Native dignity

Abstract

The article presents a reading of the painting Native Dignity (1860) by Anglo-Australian artist S T Gill. In treating the painting first as an artefact, the article shows how a discourse of dignity is embedded in it, in a way that registers its constituent understandings, anxieties, and contradictions. The result is a genealogy of ‘native dignity’ that traces its movement between Europe and Australia–a movement that reveals its terrible cost for Aboriginal peoples. While the price of ‘native dignity’ might not have been apparent in Europe, in the searing antipodal light it became all too clear that the concept, which was supposed to uphold the dignity of all humans, upheld only the dignity of European Man; that this supposedly natural property remained an artificial one that Aboriginal peoples could possess only if remade in the image of the European. If that is what the painting reveals when analysed as an artefact, then just as important is what it reveals when seen as an artwork. Here the article shows how the contradiction that lingered in ‘native dignity’ was innervated by the painting–how Native Dignity confronted its European audiences with nerve-force, revealing like a harlequin in a public square the underbelly of European Man’s native dignity.