The Correspondents, An Original Novel, In a Series of Letters has received scant attention since 1775, the year of its first publication, and despite three subsequent editions before 1784. From the beginning, it was thought to be an exchange of love letters between Lord George Lyttelton (1709–73) and his daughter-in-law, 34 years younger, Apphia Witts Peach Lyttelton (1743–1840). Very quickly the Lyttelton family issued a denial, and the work soon disappeared from critical consideration, listed in most bibliographies as the supposed work of Lyttelton and Apphia without further comment. In more recent times, it has received some small additional attention, first because in any account of Lyttelton's artistic and political life it requires brief discussion; and second, because it is a very good example of sentimental literature in the wake of Laurence Sterne (1713–68), whose “afterlife” (i.e., works in imitation of the original) has drawn considerable critical attention in the past few decades.

Indeed, my argument for the authorship of The Correspondents begins with Sterne, who, in 1767, was engaged in several activities that belied his impending death, foremost among them his encouraging a young married woman, Eliza Draper (c.1744–78), 30 years his junior and on leave from her husband in India, into an affair. The result was a flurry of love letters from Sterne to Eliza (prior to her departure back to India in April 1767) and the writing of Bramine's Journal, both sorrowful indications of illness and self-delusion. The affair also underwrites, however, his A Sentimental Journey, published just weeks before his death, in which he appears to have provided in his last year of life a meaningful perspective on the heteroclite parson of Coxwold, most importantly, perhaps, on his relationship with women, Eliza in particular.

THE CORRESPONDENTS.

I know too well the melancholy reason of your present silence, and do not presume to interrupt it, or desire you to write till perfectly convenient; but the consideration of this day's beginning a New Year, induces me to send you my best wishes (not my compliments) on that occasion.

I am just returned from church, and there, with the most ardent sincerity, I petitioned that your valuable life might be prolonged beyond the common date of humanity; that your sensibility might never more be wounded by the loss of a friend; that you might enjoy uninterrupted health and every species of happiness.

I have no suitable return for your most kind wish. The second article includes every thing; and is the best condolance I have received; for on these occasions little to the purpose can be said.

As to the rest, when I enjoy health I am thankful; but there are not many species of happiness that I can enjoy. People in advanced life, as their connexions dissolve, grow indifferent, and find their attachment to the world decrease daily: the few pleasures they can relish may generally be safely afforded them. Your correspondence is numbered among the few that I regard: you will continue it to me, and accept my sincere acknowledgments.

It is not probable that I shall ever decline a correspondence that does me so much honour; especially whilst I continue to observe your indulgent command, of writing “the very first thoughts that occur when I take up a pen.”

I have been amusing myself these two hours with a piece of embroidery. This easy occupation engages the fingers without confining the thoughts; so, after a variety of ideas had ran through my mind, I began on a sudden to review my past life.

I contemplated the chequered scene with strict attention; and concluded at length, that the white hours were infinitely more than the dark in number; and that, far from repining, I had abundant cause of thankfulness to that good Providence whose bounty had exceeded my desert. Casting my eyes round, finding myself in a very comfortable retreat,—independent of the world,— enjoying tolerable health,—a few friends still spared to me;—O Memory, thought I, what but thy annihilation is wanting to my happiness!

Elisa deCourcy has recently demonstrated the family's defining role in the development of Australian photography, starting with daguerreotypes made in the 1840s for pioneering families such as the Lawsons in the colony of New South Wales. DeCourcy suggests that family photographs were particularly suited to the ‘intensity of the colonial project underway in this part of the world’. This is to pick up on Meredith Nash's observation that family albums and collections ‘served as discursive sites for the production of the ideal white family and the reproduction of racial hierarchies and national identity’, and that such photographs ‘are often eloquent for what they do not show – for instance, domestic labour, emotional discord, social disharmony’.

