Dynamism, change and agency are apportioned to the Western centre, while Aboriginal Australians are just responding to the onslaught of modernisation on the periphery. Aboriginal masculinisation of modernity is situated in a series of photographs depicting the expansive frontier outback where Aboriginal stockmen are content to muster the cattle of white station owners. The idealised image is one of the rugged yet happy lives of the Aboriginal stockman in transition to modernity. Aboriginal feminisation of modernity is told through stories about the premodern helpmate to husband work of Aboriginal women. However, images of Aboriginal women in modern work are conspicuously absent.
Aboriginal men attempt to block a government mining survey crew.
But the six Aboriginal men gaze off in different directions and only one is clearly focussed on something in the frame, thus the assembled men assume a disconnected, uncoordinated look. Aboriginal Australian uses of land and resources are idealised as non- destructive and caring in contrast to rapacious postcolonial development aggression. National Geographic images of Aboriginal Australians have moved from the exoticised, naturalised and sexualised location past. Images in the location present of Cape York mirror the postcolonial transition from Aboriginal dispossession informed by terra nullius to their contemporary empowerment informed by native title. References Arden, H., and S. Abell.