Suchergebnisse

Photographically illustrated handbooks became popular in the 1890s and supplemented the official Annual Reports and Blue Books. Handbooks were both an instrument of propaganda and a prospectus for potential investors and settlers and served a documentary purpose by providing a glimpse of a colony's natural resources, economy, European life and Indigenous peoples. The handbook phenomenon, globally, has been largely overlooked by historians, despite adding to the complex archive generated by mid-century colonies. This article analyses the way photographs operated in the handbooks, particularly the inclusions and omissions in the many editions and reprints in the 1924–43 period, to provide insights into the ways a British colony – Fiji – was being remade and reshaped by capitalism and colonialism.

Review of: The New Port Moresby: Gender, Space, and Belonging in Urban Papua New Guinea, Ceridwen Spark (2020)
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 174 pp.,
ISBN 978 0 82488 180 1 (hbk), US$80
ISBN 978 0 82488 980 7 (pbk), US$30

Review of: Tikopia Collected: Raymond Firth and the Creation of Solomon Islands Cultural Heritage, Elizabeth Bonshek (2017)
Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 222 pp.,
ISBN 978 1 90777 439 3 (hbk), £60


Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux 1791–1794, Bronwen Douglas, Fanny Wonu Veys and Billie Lythberg (eds) (2018)
Leiden: Sidestone Press, 381 pp.,
ISBN 978 9 08890 574 2 (pbk), €60


Resonant Histories: Pacific Artefacts and the Voyages of HMS Royalist 1890–1893, Alison Clark with Eve Haddow and Christopher Wright (2019)
Leiden: Sidestone Press, 272 pp.,
ISBN 978 9 08890 629 9 (pbk), €55

Historical research on the early years of photography in the Pacific Islands has revealed changes in the practice of photography, the development of Pacific imagery, tropes and stereotypes and changes in the ways images were distributed, archived and used in modern contexts. Research in the field was initially focused on photography's indexical nature and the role of professional and amateur photographers, travellers, colonial officials and missionaries. The research highlighted here, only in the English language and excluding Aotearoa/New Zealand, reveals how later analyses have begun to grow more theoretical, in keeping with postcolonial approaches to reading cross-cultural representation, and how new directions in research point towards the nature of Indigenous engagement with early photography.

Review of: Tulagi: Pacific Outpost of British Empire, Clive Moore (2019)
Canberra: Australian National University Press, 472 pp.,
ISBN 978 1 76046 308 3 (pbk), AUS$60

Albums and scrapbooks are rarely the focus of research. This article examines the motivation and context for a unique and rare album compiled by a 'special correspondent' – George Randolph Bedford, an aspiring Federal politician, journalist and writer – who visited the Solomon Islands in 1906 on a personal fact-finding mission. His scrapbook contains 212 photographs and a series of articles on the Solomon Islands that he had published in illustrated weekend newspapers in Australia in 1906 and early 1907. The Australian colonies had just federated, Britain had just passed control of Papua to Australia and, in the New Hebrides, Britain and France were about to announce a condominium had been formed. Tonga, Niue and the Cook Islands were also the subject of imperial manoeuvring. In Queensland, Kanakas were being sent home as the labour trade was abolished. The scrapbook is therefore a window on to imperial diplomacy, colonial expansion and Australian visions of a relationship with the Pacific, the boom in illustrated newspapers, early photography and personal ambition to become an expert on the islands.