Max Quanchi

The Imaging of Samoa in Illustrated Magazines and Serial Encyclopaedias in the Early 20th-century

Drawing on English language sources and material relating to the colonial administrations of Western Samoa (now Samoa) and American Samoa, this examination of photographically illustrated serial encyclopaedias and magazines proposes an alternative historical analysis of the colonial imaging of Samoa, the most extensively covered field in Oceanic photographic studies. Though photographs published between 1890s and World War II were often ‘recycled’, without acknowledging the fact that they were taken much earlier, and despite claims in the text of illustrated publications of an unchanged, enduring, archaic tradition in Samoa, the amazing variety of photographic content often offered contradictory evidence, depicting a modern, adaptive and progressive Samoa. Contrary to orthodox historical analysis, the images of Samoa in illustrated magazines and encyclopaedias were not limited to a small repetitive gallery of partially clothed women and costumed chiefs; and the ways in which readers understood Samoa from photographs and text raises questions still to be explored.

Thomas McMahon: Photography as propaganda in the Pacific Islands

Abstract The importance of photography in constructing a colonial1 and hegemonic representation can be measured by the career of Thomas John McMahon, a journalist for the Cairns Post and Northern Herald and later a freelance author, photographer and speaker. He first visited Papua and German New Guinea in September 1915 and then spent the next seven years visiting the colonies and territories of the western and central Pacific Islands to gather material for a series of illustrated magazine and newspaper articles. After visiting Papua and New Guinea three times he toured the Solomons, Torres Strait, Nauru, Ocean (now Banaba), Gilberts (now Kiribati), Marshalls, Fiji, Norfolk Island and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). McMahons output was impressive. Altogether he had more than 1000 photographs published from 1915 to 1924. He was an archetypal essayist, booster of Australias colonial opportunities in the Pacific and seeker of public recognition.

The Power of Pictures: Learning‐by‐looking at Papua in Illustrated Newspapers and Magazines

Illustrated newspapers and magazines at the end of the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries promoted economic opportunities in gold mining, planting, tourism and trading in the Australian Territory of Papua and visually suggested it was a potentially prosperous tropical frontier of costumed dancers, ex‐cannibals, mission converts and eager labourers. The widespread dissemination of pictorial material in this era allowed Australians to learn‐by‐looking at daily, weekly and monthly publications liberally illustrated with photographs which meant existing colonial, racist and hegemonic attitudes were reinforced and new interest generated in Australias sub‐regional empire in the islands.

Disorderly categories in picture postcards from colonial Papua and New Guinea

Abstract At the turn of the century in Melbourne, a notice typed on the verso of a postcard stated that the South Yarra Baptist Young Mens class was meeting on the following Sunday at 2.45 p.m. The card, published in the United Kingdom, was numbered 51828 in the Valentine series of Papuan postcards.1 The image, a photograph of Hanuabada village taken in the early 1880s, and the text, written early in 1900, are contradictory and constitute separate realms of evidence that invite a renegotiation of meaning, analysis, and interpretation of the relationships between images, tourism, colonial rule, and ethnographic knowing. The visual evidence suggests the postcard may have played an ethnographic, educative role in the public understanding of Papua, which had just become an Australian Territory and was not yet well known. It is also suggestive of educative roles related to mission endeavours, subimperialist ambitions and the new tourist traffic through the ports of Port Moresby, Samarai, and Rabaul.

