Aletheia Casey: No Blood Stained the Wattle, Tasmania's Black War

No Blood Stained the Wattle

The series uses the violent conflicts and massacres of Tasmania's colonisation during the 1800s to examine how Australian history has been told and mis-told. Tasmania was inhabited for an estimated forty thousand years by Tasmanian Aborigines before the British invasion of 1803, after which frontier conflict irrevocably shattered those societies. The Black War that followed was a small guerrilla war with casualties of massive proportion for both sides — a death rate per capita, for Aboriginal people and first settlers alike, higher than in any other war in Australian history, including those fought abroad. The deliberate eradication of Indigenous Tasmanians is considered by the majority of scholars and historians to be a direct case of genocide.

Against that record, colonial history across Australia was told as a story of merit and progress: explorers and pioneers in a new country, a harsh and hostile landscape, the greatness of the white man in conquering untamed land. Within that dialogue the voice of Tasmanian Aborigines was silenced and frontier violence largely ignored. The narrative reinforced stereotypes and was fundamental in building a nation state that justified the actions of the past and denied the history of the land's original occupants.

Casey's subject, then, is not the war itself but deliberate historical forgetting — memory, national denial and loss, with the Black War as backdrop.

Portraits made as collaboration

Portraits of Indigenous Tasmanians run through the series to demonstrate bloodlines, attachment to place and belonging. The sitters were actively involved in the making of each photograph, deciding where they wanted to be photographed and how they were comfortable being seen, so the portraits function as a mutual arrangement between two equal voices rather than as a photographer's study.

Their argument is specific: the unalterable trajectory of bloodlines, set against the mythological figure of the Last Aborigine that colonial history invented and then mourned. Ancestry, culture and human attachment to land are the terms the portraits work in.

A physical method for a distorted history

The images are made on a large-format camera and film, and the film itself is then worked on. Casey paints the physical negatives with ochre and scratches them with tools found in Tasmania, and overlays them with landscape paintings from the same period to set the hypocrisy of the historical record against the record itself. Because the painted ochre degrades continually on the surface of the film, the images keep changing — a material equivalent of an evolving understanding of history rather than an illustration of one.

Casey worked as a motion designer in television for thirteen years before dedicating herself to photography. In the four years before this feature she published and worked with the Sunday Times Magazine, the Financial Times Magazine, BBC London and BBC World, Getty Images, Australian Associated Press, BBC Wales, SBS Television and Newspix.

She has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Foto8, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Geographic Society in London, Black Eye Gallery in Sydney and the Australian Centre for Photography. She won the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Emerging Photographer Award for the UK in 2012 and 2015, was a finalist for the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2012, took bronze and silver in the documentary category of the PX3 awards in France, and has twice been a finalist for Environmental Photographer of the Year. In 2014 she was mentored by Magnum Photos through the IdeasTap and Magnum Photographic Award, and she completed a master's in photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication with distinction.

The damaged negative is the decision that holds the whole project together, and it is worth being precise about why. A clean photograph of a Tasmanian landscape asserts that the landscape can be seen as it is; Casey's argument is that it cannot — that every view of this ground arrives through a record that was falsified as it was written. Painting ochre into the film and scratching it with tools from the island puts the interference into the material of the image itself, in the same layer as the light, so the viewer can never separate the scene from the damage done to its telling. That the ochre keeps degrading, changing the images after they are made, extends the point past the photographer's control: the history is not fixed even now. It is one of the more literal marriages of method and meaning in this archive, and among the most defensible uses of hand-worked film in contemporary documentary.