Prue Ahrens

Book Review 'Race and the Modern Exotic: Three "Australian" Women on Global Display' by Angela Woollacott, Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2011

Angela Woollacott’s latest contribution to Australian history covers the fraught terrain of national identity in the first half of the twentieth century, a period politically defined by ‘White Australia’ and culturally afflicted by ‘White paranoia’. Woollacott explores the ways in which ‘Australianness’ contributed to the international success of female stage and screen performers Annette Kellerman, Rose Quong and Merle Oberon. The fame of these women fascinated Australians and enabled a sense of Australian presence in global modernity. Thus Woollacott’s premise that the ‘Australianness’ of each performer is a transnational construct where negotiations of racial identity play out on a global level. The complexity of Kellerman, Quong and Oberon’s celebrity is teased out in terms of their negotiations of cultural difference, their strategic deployment of exoticism, and their positions amongst changing feminine ideals in post-suffrage Australia. What emerges is a compelling argument for ‘Australianness’, or more specifically Australian femininity, as a negotiable construct even in the entrenched era of White Australia. Woollacott’s text further enriches important work by Aileen Moreton-Robinson and others, who have established that constructions of whiteness were central to the racial formation of Australian society. What Woollacott makes clear is that even during the seven decades of White Australia, constructions of whiteness were anything but fixed and simple. The point is quickly established in Woollacott’s first case study of Annette Kellerman*here a white Australian woman played with the category of South Sea Islander to sell her image internationally, and on a global stage the mythologies and meanings surrounding South Seas Islanders extended to include Australians. Quong and Oberon also packaged their racial identities loosely. Tracing Quong’s incarnation from Australian-born actress to Chinese cultural ‘authority’, Woollacott aptly demonstrates the malleability of ethnic identities and their capacity to travel, teasing out her deployment of ‘Orientalist’ symbols across the contexts of Australia, London and New York. The ‘Australiannesss’ of Oberon’s global image was a wonder, given the ‘magnificent product of the Apple Isle’ hadn’t set foot in Tasmania until very late in her life. What Woollacott finds in Oberon’s story are the deep anxieties surrounding ‘exoticism’ for Australians, anxieties related to racial miscegenation, promiscuity and morality. Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, June 2012, 253 265

Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women's Pan-Pacific by Fiona Paisley, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, 291 pp., ISBN 9780824833428

Within the popular field of trans-national history is an expanding focus on panPacific networks, as evidenced by the transoceanic bias in a new series by University of Hawai’i Press, ‘Perspectives on the Global Past’. A most recent addition to the UHP list is Fiona Paisley’s Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific, an illustrated account of the first three decades of the pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) since its inception in 1928. Fiona Paisley is a Cultural Historian at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and the author of Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919 1939 (2000) and her expertise in gender studies brings critical focus to the place of women in pan-Pacific cultural networks. Glamour in the Pacific highlights how early suffragettes sought to create a role for themselves in a globalising world, where inter-racial friendships and cross-cultural awareness would provide a praxis for a new world order and peace. Driven by an unwavering belief in the importance of interpersonal relationships in global affairs, the PPWA’s methodwas to stage conferences at various Pacific and Pacific-rim countries and include as many representatives from the region as possible. Paisley points out that the diverse destinations for the conferences aimed to heighten the sense of cultural difference within modernity, and underlined the glamour of the conference experience. The conferences attracted delegates from countries such as Hawai’i, the US Mainland, Japan, China, the Philippines, Latin America (Chile and Mexico), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the trusteeships of (British) Fiji and (American) Samoa. By 1958 these delegates were joined at the eighth conference, held in Tokyo, by delegates from Ceylon, Pakistan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Western Samoa and Thailand. Paisley has chosen a roughly chronological format to discuss the conferences, which also manages to fit neatly into thematic categories which include decolonising movements, peace-building, culture and identity. Glamour in the Pacific traces the development of the PPWA from early logistical challenges to the struggle to maintain international relationships in the context of the Cold War. Paisley has brought a keen critical eye to PPWA, noting the predominance of a middle-class clientele, the inconsistencies in gender politics and nationalism, and its deeply ambivalent approach to Indigenous women, despite the drive to include Pacific women in a world community. But these criticisms are balanced by respectful acknowledgments of the motivation and intention of these women who committed themselves to the promotion of social reform and a new world order through a cultural internationalist project. Paisley draws mainly on diaries and letters produced by women attending the conferences to tell the story of the PPWA, and locates these first-hand accounts in