In this chapter, we discuss two sets of Australian family photographs. The first, by the amateur photographer Ada Armytage (1858–1939), forms part of the Armytage Family Collection (AFC) held by the University of Melbourne. The Armytages were a pastoralist family based in Victoria's Western District who also owned the illustrious townhouse known as Como House from 1864 to 1959, when they sold it to the National Trust. The other set belongs to the recently rediscovered family collection of Mavis Phillips née Walley (1921–1982), one of Australia's first known Indigenous photographers. Both the Walleys and the Phillipses are large Ballardong Noongar families who are well known throughout Western Australia, particularly in the southwest.

Both Armytage and Phillips are remembered within their respective communities as avid amateur photographers. They are also lauded for having captured a way of life that has largely disappeared. These features, however, are arguably all they have in common because of their resoundingly different levels of education and wealth, a disparity born of Australia's continuing history of colonisation and rendered all the more obvious by the fact that Phillips was born almost 70 years after Armytage. Because of this history, it behoves us to read these photographs through a political lens. In fact, a political reading of heritage collections is probably long overdue. At the same time, we remain mindful of the risk of reductive analysis that political critiques often pose.

From Strange Guests to Dear Friends?

Štefan is a chaplain and the pastoral worker for the Christian Iraqi community in Nitra. Each Sunday he holds the bilingual mass in a tiny chapel in the local seminary. It is a small congregation with an almost familial ambience: the sermon is usually tailored for its specific audience, referring to the biographies and personalities of the group. Meeting the Iraqis and learning about their tragic life stories made Štefan appreciate his privileged life in security and peace. “Me and my family didn't have to run away, we live a calm life. When I think of them, I pray that they manage to adapt, that they feel good, because in the Middle East, the situation is terrible.” For him, ‘adapting’ is as much about fostering an appropriate attitude to one's host country as it is about language and customs: “Integrating means dreaming about home, but also accepting life where I am and living my life to the fullest where I am. If they like life here and accept being here it will be easier for them to learn the local way of life.”

The Christian faith, which they share with the majority of the Slovak population, Štefan believes, provides a good foundation for this endeavor—not least because “Slovaks are more likely to accept Christians and are less afraid of them.” He is convinced that the church should stand up for refugees with everything that is in its power—not only for Christians but for all those who need it. “Of course, we shouldn't open the borders either—but we should open our doors to those who knock on it.”

Refugees are, for refugee supporters, ethical ‘Others’ writ large—human beings whom they want to treat ethically, and who—despite their ‘shared humanness’—differ from them in meaningful ways. Štefan observes how he feels when he imagines the things they went through happening to him and his loved ones and can empathize. But he also acknowledges vast differences between him and them, both biographical and cultural, and he problematizes them—both concerning their own well-being and indirectly to Slovak society. If we assume introspection to be at the foundation of moral practice, difference poses a lot of questions.

From the Scots Magazine 30 (June 1768): 281–82 (see above, n147).

A short account of the Bishop of Lucon and Madame de Rouvraie; two of the most celebrated instances of Platonic love in France, or, perhaps, any other country.

The bishoprick of Lucon is near Rochfort, and one of those which, being distant from the metropolis, may be called a rich one; as, in proportion to the revenue, all provisions are so amazingly cheap. I take the liberty to mention this as my reason why his Lordship was able to do such munificent acts in his lifetime, almost superior to royalty.

From his taking the gown he had a sincere affection for Madame de Rouvraie, who was of a very noble family; but one, among the almost innumerable instances in France, of high blood, without the proper means to support it.

The Abbé, though with no income at first but what his genius and abilities, joined to uncommon industry, could produce, ever supported her as a gentlewoman. He taught music, to sing, to paint in crayons, and water colours, besides giving lectures in different sciences; and all to replenish the purse of Madame de Rouvraie.

He now got advanced in the church; she of course advanced with him: but he took care to board her always in such pious and regular families, that envy itself (and that quickest of all, the envy of her own sex) never could fix a stain on his, or her character.

By the various great offers in marriage, which she often refused, it is visible she preferred the Abbé, and his celestial qualities, to all earthly ones; and she would give it for a reason why she did not engage in that state, that there was but one Didoyard in the world, and he was married to Christ: “Find me a second not so engaged,” said she, “and I will enter into matrimony with him immediately.”

