Aboriginal cottages, transactional encounters and mission lifestyles at New Norcia, 1860-1900s

Several photos of Aboriginal people outside their cottages exist in the New Norcia Archives. These images could be read in different ways but have commonly been viewed as powerfully symbolic stories of successful mission life and converted Aboriginal people. While historians of colonial photography have persuasively linked the photographs of ‘settled’ Aboriginal residents with evidence of missionary success, we might add that they could also be compelling proof of Aboriginal families’ own success in adapting their land use and way of life in the context of dispossession. Reading this photograph of Aboriginal houses alongside Aboriginal voices in New Norcia’s archive it is possible to suggest Aboriginal people’s own desires for houses and settlement aligned with their ideas about respectability, as well as Aboriginal families’ own complicity in mission propaganda through such images.