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Oceania in the Age of Global Media Peter Britos, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 23:1 (Spring 2003) 13-26.

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On January 8th 1921, a photograph on the front cover of Sphere, “an illustrated London news-paper for the home” depicted the New Years Eve revelry at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The caption told readers that the dance fl oor was decked with a “great replica of some strange unknown South Sea Island God, four-faced, massive and grotesque,” and sur round ed by cavemen and women in leop ard skins, grass tops and skirts. Confronted by this mélange, readers probably did not ques tion whether Pacifi c Islanders lived in caves or wore leop-ard skins. Was Sphere using this pho to graph to satirize the behaviour of Lon don ers as well as the behaviour of Europeans in the Pacifi c, or mocking European un der stand ing of “na-tives”, primitives and Oceania in general? Grass skirts and leopard skins were common enough symbols of otherness that mixed Oceanic and African tropes, but the transfer of leopard skin to Pacifi c Islander suggests as well an uncritical, if not Dar win i an confl ation of “primitive” culture.

The extent to which photographs fa cil i- tat ed learning-by-looking and educated the read ing public in the early 20th century boom in pho to graph i cal ly illustrated media—post-cards, stereographs, gift albums, illustrated mag a zines, journals, weekend newspapers and se ri al encyclopaedia—has not been fully ac knowl edged by historians.1 A century later these same black and white images circulate in the public domain as posters, video covers, museum installations and book illustrations educating a 21st century audience about an imagined (historical) and actual (con tem -po rary) Oceania. I became intrigued by the nex us between published photography and public education after reading that Austra-lian politicians during the Papua annexation de bates of 1902-1906 knew nothing about their new colony—this claim astounded me because thousands of images of Papua and Oceania generally were circulating on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis in il lus trat ed weekend newspapers and pictorial mag a zines

MAX QUANCHI

Pacifi c Island PhotographyKnowledge and History in the Public Domain

“Armed Native constabulary,” photographed and sold as a postcard by Gus Arnold, Suva, c1910; also sold as a black and white and colour postcard by other Suva retailers.

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PACIFIC ISLAND PHO TOG RA PHY

at the turn of the century. Today, these same photographs are stored and cir cu late in new forms (electronically, artistically, in collage or installation) as visual proof of what Oceania was like before. Recently I purchased a promo-tional video on Samoa and the cover featured a huge canoe photographed c1902. This was the last great voyaging canoe built in Samoa. Did readers in 2002 differentiate be tween the photograph’s contradictory mean ings; was it explicit that canoe con struc tion was historical (there-before), or a practice still carried out in Samoa (here-now), or was the photograph merely serving as a cute cov er graphic broad-ly symbolic of all Oceanic peo ples and places? Oceania has been very vis i ble in black and white photographs cir cu lat ing profusely since the turn of the 19th cen tu ry, and Oceania, by assumption—albeit in limited ways—was fa-miliar and un der stood. Although publications presented con tra dic to ry visual and text nar-ratives, and despite photographs appearing

“out-of-time” and out of context, audiences in both 1902 and in 2002 used these images, and in some cases, depended on these images, to form opinions about Oceania.

International exhibitions, another booming and popular entertainment were also char- ac ter ized by a widespread enthusiasm for ob serv ing or learning-by-looking.2 By looking at objects, art and photographic rep re sen t-a tions, Euro-Americans and settler colonies, like Australia and New Zealand, came to know the peoples and cultures of Oceania through the sheer volume, accessibility and profusion of images. Photographs offered the vicarious experience of being there with the planter, explorer, traveller, patrol offi cer and missionary. Readers could also “revisit” Fiji, Tahiti or Papua by looking back through pho to graphs in previously read or widely dis trib ut ed copies of magazines, serial ency-clopaedia, journals and weekend news pa pers. The enthusiasm of expatriates in the colonies for publishing illustrated stories meant Ocea-nia was regularly featured in pub li ca tions from the mid-1890s through to the 1930s. If a conservative fi gure is accepted of 10,000 to 20,000 sales for each of the eastern Australian

capital city illustrated weekend newspapers, after allowing 30,000 sales in Sydney and Mel-bourne and smaller sales in Brisbane, Hobart and Adelaide, the total cop ies circulating in the public domain was be tween 110,000 and 220,000. Using a rough estimation of fi ve to ten readers for each copy purchased, between 1.1 and 2.2 million Aus tra lians in the eastern capital cities were brows ing through pho-tographs of Oceania in illustrated weekend newspapers alone. In the census of 1921, the literacy rate for Aus tra lians was 82% to 86%. There was a potential con tact with photog-raphy of Oceania of just over three million readers aged fi fteen to seventy years. If for reasons of poverty, lack of interest or access, only a third of the literate and/or magazine-buying public browsed through published photographs, it still seems rea son able to claim photographs by their sheer vol ume did seed, challenge or reinforce knowl edge of Oceania. Papua, for example, appeared in spe-cial-interest publications, pro fes sion al journals, art columns, annuals and in advertising and front cover graphics. Such photographs depicted villages, belles, tree hous es and canoes, views of sisal hemp plan ta tions, lines of robust labourers and pan ora mas of wharves and towns.

