QUT Digital Repository:

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/

Quanchi, Max (2007) A single visual history of Oceania, New Zealand and
Australia. In: A History of New Zealand Photography, December 2007, University of
Otago, Dunedin.

© Copyright 2007 [please consult the author]

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"A single visual history of Oceania, New Zealand and Australia"

Max Quanchi

I will begin by posing a series of questions –

• Who was the first Australian or New Zealander to visit the Pacific Islands and
take photographs?
• When was the first photograph of the Pacific Islands published in a Pacific Island,
Australian or New Zealand magazine, journal or newspaper?
• In the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand, what subject in newspapers
and magazines was the most popular published photograph early in the 20th
century – was it landscapes, portraits, belles, indigenous villages,
settler/pioneering expansion, or cities and townscapes?
• Is there a difference between the depiction of the Pacific Islands, Australia and
New Zealand pasted up in private albums and the photographs published in the
public domain?

I admit to spending a lot of time counting, listing, categorising, and cataloguing old
photographs of the Pacific Islands. This might place me in the amateur historian,
empiricist, cliometrics stable. A scientific scholarly approach to old photographs can be
found in the international journal the History of Photography. It declares that it is
“devoted exclusively to the history and criticism of the basic semantic unit of all modern
media - the photograph”. It focuses on the uses of photography and particularly critical
approaches originating from history, art history, sociology, or anthropology. The history
of photography began as a debate about the invention of the first camera and subsequent
technological change. Then, as the Oxford Companion to the photograph notes, about
1900, “photographs came increasingly to be regarded as art objects. Subsequently … the
history of photography came to be written as the history of an expressive medium within
the history of art”.1 “Rather than remaining fixated on particular images and their
aesthetic qualities” 2 the History of Photography changed in recent times to examine what
is distinctive about photographs and about their function.
 2

Another approach to old photographs might be found in pictorial history books and in the
catalogues of exhibitions of old photographs. These are wonderful to have on the shelf as
they alert us to the hidden archive of photography. But a study of 300 colour photo-
chromes from the Photoglob collection, in the new book The world in 1900: a colour
portrait, has been described as “a curiosity rather than a compelling historical
document”.3 (although about “The world”, Australia and the Pacific Islands do not get a
mention!!) As pictorial histories and exhibition catalogues occupy a well defined
commercial niche and have high market demand – relying on our antiquarian fascination
with old things - they will always be bobbing up in book stores and online. This is shown
by an series of illustrated histories in New Zealand, most recently Anna Rogers
Illustrated History of Canterbury, preceded by illustrated histories of Central Otago,
Queenstown, West Coast and Taranaki, a series by the Queensland State Library, A
travelling photographer in Queensland; the work of William Boyd, ……

These three domains – the empirical, the theoretical, and the commercial overlap. The
empiricists have an obsession with “firsts”, identifying locations and subjects, counting
the number of photographs published, or turned into postcards and lantern slides, and the
listing of photographers by names, studio and output. Across the divide, the theoretical
approach to a History of photography focuses on semantics, critical theories and
methodologies emerging out of the disciplines. I highlight this gap because to write a
single visual history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, we need to leap
back and forth between several contiguous lines of research

It should be noted that Australia lags behind in producing a history of its photography,
despite numerous exhibitions, monographs and the benchmark survey publications of
Jack Cato (1955), Robert Holden (1985), Gael Newton (1988), Anne-Marie Willis (1989)
and Alan Davies (in 1985 and 2004).4 There also have been some interesting studies of
colonial era Indigenous Australian photography (that is about Indigenous Australians, not
by Indigenous Australians). These include Donald Thompson’s Children of the
Dreamtime and Children of the wilderness (both in 1983) and the more recent The
 3

photographs of Baldwin Spencer, edited by Philip Batty, Lindy Allen and John Morton,
Jane Lydon’s Eye contact on photographs of Coranderrk Mission near Melbourne and
several books and articles by Robert Dixon on the photographer Frank Hurley.5 The
exhibition field is vibrant, and the Art Gallery of South Australia is currently showing In
century in focus; South Australian Photography 1840s-1940s. It claims to present all the
major photographers, every genre and technique and to document the move from
professional practitioners to “a democratic medium available to everyone”.6 Recent
exhibitions in Australia include All human life; Great photographs from the Hulton Getty
Collection, (1998), World without end; photography and the 20th century (2001),
Witness; an exhibition of Australian photojournalism (2002), The Freeman Studio 1875-
1910 (2003), Captured in colour; photographers views of the Great war (2003), In a new
light (2003), Inside Sydney; Photographs by Max and Rex Dupain (2004), and Small
worlds; travel photography of the 19th century (2007) and Frank Hurley; Journeys into
Papua (2008). 7 The public interest in old photographs is demonstrated by the range of
venues in this list – public libraries, museums and art galleries, a War Memorial and
commercial galleries.

