MUSEUM OF THE COLONIAL POST COLONIAL
October 1997                  PHILIP JONES

Alan Cruickshank's manipulations both add to and subtract from an already resonating archive - J.W. Lindt's Album of Australian Aboriginals, originally created during the early 1870s in his Grafton studio. The layers of meaning and allusion in Lindt's studio portraits ripple beneath Cruickshank's additions to them. We are faced with a double set of entanglements.
        On the surface at least, Cruickshank's transposed heads remind us of the extent to which Lindt's original compositions evoked the 'almost totalising encounter' [Mydin: 249] of colonialism, through which indigenous peoples were reduced firstly to passive witnesses and finally to objects of curiosity. But instead of the black faces and sombre, unreadable expressions of Aboriginal subjects confronting the photographer's lens, Cruickshank has substituted the faces of Europeans, and suddenly our confidence in reading these photographs as texts of the colonial encounter disappears.
         This is Cruickshank's third foray into the Arcanum subject. His earlier attempts were more playful, more ambiguous in their confrontation. In those studies, exhibited as ARCANUM and THE ARCANUM MUSEUM in 1992 and 1995-96, his transpositions strategically modified existing historical photographs through the addition of a black face here, a black face there. Like a rogue historian, Cruickshank has cut and pasted identities and facts, suggesting a different Australian history in which Aboriginal people had exerted authority and power equally with Europeans during the 'nation building' phase. Some of the appeal of those exhibitions lay in the apparent randomness of Cruickshank's selections, a reduced didactism which suggested merely that Australian history might have been different if ....