Photography’s signifi cance in shaping at- ti tudes and opinion came about because it cir cu lat ed prolifically in the public domain, roughly at the time the photographs were tak en. The following discussion ac knowl -edg es that photographs, because of their sub ject matter, attract attention historically as fragmentary evidence. In 2002, they function as partial evidence of events a century ago, but in 1902 they were not read as frag men -tary; for readers they were complete, actual and depicted real life. Today they are stored and circulate in new forms as visual proof of what Oceania was like before. Surviving pho- to graphs are privileged and new meanings at trib ut ed to them in publications, ex hi bi tions, displays and installations. But rather than ar gue about photographs that may or may not have emerged recently in new forms, I stress the influence of the many hundreds

15OCEANIA IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL MEDIA

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of thou sands of photographs of Oceania that fl ooded the public domain in illustrated magazines, journals, newspapers and se-rial encyclopaedia after the mid-1890s when half-tone processes made mass production of pho to graphs possible. To indicate the extent of this proliferation, and its pedagogic im pact, I focus on examples from two Australian pe- ri od i cals, the Sydney Mail and Walkabout, and one British periodical, Wide World Magazine, and although the visual evidence is primar-ily taken from the Australian colony of Papua, I assert a wider socio-cultural and political rel e vance. “Magazine” in the following dis- cus sion refers to weekly, monthly or quar ter ly book format, usually crown quarto sized publications with short articles and nu mer ous supporting illustrations. Illustrated news- pa pers refer mostly to weekend, large format newsprint editions with illustrated news and a separate pictorial feature section. The ev i dence is drawn mostly from eastern Aus tra lia, but some English and USA publica-tions are considered.

Editors, opportunities and open invitationsThe pairing of a print-only daily news pa per with a heavily illustrated magazine-style week end edition began in Australia in the 1860s. Initially designed for sale in rural areas as a weekend news summary, they also attract ed large sales in urban areas. As much column space was devoted to photographs as to text. Three examples from 1903-1910 dem on strate the subject matter and diversity of published photographs. The illustrated ar ti cles “New Guinea pictures” in June 1903 in the Australasian, “Views in New Guinea” in November 1907 in The Leader and “Pic tur -esque Papua; Australia’s fertile possession” in November 1910 in the Sydney Mail, contained thirty three photographs of “types”: Papuans chewing betel, Papuans enjoying a smoke or decorated for dancing, views of Port Moresby and a lakatoi (canoe) with its distinctive Aus-tronesian lateen sail. A group of uni formed native police, a game of cricket, a cap tion that informed readers a group of young women were “school girls”, a sisal hemp plantation

A Samoan ‘alia photographed by local photographer, AJ Tatersall c1900. After the German takeover this ‘alia was built as a present for the Kaiser but was too big to ship and eventually rotted on the beach in Apia.

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and a seedling nursery sug gest ed European presence. These fi ve im ag es, although over-whelmed visually by several pages of plumed dancers, lakatoi and village views, were sufficient to suggest to readers that Papua was a colonial possession and un der European control.

The Sydney Mail, the illustrated weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, began in 1870 and by 1874, sales reached 10,000 and by 1912, 20,000 copies. By the 1930s it was sell ing 30,000 copies with fi fty-three pages of

“art and illustration”. It used engravings from pho to graphs in 1886, introduced half-tone re pro duc tions in 1888 and by the mid-1890s was publishing full-page photographic features. The Oceania content of the Sydney Mail included illustrated articles on political de vel -op ments, travelogues, plantations, shipping, geographic wonders, ethnography and fi c tion as well as single photographs in special camera study or photography columns. The Sydney Mail’s illustrated articles and special pictorial features demonstrate the diverse di rec tions being taken in photographic rep re sen ta tions. Editors continued to rely on ethnographic material, which still carried strong reader interest, but were also receiving solicited and unsolicited propaganda pho to graphs that extolled the economy, progress and potential of new colonies such as the Solomon Islands Protectorate (annexed 1892), Western Samoa (1900), New Hebrides (1906) and post-war mandates in Nauru and the ex-German New Guinea (1921). There was a dwin dling supply of photographs taken on alleged adventures, near escapes and won drous landscapes, but editors could add art photography particu-larly from the pictorialist school searching to aesthetically represent both familiar and dis-tant worlds. Further sourc es were the visual recording of major events and emerging in the 1930s, illustrated articles of tours and voyages, mostly thinly disguised advertisements for Burns Philp and other steamer companies. In the 1920s and 1930s reporting on expedition and patrol ac tiv i ty underwent a slight surge as the New Guinea highlands were mapped and gold min ing boomed on the mainland

of the Man dat ed Territory of New Guinea. However, an I-was-there article on bird of paradise col lect ing in 1934 was the denoue-ment of a genre that had lost both reader and editorial in ter est.3 Interestingly, in the late 20th century this type of article re-surfaced in travel, natural sci ence and eco-tourism maga-zines such as Geo, Australian Geographic and National Geo graph ic, usually accompanied by one or two old black and white photographs to add geo graph ic context and a sense of historical con nec tion.

In addition to the weekend-illustrated news pa pers, Oceania was featured regularly in weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual il lus trat ed periodicals. For example, in 1905, Papua featured in a three-part series by MS Smith in the Review of Reviews that included thirty-three photographs. TJ McMahon’s six articles on Papua in the Australasian in 1916-17 included thirty-seven photographs and his nine articles in Wide World Magazine between 1917 and 1922 included 102 photographs. EWP Chinnery’s two series of articles in Wide World Magazine in 1919-20 included forty-four photographs. In Europe, the Illustrated Lon- don News between 1919 and 1924 published eighty-four photographs of Papua by TJ McMahon, WN Beaver, Rosita Forbes, Lilian Overell, Frank Hurley and AY Gowan and in the United States of America, trade and travel magazines such as Dun’s Review, Mid-Pacifi c, Overland Monthly, Pacifi c Ports, Sunset, Travel, Trans-Pacifi c, World’s Markets and World’s Work were popular destinations for a few pages of typescript and a bundle of photographs mailed from Papua. The rapid spread of imag es across a range of illustrated magazines, newspapers and journals is demonstrated by the worldwide distribution of images col- lect ed during the visits to Papua and German New Guinea in 1915 and 1917 of TJ McMahon, a free-lance journalist on a commission from the Cairns Post and Northern Herald.4 He was not in Papua to observe the material culture and customs of newly discovered natives, but to report on “the prospects for commercial men, both territories being very little ex- ploit ed from a commercial point of view”.5