While saying Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Island scholarship has made little
progress towards a regional history of photography, it is interesting to note that for the
same colonial era in Africa, as Paul Landau noted in 2002, “serious investigation of
visual signs in the experience of colonialism has only just begun”.8 Landau also makes
the point that studies so far, after acknowledging the differing, but intersecting, African,
European, global and local readings of images, are “demonstrating that images change
depending on who is looking at them … and that people use images to draw together
previously inchoate social meanings from their own societies, and how they use them to
recognize people from other societies”.9 Christraud Geary offers the same warning about
images from central Africa, noting historians have already found that
“decontextualisation is inherent in the very nature of the photographic medium. It is left
to the viewers who are often unaware of the picture’s original contexts, to invest them
with meaning”.10
 4

In the Pacific Islands scholarship there is considerable output in the form of journal
articles, conference papers and a few pioneering studies of photographs by Diamond
Jenness, FE Williams, Bronislaw Malinowski, JW Beattie, JW Lindt, FR Barton, George
Brown - and on World War 11 material. The history of photography in the Pacific has
started but it has so far been limited by boundaries – a village, a specific language group,
a single island or small nation.

In New Zealand, a conference in 2007 with the title “The rise of New Zealand
photography 1839-1918” offered pioneering papers on daguerreotypes, lantern slides,
photomontages, portraits, public works, masculinity, landscapes, and well known and less
familiar photographers and studios. It also raised the question of what to name the next
era – if “The “rise of photography” characterised the 1839-1918 period, what would the
next era - 1918-1980 - be called - The further rise, or perhaps “Many photographies” to
borrow David Eggleton’s phrase.11

I would like to offer several explanations for why there are commonalities in
photography history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. The taking,
buying, swapping, pasting-up, publishing and display of photographs, was motivated at
first by basic technological improvements in the camera which created accessibility as
the dry plate, and then the roll-film, hand-held camera were invented. This allowed
photography to change from a professional or dilettante occupation, to being amateur and
popular. It should also be noted that most of the photographs so far researched by
academics, were not amateur snapshots but taken by professional photographers in 1839-
1918 using dry and wet-plate cameras mounted on tripods.

A second commonality was the change from individual portraiture, and photography as
art to mass publication photography useage as propaganda. Australians, New
Zealanders, and expatriates in Suva, Noumea and Apia lived in settler colonies and these
merchants, bureaucrats, farmers and planters wanted photographs to send home to Europe
a record of their achievements, to put on the mantelpiece or to paste in family albums to
prove their enterprise, energy and prosperity. This rise was associated with the use of
 5

photography in commercial and government advertising to attract consumers, investors

and new settlers from Europe; and later by colonial governments to unify settler society
with indigenous inhabitants and demonstrate for example, planter opportunities in the
Solomon Islands, the suitability of Fiji for investment, the immigration prosects in
Queensland and the status of New Zealand as a cohesive, exciting new dominion. The
advent of government photography departments and the rise of international, inter-
colonial and colonial exhibitions as a showpiece for new nations, as John Mackenzie,
Robert Rydell, Annie Coombes, Anne Maxwell and others have shown, also pushed
photography as a form of propaganda into the public domain.

In the published photography of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands there was
a late nineteenth century fascination with nature – ferns, banyan trees, peeling bark, 400
year old forest giants with massive girth, towering cliffs, blowholes, sweeping bays and
sandy coastlines, chasms, natural arches, waterfalls and of course the volcano – a
photographic category on its own. The interest nature was a reaction to the urbanisation
occurring in settler colonies. As the urban historian Graeme Davison noted the “rural
dream was the reflex of the urban nightmare”12 and promoted a romantic notion of rural
idealism. This created a demand for the picturesque by crowded, depressed city dwellers
and suburban magazine readers and inspired field trips and photography club excursions
to mysterious natural features along the coast or deep inland.

The lantern slide and the popularity of the public lecture was also found in Australia,
New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. A speaker’s circuit was created through cities and
provincial centres as returned travellers, missionaries and dubious “experts” travelled the
colonies, relying very much on photographs made into a lantern slide or “limelight
views,” to illustrate their lectures – usually to packed halls.

Another new and insatiable market opened up in the 1890s once photomechanical and
halftone reproduction allowed photographs to be reproduced on newsprint. This
unleashed a flood of illustrated magazines, special illustrated weekend newspapers and
illustrated serial encyclopaedia. Monthly issues of The world of Today, People of all
 6

nations, Countries of the World were later turned into bound volumes with gold
embossed spines, and created another visual realm. The photographically illustrated book
also created a new and demand for photographs. For example the mid-19th century book
usually had half a dozen plates or engravings (often based on photographs). By 1900, one
hundred black and white photographs were not unusual in travelogues, books of empire
and conquest and studies of indigenous peoples.

