When the Transforming Tindale exhibition opened at the State Library of Queensland in September 2012, there was much excitement and goodwill. This landmark exhibition was curated by Michael Aird and featured Ah Kee’s drawings and enlarged prints of anthropologist Norman Tindale’s photographs of 1938-1940, as well as extensive archival information and stories from the subjects themselves and their relatives. The transformations of the exhibition’s title refer to the way Tindale’s ‘data’ was given both new physical form, as well as engendering and renewing social meanings. Scholars such as Elizabeth Edwards have argued that we should explore the materiality of images and the diverse forms they assume, attending to the ways their form and vitality shape us as much as we imbue them with meaning. Digitisation constitutes a major transformation of photographs’ historical accumulation of materiality. It also enables the return of historical archives from European museums to Indigenous relatives in Australia. In this article I explore the relations and narratives that emerge from this process, focusing on their Indigenous significance, and using the example of an enigmatic cardboard panel held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on which are mounted thirteen photographs from South Australia. For Indigenous descendants of the people recorded in these photographs, their physical form is less important than the way they embody missing relatives, lost through invasion and assimilation. This process is slow and often awkward, but the rewards are great, in challenging foundational national histories, re-connecting family networks, and telling the truth of Indigenous experience.

中文翻译：

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“真实照片”：改造Tindale和后殖民档案馆

当2012年9月在昆士兰州州立图书馆举办的“变革廷代尔展览”开幕时，充满了兴奋和善意。这次具有里程碑意义的展览是由迈克尔·艾尔德（Michael Aird）策划的，展出了阿基（Ah Kee）的绘画和人类学家诺曼·廷代尔（Norman Tindale）1938-1940年的照片的放大印刷品，以及来自受试者及其亲戚的大量档案信息和故事。展览标题的变化是指给廷代尔的“数据”赋予新的物理形式以及引发和更新社会意义的方式。伊丽莎白·爱德华兹（Elizabeth Edwards）等学者认为，我们应该探索图像的重要性以及它们所采取的多种形式，并尽力使图像的形式和生命力塑造我们的方式，就像我们赋予其意义一样。数字化构成了照片历史上的物质积累的重大转变。它还可以将欧洲博物馆的历史档案归还给澳大利亚的土著亲戚。在本文中，我将探讨在这一过程中出现的关系和叙述，着重于它们的土著意义，并以牛津Pitt Rivers博物馆持有的神秘纸板面板为例，上面放着13张南澳大利亚的照片。对于这些照片中记录的土著人民的后代来说，他们的身体形态比他们体现失踪亲戚，因入侵和同化而失去的方式不那么重要。这个过程很缓慢，而且通常很尴尬，但在挑战基础民族历史，重新建立家庭网络，