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In response to this objective, between 1915 and 1921, he published illustrated newspaper ar ti cles in the Cairns Post and Northern Her-ald (102 photographs), the Queenslander (47 pho to graphs), Daily Telegraph in Brisbane (12 pho to graphs), Sydney Mail (73 photographs) and the Australasian (36 photographs) and in more than twenty Australian and in ter na -tion al mag a zines. Others such as government an thro pol o gist FE Williams6, the amateur photog ra phers EWP Chinnery, FR Barton7, OM Manning, RA Vivian, the professional photog ra phers JW Lindt8 and Archie Gibson, and the missionaries WG Lawes, PJ Money9 and HM Dauncey had larger private col lec tions on Papua, but for impact on the world stage in easily accessible formats for the read ing public, McMahon stands alone as a pho tog ra pher, photo-journalist and image-maker. In 1915-1930 it would have been dif fi cult for readers to avoid seeing McMahon’s photographs of the Marshall Is lands, Kiribati and Banaba or across Melanesia to eastern New Guinea and the Torres Strait.

Strictly true in every detailWide World Magazine was an exception-ally popular illustrated monthly, as its banner pro claimed, of true narratives: adventure,

travel, customs and sport. It was noted in capital let ters in the editor’s monthly call for manu scripts that articles must be ‘STRICTLY TRUE IN EVERY DETAIL”. From 1901 to 1928, the fi fty illustrated articles on Papua in Wide World Magazine meant Papua featured more than any other colony or territory. Those who sent in stories of their adventures, or who reported the adventures of others were re quired to stick to the truth. The call for cu ri ous or remarkable photographs to ac-company the stories did not carry the same warning. The photograph was assumed to be

“true” to real life. Wide World Magazine also used original drawings to illustrate articles, which in ironic mockery were produced by their so-named “Cliché Department.” There was no suggestion that photographs were clichés. Readers may have suspected the ac cu ra cy and claims of some authors but the ac com pa ny ing photographic images were pow er ful and persuasive. A ripping ad ven ture and a good yarn illustrated with curious or remarkable photographs was the standard format and contributors, obviously aware of earlier content, shaped their manu-scripts and photographs accordingly.

A dissonance found in early 20th century illus trat ed articles, but not found today due to

A group of planters resting on a longboat in the Solomon Islands c1917; photographed by Australian photo-journalist, Thomas McMahon and published widely in magazines and illustrated newspapers.

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greater editorial diligence, was the pairing of contradictory text and photographs. In titles and sub-titles the author’s pedigree in ex plo -ra tion, science, geography, botany or colonial administration was touted but the images of ten acted in opposition, being devoted en- tire ly to indigenous subjects, customs and material culture. The accompanying pho to -graphs therefore led readers well away from the advertised subject matter of the article. While the text, by-lines and banners spoke of daring adventures,10 fi lmmaking ex pe di tions11, naturalists on collecting expeditions,12 fi ction-alised yarns13 and gold digging,14 the images visually presented a different nar ra tive. For example, the illustrations in Harry Down-ing’s articles on patrolling and gold min ing in Papua between 1922-1931, offered little op-portunity to experience vicariously what was involved in patrolling or mining. His article on the six-week WB Joyce patrol from Yule Island through the Papuan ranges to the Ger-man border included only one pho to graph of a bivouac in a ridge-top clearing.15 The visual experience for readers was not of patrolling but of material culture, customs and the ap-pearances of village life. This du al i ty was also found in so-called missionary pro pa gan da. For example, the thirty-six pho to graphs in Father Fillodeau’s “Papua pic tured” in Lone Hand in 1909 offered an al ter nat ing sequence of situating ethnographic and mission im-ages. The opening half-page photographs geographically positioned the sto ry in Papua with villages, fi re-making, dance groups and women at work. This was followed by thir-teen ethnographic quarter-page sized images of tree houses, cradles, danc ers, archers, sago-making, tapa-making, hunting, marriageable girls and chiefs. A sin gle page of eight small photographs on mis sion activities led to a fi -nal page of canoes, food preparation, feasting and a sham fi ght between so-called warriors armed with shields and spears. By vary-ing image size and page formats the reader was taken back and forth from geographic positioning to mission endeavour and ethno-graphic observation. Fillodeau’s missionary message was neither dominant nor explicit. It

was not until the fourth page of photographs that readers were asked to connect with mis-sion work. Here a coastal view with a church on a distant ridge was overwhelmed amid a double-page spread of fire making, danc-ers and domestic activity. On another page a group portrait of twenty-eight European missionaries was lost amongst dancers, a tree house, a village scene, women with pigs and a huge ceremonial longhouse. The fi nal double-page offered eight small pho to graphs of mission activities on the left jux ta posed against seven ethnographic im ag es on the right hand page. Readers of Lone Hand could see that a few dedicated Chris tians were car-rying out mission work on the frontier, but Fillodeau’s evangelical message was prob-ably missed by readers as they fo cused on photographs of the material culture and phys-iognomy of Papuans from what Fillodeau claimed was “our black possession…where no other white man had been”.16

In 1934, the Queenslander, an illustrated week end newspaper in Brisbane, ran a dou ble-page feature with fi fteen photographs straight from the frontier. Taken a few weeks earlier by Mick Leahy in the highlands of New Guinea17, these were indeed “newly dis cov ered” na-tives as the article’s title proclaimed. The inclusion of Leahy’s photographs might be explained by their topicality in mid-1934, but it also indicates how editors waited on en- thu si asts to send in unsolicited manuscripts and photographs, or for someone to arrive on the Port Moresby, Suva, Nauru-Banaba or Tulagi steamer carrying a package of new pho to graphs. The editorial decision to use Leahy’s patrolling material may have been in response to the over-exposure of readers to images of port towns like Suva, Noumea, Rabaul and Samarai. In the absence of his- tor i cal evidence of editorial selection we must con clude that subject matter and decisions on what to present to the reading public were of ten a matter of chance, as much as delib-erate market awareness, or an ideologically driven agenda.