His merits, now, being promulgated, he was made a chanoine of the cathedral church of Anjou, capital of the province of Anjou; and, from thence, dean of Nantz; from whence he was removed to the bishoprick of Lucon. Grown now independent, and having early declared that he was an enemy to translations, he set himself down quietly on this provision; and Madame de Rouvraie now appeared with that rank and lustre her merits so well deserved.

This book was inspired by Linda Nochlin's seminal 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ and Germaine Greer's equally ground-breaking 1979 book The Obstacle Race, both of which featured women artists who had been overlooked in history. Where those works focused on women's paintings, this book centres on photography, specifically the works of some early minor and major Australian women photographers, and probes women's contribution to Australian photography in the era of cultural modernity.

Our primary purpose in this volume has been to add to what is known of the history of Australian photography. We have set about this task by focusing on works by six women photographers whose names and achievements have, for the most part, been left out of the historical record. One of our driving beliefs has been that the specific, partial points of view of these women illuminate a wide range of aspects of life in Australia as the country emerged as a modern, industrialised nation. To this end, our focus has been on establishing some of the different ways in which these women's images were shaped by that intensely vibrant period of cultural production known as colonial modernity.

The stories that have emerged paint a compelling picture of some of the more obvious challenges and events confronting Australian women photographers in the period in question. Foremost among these challenges was the still powerful pull exerted by marriage and motherhood, despite the gains made by first- and second-wave feminism. Part of the problem was practical: traditional roles took up much time and energy and directed attention away from photographic pursuits. Additionally, the greater social status that marriage accorded to men meant that women often had to sacrifice their photographic interests and activities for the furtherance of their husband's careers.

This problem was especially prominent in the nineteenth century, an obvious example being the British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose prolific photographic output effectively halted when she was obliged to accompany her husband to live on his estates in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), a place whose climate and distance from Europe made it difficult for her to practise her craft. But one can also see it playing out in the early twentieth century. Claire Langhamer, in her social history, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (2009), observes that the majority of British women continued to privilege marriage and (with it, motherhood) well into the twentieth century despite its structural inequalities, and this also remained the dominant pattern for women photographers in Australia.

The strong pull exerted by marriage can be seen in the way that Mina Moore wound down her photographic activities once she married and started having children, while Doris McKellar largely ceased practising law and photography the moment she walked down the aisle.

The Difficulty of ‘Letting-Be’

Elizibeth and her husband Milad are among the Iraqi families who took out a loan to buy a little house outside of Nitra. But while the family feels very comfortable in their own home, it comes with new challenges: the villages around Nitra are predominantly commuter areas. People commonly travel into town by car to work. Elizibeth's husband, however, works in Germany for several weeks at a time, taking the family car with him. Not just jobs, but also education and health facilities are concentrated in Nitra. Elizibeth has to travel from their settlement to the center almost every day, to attend driving classes and to bring her four-year-old daughter Lana, who has Down syndrome, to a daycare and rehabilitation center.

Having her long-term adaptation and ‘functioning’ in mind, social workers wanted to teach Elizibeth to go to Nitra by bus. They showed her where the bus stops were, and explained to her the connection, schedule, and where she had to change. Elizibeth was unenthusiastic about the proposal, to say the least. The bus goes only once an hour and takes, unsurprisingly, significantly longer than the car. But the social workers argued that many Slovaks rely on public transport daily, so they could expect Elizibeth to tolerate the inconvenience and do the same. Elizibeth claimed that the bus ride was a stressful and straining experience for Lana and that her daughter's restlessness could affect the other passengers. Anyone who ever accompanied Elizibeth and Lana on the bus (including me) got a rather different impression, namely that Lana, generally of calm and introverted nature, was not too bothered by the ride and the other passengers. “If a doctor or health professional confirms that it is bad for Lana's development to go by bus, then that's a different issue, of course,” Jakub explained, immediately adding that he was rather inclined to see it as an excuse. Elizibeth also complained that she had to carry Lana in her arms due to her difficulties with balance and coordination. The NGO promptly addressed this problem by providing Elizibeth with a secondhand stroller. Once, Elizibeth missed the bus but elegantly saved the day by calling her acquaintances from the village, asking them to give her a lift.