Public access and familiarity with photography was also linked to the advent of the
postcard – when millions of black and white, hand coloured and later colour photographs
entered the family home, work place and office in the pre-WW1 postcard boom. We can
also add the popular although smaller demand for the panorama and stereograph as a
further motivation for the taking of photographs; and the role of commercial studios as
well as the motivation to take photographs that emerged from photography clubs and
societies and their annual competitions and fieldwork jaunts. The biographies of
individual photographers highlight the direct links between Australia, New Zealand and
the Pacific Islands as many photographers travelled back and forth across the Tasman and
out into the islands on postcard hunting expeditions, tourist cruises and on government
trips as official photographers. Many had brief commercial adventures in Australia, New
Zealand and the Pacific Islands, setting up a studio before moving on or back home.
There was also a busy traffic in undeveloped film between Australia, New Zealand and
the Pacific Islands. In the 1970s you could get black and white prints developed in a
Nuku’alofa studio, but had to send colour film to Auckland and colour slides to Sydney
for processing.

The content of published photography in illustrated magazines and newspapers was much
the same in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, but this remains to be further
researched. Portraits, postcards, colonial annual reports, travel brochures and the
illustrated travelogue all contained much the same subject matter – probably because
photographers trained and operating studios in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific
Islands copied or replicated the images they saw produced by other photographers or
published profusely in the public domain.
 7

An under-researched area of the history of photography is lounge rooms – or the practice

of decorating living spaces in private homes with framed portraits and photographs of
important personal, family and community events, and oneself, and in modern times
laminated collages, pop-art and fridge magnets. Every home in the early 20th Century had
a photograph on display – on the lounge room walls, on Grandma’s mantelpiece or on
occasional or side tables. This practice is particularly noticeable in the Pacific Islands. On
Eua Island in Tonga my host family in December 2007 had a hundred black and white
and colour photographs on the walls, including studio portraits and laminated sheets of
snaps sent home from children now living in New Zealand. Other homes were the same.
This practice can be traced back to the 19th century. The difficulty now is that we have no
evidence, only a glimpse in the background of a portrait taken in a lounge room. For
example, in Anna Petersen’s New Zealand at home; a cultural history of domestic
interiors, many photographs can be seen in the background of photographs taken for
other purposes. The modern mania for DIY and home “makeovers” has obliterated the
evidence in old homes. However, the display of photographs in the family home is a
significant comparative dimension of the history of photography, but remains elusive
research field.

Finally there was the phenomenon of the album – a pasted up showing of family events,
relatives and friends, major national events, and as tourism increased at the turn of the
century, the record of trips, tours and cruises. The album can be found in Australia, New
Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Photography in the 19th century and early in the 20th
century in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific was therefore characterised by a
complex set of intersecting factors – commercial studios, photography clubs and
societies, photo-journalism, albums, commissioned portraits, panorama, the picturesque,
stereographs and postcards, the lantern slide/public lecture, exhibitions, lounge-rooms,
tourism, propaganda, nationalism, empire, illustrated books, magazines, encyclopaedia,
newspapers aerial photography and school class photographs, Facilitating all that was the
technological change that put cameras in the hands of amateurs and ordinary settlers,
farmers, office workers and enthusiasts.
 8

David Eggleton in Into the light in 2004 acknowledged the difficulty of encompassing all
this material – he avoided the task of producing an exhaustive or encyclopaedic history,
and produced instead what he called a concise survey in eight chapters, “a kind of
national photo-album; a linked collection of images which demonstrate … a continuous
unfolding of technological advances, combined with changing ideas about what
photography can be”. 13

In Australia in 1988, Gael Newton tackled this same problem in Shades of light;
photography and Australia 1839-1988, by covering the period to WW1 in 96 pages and
ten chapters. Her emphasis was on “fine photographs and their makers, and the reasons
behind the changing subject matter and physical appearance of photographs in different
periods”.14 Anne-Marie Willis in a study of how histories of photography had been
written, noted that “most histories of photography assume that the history of photography
is the same thing as the history of photographers”.15

Twenty years later in 2004, Alan Davies in An eye for photography; the camera in
Australia, also used eight chapters to cover this same period, emphasising pictorialism,
colour and digital formats, portraits and the picturesque to offer a “visual documentation
of the people, places and events of the nation … fleeting camera images will become part
of the shared memory of all Australians”.16