Early published photographs also misled readers because of their use over several de-


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cades without attribution to the time of tak ing. For example, an artistic composition by Port Moresby photographer Archie Gibson of two small children captioned “Papuan smiles” ap-peared in the regular photography column in the Sydney Mail in 1920 and thir teen years later as “Two Little Papuans” in the new BP Maga-zine in 1933, an indication of the lon gev i ty and multiple uses made of some pop u lar images. This practice continues in the 21st century. As noted earlier some pho to graphs of Samoa have long histories, being published many decades later to suggest ei ther primitive timelessness or the existence of a continuing tradition. For example, the ‘alia photographed by the Apia photographer AJ Tattersall c1902 was the last of its kind to be constructed. Although destined as a present for the Kaiser it eventually broke up on a beach in Samoa, after proving too big to ship to Germany. The same ‘alia captioned as a Fijian canoe appeared in 1907 in the Cyclo-paedia of Fiji. Different photographs of this ‘alia were published in 1907, 1926 and 1936 and a hundred years later on the cover of the govern-ment promotional video Samoana18, suggesting the continuing skills of Samoan shipbuilders and navigators, or suggesting the old Samoa of centuries past. The re pro duc tion of this ‘alia on the cover of Samoana might on the other hand suggest to some readers that Samoa is losing its traditional culture due to global or mod-ernizing tendencies, or al ter na tive ly that the culture is stridently main tain ing fa’a Samoa (Sa-moan way of life). Repetitive usage raises the question of mo ti va tion—is it their availability (copyright free and accessible) and convenience (“anything from Samoa will do!”) that sees them used on museum and gallery posters, dis-plays and cat a logues as well as book and video covers? Or is such deployment a deliberate reconfi guring of contemporary meaning?

Walkabout; photography, geography and eth nog ra phyThe proliferation of illustrated magazines, serial encyclopaedia, postcards, stereographs and weekend editions did not survive the 1930’s depression. Contrary to trends in in dus try contraction, however, a part-geo-

graph i cal, pro-tourist and overtly na tion al ist pictorial magazine, Walkabout, de but ed in Australia in 1934. It offered a month ly ex-posé on the “South Seas” for a for ty-year period until 1973. Although many illustrated magazines were struggling in the 1930s, Walk-about was able to benefi t from the popularity of global themes, other worlds and native peoples in the heavily illustrated mag a zines National Geographic, Wide World Mag a zine, Life, Sphere, the Illustrated London News and Picture Post. Walkabout’s readership was smaller, at an estimated 28,000 buyers and 100,000 read-ers. Liberally illustrated sto ries and special camera studies featured in di vid u al Pacific Islands, volcanoes, the Kontiki voyage, the South Pacifi c Com mis sion, travel promotion conferences and distinctive regional foods, fi shing and fauna.19 Each ar ti cle by a traveller, offi cial, resident, journalist or visiting novelist was supplemented by as many as fi fteen full, half and quarter-page black and white, sepia or colour photographs. Oceania had been extensively illustrated since the 1890s in tour-ing missionary lanternslide shows, postcards, serial encyclopaedia, mag a zines and illus-trated weekend newspapers. By 1934, when Walkabout began, photographs of canoes, cos-tumed dancers, suspension bridg es, riverbank villages, partially clothed men and women, plantations and tropical port towns were eas-ily recognised and not ex traor di nary.20 The increasing number of daily newspapers and particularly international news coverage in the 1950s21 meant Aus tra lians were seeking to understand, and be bet ter informed about a world being re shaped by new ideologies, forms of consumerism and challenges to old certainties. Tourism to and from Australia also expanded in the post-World War II pe-riod creating another level of interest.22 As each month Walkabout con tained photographs and articles on Oceania, the quan ti ty of po-tentially educative text and pic to ri al material was both accessible and con sis tent for forty years. Rural and regional Australians were therefore visually as fa mil iar with Papua, Fiji, Samoa and the Solomon Is lands as with Mount Kosciusko, Coolgardie and the streets,

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parks and statues of Sydney and Melbourne. Due to such exposure, fa mil iar i ty with the South Seas was conceivably great er for many than the rural continental in te ri or, or what was called the Australian Outback. In the fi rst edition of Walkabout twelve un-attributed photographs of Tahiti and New Zealand and twenty New Guinea highlands photographs by Mick Leahy23 were possibly as easily if not more readily recognised than forty-one photographs of the cattle industry, capital city monuments and parks and the Kimberley region. In the fi rst four issues, Walkabout pub-lished photographs of Papua, Tahiti, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Lord Howe Is land, the Torres Strait Islands and New Zealand,24 and, from 1934 to 1973, pub-lished 373 stories and 1539 photographs on Oceania, or roughly 10 percent of all editorial and pictorial cov er age.25

After the Pacifi c War (1941-45), Walkabout began reporting on gradual colonial de- vel op ment but in parallel narratives also visually continued to portray Oceania as though the 1900-1930 colonial era had not ended. Read ers found familiar photographs depicting an old er frontier of friendly and

accessible, part ly clothed bodies and pictur-esque villages. Ed i tors seemed to have no problem switching from anachronistic text to sympathetic, liberal reports on indigenous progress, and from ar cha ic visual depictions to symbolic rep re sen ta tions of modernity and indigenous agency. As these discourses ran concurrently, often in the same article, it was not un com mon for naive, primitivist, racist text to be par al leled with photographs depict-ing Is land ers accustomed to new technologies, oc cu pa tions and political responsibilities. Walkabout offered readers the comfort of es- tab lished text genres, but also imposed the dis com fort of newly emerging visual par a -digms. Two conclusions can be drawn—one that photographs and text functioned in this milieu at confl icting levels, and secondly, because editors continued these practices over a sixty-year period, readers were not confused (or in any case, bothered) by these con tra -dic tions. The photograph and letter sent in by the gold miner Jack O’Neill in 1938 is an ex am ple of this duality.26 O’Neill depicted an at ten tive Papuan assisting a surveyor at work, but claimed in the text Papuans were an ever-present danger and that “hostile native tribes”

“Native village, Fiji”; location and photographer not known; sold as a postcard by both Robbie and Anderson, Levuka postcard retailers c1902-1906.


