In 1834, Edward Henty and William Dutton, landed at and colonised the Portland Bay area in Victoria, including the land that was to become James Tylor’s family farm at Narrawong. Henty and Dutton were commercial sealers and whalers, establishing the state’s first permanent European settlement in 1834. The Gunditjmara Aboriginal people had been in this area for thousands of years before Henty and Dutton’s arrival and had established elaborate fishing systems in Lake Condah, which remains to this day their sacred land. In the years following Henty and Dutton’s arrival, during colonisation and for many years afterwards, large numbers of Gunditjmara people were killed and their land claimed by force or otherwise.

Tylor’s series Whalers, sealers and land stealers comprises nine daguerreotypes that document rural landscapes around the Portland Bay area. The daguerreotype, which was one of the earliest forms of photography and the first practicable method of obtaining permanent images, is reasonably indestructible, with the image appearing on a silver plate and sitting within a wooden frame. The artist has shot these silver plates with his great-grandfather’s shotgun rifle, peppering a colonial method of record with a colonial method of domination. As an Australian with both British colonial settler and Indigenous heritage, Tylor observes just how complex his lineage and the land are, and in doing so he reimagines a documentary photography practice in a uniquely Australian context.

(2021)