Two women sitting in Bourke Street, Melbourne yesterday: Photo Julie Clarke 2010.So, what do you think of my strange obsession with words and images? Yesterday I'm sitting as one does in the Bourke Street Mall and a woman sits down and almost perfectly mirrors the blond-haired woman sitting on the seat next to her. On the edge of her sleeve was the word 'Barbara'. How interesting I thought, perhaps a new designer? But no, when she shifted position I noticed that the words read from left to right upwards from her sleeve to her shoulder and it said 'Santa Barbara'. Was she from California, or just wearing the t/shirt. Then I remembered that the one thing that really annoyed me about Barbara Creed's book: Darwin's Screens, Evolution Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema is that in discussing the role that women played in Hollywood musicals during the 1930s, that is, as metaphor of the fecundity of nature, she omitted the fact that many women in Hollywood musicals had blond hair and blue eyes and were blatant representations of the eugenic Aryan ideal, promoted by Hitler and the Third Reich. So, whilst she stresses the influence on Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories on Hollywood film-makers, particularly Darwin's 'natural selection' and 'sexual reproduction', and points out how the dance sequences are in fact demonstrations of the 'mating ritual', she makes no mention that Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was inspired by Darwin's On the Origin of the Species... and created the term 'eugenics' (from the Greek word meaning 'well-born') in 1883 and promoted a purer, improved species through selective breeding. It's a well-known fact that 60,000 people were sterilized in America through eugenic social policies, designed to purify the race of minority identities (Jews, Gypies, Blacks and Indians), mostly dark haired and dark skinned. Indeed, America - actually California, was the epi-centre of eugenic activity.
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