Chapter 7 dissects how human rights laws have been harnessed in climate cases, scrutinising key judgments that have applied human rights frameworks to climate change and the implications of these legal strategies for both claimants and defendants. The authors’ analysis of emerging best practice reveals a growing acceptance of the notion that a State’s failure to take adequate action to address climate change constitutes a breach of human rights obligations, and this recognition is shaping legal strategies in climate litigation at the national and international levels. The authors also highlight how recent jurisprudence further suggests that corporations have important obligations to respect human rights in the face of climate change. Although jurisdictional disparities exist, the growing body of case law demonstrates the adaptability and replicability of rights-based reasoning, thereby contributing to the establishment of a consistent and coherent framework for ‘transnational’ climate law.

The history of war and the history of photography could both benefit from reconsidering women's war photographs. In Australia, as in many other nations, these photographs have generally been excluded from the iconic imagery of war. Yet there are strong arguments for including home-front photography in the analysis of war photography, as Pippa Oldfield makes clear in her recent work on women's photography during the American Civil War. Oldfield also builds a case for examining women photographers’ entrepreneurial and business activities, which are often overlooked by scholars who focus exclusively on artistic issues.

The consideration of women's war photography builds on wider movements to include women in the cultural memory of conflicts. Researchers in numerous fields have emphasised the range and significance of women's participation in war. On the battlefront, women offered voluntary aid, locating those missing, wounded or killed; they were also present in large numbers as nurses and medical support personnel. On the home front, women raised war funds and charitable donations, bolstered morale, took on work traditionally done by men and engaged in political activism both for and against war.

Yet war photography in Australia has generally been considered a male domain. The defining images of the nation during the First World War drew on combat photos by Frank Hurley, Charles Bean (Australia's official war correspondent) and other journalists such as Phillip Schuler. In this chapter, we look at two very different situations where women photographed soldiers on the cusp of battle. The sisters May and Mina Moore ran commercial portrait studios, while Doris McKellar (née Hall) was an amateur snapshot photographer. What these women had in common was that they were not setting out to create authoritative war photography but to make photographs for personal use, manifesting an intimate connection between war and the home front. Their photographs, particularly their portraits of soldiers, shed light on the war experience, offer insights into the experience of war at home, and confer on their subjects a rarely seen emotional depth and range.

May and Mina Moore

May and Mina Moore were two artistically inclined sisters born in New Zealand in 1881 and 1882. They had limited experience with photography before they embarked on professional photographic careers.

In the previous chapter, we examined images produced in response to the Great War by three Australian women photographers. Two of those women, namely the Moore sisters, were originally from New Zealand, but they swiftly became part of Australian society and its vibrant cultural scene. In this chapter, we examine the works of two women photographers who migrated to Australia from Europe in the period after the Great War. Both women contributed to Australians’ sense of identity and broadened the imagery that came to be held in the nation's photographic archives.

At first glance, these two women might appear to have very little in common. They worked at slightly different times, came from strikingly different cultural backgrounds and enjoyed markedly different levels of training. They also lived and worked in different locations with vastly different histories – one in pre-revolutionary China and later Sarawak, the other in the Australian-mandated Territory of New Guinea. However, both shared a common interest in ethnography and in photographing people from non-European societies and cultures in a way that did not subject them to the primitivising or exoticising tropes popular among travel writers and the tourist industry. Finally, both lived and worked for an extended period among people who were Indigenous to these places and engaged with them on a personal basis, making the two women an important and fascinating pair to study.

The first photographer was Sarah Chinnery, an amateur photographer who for seventeen years lived in Rabaul, which was the administrative capital of New Guinea, until 1937, when the town was destroyed by a large volcano overlooking the harbour. Chinnery's images serve as records of some of the more obvious changes that took place in Rabaul and its surrounding villages as the Australian administration set about bringing New Guinea's people into what at that time was commonly referred to as the ‘civilised’ world. Chinnery's photographs were realist in style. Apart from a small number of works she published in Australian newspapers and magazines, their only significant impact during her lifetime was among friends and family.

Elisa deCourcy has recently demonstrated the family's defining role in the development of Australian photography, starting with daguerreotypes made in the 1840s for pioneering families such as the Lawsons in the colony of New South Wales. DeCourcy suggests that family photographs were particularly suited to the ‘intensity of the colonial project underway in this part of the world’. This is to pick up on Meredith Nash's observation that family albums and collections ‘served as discursive sites for the production of the ideal white family and the reproduction of racial hierarchies and national identity’, and that such photographs ‘are often eloquent for what they do not show – for instance, domestic labour, emotional discord, social disharmony’.

