Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land

First published on 28 Apr 2009. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

History tells of George Augustus Robinson, chief protector of aborigines for the Port Phillip District, who in 1830 moved 300 indigenous Tasmanians to a mission at Wybelenna, Flinders Island, where most of them died of influenza - leading to the extinction of all original Tasmanians.  

'History' is a crock. Indigenous photographer Ricky Maynard is pursuing an ongoing project to "battle that endless myth of the 'last Tasmanian', that is not only hurtful but so untrue. I remember being in state school [in Launceston] and our teacher telling us there were no more Tasmanian aborigines! It's always stuck in my mind, and always come through in my work. It's really about saying, 'we're still here'."

Maynard this month celebrates the opening of his career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a show that has already toured to Paris and Busan, South Korea.

He belongs to the Ben Lomond and Cape Portland peoples of Tasmania and lives on his traditional lands of Flinders Island in Bass Strait. Here he pursues the project of documenting his mob that began in the mid-80s with the famous series The Moonbird People, depicting the large-scale hunt of mutton birds that locals take part in every April. "It's a very important part of our yearly calendar and always has been," Maynard explains. "The bird is important cultural tucker for us. We need the oils for our medicines."

His recent series Portrait of a Distant Land (2005) combines black-and-white landscapes of sacred burial sites such as Wybelenna with portraits of the islands' living inhabitants - in stark contradiction to the extinction myth. "There were small communities on all these islands [when Robinson's mission was established]," Maynard says. "That's not recorded in white history books, of course."

In the early 80s, Maynard began a traineeship at the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. One of his duties was making prints of historical photos of indigenous people. "It was late 19th century photography - very sad images used by native protection agencies to [prove we were] a 'dying race'. Propagandist photography. It had a huge impact on me. I thought 'this needs to be changed' and made a very firm commitment to documentary photography."

The award-winning success of The Moonbird People secured him a place at the International Centre of Photography in New York in 1990 where he studied under greats such as Mary Ellen Mark and Duane Michals.

Returning to Australia, he shot No More than What You Can See (1994), an exposé of South Australian prisons shot in the wake of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. ("You walk into some of these major prisons," Maynard recalls, "and all you see is aboriginal people.") In 2000 he made Returning to Places that Name Us - a series  of evocative portraits of Wik elders. "I came away from that project thinking that a really good portrait is the result of an intimate conversation between photographer and subject - talking quietly and closely about our lives as aboriginal people."

Maynard has curated an adjunct to his MCA show, Revealing Moments in Time, featuring the work of American documentary legends including Walker Evans, W Eugene Smith, Paul Strand and Ansel Adams. "It's all the photographers who influenced my direction. I think all documentarians are humanitarians. It was once termed 'concerned photography', after all." Nick Dent