photographer, film-maker, editor and Presbyterian clergyman, was born and educated in England. He came to Australia as an adult in 1942 and played an influential role in the Presbyterian Church for 40 years. He was the first Director of the Audio Visual Department of the Church in Victoria, he ran the first Stewardship campaign in the country in 1955 and he was founder and first president of the Australian Film Society. In 1953 he produced a film about Aborigines entitled Man of the Mulga .
In 1966 Aikin became a freelance professional photographer. In 1970 he was appointed editor of the Church’s paper, Outreach , and then often took photographs to illustrate articles. His widow, Margaret Aikin, said that 'he always saw photography as a means of communication’. The National Library of Australia holds a collection of about 1,000 of Aikin’s gelatin silver photographs taken 1942-c.1978. Most are of young people, both indigenous and non-indigenous, in schools or church-related activities throughout Australia. 81 are exhibition prints. 21 photographs, ranging in size from exhibition prints to reference prints, record the traditional life of the people of the South Australian Musgrave Ranges region (c.1950). They include portraits of individuals, e.g. a man holding a baby (P3499), groups such as a large group of hunters (P3506) and people engaged in activities like skinning a kangaroo (P3498) or milking a goat (P3501). There is a photograph of the opening of Ernabella Church in the Musgrave Ranges in 1953, showing a large mixed population waiting outside before the ceremony began (P846/120). 14 photographs of Yirrkala Aboriginal Community on the Gove Peninsula at the north-eastern tip of Arnhem Land (c.1974) include buildings around Yirrkala and construction work around the college and a portrait of Wandjuk Marika. (Aikin took another portrait in the 1970s when Wandjuk was a member of the Australia Council for the Arts.)
His photographs of Aurukun (Cape York) people include one of an Aurukun (Wik?) woman teaching her weaving skills to a Spinners and Weavers Guild Exhibition crowd at Melbourne in 1975. 16 (c.1968-78) are portraits of young people living in the Top End, ranging from kindergarten children to young girls sewing and young men with guitars or harvesting pawpaw on Elcho Island. Photographs in his Australian Inland Mission (AIM) frontier services collection taken 1974-75 show various people involved in education, from primary school to health education, including a white teacher learning the Aboriginal language Anindilyakwa (or Warnindilyakwa, P846/940); also a blacksmith shop (P846/948).
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