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menaced Europeans. Yet the surveyor’s as- sis tant appears as a colleague, subservient and friendly more than menacing. The dual-ity ex tend ed across articles, monthly editions and decades. In September 1938, readers saw a Papuan milking a cow in a scene familiar to many rural Australians, but the next month were confronted with four full and half-page portraits of traditionally costumed women, armed warriors and alleged savages from the Waghi valley. For forty years Walkabout offered similar oppositions and dissonances.

Establishing intersections between images, education, public debate and hegemonic dis cours es reveals the uncertainty of symbol, metaphor and meaning impinging upon read ers glancing at, for example, the Novem-ber 1934 edition of Walkabout. Here one sees a full page layout of two men decorated with shells and wigs, but one smiling with enjoy-ment at the presence of the patrol, and the other in tent ly and querulously concentrating on an off-camera incident. Taken out of con-text, what do such images convey about the pol i tics, culture or dispensation of such in di -vid u als and their experiences, both in gen er al,

and in this particular moment? In February 1935, a bamboo pipe smoking Papua New Guinean dressed in shell armbands, neck lace, wig and feather headdress was on the front cover of Walkabout, the fi rst of 52 front cov-ers devoted to Oceania. Thirty years later the front cover featured a colour pho to graph by Peter Drummond depicting a brief case-car-rying man dressed in imported shorts and shirt, leaving a village along a track past a traditionally clothed young woman. The duality of imaging Papua and New Guin ea was maintained by a by-line on the cover that declared the article would cover “From Stone Age to University”. The 1935 and 1968 covers demarcate the conventional chronol-ogy and apparent visual history of Oceania, evolving inevitably from the co lo nial and recently dis cov ered Highlands “native” in traditional cos tume in February 1935 through to the mod ern, briefcase-carrying stu dent of 1968 head ing for a university in the city. The il lus tra tions in the 1934 article, “Un dis cov ered New Guinea; with the Mt Hagen patrol” and in the 1968 story “From Stone Age to Uni ver -si ty” support this chronology. Three images of Taylor, Leahy and Spinks on patrol and seven teen intimate portraits of High lands men and women, historically form a sharp con trast with the 1968 images of schools, a busy Port Moresby street and students posing with their books outside a lecture room. But in 1968, the author/photographer Peter Drummond, was still searching for the style of photographs that had characterised Walkabout in 1934. He complained: “it was diffi cult to fi nd village locations around Port Moresby” and that he

“couldn’t help regretting the pass ing of the photogenic thatched houses.”27 Grove Day, in a study of early Oceanic novels and short stories, noted three consistent el e ments: a sense of a region without bound aries, an adventure, and thirdly, “free dom from conventionality” and a sense of dif fer ence from the normal read er ’s life.28 Walkabout offered three fur-ther visual di men sions. It was also educative, sci en tif ic and by the 1960s, acknowledging that Pacifi c Is land ers were actively maintain-ing tra di tions as well as adopting new ways,

[Left]“Men of the Kunimbi tribe…,” Walkabout, November 1934[Right]“One of the headmen of the Mairifutekar tribe…,” Walkabout, November 1934

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modernising and demanding participa-tion in responsible par lia men ta ry forms of gov ern ment. However, the text and visual de scrip tion of Oceania did not always follow the chronological con ven tion of gradual prog-ress. Walkabout often pre sent ed the is lands as though nothing had changed be tween World War 1 and the decolonisation era of the 1960s and it de lib er ate ly ignored mentioning the 1941-45 war in the Pacifi c. In 1953, Walkabout was portraying Western Sa moa using 30-year old recycled pho to graphs of outrigger canoes, dancing girls and copra plantations. An au-thor, Eleanor Fleming, de scribed Samoa as a “won der ful panorama of untouched native life” and ignored the growth of urban Apia, the tragedies of the pre-war influenza ep i -dem ic and Mau campaigns, the dislocations of World War II and the forty-year struggle for independence, gained just nine years later.29 Walkabout, meanwhile, was documenting for readers parallel histories of Oceania, one of developing rubber, oil, gold and kapok, local government elections and new universities, and the second of idyllic ha vens far from the modern world where “prim i tive” folk

prac ticed enduring customs, chiefs ruled and white men were rarely sight ed. Forty years of resilient and un ashamed eurocentricism in Walkabout enig mat i cal ly sat alongside the erst- while ef forts of authors and editors to depict a “new” Oceania. There was also continuing editorial preoccupation with the same exotic, paradisaical Oceania upon which National Geo graph ic had built its hugely successful au- di ence.30 In 1912-1913, illustrated articles in National Geographic on “Untoured Burma”, “A land of giants and pygmies” (Rwanda) and

“Head hunters of Northern Luzon”31 were vi su al ly similar to those in Walkabout twenty years later. National Geographic, Walkabout and the monthly installments of illustrated serial encyclopaedia shared an editorial preference for body scarifi cation, canoe paddlers, ar chers, pot-makers, fire-making, partially clothed young girls, dancers, tree houses, armed native policemen, patrols snaking into the distance through mountain grasslands and ubiquitous anonymous boys climbing palm trees. An amazing educative experience therefore unfolded as pages were turned and

Cover, Walkabout, February 1935 Cover, Walkabout, September 1968


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alternately familiar or novel presentations of Oceania were consumed.

