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.