyeless and other-wise featureless, fully frontally exposed, graced with less shading and less detail than his six nonhuman counterparts and placed diagrammati-cally inferior to three of them. He is offered only as a form of scale and competes with the surrounding iconography for visual presence. As per previous examples, he is a faceless, uniform stereotype enveloped by an elaborate environment.

Arguably, White’s co-author O’Connell extends these connotations even further in a co-written journal article on Sahulian colonisation pub-lished 20 years later (Allen and O’Connell 2003: 10) wherein a table of 58 radiometric dates (adjacent to six additional tables spread across eight pages containing more than 128 dates) manifests the erasure of human beings from Australian peopling altogether. This type of cataloguing of data in massive alphanumeric grids extending across multiple pages has the effect of inflating the environment to major proportions, correspond-ingly shrinking all evidence of human involvement into ecological frag-ments (e.g. sand, charcoal, fish otolith, etc.) that facilitate the dating of prehistory. These dates, I contend, speak to the age of the landscape that surrounds the Australian past, not to colonisation. To suggest otherwise is, as Irwin (2000) notes, to mistakenly substitute post-colonisation history for peopling processes. Data tables such as that of Allen and O’Connell masquerade chronology as meaningful commentary on peopling. In privileging the disciplining of time scales above contemplations of the skilful actions behind Sahul’s colonisation, peopling is converted into a ‘when’-focused research programme whose hero is exclusively the scien-tist. These tables are highly evocative of what have been called the “lin-guistic cages” of scientific discourse (King 1997 in McNiven and Russell 2005: 205). Such cages rely on the esoteric language of science to sanitise archaeology, to inhibit non-specialists from interacting with its findings, and to thereby allow an elite specialist minority to take control of the past (McNiven and Russell 2005). Within the cage of Allen and O’Connell’s grid, contents are separated from the field and assembled as specimens



that have no recognisable connection to the people or processes from which they come.

The De-Peopling of Australia and the Pacific

As noted above, the concealment of Australian and Oceanic peopling processes behind dispassionate material or biological artefacts is commonplace. It is seen on the cover of Kirch and Hunt’s (1988) edited volume, wherein the colonisation and cultural negotiations of Lapita peoples are reduced to an image of a single token chip of pottery. It is

seen on the cover of Goodenough’s (1996) edited text, wherein a decontextualised photo of a pot stands in for the entire prehistoric settlement of the Pacific (fig. 6). It is also seen on the cover of Dodson’s (1992) edited volume, The Naive Lands, wherein early colonisers are arguably equated with naïveté—collapsed into a few depauperate line drawings of a giant pottery fragment, a comparatively tiny hand-axe, an extinct moa and a changing Sahulian geography.

What I perceive to be at play in these images is precisely what Pearce (1999: 23)

Fig. 6. Reminiscent of the front covers of a variety of volumes including Kirch and Hunt (1988), this image unproblematically telescopes all prehistoric Pacific peopling processes into a reconstructed pot (Goodenough 1996: front cover; reproduced by per-mission of the University of Pennsylvania Museum (image #128585) and the American Philosophical Society).

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calls the archaeological act of “depersonalising individual traces and ob-jects by serialising them into anonymity”. It is also akin to what McNiven and Russell (2005) mean when they speak of the process of “subjectation” (the reduction of indigenous peoples to objects of colonial examination). Academic archaeological visualisations are complicit in ‘de-peopling’ peopling studies; they strip the past clean of passion and dynamism, leav-ing behind a series of nameless specimens. In this sense, the collection of human bodies in figures 1 or 3 or in the photos of Terrell (1986: 17–19), Clark (1969: Plate XIII) or Irwin (2008) is equivalent to the collection of pottery sherds on the front cover of Goodenough’s (fig. 6.), Kirch and Hunt’s (1988) and Dodson’s (1992) texts, which is equivalent to the collec-tion of numbers in Allen and O’Connell’s (2003) tables: all are “speaking corpses” (Barthes 1972: 133). Moreover, some images, like archaeological data tables (and perhaps also images akin to fig. 4), work especially hard. Barthes (1972: 132) alludes to such work in his description of the language of mathematics:

[I]t has taken all possible precautions against interpretation: no parasitical signification can worm itself into it. And this is why, precisely, myth takes it away en bloc…Myth can reach everything, corrupt everything…even the very act of refusing oneself to it.