Full circle – old images and new meanings Photographs appeared in the public do main, were looked at and commented on re peat ed ly, and remained in personal and so cial memory in a variety of circumstances over a long pe-riod of time. The meanings at trib ut ed to these thousands of images—the un der stand ing acquired by readers as they learnt-by-look-ing—can only be revealed through an investigation into the myriad of milieus, con-texts and surrounding events of consumption, and the prevailing ideas and predilections of photographers, editors, au thors and readers. This does not deny the val ue of analysis along what Elizabeth Edwards in Raw Histories: pho-tography, an thro pol o gy and museums called the production-ex change-consumption axis.32 Edwards suggests that an individual pho to -graph’s history is revealed by in ves ti ga tion of production, exchange and con sump tion over a longer period, including the pres-ent. Edwards notes that public pho to graphs become “free fl oating, externally gen er at ed and read in term of symbol and metaphor.”33 But single-point and present-con text ap-proaches tend to ignore pho to graphs that circulated worldwide in a number of media formats. Although pho to graphs are initially categorised by the mean ings attributed in the immediate action of their taking, different histories are imposed by hindsight and pres-ent-time analysis, me di at ed inextricably by a series of exposures over a long period before they reach the present. Each photograph therefore has a history, me di at ed by chang-ing use, format and milieu and also acquires meaning from the prism of today’s concerns and interests. But the his to ri an’s task when investigating hundreds of thousands of pho-tographs in the public do main becomes one of contextualizing or cul tur al ly circumscrib-ing the image within di verse contemporary socio-political forces, of ten models of alterity and spectacle. What readers learnt-by-look-ing, for example, in 1934 when Mick Leahy’s

patrol photographs appeared in Walkabout can be understood through his diaries and patrol reports and through innovative, re-visionist research such as that carried out by Crittenden and Schiffelin on the Hides and O’Malley patrol, Bill Gammage on the Hagen-Sepik patrol of 1938-39, or by August Kituai on the post-war patrols by kiaps and the Armed Native Con stab u lary.34 Single point analysis, or in ter ro gat ing often private, unpublished im ag es, will reveal a great deal about individual photographs pasted in fi eld notes, used as lan tern slides in lectures or attached by cor re spon dents to letters sent to colleagues, but is less useful when trawling the pho to jour nal ism and mass-media impact of early 20th century published photography. Con sump tion, related to modern usage in gal ler ies, museums, exhibitions and archival collections, is the third of Edward’s categories and this must now include the downloading of images from repositories, collections and homepages worldwide. Analysis must also accommodate meanings acquired elec tron i- cal ly as images are transmitted here, there and everywhere as jpegs, bitmaps, giffs and tiffs. To consumption perhaps we should add a cat e go ry called “privileging” to acknowl-edge how individual photographs, a hundred years after their taking, attract new usage, im por tance and meaning. To Edward’s pro-duction-exchange-consumption axis we could also add the academic practice of ci ta tion and referencing as well as the continuing academic, editorial and designer practice of re-cycling a small gallery of favoured images. The manner in which researchers, publishers and curators now cite photographs, from 1904 or 1934, is also important in compiling the full history of a particular photograph. Because histori-ans have focussed primarily on prov e nance and exchange and ignored mass, pub lic dis-semination as a structural com po nent of their research on photographs, the long-lasting educative impact and popularity of heavily illustrated mass-circulation mag a zines such as Walkabout, Sydney Mail and Wide World Magazine has been overlooked. Further his-torical analysis is needed on dissemination

24 SPRING 2003


into the public domain so the educative role photographs played for the ordinary reader will be more fully acknowledged.

The early 20th century iconographic im per a- tive that created the Papuan, Fijian, Samoan or a more generic Oceanic gallery, crossed many boundaries of trope, genre and discourse and Oceanic peoples were photographed and pub lished in ways that were racially predi-cated, falsified and misleading. Captioning and for mat further mediated notions of otherness. Although the 20th century learner-by-looking knew about an Oceania defi ned by editorial practice, supply and access, in the 21st century the Internet user, magazine advertisement read er and those who glance at posters, post cards and book illustrations also know about Oceania but their knowing is outside editorial control – thus multiplying the meanings at trib ut ed to old photographs. The un der stand ing of Oceania via pho to jour -nal ism in the early 20th century was infl uenced as much by editors as by what photographers intended when they sent unsolicited il lus -trat ed manuscripts home on the steamer. The published mass of photographs also suggests there were contradictory narratives and an el e ment of editorial reliance (or laziness) on al leg ed ly typical portraits and scenes. It re mains problematic whether readers and learn ers-by-looking were aware of this con junc ture or whether they turned pages with out questioning the processes by which images came to be presented to them as facts from real life. The prevalence of satire and parody in the archive of published pho tog -ra phy invites the conclusion that there was some awareness that Oceania was not really like that, but it is more probable that readers were blithely unaware of the photographic image’s limitations or its historicist and mis- in for ma tion proclivity. The many thousands of published photographs of Oceania spread fast across a wide domain, responding to and cre at ing an amazing level of consumption by a reading public eager to know about distant places and peoples.35 As photographs were copied decades later without acknowledge-

ment, the same photograph could appear in several different formats across a one hun-dred year period and become the prototype for the next traveller or pho tog ra pher to point a camera. In both re pro duc tion and replica-tion photographs ac quired multiple meanings and acted in di ver gent educative ways.

In the public domain glancing at pho to graphs became a collective act of learning-by-looking. The intimate, pic tur -esque and the spectacular soon become fa mil iar. But readers as well brought to the image existing ideas. In Australia for ex- am ple, such ideas were fermented in a settler society characterised by political and moral debates over the fate of indigenous peoples, the per va sive ness of Western colonialism and the right to free enterprise and capitalist en deav our. These attitudes were further pred- i cat ed on the reader’s own cultural bag gage in an im mi grant society. Any new knowl edge was contextualized by what was already known. As Caroline Brothers notes, while pho to graphs shaped and subverted opin ion they were in turn circumscribed by the popu-lar unconscious, the collective imag i na tion and ideas which already existed.36 There were many readers early in the 20th cen tu ry able to easily identify canoes, indigenous houses, vil- lag es, hairstyles, head-dresses, harbours and port towns in Oceania, and this familiarity came from the profusion of lib er al ly il lus -trat ed media. Has this learning changed now that archival photographs gain a second, third or indefi nite life as they fl it elec tron i cal ly from archives and repositories to World Wide Web sites, homepages and a proliferating gallery of book covers, posters and advertising fli-ers? The photographically illustrated pages of ear ly 20th century pub li ca tions have become subordinate to the he ge mo ny of the single im age, an image that assumes a generalising sym bol ism—thus we witness the ongoing re duc tion of history and the substitution of deep er meaning for trite, cluttered familiarity, an empty parody or car i ca ture of the subject that elides the true com plex i ty of other worlds and other peo ples.


