Early Photography in Colonial Australia (Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press) explores the origins of the photographic culture that continues to shape how we see the world.

From its mid-nineteenth-century beginnings photography was more than just a new technology – it was deeply implicated in the colonial project. The invention of photographic technology coincided with the rise of imperial control across the Pacific, and many of its raw materials were extracted from colonised lands.

This book offers the first major study of photography’s arrival and establishment in colonial Australia. It places photographs in conversation with prints, sketches and watercolours to explore how the foreign medium adapted to the Australian environment, artistically and politically. It shows how cameras were put to work, visually redacting Indigenous custodianship and knowledge of Country to celebrate colonial construction and expeditions.

Early Photography in Colonial Australia reveals the complex power of the medium. Elisa deCourcy considers these early images beyond colonial systems of knowledge and their contemporary role in acts of colonial reckoning and First Nations cultural reclamation.

'Elisa deCourcy has given us the most subtle and erudite history of colonial photography yet. For the first time First Nations perspectives are centred within the larger story of photography in Australia.'
Professor Jane Lydon, University of Western Australia

'This is a book from which we could all learn much.'
Professor Geoffrey Batchen, University of Oxford

'This is a book about much more than photography, but the photographs themselves have an astonishing presence and power.'
Professor Emerita Helen Ennis, Australian National University

'An important contribution to rethinking the early history of photography and its imbrication in the practices and history of colonial dispossession.'
Professor Steve Edwards, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Dr Elisa deCourcy is a writer and curator living and working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. She has written about photography and colonial art for the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Musée du quai Branly, Paris; the National Gallery of Victoria; The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, as well as a range of national and international scholarly journals. 

Elisa has been the recipient of fellowships from, and given invited lectures at, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas (2018); the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2018); the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute of Art History, Rome (2023) and the University of Oxford (2023). 

Elisa was an ARC DECRA Fellow (2020–2023) at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, within the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, ANU. This book is a principal outcome of that fellowship.