The irony is that such myth is the very thing that many Australian and Oceanic archaeologists aim to subvert. These scholars appreciate the fact that “archaeology, both historically and in the present, is inti-mately involved in definitions of humanness” (Gosden 1994: 37). These scholars have invested heavily in establishing the first Australians and Pacific Islanders as engaged peoples who dynamically negotiated both their environments and themselves. Yet, it is precisely these scholars’ own (visual) artefacts that have enabled the survival of long-held myths about early colonisers.

I, too, may be accused of complicity in such mythology (as per Bal 1996) given that I seem to perpetuate its circulation, and use images on ex-actly the same terms as I critique others for using them: as unproblematic



expository evidence. However, unlike typical peopling displays, I present images alongside immediately accessible critiques; I make explicit refer-ence to their original contexts; and I actively use captions to disrupt their readings and to betray my own presence in their presentation. This pa-per is thus a necessary first step in finally beginning to look at scholarly imagery with vigilance. As demonstrated here, it is untenable to ignore pictures or to discount them for their associations with generalist audi-ences. All images, like all artefacts, are embedded and interrelated. Taking all archaeological visualisation seriously (cf. Fyfe and Law 1988), then, is an essential precursor not only to re-peopling our depictions of peopling, but to reformulating our visions in—and of—archaeology overall.

Acknowledgements

This research is indebted to the critical feedback of Quentin Mackie, Andrea Walsh, Peter Stephenson and delegates at conferences in Canada, America and Australia. Tremendous appreciation is extended to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Victoria for funding these studies, and to Geoff Irwin, Bert Roberts, Mike Smith and the museums and editors who so graciously permitted me to reproduce their images. I am incredibly grateful for the support of Stephanie Moser. More than anything, I thank Ian Kirkpatrick.

Notes

1. The terms visual representation, imagery, picture and pictorial are here used inter-changeably to refer to two-dimensional graphic materials such as photos, drawings, illustrations, maps, tables and diagrams.

2. In my mind, clear referencing does not include (as is common) writing the initials of an illustrator along the border of their image in 5-point font, nor does it include acknowl-edging their name in small type on the last page of a document.

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3. This type of map will be familiar to archaeologists, as its conventions (i.e. colourless style; lack of detailed geographical information; reduction of diverse spaces into dots on a page; telescoping of dynamic processes into static products (Conkey 1987)) are well established.

4. Note that the images here have been interpreted using a mixed methodology of semiological, discourse, content and compositional analysis, the details of which are outlined in Perry (2006). This article is part of a larger research project comparing visu-alisations of the peopling of North America with those of Australia and Oceania.

5. With water reserves locked in continental glaciers during much of the Pleistocene, the islands of Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were once joined by low-lying plains into a single landmass known as Sahul (Lourandos 1997, Webb 1998).

6. Indeed, Chappell et al. (1996: 543) reference this fact when they state “the question of human antiquity in Australia has recently become a debate largely about dating”.

7. This fixation may partly be explained by the weaknesses of radiocarbon dating, the effective limit of which falls outside the time period to which Sahul’s colonisation has been attributed (Chappell et al. 1996, Webb 1998).

8. The image I describe here (Trezise 1988: 8–9) is one of a series of paintings in Trez-ise’s children’s book wherein an awesome environment is positioned as a foil to the earliest peoples.

9. The caption to Allen’s (1998: 51) photo suggests viewers can see “Bone Cave…to the right of the picture”, but the dense foliage which fills the frame and the poor overall quality of the image makes this cave essentially impossible to perceive.

10. Grant’s (1988: 63) Australopedia text for juveniles contains a truly questionable de-piction wherein, again (like Trezise’s 1988 illustrations), a small group of indigenous Australians are seen huddled together, apparently waving to a sailboat of incoming European explorers.

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