Santa Cruz island figure sculpture and its social and ritual contexts

Thepast twodecades havewitnessed growing scholarly interest in the cultural politics surrounding public monuments and memorials. Once largely the concern of historians and anthropologists, numerous geographers have now investigated the processes through which social groups compete to construct memorial landscapes that buttress their own selective readings of the past. Although historians and scholars in related fields have developed a significant literature on this topic, much of this research tends to gloss over the geographical issues involved in the creation, function, and contestation of memorial spaces and places. By focusing on the memory and memorialization of the First World War within the Irish context, Nuala Johnson’s book brings to the fore the inherently geographical nature of constructing sites intended to convey specific interpretations of the past. The differing interpretations of Ireland’s role in the First World War and the island’s contentious position within the British Empire provide fertile ground for exploring this topic. The book’s first chapter begins by reviewing current research on memorials, monuments, andmemory. Although research focusing on the politics of memory has grown significantly in recent years, Johnson argues that geographers have to date made relatively modest contributions. Partially as a result of this, the role of geographical notions of space, place, and landscape are often overlooked or dealt with superficially. Johnson draws attention to this omission by arguing that if ‘‘memory is conceived as a recollection and representation of times past, it is equally a recollection of spaces past where the imaginative geography of previous events is in constant dialogue with the current metaphorical and literal spatial setting of the memory-makers’’ (p. 6). Johnson offers a succinct outline of the book’s theoretical and methodological approach. Drawing upon recent research in cultural geography and the earlier writings of Roland Barthes, Johnson lays bare the cultural and political assumptions and agendas driving the creation of places intended to represent Ireland’s experience during the war and the memories of those who fought and died in its battles. In doing so, Johnson hopes to demonstrate that space and place are more than simple containers of memory. Rather they are instrumental in the construction and contestation of memory. Chapters 2 through 6 present a thematic reading of various facets of Ireland’s experience of the First World War. The crux of the book revolves around the differing attitudes held by unionists and Irish nationalists toward the war and how these competing interpretations were expressed geographically through public spaces and places of commemoration. Unionists, those favoring Ireland’s continued position within the British Empire, tended to view participation in the war as a noble act in defense of the Empire and were generally supportive of later efforts to create public memorials and monuments to those who sacrificed for this cause. Irish nationalists, those advocating Ireland’s independence, were less supportive of, if not outright opposed to, Ireland’s role in the war and subsequent campaigns tomemorialize it. ‘‘The narrative of war commemoration in Ireland,’’ Johnson argues, ‘‘was consistently in dialogue with the narratives attendant on the national question’’ (p. 12). Chapter 2 examines efforts to promote the war effort in Ireland through recruitment posters and propaganda. Augmented by 17 illustrations, Johnson analyzes the themes used to justify Irish participation in the war and the varying response this call to arms generated across Ireland’s divided political landscape. Chapters 3 through 5 focus on the politically charged atmosphere surrounding efforts toThis article contains a review of Tattoo: bodies, art and exchange in the Pacific and the West. Edited by Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole and Bronwen Douglas. London, Reaktion Books, 2005. 252 pp., illus, endnotes, select bibliog., index. ISBN 978-1-85189-225-6.

Colonising with Christianity?: The Case of George Brown, Missionary Photographer

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE104930.sgm 10.1080/0 528820500049478 hird Text 0952822 (pri t)/1475-5297 (online) Or ginal Article 2 05 & Francis Ltd 3 000May 005 D Prud nceAhrens /75 M cqu i StreetSt LuciaQLD 4067Australia 11 617 3871 1 30 p. hrens@griffith.edu.au John Davis is credited with the earliest commercial photographs made in Samoa, a series of cartes de visite dating from the mid-1870s. Davis’s image Outrigger canoe at the mouth of the Falefa River presents Samoa as the buying public had come to expect. It is a picture of paradise far removed from the crowded, developed, and polluted cities of Europe. This image of Samoa is consistent with Blanton’s argument: that colonial photography in Samoa saw a constant reiteration of established marketable themes that bore little relation to changes in Samoan cultures. 1 In the early 1890s, around the time that Outrigger canoe was photographed, Davis was Apia’s postmaster, a position requiring regular contact with overseas shipping and certainly conducive to the sale of prints and postcards. Davis was evidently in touch with international trends in picturing island cultures and this image reflects his knowledge of consumer demand for images of island paradises. Likewise, Davis’s portraits of Samoan people meet market demands for the exotic, drawing focus on costume and props. In a series of images discussed by Nordstrom, Davis employs an Oriental rug as a backdrop for a study of three girls making kava. 2 The rug, as Nordstrom suggests, is no doubt intended to suggest the sensuality of the harem, and combines incongruously with the Samoan mat they are sitting on and the traditional bowl and cup which they display. 3

From darkness to light: The story of conversion in the Reverend George Brown's photographs

The Samoans were very familiar with the Bible before the reverend George Brown arrived. Brown writes: ‘When I began my work in Samoa most of the people were professing Christians, though with many of our people in the outlying parts of Savaii this was only a profession, and heathen practices and dances were still carried on by them’ (Brown, 1908, p. 35). According to Brown, the Bible was always regarded by Samoans as their infallible guide in perplexity and doubt, their strength in weakness, and their comfort and joy in the hour of death. During the death of one Samoan chief, Brown records how the people turned to Christianity for comfort from their grief. He writes:

Langafonua — Building a New Life: Documenting the Cultural Life of Polynesians in Redland Shire

Redland Shire lies between the Brisbane City limits and the waters of Moreton Bay and is named after its red soil, which has provided fertile farmland since the establishment of the City of Brisbane. The photographic collection entitled ‘Langafonua’ pictures Pacific Islanders building a new life in Redland Shire. In 2002 it was exhibited in the Redlands Gallery from 16 March to 12 April, and then at the Australian Historical Association Annual Conference in Brisbane in July. The photographs and text explore aspects of cultural life of the Polynesian families who immigrated from the South Pacific in the 1970s. The title ‘Langafonua’ connotes the aspirations of this community as it attempts to build a new life in Australia. The migrant families pictured here work in fields that are often on the cusp of rezoning for residential development. Much of the land is still owned by retired Italian farmers who lease the farms to Tongans and Samoans. In the hands of the Islanders, the farms produce the yams, sweet potatoes and bele so beloved by the Polynesian community.