Acknowledging Local Heroes: the Lapérouse Museum in Albi, France

In a central city park, the Jardin National in Albi, France, a large statue of Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse (1741–88), faces east down a tree-lined avenue towards a much larger World War I memorial (Figure 1). In the city of his birth, Lapérouse stands, telescope in one hand and the other resting on a table of charts, above a plaque noting his military campaigns in North America, Mauritius and the Seven Years War and also his voyage ‘autour du monde’ (around the world). Strangely, the Lapérouse Museum, several blocks away on the left bank of the Tarn River, uses images of the statue in its brochures but does not refer to the statue’s location, and it is not listed on heritage walking tours of the historic city of Albi. Lapérouse is remembered elsewhere across France by street names, but as historian Robert Aldrich has pointed out, Lapérouse does not have a statue in Paris. In 1843, the Musée National de la Marine (National Maritime Museum) in Paris opened two rooms devoted to relics from the Lapérouse shipwreck (provided by Dumont d’Urville in 1828) and today still maintains two rooms on Lapérouse’s voyage and subsequent searches for his whereabouts. A Restaurant Lapérouse can be found in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, named in 1798, and Lapérouse’s name is inscribed on the French Geographical Society’s monument to d’Urville in Montparnasse cemetery. The Lapérouse Museum in the provincial city of Albi in the south of France is therefore a modest acknowledgement of Lapérouse’s Pacific voyage, 1785–88, and the tragic shipwreck on Vanikoro (Solomon Islands) that created a mystery over his disappearance until the chance discovery of the site by the trader Peter Dillon in 1826. The Musée Lapérouse has three rooms of relics, models, dioramas, maps and charts, large scale models of the ships L’Astrolabe and La Boussole, and personal information on Lapérouse’s marriage, birthplace and family home. This cornucopia includes large objects such as cannon and anchors from the shipwreck but also minute needles and pins, buckles, plates, glass phials and shot balls salvaged in a series of continuing maritime archaeological excavations. These are displayed to one end of the long viewing room in a series of vitrines, eight glass-windowed showcases mimicking the 18th-century ‘cabinet of curios’. The walls are devoted to the route of the voyage prior to 1788, which in a less-well-known series of east–west and north–south ocean traverses, visited Siberia, Kamchatka, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, California and the Philippines as well as Hawaiʻi, Samoa and Tonga. At the far end of the cramped display rooms, Lapérouse’s visits to these sites are highlighted by photographs of modern-day memorials. A touchscreen display also allows the visitor to follow the encircling global routes and zigzag track of Lapérouse’s predecessors, Magellan, Wallis, Bougainville and Cook, voyages that had inspired the French navy, supported by King Louis XVI, to prepare an expedition to the Pacific, similarly equipped for research, scientific experiments and geographic discoveries. A museum brochure notes that Lapérouse ‘admired British explorers and was eager to compete with them’ and describes Lapérouse as ‘France’s Captain Cook’. A fascinating insight is provided by the touchscreen that presents this series

Imaging the USA’s Pacific Empire

In 1898 America made a dramatic switch from isolationism to an expansionist international agenda. After a short war with Spain, the USA acquired Guam and the Philippines, Congress agreed on the annexation of Hawai‘i and Wake Island, and, shortly after, tripartite negotiations led to the acquisition of American Samoa. The USA had become a colonial power and acquired a Pacific ‘empire’. In 1899 this new status met with the publication of Our Islands and their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil, a two-volume text that included twelve hundred photographs. The pictorialising or visualising of empire in the text was a publishing coup. Although historians have been reluctant to acknowledge the USA as an imperial power, the analysis here links the visual record of new territories in illustrated publications to expanded public awareness and a political debate that potentially took Americans to a new level of understanding of the Pacific Islands. The analysis of American ‘empire’ suggests that territorial expansion was a long-standing characteristic of the nineteenth century that was visualised in photographs for national debate.

The Pacific Islands: environment and society

The Pacific Islands is a difficult textbook to categorise and evaluate. The publisher lists it under ‘Pacific, Geography’, but the editor describes it as a ‘basic reference on Pacific Islands envir...

Norman H. Hardy: book illustrator and artist

ABSTRACT Norman H. Hardy is not a well-known historical character, so an element of salvage exists in bringing his art and book illustration to a wider audience. His short career as an artist with the Sydney Mail and the 68 paintings in The Savage South Seas in 1907 open up a wider discourse concerning the links between art and photography, between visitation and recording in the field, between art and journalism, and between popular imagination and the publishing practices for illustrated travelogues. Hardys paintings of Papua, Solomon Islands and New Hebrides reached a wide audience and provide a close-up, intimate record of Indigenous life in the islands, as well as hinting at complex encounters between Islanders and traders. The visual evidence in The Savage South Seas also contributes to debates about the motivations of early 20th-century Euro-American travellers, authors and purchasers of books on the Pacific and provides yet another citation of notions of faraway lands and people in the Pacific as perceived by distant readers and audiences.

