Convenor: Dr Liz Conor, Senior Researcher, La Trobe University

Keynote speakers: Dr Greg Lehman and Professor Jane Lydon

Until the widespread use of photographic reproduction from the later nineteenth century, visual imagery of the colonial encounter was disseminated through printed means, including woodcuts, engravings, etchings and the newer technique of lithography.

In recent years considerable attention has been given to colonial photography depicting Indigenous Australians, yet relatively little has been undertaken into the earlier and formative archive of colonial-era prints of Indigenous Australians.

This conference will bring together scholars, curators, librarians, artists, collectors, dealers and anyone with an interest in print media and visual culture to explore the production, circulation, collection, publication and exhibition of prints of Indigenous peoples in transnational circuits of communication. While some academic papers will be presented, we're hoping to include a wide range of perspectives on this colonial visual archive at the conference.

Attention to the mobility of technologies, techniques and technicians along with traces of resistance and assertions of sovereignty are encouraged. We seek to interrogate how settlers inscribed ‘prospects for settlement’ and the ways they ‘put themselves in the picture’ of colonial incursion. The conference is interested to explore all aspects of racialized thought within the production and dissemination of the foundational and formative visual library of colonial prints.

The 2018 Graphic Encounters conference is joint hosted by the History program and the Centre for the Studies of the Inland at La Trobe University, providing a forum for a much needed examination of this overlooked archive of inscribed Indigenous peoples. The conference is designed to encourage reflection on Australian prints in transnational circuits, and those produced in prints workshops around the world and the impacts of these imaged meanings across disciplines. The movement of images and artists, printers, publishers and collectors through these ‘webs of empire’ through networks of dispersed yet intersected publics as they competed to lay claim to the New World will be showcased through the conference. It will focus on hundreds of well-known and still unknown and startling images, yielding new understandings about settler impressions of Aboriginality, race relations and their sense of place in New Holland/Australia.

Panels and papers are invited which address the following themes in historical/cultural perspectives and contemporary debates:

- Sovereignty and resistance
- Periphery and portrait
- Technicians, techniques and technologies
- Mobility and trade
- Printing and publication
- Collecting and exhibiting
- Local and global connections

Further details of the submission guidelines are available via the 'External Link' below.