From “Poetical Essays in April 1773,” London Magazine, or Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer 42 (1773): 200–201.

“Verses by Lord Lyttelton, to Mrs. Peach, now Mrs. Lyttelton”

Negotiating Trust and Mistrust

During an integration meeting, Mohamed was asked whether he had any opportunity to talk Slovak in his day-to-day life. Mohamed answered through his interpreter that he had Slovak friends he could practice with. “Slovak?!” Sofia commented incredulously, looking at the others with raised eyebrows. After the meeting, Nina told me she also had a funny feeling about these ‘friends.’ She expressed worries that they might be associated with the local drug scene. At the next meeting with Mohamed, Nina tried to find out more about the mysterious friends. Casually, she asked him how often he met them and how old they were. Mohamed answered her questions and added with a giggle that they shared a joint sometimes.

The revelation that Nina's immediate suspicion was not too far beside the point made me painfully aware of my own subconscious assumptions. The team's intuition that those people accepting Mohamed as a friend could not be entirely kosher seemed cynical to me. I had brushed off Nina's scenario of him spiraling into drug abuse and petty crime as too pessimistic—and it probably was. Yet it still astonished me that Nina's instinct about the involvement of illegal substances, the possession and consumption of which is punishable by severe penalties in Slovakia, was correct.

My misjudgment both of Mohamed's integrity and of Nina's intuition was one of those fieldwork moments that made me acutely aware of the delicacy of “negotiated trust” (Loizos 1994): How to approach the refugees’ and NGO workers’ accounts and my own assumptions with some caution while building trust at the same time? Trust is the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, especially in organizations. A modicum of trust needs to be there to build any kind of relationship; if we cannot believe that people's accounts of themselves hold at least some value, and that the information they convey is by and large in consonance with what they take to be true, ethnography as a method would essentially be worthless. Participant observation, with close attention to the thoughts, speech, and actions of those in the field, can approximate knowledge, but never produce certainty.

Individuals in Charge

Whenever I was addressing the state of the Slovak refugee care system with my interlocutors, the workers at the NGOs, schools, and even the state institutions opened up really quickly and did not hold back with their frustrations and complaints. Often, they delivered a crushing critique of the formal procedures, only to express their discomfort about the informal means (involving rule-breaking and their own over-engagement) they applied to make up for these deficits.

Katka, the manager of the state-led integration project, which had been implemented by Charita and had already ended by the time of my fieldwork, elaborated:

Renata, the vice president of a school that accepted two Syrian refugee girls, explained:

This book focuses on the works of six Australian women who were active photographers in the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It critically examines their photographic works against the tumultuous backdrop of the first women's movement, British settlers’ violent and incursive treatment of Indigenous Australians, the Great War in Europe, the last years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China, Australia's imperialist occupation of New Guinea and debates about photography's status as an art form – all of which occurred during the period in question.

The photographers who inform our study are not particularly well known today, unlike mid-twentieth-century Australian modernist photographers such as Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis, but we have selected them because we believe that their stories and works offer new insights into aspects of Australian society and culture that have received little or no treatment in histories of Australian photography. Clearly, we are not attempting to produce a comprehensive record of Australian women's photography from this period or write a history of women's photography focusing on aesthetic issues. We are rather attempting to demonstrate photography's usefulness as a source for understanding key moments in Australia's cultural history and exploring some unique ways in which women contributed to the history of photography in Australia.

The idea that photography might shed new light on major cultural forces at work in the nation's past is by no means novel. As early as the 1940s, Australia's national librarian, Harold White, described photographs as ‘another vital form of source material that illustrated the life and development of a nation and its people’. This observation guided the National Library's collecting policy from 1952 to the present. However, as Helen Ennis has pointed out, the library's preference has been for ‘representational pictures’, with the result that most of the images collected by the National Library are realist and documentary in style. They also focus on activity in the public domain. Typical examples include industry-related photographs of mining, agriculture and large-scale construction projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Largely overlooked, according to Ennis, have been photographs that are expressive in style or record the private and intimate aspects of people's lives.