In my own attempt to plot a path for a history of photography in the Pacific Islands, I
noted in 2006 in the Journal of Pacific History that photographs comprised a massive
archive, but that this archive, in Ewan Maidment’s words, was dispersed, fragmentary
and hardly scrutinised by researchers. I acknowledged that this project was daunting
because it relied on “multiple trajectories, parallel and conflicting discourses and
approaches that look beyond the photograph to find relationships between subjects and
photographers and between photographs and universal narratives’.17
 9

When considering a history of photography that encompasses New Zealand, Australia

and the Pacific Islands I admit that I ignored New Zealand in the ten years it took me
write a history the colonial photographic representation of Papua. Having finished that
book, it was a shock last December, while looking for photographs of post-WW1
memorials and commemorations in the Hocken Library, to discover that my own
favourites - the prodigious self-promoters, photographers and authors Charles Price
Conigrave and Thomas McMahon – had in 1919-1920 published a hundred of their
Pacific photographs in the Auckland Weekly News.18 These photomontages informed the
New Zealand reading public that New Guinea was “Freed from German rule”. They also
depicted the “Torres Strait”, the “The phosphate of lime industry”, “Nauru”, Australia’s
new Territories in the South Pacific, “Picturesque life and scenes in the Solomon
Islands”, “The sisal hemp industry”, “Life and scenes on Norfolk Island”, and “Life and
scenes in the New Hebrides”. After that chance discovery I am aware of the need to look
for more commonalities, and shared visual histories across the Tasman.

About ten years before this I made another discovery when coming across a mysterious
black and white photograph of a New Guinea “cannibal”. The man carried a decorated
dance stick or club in one hand and a human head dangled from his other hand. In
captions, the head hunter’s village was located geographically as far apart as the Sepik
on the north-west coast and the Gulf of Papua and chronologically anytime from the early
1880s to the 1930s. This image first appeared in book form in 1926 as the frontispiece to
Edmond Demaitre’s New Guinea gold. Demaitre admitted being given the print in 1934
by Archie Gibson, a professional Port Moresby photographer, and claimed that Gibson
assured him it was taken on a patrol in 1927.19 The alteration to add the bleeding head
can be detected. Either Archie Gibson or one of the patrol officers in 1927, probably the
keen photographer Harry Downing,20 had airbrushed the photograph to add the severed
head. This so called head hunter print was not used to illustrate books in the decade prior
to 1936 nor is it found in the large archive of unpublished private albums and loose
personal collections from that period. It was made into a postcard in the 1920s as one of a
set for the Missionaires du Sacre Coeur d’Issoudin and was “Number 61” in a
commercial set probably available from the photographers Archie and Kathleen Gibson
 10

at the Papuan Courier offices in Port Moresby. But residents and collectors of
photographs in Papua considered it not worthy of keeping and it was not sent to editors or
publishers to accompany a manuscript. Although locals shunned it, the 1930s traveller
and visitor Demaitre gave it prominence. In 1975, it was included in the pioneering
pictorial history of Papua New Guinea by Gash and Whittaker and in 1984 it was the
opening photograph in the officially sanctioned commemorative publication on the
anniversary of colonial rule. In 1990, it appeared again in a popular pictorial history
published in Port Moresby.21 So after being ignored at the time of its production, it was
highlighted later by a visiting European traveller-adventurer-cum-author, and then a
hundred years later privileged by a series of otherwise well-informed editors, compilers
and authors. In the 1980s and 1990s had anyone questioned the authenticity, and checked
on the truth value of this image? Had they questioned the iconography that imaged
Papua New Guineans as head-hunters? Moore, Griffin and Griffin in 1984 did at least
suggest to readers that this image was typical of the ways Europeans depicted and knew
Papua New Guinea.

What I learnt from the continuing publication of this image was that uncritical use of
photographs as supplementary illustration was characteristic of most publications about
Papua New Guinea and that if a single visual History of the three regions was to be
written it would have to include a chapter on fakes, airbrushing, and stage-managed
photography in the public domain, and their continued use by authors, editors and
curators, online and by tea-towel manufacturers.

Another chapter in the shared visual history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific
Islands might also highlight the scholarly, editorial and aesthetic processes by which a
small number of images are repeated, valorised and privileged. This repetition of a few
favourite photographs is demonstrated by the many reproductions of an 1850s
daguerreotype of the Barrett sisters, Caroline and Sarah, in New Zealand, and many
similar examples can be cited for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.
 11

