'Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia in Europe, with names, dates and locations erased so that individual women came to be an anonymised as 'gins' and 'lubras'. Liz Conor identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged.'
'The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Conor shows how the industrialisation of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep.' (Source: Publisher's website)
'In this important and challenging book, Liz Conor analyses in compelling fashion a range of settler impressions of Aboriginal women circulating in vernacular settler colonial print culture. Deeply aware that these disturbing images have been powerfully destructive historically and continue to cause hurt, Conor insists nonetheless that we must look at them more closely if we are to better understand the violence, misogyny and disavowal embedded within settler colonialisms past and present. Conor seeks to unveil a way of ‘knowing’ that may be skin deep but has been influential in shaping settler understandings of racial difference. Everyday images intersected in complex ways with the truth claims of expert or eyewitness accounts (for example, in the records of early explorers) and Conor follows their multivalences and circulations via the coincidence between industrialised print culture and colonialism itself. Her insightful interrogations illustrate how diverse sources often ‘strewn across time and place’ came to create ‘everyday cultural meaning’ (67).' (Introduction)
'In this important and challenging book, Liz Conor analyses in compelling fashion a range of settler impressions of Aboriginal women circulating in vernacular settler colonial print culture. Deeply aware that these disturbing images have been powerfully destructive historically and continue to cause hurt, Conor insists nonetheless that we must look at them more closely if we are to better understand the violence, misogyny and disavowal embedded within settler colonialisms past and present. Conor seeks to unveil a way of ‘knowing’ that may be skin deep but has been influential in shaping settler understandings of racial difference. Everyday images intersected in complex ways with the truth claims of expert or eyewitness accounts (for example, in the records of early explorers) and Conor follows their multivalences and circulations via the coincidence between industrialised print culture and colonialism itself. Her insightful interrogations illustrate how diverse sources often ‘strewn across time and place’ came to create ‘everyday cultural meaning’ (67).' (Introduction)