In this chapter, we discuss two sets of Australian family photographs. The first, by the amateur photographer Ada Armytage (1858–1939), forms part of the Armytage Family Collection (AFC) held by the University of Melbourne. The Armytages were a pastoralist family based in Victoria's Western District who also owned the illustrious townhouse known as Como House from 1864 to 1959, when they sold it to the National Trust. The other set belongs to the recently rediscovered family collection of Mavis Phillips née Walley (1921–1982), one of Australia's first known Indigenous photographers. Both the Walleys and the Phillipses are large Ballardong Noongar families who are well known throughout Western Australia, particularly in the southwest.

Both Armytage and Phillips are remembered within their respective communities as avid amateur photographers. They are also lauded for having captured a way of life that has largely disappeared. These features, however, are arguably all they have in common because of their resoundingly different levels of education and wealth, a disparity born of Australia's continuing history of colonisation and rendered all the more obvious by the fact that Phillips was born almost 70 years after Armytage. Because of this history, it behoves us to read these photographs through a political lens. In fact, a political reading of heritage collections is probably long overdue. At the same time, we remain mindful of the risk of reductive analysis that political critiques often pose.

This book was inspired by Linda Nochlin's seminal 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ and Germaine Greer's equally ground-breaking 1979 book The Obstacle Race, both of which featured women artists who had been overlooked in history. Where those works focused on women's paintings, this book centres on photography, specifically the works of some early minor and major Australian women photographers, and probes women's contribution to Australian photography in the era of cultural modernity.

Our primary purpose in this volume has been to add to what is known of the history of Australian photography. We have set about this task by focusing on works by six women photographers whose names and achievements have, for the most part, been left out of the historical record. One of our driving beliefs has been that the specific, partial points of view of these women illuminate a wide range of aspects of life in Australia as the country emerged as a modern, industrialised nation. To this end, our focus has been on establishing some of the different ways in which these women's images were shaped by that intensely vibrant period of cultural production known as colonial modernity.

The stories that have emerged paint a compelling picture of some of the more obvious challenges and events confronting Australian women photographers in the period in question. Foremost among these challenges was the still powerful pull exerted by marriage and motherhood, despite the gains made by first- and second-wave feminism. Part of the problem was practical: traditional roles took up much time and energy and directed attention away from photographic pursuits. Additionally, the greater social status that marriage accorded to men meant that women often had to sacrifice their photographic interests and activities for the furtherance of their husband's careers.

This problem was especially prominent in the nineteenth century, an obvious example being the British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose prolific photographic output effectively halted when she was obliged to accompany her husband to live on his estates in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), a place whose climate and distance from Europe made it difficult for her to practise her craft. But one can also see it playing out in the early twentieth century. Claire Langhamer, in her social history, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (2009), observes that the majority of British women continued to privilege marriage and (with it, motherhood) well into the twentieth century despite its structural inequalities, and this also remained the dominant pattern for women photographers in Australia.

The strong pull exerted by marriage can be seen in the way that Mina Moore wound down her photographic activities once she married and started having children, while Doris McKellar largely ceased practising law and photography the moment she walked down the aisle.

This book focuses on the works of six Australian women who were active photographers in the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It critically examines their photographic works against the tumultuous backdrop of the first women's movement, British settlers’ violent and incursive treatment of Indigenous Australians, the Great War in Europe, the last years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China, Australia's imperialist occupation of New Guinea and debates about photography's status as an art form – all of which occurred during the period in question.

The photographers who inform our study are not particularly well known today, unlike mid-twentieth-century Australian modernist photographers such as Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis, but we have selected them because we believe that their stories and works offer new insights into aspects of Australian society and culture that have received little or no treatment in histories of Australian photography. Clearly, we are not attempting to produce a comprehensive record of Australian women's photography from this period or write a history of women's photography focusing on aesthetic issues. We are rather attempting to demonstrate photography's usefulness as a source for understanding key moments in Australia's cultural history and exploring some unique ways in which women contributed to the history of photography in Australia.

The idea that photography might shed new light on major cultural forces at work in the nation's past is by no means novel. As early as the 1940s, Australia's national librarian, Harold White, described photographs as ‘another vital form of source material that illustrated the life and development of a nation and its people’. This observation guided the National Library's collecting policy from 1952 to the present. However, as Helen Ennis has pointed out, the library's preference has been for ‘representational pictures’, with the result that most of the images collected by the National Library are realist and documentary in style. They also focus on activity in the public domain. Typical examples include industry-related photographs of mining, agriculture and large-scale construction projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Largely overlooked, according to Ennis, have been photographs that are expressive in style or record the private and intimate aspects of people's lives.