More recently I discovered that I had overlooked another important aspect of photography
– the photo album. I realised this when the Queensland Museum acquired two albums
compiled by William and Miriam Park after they had gone south at the end of their bank
appointment on Samarai Island between 1929 and 1938. They had carefully pasted up two
albums with a narrative sequence of their work place, social life and environs. Taken when
Samarai was not yet in decline as a port and administrative centre, the albums projected a
sense of ordered, progressive, calm, familiar colonial settlement and achievement – the
colonial enclave lifestyle of expatriate residents and visitors, but also of the Park’s
emotional attachment to a place - to Samarai. These two albums and the thousands of other
albums compiled and pasted up in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific in the early
1900s were used to visually document events and experiences for friends and neighbours
back home. At the same time, albums like those created by the Parks deny other emotions
and other histories. Maria Lepowksy noted that expatriate women, small independent
traders, pearlers, miners, “unofficial whites” and Papuans were poorly represented in the
masculinist, dominant ideologies of British and Australian settlement in Samarai and
elsewhere in eastern Papua and this is also very noticeable in the photographic record.
Lepowsky found that women from the commercial class of traders, storekeepers, hotel
keepers, planters and gold-rushers were the most visible European women in eastern
Papua.22 These women also were mostly absent in albums, loose collections and published
photography. Papuan and New Guineans were also invisible in the Park albums, only
appearing occasionally, clearing land or working on the wharves. Papuans from nearby
mainland villages only appear in the two Park albums at the back in a few, what we might
call “ethnographic,” pages. The 268 photographs in the two Park albums are important as
they allow us to document the physical, environmental, economic, social and political
transformations on Samarai over a fifty year period.23 Was the content and the pasting,
selection and ordering practices in albums the same in Australia, New Zealand and the
Pacific Islands – this is another fascinating research project.

Finally let me turn to a mysterious portrait from Samoa. The naming of portraits in the
Pacific was often random and usually confused given names, titles and honorific, as well
as being regularly misspelt. For example, a John Davis portrait c1895 is named “Princess
 12

Fa’ane” on one print24 but named “Sao Tama’ita’i Faamu, daughter of Malietoa
Laupepa” in a slightly different pose in another portrait.25 Her full name was Fa'amusami
Malietoa. Fa'amu, the shortened version of Fa'amusami was misspelt as Fa’ane on one of
the Davis portraits. Another early 1900 postcard made from the same photograph was
anonymously captioned "A Samoan Dancing Girl” and Alison Nordstrõm found another
Fa’amusami portrait on a Muir and Moodie postcard c1910. Several other prints with
different captions are also held by museums in the USA. 26 The studio portrait was a
cliché well before 1900. The photography studios of John Davis, AJ Tattersall and
Thomas Andrew in Apia regularly posed anonymous young men with a necklace, tuiga
and often a club, as well as named and un-named young women in similar studio and
exterior poses wearing tuiga and holding clubs or knives.27 The error in continuing to
present these studio portraits as signifiers of Samoa is compounded by their use on the
covers of two recent scholarly works on Oceania, Anne Maxwell’s, Colonial
photography and exhibitions in 1999 and the edited collection by Jeanette Mageo,
Cultural memory in 2001, in both cases using a portrait by Thomas Andrews. I refer to
the use of portraits as a warning that we also need to acknowledge how single
photographs - which we valorise and decontextualise by repeatedly publishing them
today - may not have been accessible across the public domain at the time, and indeed
that they provide very fragile forensic evidence of Samoa or elsewhere at the time of their
taking.

Early Pacific photography

The camera arrived in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands probably about the
same time. A photograph of the missionary Guillaume Douarre landing at Balade in New
Caledonia is attributed to 1843, a mere four years after the camera had been invented in
France. Daguerreotypes by d'Urville and Seibold were taken during voyages in the
Pacific in the 1840s; and the French photographer Gustave Viaud photographed Tahiti in
1859.28 In the United States of America by the early 1870's, a travelling "South Seas"
show was able to advertise a catalogue of prints of chiefs and villages available for
purchase.29 New Caledonia, annexed and settled by the French in the 1850s, was
 13

extensively photographed by 1872. French homes, domestic scenes, sugar mills and
panoramic views of Noumea were available and in the 1890s, studio portraits of
canaques were widely distributed.30 In 1895, Captain Charles Reade gave a lecture and
lantern slide presentation at the Liverpool Geographical Society on “the coral isles and
their strange inhabitants”.31 “Excellent views were shown” at his second lecture in
January 1896, this time on “My volcano adventures in the South Seas”. HO Forbes had
already presented an illustrated address at the Society the year before, in the following
years FW Christian spoke twice on the Caroline Islands and MJ Finucane on Fiji and
Papua was the subject of two illustrated addresses by AH Abbott and also by AE Pratt,
CD Rawling and AFR Wollaston. Pratt opened by stating he believed that “in an
illustrated lecture the pictures do the best part of the talking”.32 Photography in Papua
New Guinea arrived well after the camera had intruded on other Pacific Island peoples. It
also arrived during an atmosphere of public and scholarly debate about colonialism, and
the appropriate form for “native” administration. Images of Papua were also affected by
Edwardian interests in pictorialism and attention to aesthetic matters of shape, tone,
harmony and proportion. One task is to determine whether photography practices, subject
matter, commercial considerations and access in the public domain were running parallel
in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

If we take postcards as an example, we find that postcards depicting urban scenes in

Noumea and Suva, Brisbane and Dunedin were remarkably similar. Indeed in April 1908,
a visitor to Suva, signing herself as “Maggie”, sent a JW Waters hand-coloured postcard
of Renwick Street in Suva home to her family in Waverley, a Sydney suburb, noting on
the front “This is better than Waverley”.

