Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women: Book Review

Liz Conor's Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women examines representations of Aboriginal women in print media created for White-settler consumption, and their deployment for the project of Indigenous dispossession. The premise of Skin Deep is the historical coincidence and interdependence of industrial printing and colonialism. Drawing from a range of print genres including magazines, newspapers, travelogues and pictorial atlases, Conor's case studies begin with the earliest accounts of European explorers and take us through to the mid-twentieth century. The six chapters tackle central themes in settler representations of Aboriginal women: gender status, maternity, domesticity, sexuality and ageing. The chapters work nicely as stand-alone analyses and are united by a common focus on the violence of representations that only go skin deep.