Nicolas Rothwell; 7/8/08
Camel camps and lonely stations, posed groups and shy, trusting faces: the photographs of Herbert Basedow, Australia’s unknown polymath, display to perfection the capacity of images to summon up, in present tense, the poignant immediacies of the past. At once anthropologist, naturalist, geologist, botanist, doctor, politician and inveterate promoter of his own interests, Basedow probably never thought of himself as an artist in the photographic form. But the landmark exhibition on view at the National Museum of Australia stakes his claim. Basedow spent much of his short life quartering the deserts of the centre, the jagged far Kimberley and the tropical savannas of the north, writing, collecting, recording, using every technique at his disposal to capture what he saw. His first journey into the lush ranges of the centre, in 1903, was early enough to form a footnote in the history of desert exploration: by his ninth and last, in the late 1920s, deep into the southern reaches of Arnhem Land, he was scouring the backblocks for unexploited pastoral runs.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24139366-16947,00.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History