QUANCHI

NOTES1 Research on the history of photography in Oceania is only just beginning. The fi rst academic forum on Pacifi c pho-

tography and representation was held in Hilo, Hawai`i in 1996. Subsequent Pacifi c History Association conferences in Honiara (1998), Canberra (2000) and Apia (2002) have fl agged a wide range of research. Papers from the 1996 panel were published as a special issue of Pacifi c Studies, 20, 4, 1997.

2 This phrase is borrowed from Graeme Davison, “Festivals of nationhood; the international exhibitions” in Gold-berg SL and Smith FB, eds, Australian cultural history (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1988); see also, McKenzie J, Propaganda and empire; the manipulation of British public opinion 1880-1960. Manchester, Manchester University Press 1985); Maxwell A, Colonial photography and exhibitions’ representations of the native and the making of European identities. London, Leicester University Press 1999.

3 Bledsoe A, “The quest for birds of paradise”, Travel, June 1934 (pp. 27-39 and 50). In the 1930s, botanical, ethno-graphic, geological and other technical reporting on oil, sugar, mineral deposits, music, string fi gures and language continued but were either not illustrated or contained one or two technical photographs of specimens or labora-tory test material.

4 Quanchi M, 1994, “A trip through the islands in 1918; the photography of TJ McMahon”, Meanjin, Dec, (pp. 714-22); Quanchi M, 1995, “TJ McMahon; photographer, essayist and patriot in colonial Australia, the Pacifi c and Empire”, in Talu A and Quanchi M, eds, Messy entanglements, Pacifi c History Association, Brisbane, (pp. 49-62); Quanchi M, 1997, “Thomas McMahon; photography as propaganda in the Pacifi c Islands”, History of Photography, 21, 1, (pp. 42-53).

5 McMahon TJ, 1917, “After outlaws in unknown New Guinea”, Wide World Magazine, Jan 1917, (p.372).6 Young MW and Clark J, 2001, Anthropologist in Papua; the photography of FE Williams 1922-39, Crawford, Adelaide.7 Wright C, 1997, “An unsuitable man; the photographs of Captain Francis R Barton”, Pacifi c Arts, 15, 10, (pp. 42-60).8 Quatermaine P, 1992, “Johannes Lindt; photographer of Australia and New Guinea’, in Gidley M, ed, Representing

others; white views of indigenous peoples, Exeter University Press, (pp.84-102).9 Bolzan R and Bonshek E, 1990, “Money in glass plates”, Australian Natural History, 23, 4, 1990, (pp. 280-81).10 For example, Ellis Silas published “An artist in Papua” in the Sydney Mail (1922), “An artist on a tropic isle” in

Wide World Magazine (1925) and then A primitive arcadia; being the impressions of an artist in Papua in 1926 (London, Fisher and Unwin). WN Beaver published articles in Empire Review in 1913, Man and the Geographical Journal in 1914; and “A theatre in cannibal land” in Wide World Magazine (1916) before his book Unexplored New Guinea was published in 1919 (London, Seeley Service). His book was reviewed with seven photographs in the Illustrated Lon-don News (8/11/1919, 724-25).

11 Alder WF, 1921, “Six months among the head-hunters”, Wide World Magazine, Jun 1921, (pp. 205-10); Collins D, 1923, “Round the world in a motor boat”, ibid., Feb 1923, (pp.365-73) and Briggs EA, 1927, “Filming in cannibal land”, ibid., Jun 1927, (pp. 124-36).

12 Mackellar RH, 1899, “A naturalist in cannibal land”, Wide World Magazine, Apr 1899, (pp. 32-9); Pratt AE, 1910-1911, “A naturalist in New Guinea”, (in four parts) ibid., Nov 1910-Feb 1911. Pratt published Two years among the cannibals, with fi fty-four photographs in 1906 (London, Seeley Service) and gave an illustrated lecture at the Liverpool Geo-graphical Society in 1907: see, Journal of the Liverpool Geographical Society, Vol 16, 1907, 11-20. He published Scented isles and coral gardens with forty-four photographs in 1912 (London, John Murray).

13 Arnault FE, 1918, “The wooing of Abia”, Wide World Magazine, Jun 1918, (pp. 164-68); Osbourne HC, 1923, “The six fathers”, ibid., May 1923, 119-21; Pound R, 1923, “Among New Guinea cannibals”, ibid., Jun 1923, (pp. 235-41); Thompson WH, 1936, “The soda-siphon bottle”, ibid., Sep 1936, 381-85; Turner F, 1923, “Marooned”, ibid., Nov 1923, (pp. 129-33).

14 Macdonald RM, 1898,”The dancing dead”, ibid., 184-188; MacDonald SG, 1938, “Dead man’s gold; the story of an amazing treasure hunt”, (in two parts), ibid., Sept 1938-Oct 1938. RM Macdonald was touted as a veteran gold seeker and SG MacDonald as an authority on Papuan ethnology who had also broadcast and lectured.

15 Downing H, 1922, “In the wilds of inland Papua”, Sea Land Air, 1//8/1922 and “A night in a cannibal village”, Ibid., 2/10/1922; Downing H, 1925, “Gold seekers of New Guinea”, Sydney Mail, 1/4/1925; “Putting colour into New Guinea” ibid., 6/5/1925; and “The New Guinea goldfi elds”, ibid., 24/6/1931.

