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‘This striking ornament of nature’

The ‘native belle’ in the Australian colonial scene

University of Melbourne

Feminine beauty was implicated in colonial ways of seeing Indigenous peoples. The Australian ‘Native Belle’, as the feminine type of the noble savage, caught the European imagination at the time that European women such as Mary Wollstonecraft inaugurated a critique of feminine beauty as enslaving. Representations of the native belle were disseminated through new forms of communication and were implicated in prevailing discourses of Indigenous peoples such as ethnology. The native belle demonstrates a European longing for feminine beauty that was natural and unaffected. This type also demonstrates that ideas of visual identity as manifest in feminine beauty were important descriptors of racial difference.

Key Words: Aborigines • Australian visual culture • colonialism • gender • visual identity

Feminist Theory, Vol. 7, No. 2, 197-218 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1464700106064420


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