From the archives: photography collections of the Archives of New Caledonia

Photography on the periphery of colonial empires has attracted attention in Africa and Asia but less so in the Pacific, partly due to the scattered nature of small and large collections divided between the metropole and the newer colonial archives and personal and family holdings around the globe. This has prevented the work of officially sanctioned albums, large glass plate and print collections, and smaller private collections being brought to the foreground of visual histories of French colonialism. New Caledonia, a French colony from 1853, and later promoted as a penal colony, a settler colony and a economic powerhouse due to nickel mining wealth has a rich visual history due to the popularity of photography with professional and amateur resident photographers, visiting officials and tarvellers, and the colonial adnministratiion. The Archives of New Caledonia has now addressed that problem of a scatterred archive by creating a massive collection of colonial photography of the French colony of New Caledonia in one place at the Archives of New Caledonia at Ile Nou, Noumea, drawn from private donations, purchases in Europe and astute managing of the global photography market. What is reveaed is a reinforcement of existing historical accounts, but equally divergent histories and alternative stories of life on the frontier.

Drua: the wave of fire. Co-directed by Vilsoni Hereniko, Peter Rockford Espiritu and Igelese Ete

In a question-and-answer session after the premiere of the musical-dance-drama production Drua: the wave of fire, a member of the audience asked the Rotuman, Hawaiian and Samoan co-directors what message lay behind Drua. Their response reflected the historical, political and theatrical imperatives of the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies (OCACPS) – the inspiration and legacy of its founder, Epeli Hau‘ofa, and now home to the three directors of Drua. They replied that ‘the main message is collaboration between Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji to promote sailing technologies’. The co-directors’ message of regional unity and collaboration and a sense of ‘we are one’ (also the title of a song in Drua: the wave of fire) was repeated in the printed programme, as well as at a concurrent voyaging display at the Fiji Museum, and also in Fiji’s newspapers over a week of associated activities, which ran parallel to World Oceans Week. The Fiji Islands Voyaging Society, formed in 2008, declared that a revival of interest in early Pacific histories, voyaging and maritime heritage is well under way, shown in the staging of Drua and in the arrival of a fleet of seven double-hulled canoes in Suva after an impressive route from New Zealand to Hawaii, the USA and then Latin America, before crossing the South Pacific on its way to the Festival of Pacific Arts in Honiara. The promotion of cultural legacies and traditions of open-ocean, double-hulled voyaging has certainly expanded far beyond the few ripples that David Lewis correctly predicted after the H ok ule‘a voyage of 1976. Large canoes are now being constructed with regularity in both the north and south Pacific, voyaging societies can be found in several nations, and national museums, galleries and cultural centres have permanent displays on the history of canoe construction and voyaging. Public engagement with this exciting and expanding regional voyaging revival is enthusiastic and moving. Drua: the wave of fire, the stage manifestation of this Oceanic cultural movement, made some exaggerated claims about Fijian canoes while promoting the event. For example, Fijians did not build the ‘fastest ocean going vessels’, and while there is solid evidence of Tongan and Samoan contributions to Fijian canoe building, there is little to suggest a regular exchange of expertise and technology between Fiji and Kiribati, well to the north. The narrator of Drua also suggests missionaries caused big-canoe building to be prohibited, when the blame should have been directed at colonial administrations (for example, in 1907 in Kiribati). The text and narration accompanying Drua further claim that voyaging canoe building had died out by the end of 19th century, but Samoans built a huge 19-metre canoe to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday in 1901, and just down the road at the Fiji Museum, a 13-metre drua sits at the entrance, its construction in 1913 clearly labelled. Papuan double-hulled lakatoi were still undertaking hiri trade voyages in the 1930s and 1950s. These are minor quibbles, however, about a stage production that is exciting, entertaining and, as the co-directors claimed, full of messages. The performance premiered during ‘Drua Week’, a festival in Suva celebrating the importance of voyaging skills and technologies. Coinciding with Drua were the arrival and departure of the voyaging fleet heading towards the Festival of Pacific Arts in Honiara, the Fiji Museum’s opening of a display of artefacts gifted to and collected by the seven voyaging canoes (curated by Letila Mitchell), a University of the South Pacific library display of twenty years of voyaging posters (curated by Marty Williams) and daily media releases and reports. Historical voyages reformatted on the stage as plays, musicals and pantomimes have a long history. Bernard Smith has discussed how the history of European voyaging in the Pacific was first brought to the stage. For example, the publication of Cook’s final voyage inspired a 1785 pantomime, Omai; or, a trip round the world. Three years later (and after Cook’s death),