16 Fillodeau A-M, (1909), “Papua pictured”, Lone Hand, 1/3/1909, (pp. 526-35).17 Queenslander, 25/1/1934, (pp. 26-27).18 This ‘alia appeared in Kramer A, The Samoan Islands, 1902, Vol 2, 282; Anon., Cyclopedia of Fiji, 1907, (p.184); Anon., Cy-

clopedia of Samoa, 1907, (p. 15); Hammerton J, ed, People of all nations, 1926, 4394; Haddon AC and Hornell J, Canoes of Oceania, 1936-1938, (p.242); Samoana (56-minute video) Government of Samoa and Juniper Films, Sydney, 2002; Quanchi M, “The imaging of Samoa in illustrated magazines and serial encyclopedia in the early 20th century”, unpublished paper, 15th Pacifi c History Conference, Apia, December 2002.

19 There were 197 articles on Papua New Guinea, 102 on other Pacifi c countries and 74 on general Pacifi c topics. Hawai’i and Yap were the only north Pacifi c countries featured.

20 Quanchi M, “The power of pictures; learning about Papua and New Guinea by looking at illustrated newspapers and magazines”, unpublished paper, Popular Culture Conference, Brisbane 1997; Quanchi M, “Jewel of the Pacifi c and planter’s paradise; the visual argument for Australian sub-imperialism in the Solomon Islands”, unpublished paper, 12th PHA Conference, Honiara 1998.

26 SPRING 2003


21 Curthoys A and Evans K, 1997, “Tabloid culture in the 1950s”, Headon D, Hooton J and Horne D, eds, The abundant culture; meaning and signifi cance in everyday Australia, Allen and Unwin, (99-112).

22 White R, 1997, “The retreat from adventure; popular travel writing in the 1950s”, Australian Historical Stud-ies, (pp. 109, 101-3).

23 The editor, (CH Holmes was not identifi ed), had reworked and taken extracts from Jim Taylor’s report and used Mick Leahy’s photographs. See, MJ Leahy, Exploration into highland New Guinea, The University of Alabama Press, 1991, (Chp 5, “The year 1933”) Mick Leahy later wrote two illustrated articles for Walkabout (November 1935 and May 1967) and provided photographs for other authors on alluvial mining and the Waghi Valley.

24 These photographs either supported articles on these locations or appeared individually in the picto-rial section. The byline “Camera Supplement” was changed to “Our Cameraman’s Walkabout”, “Australia and the South Pacifi c in Pictures” (briefl y including New Zealand in the title), “Australia in Pictures” and after 1961,

“Australian Scene”. It began with 8, 17, 22 and 23 photographs respectively spread over 6-8 pages in the fi rst four issues. It was reduced to 6-10 photographs in the 1960s also moving from black and white to sepia and fi nally colour. The photography segment was occasionally devoted to a single topic, but generally favoured a random gal-lery of images in the early years, and single-topic double-page spreads in the 1960s.

25 For example, in the November 1943 issue the twelve articles were on gold mining at Coolgardie, shark fi shing, Mt Kosciusko’s lakes, wildfl owers, buckjumping, an early Tasmanian homestead, albinism in animals, wool, homing pigeons and the Red Cross. There were no articles on Oceania but a photograph of Malakula Is, Vanuatu and one of a Papuan outrigger appeared in the Camera Supplement.

26 Letter to the Editor, (“While the Billy Boils”), Walkabout, November 1936, January 1937 and January 1938. O’Neill also contributed one article, “Port Moresby; capital of Papua”, Walkabout, May 1940, 3-4. While prospecting on the Lower Watut, after buying a typewriter and teaching himself, he sent articles to Pacifi c Islands Monthly and encouraged by this success, noted in his memoirs that he “sent other publications articles from the Watut, it was all good practice but writing and typing surely was hard work”. O’Neill J, (ed by James Sinclair), 1979, Up from the south; a prospector in New Guinea 1931-1937, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, (p. 166).

27 Drummond P, 1968, “The broken silence”, Walkabout, September 1968, (p. 27). 28 Ross Gibson cites Grove Day’s reliance on EC Parnell’s comments in 1928; Gibson R, 1994, “I could not see

as much as I desired”, Stephen A, ed, Pirating the Pacifi c; images of travel, trade and tourism, Powerhouse, Sydney, (p. 34).

29 Fleming E, 1953, “Western Samoa”, Walkabout, April 1953, (pp. 14-16). 30 Abramson HS, 1987, National Geographic; behind America’s lens on the world, Crown, New York; Lutz CA and

Collins JL, 1993, Reading National Geographic, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 31 Frederick A, 1912, “A land of giants and pygmies”, National Geographic, 23, 4, (pp. 369-88); Worchester D,

1912, “Head-hunters of Northern Luzon”, National Geographic, 23, 9, 833-930; Bartlett CH, 1913, “Untoured Burma”, National Geographic, 25, 7, (pp. 835-53).

32 Edwards E, Raw histories; photographs, anthropology and museums, Berg, Oxford, 200133 Edwards E, Raw histories, (pp. 3 and 9) 34 Schieffelin E and Crittenden R, 1991, Like people you see in a dream, Stanford University Press, Stanford;

Kituai A, 1998, My gun my brother; the world of PNG colonial police 1920-1960, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1998; Gammage B, Sky travellers; journeys in New Guinea 1938-39, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne 1998.

35 Anna Grimshaw notes the same popular interest in far places and peoples motivated early ethnographic motion picture and documentary fi lmmakers; Grimshaw A, 2001, The ethnographer’s eye; Ways of seeing in Modern Anthropology, , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 23.

36 Brothers C, 1997, War and photography; a cultural history, Routledge, London, (pp. 26-27).

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