“Main Street Suva” (Renwick St); JW Waters, Suva.

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Sent from Suva to Waverley, NSW in April 1908

Postcards, because of their huge worldwide circulation, contributed to the spread of a

tropical “South Seas” mythology. In Fiji, the impact of ten thousand separate black and
white and colour postcards between 1900 and 1920 was to make Fijians well known, and
although remote, an example of loyal subjects, successful colonial rule and expanding
empire. Did postcards serve the same purpose for Indigenous Australians and Maori? My
guess is that the work of local studios and travelling photographers meant Indigenous
Australians and Maori had already entered the visual economy through portraits, prints
and travelogues in the 1880s and 1890s. Postcards, which did not boom until 1900-1914,
projected an image of successful German, Dutch, Japanese, British and French
colonisation, with indigenous inhabitants secure in their long-standing customs and
traditions. Fiji was depicted on postcards in a natural state with pleasing coastal views,
waving palms above tranquil villages and Fijians who still knew the protocols of yagona,
lala and meke, how to make masi and how to sail takia. Yet Fiji was also depicted as
modern and European; tourists took trips by car to inspect mountain forests; gas lamps lit
urban shopping districts; two storied concrete public libraries and Memorial Halls lined
the esplanades; the harbour was home to two, three and four funnelled battleships, cruise
liners and cargo steamers.

Without a caption was it possible to distinguish between a streetscape in Waverley in

Australia, Suva in Fiji or Dunedin in New Zealand or indeed any port city, provincial
capital or urban settlement in similar settler colonies? The postcards of banks, grand
hotels, town halls and wharves in Noumea, Suva, Samarai, Dunedin or Townsville were
probably indistinguishable without the caption. Postcards of topographical features – a
waterfall or a strangely configured basaltic mountain peak – were easier to
geographically locate and belonged to a familiar genre – the unusual, the exotic and the
prehistoric.

It would be fascinating to compare portraits. For example, this comparison might reveal
that a common photographic practice encompassed Australia, New Zealand and the
 15

Pacific Islands. The group portrait of Maori taken by Dr AC Barker at TuaHiwi in the
South Island in 1867, 33 might usefully be compared to the Queenslander, William
Boag’s portraits of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders (Kanakas) in early
1870,34 an Ernest Robin portrait of a Kanak man from Ouve’a in New Caledonia in the
early 1870s35, or a portrait of Adi Arieta Kuila, the daughter of Ratu Seru Cakobau in Fiji
in 1874.36 Taken at about the same time, these photographers clearly knew what other
photographers were doing – they were seeing portraits taken elsewhere and were
replicating formats, composition and settings. These sorts of comparisons suggest a
single field for the history of photography as one field, a visual transnational history.

Insert 4 portraits

Another equally daunting task concerns the journeys that photographs took – not the
photographs that were printed and then tucked away in tins and cardboard boxes and little
cared for in drawers and cupboards – but the massive archive that editors created when
they chose frontispieces and book covers and photomontages for magazine, newspaper
and illustrated encyclopaedia, or when photographs were turned into postcards, lantern
slides, posters, advertisements and museum displays. That is, we need to trace
photographs as they entered the public domain, were seen, commented on, shaped public
opinion, or confirmed existing beliefs and ideologies.

There have been several recent attempts to write a history of the Pacific as a single entity,
what Americans call an Area Study and what Blackwell’s called a Regional History when
publishing their series of world histories. Area or regional histories are rare these days,
but does include the multiple-authored Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders in
1997. A few photographs appeared as illustrations. The only attempt to link the three
neighbouring regions has been Donald Denoon, Phillippa Mein-Smith and Maravic
Wyndham’s book in 2000, A history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. They
admitted that “Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific do not form a self-contained
universe … few scholars have treated it as such and its boundaries coincide with no
major organization. Broad and deep links draw these polities and peoples together but
 16

these ties are not exclusive”. But might a study of photography, its uses and its “linked
collections of images” inspire a new round of revisionist history, one that highlights
different events, behaviours and motivations, and frees up historians to interpret the past
only through a visual archive? Might the transnational narrative that Denoon, Mein-Smith
and Wyndham avoided37, be allowed to emerge from the visual data?

