From the Inside: Indigenous-Settler Reflections on the Family uses of the Thomas Dick ‘Birrpai’ Photographic Collection 1910–1920

ABSTRACT In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas Dick and several Birrpai families. The photographs, reflecting Dick's colonial mindset, were staged as pre-contact and sought to depict Birrpai life of a century earlier. The images are now held in local, national and international collections. The TDPC holds particular familial significance for both Heath and Barnwell, who are respectively descendants of the Bugg-Dungay family (featured in the photographs) and the Dick family (the photographer). Heath is the foremost expert on Dick's Birrpai collection, and has done extensive work; to locate the photographs in inter/national collections; to determine and correctly label the participants and places featured; and to develop a set of cultural protocols for its use in dialogue with a Family Stakeholder Group (FSG) and key collecting institutions. The FSG Protocols provide an indication of the value and use of the images as preferred by descendants. In this paper we write about the role of the photographs as family photographs in both the Bugg-Dungay family and the Dick family, including when we each first saw the photographs and what these initial encounters reveal about how such photographs, when looking at them and beyond them, can be used to both construct and deconstruct settler mythologies of time and history.