A chance encounter took place in the remote, rocky desert-scape east of Alice Springs sometime in the 1930s between an ambitious young tourism executive from Melbourne and a young Warlpiri-Anmatyerre man.^[1] The Melbourne man was touring Australia by car, searching for spectacular pictures and adventure stories for a new tourism magazine. The Aboriginal man was walking south to a large ceremonial gathering of clans with a senior companion. The tourism executive, Charles Holmes, could not believe his good fortune when a young, fit and handsome man named Jimmy appeared unexpectedly before him, naked, carrying a woomera, a spear and a boomerang. He immediately drew a mental link between the books he had been reading and the man he was looking at. Holmes was overcome by the belief that the man named Jimmy was the most magnificent specimen of Aboriginal manhood, a living example of Baldwin Spencer’s ‘Stone-Age’ man and Charles Pickering’s ‘wild’ ‘original’ hunter all rolled into one.^[2] He felt compelled to capture Jimmy’s image on film and instructed his cameraman to snap a series of photographs. The camera shutter whirred as the photographer launched into action, stage-managing poses, expressions and settings and freezing for posterity scores of static portraits and action shots. During the following 30 years these captured images played a significant role in the definition of Australian Aboriginality. Holmes later admitted he had used them repeatedly to present Jimmy as a ‘symbol of a vanishing race’.^[3] These images also enmeshed both men in a complicated relationship, an understanding of which provides a rare insight into the dynamics of Australian race relations and the power of tourism as an agent of social control and change.