Photography expanded simultaneously in Australia, New Zealand and the Islands, and the
increasing output – a deluge - of prints, postcards, portraits and other formats does have a
remarkably similar subject matter. But these photographs were also shaped by three
different sets of unique geographical, political and social trajectories. To make the next
step we need to trawl through the archives, including those already existing and those yet
to be discovered and catalogued. We need to highlight seminal, stereotypical single
images, but we also need to highlight the power and influence of the mass of
photographic material that entered the public domain and entered the public
consciousness – the public memory of those who lived in Australia, New Zealand the
Pacific Islands in 1839-1918.
 17

Bio

Max Quanchi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Queensland

University of Technology. His first research in the field of visual history was on the
colonial photographer Thomas McMahon and this resulted in several early journal
articles but he is better known for his pioneering efforts in convening a series of panels
at Pacific History Association conferences, running from Hilo in 1994 to Noumea in
2004. He was also here at the PHA conference at the University of Otago in 2006 when
he spoke on albums as a resource for writing Pacific Histories. (Nearly 100 papers in
the field known as the “History of Photography” have been given in these PHA panels).
Reflecting his interest in schools, he has also published classroom lessons, and articles
on Pacific photography for use by history teachers. He has been Guest Editor for two
special journal issues on photography in the Pacific, in Pacific Studies in 1997 and the
Journal of Pacific History in 2006. His conference papers, articles and chapters in
books cover such topics as the colonial imaging of Papua, (including a new book this
year called Photographing Papua), missionary photography, colonial propaganda,
postcards and albums.

1
Robin Lenman, ed, 2005, Oxford Companion to the photograph, Oxford, OUP,
280
2
Lenmam, op.cit., p.281
3
Lorien Kaye 2007, (Book review of The world in 1900: a colour portrait by M
Waller and S Arque, London, Thames and Hudson) The Age (Melbourne), 30/11/2007.
4
Jack Cato 1955, The story of the camera in Australia; Robert Holden, 1988,
Photography in colonial Australia; the mechanical eye and the illustrated book; Gael
Newton 1988, Shades of light; photography and Australia 1839-1988; Anne-Marie
Willis, 1989, Writing Photographic History in Australia: Towards a Critical Account,
Angus & Robertson; Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury, 1985, The mechanical eye in
Australia 1841-1900; Alan Davies 2004, An eye for photography; the camera in
Australia.
5 Robert Dixon, Prosthetic Gods: travel, representation and colonial governance
(Brisbane 2001); Dixon, Robert, “Frank Hurley’s Pearls and savages; travel,
representation and colonial governance” in In transit; travel, text and empire, edited by
Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnson. New York, 2002, 191-218.
 18

6
In century in focus; South Australian Photography 1840s-1940s, Art Gallery of
South Australia, Nov 2007-January 2008.
7
Inei/konei – The Pacific in Photo Art from Aotearoa, 1997, Australian Centre for
Photography; All human life; Great photographs from the Hulton Getty Collection, 1998,
State Library of NSW; World without end; photography and the 20th century, 2001, Art
Gallery of NSW; Witness; an exhibition of Australian photojournalism, 2002, Australian
centre for Photography, Sydney; The Freeman Studio 1875-1910, 2003, State Library of
NSW; Captured in colour; photographers views of the Great war, 2003, Australian War
memorial, Canberra; In a new light, 2003, National Library of Australia; Inside Sydney;
Photographs by Max and Rex Dupain, 2004, Museum of Sydney; Small worlds; travel
photography of the 19th century, 2007, National Gallery of Victoria; Frank Hurley;
Journeys into Papua, Australian Museum, Sydney, 2008.
8
Paul Landau, 2002, “Introduction; an amazing distance: pictures and people in
Africa” in Images and empires; visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa; edited by
Paul Landau and Deborah Crispin, Berkeley, University of California Press, p.5
9
Landau, op.cit., p.1
10
Christraud Geary, 2002, In and out of focus; Images from Central Africa 1885-
1960, Washington, Smithsonian Institution, p.15.
11
David Eggleton, 2006, Into the light; A history of New Zealand Photography,
Nelson, Craig Potton, p.6
12
Graeme Davison, 1978, The rise and fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Melbourne,
MUP, 251 and 255.
13
Ibid., pp.6-7
14
Gael Newton, 1988, Shades of light; photography and Australia 1839-1988,
Canberra, Australian National Gallery, p.vi.
15
Anne-Marie Willis, op.cit., p.253.
16
Alan Davies, 2004, An eye for photography; the camera in Australia, Melbourne,
The Meigunyah Press, n.p.,
17
Max Quanchi, 2006, “Photography and history in the Pacific Islands; Visual
histories and photographic evidence”, JPH, Vol 41, 2, 2006, p.165.
18
For New Zealand examples see, McMahon TJ, “Freed from German rule”,
Auckland Weekly News, 27/2/1919, p.34; idem, “Torres Strait”, ibid., 19/2/1920, p.34;
idem, “The phosphate of lime industry”, ibid., 9/1/1919, p.40; idem. “Nauru”, ibid.,
10/4/1919, pp.32-33; idem, “Territory in the South Pacific”, ibid., 22/5/1919, p.41; idem,
“Picturesque life and scenes in the Solomon islands”, ibid., 12/8/1920 pp.32-33; idem,
“The sisal hemp industry”, ibid., 28/10/1920, p.37; idem, “Life and scenes on Norfolk
Island”, ibid., 18/11/1920. p.33; idem, “Life and scenes in the New Hebrides”, ibid.,
9/12/1920, p.35.
19
Edmond Demaitre, 1936, New Guinea gold; cannibals and gold-seekers in New
Guinea, London, Geoffrey Bles, frontispiece and p.139. This was published in several
languages during the following decade.
20
Harry Downing, a former professional photographer from Sydney, joined the
Papuan administration as a patrol officer and accompanied Demaitre on an expedition in
1934: see, Demaitre E, op.cit., p.8. Downing could have faked the “head hunter” from
material collected on his patrols in Papua in the late 1920s. But, the image is not present
 19

