Dr Liz Conor is a lecturer at Monash University, and describes herself as a Visual Historian. She is the author of a new book, a decade in the making, called ‘Skin Deep: Settler impressions of Aboriginal women’.
Dr Conor outlines in her book how the dehumanisation of Aboriginal women contributed to the racist colonial project – and how these repeated tropes in Australian and European print media – that Aboriginal women were victims of ‘bride capture’, that they engaged in infanticide, that they were hypersexualised beings for example – have seeped into Australia’s racist modern day.
Dr Conor tells Let’s Talk that these racist perceptions of Aboriginal women did two things, it reinforced that Aboriginal women were “Incapable of two things – incapable of agency, and Aboriginal women and men are incapable of any kind of love… romantic love, familial love, love for their children… and that’s the biggest constant in all of this is that Aboriginal people are incapable of love. And if you take that away I don’t know how you could dehumanize a person more to be honest.”