in the substantial collections of Gibson’s and Downing’s photographs held at UPNG,

Mitchell Library, Australian National Library, Noel Butlin Archives, Royal Geographical
Society (London) or the CWM/SOAS, London.
21
Moore C, Griffin J and Griffin A, 1984, Colonial Intrusion; Papua New Guinea
1884, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea Centennial Committee, p.1; Gash N and
Whittaker J, 1975, A pictorial history of New Guinea, Brisbane, Jacaranda (reprinted
1977, 1978 and 1989), p.102; Coutts MN, 1990, Looking back; ol piksa bilong taim bipo,
Port Moresby, South Pacific Magazine, p.16.
22
Maria Lepowsky, 2001, ‘The Queen of Sudest; White women and colonial
cultures in British New Guinea and Papua’, in In colonial New Guinea; Anthropological
perspectives, edited by Naomi McPherson, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 143-44.
23
WHK Park and Miriam Park, Photographic album E-177788-0, and WHK Park
and Miriam Park, Photographic album, E-17789-0, Brisbane: Queensland Museum.
24
Casey Blanton, 1995, Picturing paradise; colonial photography of Samoa 1875-
1925, Daytona Beach, Daytona Beach Community College, Illustration 29, page 71.
25
Malama Meleisea, 1987, Lagaga; a short history of Western Samoa, Suva, IPS,
plate 1.
26
Alison Nordstrom, 1991/1992, “Paradise recycled; photographs of Samoa in
changing contexts”, Exposure, 28, 3, pp.10 and 11-12.
27
I thank Lau Asofou So’o for alerting me to the spelling error and Max Shekleton
for alerting me to this postcard; in the private collection of Max Shekleton, Noumea).
28
Jammes A and Sobieszek R, eds, 1970, French primitive photography, New York,
Aperture, p.6. Photography in the Pacific is discussed in a special issue of Photofile
magazine see, Gibson R, ed., Photofile; South Pacific, Spring 1988, 6, No 3; Stephen A,
ed., Pirating the Pacific; images of trade, travel and tourism, Sydney, Powerhouse
Museum; Blanton C, ed., 1995, Picturing Paradise; colonial photography of Samoa
1875-1925, Daytona, Southwest Museum of Contemporary Art.
29
See advertiser’s text on a poster, reproduced in, Thomas N, 1991, Entangled
objects; exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, p.166.
30
O'Reilly P and Poirier J, 1959, Nouvelle Caledonie documents icon-ographiques
anciens, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, pp.44, 52, 53, 100-1 and 109.
31
Reade C, 1895, “The coral isles and their strange inhabitants”, Liverpool
Geographical Society; Proceedings, 10/1/1895, p.4.
32
Ibid., 24/1/1907, p.11.
33
King, M, 1983, Maori; a photographic and social history, Wellington, Reed, p.59
34
Byrne D, 1994, A travelling photographer in colonial Queensland, Brisbane,
State Library of Queensland, 1994
35
Kakou S, 1998, Decouverte photograhique de la Nounvelle-Caledonie 1848-
1900, Noumea, Actes Sud, p.57
36
Roth J and Hooper S, eds, 1990, The Fiji journals of Baron Anotale Von Hugel
1875-1877, Suva, Fiji Museum, p.176.
37
Denoon, Mein-Smith, Wyndham, op.cit., p.4.