might support or challenge the interpretation of colonialism in Oceania in conventional ..... rising free settler Indo-Fijian population of tenants, artisans and small.
QUT Digital Repository: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/
Quanchi, Max (2008) Visual histories : contrasting postcard views of early 20th century French, British and Australian colonies. In: Photographies : New Histories, New Practices, 10-12 July 2008, Australian National University, Canberra.
© Copyright 2008 [please consult the author]
Visual histories; contrasting postcard views of early 20th century colonies of French, British and Australian colonies Photographies, ANU, Canberra July 2008 Max Quanchi, Queensland University of Technology1
Abstract The huge output of photographically illustrated material generated by Euro-American colonial administrations, capitalist enterprise, settlement, evangelism and cross-cultural relationships has been recently applied to histories of colonialism. This paper addresses the colonial era comparatively by analysing early 20th century, photographically illustrated picture postcards from the British Crown Colony of Fiji, the French territory of New Caledonia and the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea. This reveals similarities and suggests that visually there was a singular colonialism in Oceania. The indexical value or forensic visual evidence in picture postcards from four colonies in Oceania – Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua and New Guinea – might support or challenge the interpretation of colonialism in Oceania in conventional histories already on bookshelves and call for a revision of histories written without critical reflection of the visual evidence. 2 The visual evidence in postcards also might reveal that each colony was unique – a reflection of its indigenous history and the nature of its subsequent French, British, German or Australia colonial regime, but it also might reveal similarities in the histories of all four colonies and therefore support claims of a monolithic Pacific Island colonialism. The turn-of-the century surge of postcard photography from Oceania suggests that editors, publishers, the British Colonial Office and the French Ministère des Colonies and Administration Coloniale, as well as colonial advocates, investors and boosters in England, France, Germany and Australia were alert to the role the new visual medium of postcards might play. For historians, a search through the mass of postcards flooding the public domain offers deeper insights into public perceptions of the economic value of colonies, of the role of colonial administrations, of the potential for immigration and investment, and of cross-cultural relationships on the frontier.
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The relationship between colonialism and photography has been the subject of limited scholarly scrutiny. • John Mackenzie suggested in a study of imperial propaganda in 1984 that images were a form of propaganda, a ‘conscious manipulation on the part of those who controlled the powerful religious, commercial, military and official agencies’.3 McKenzie noted the production, distribution and varied uses of postcards were historically significant because they ‘construct, disseminate and perpetuate stereotypical images of non-western peoples’.4 • Nicholas Thomas warned in 1993 that colonialism was “imagined and energised” through various mechanisms, and that colonialism should not only be seen through “ideologies of racism and oppression”.5 • James Ryan later noted that the influence of photography had been overlooked in Orientalist discourse, but that “photography – with its detail, ubiquity and currency across a range of institutional sites – played a significant role within the construction of the imaginative geography of empire”.6 He argued there was a need to narrate the experience of specific persons and places and then to relate them to broader themes and ideological frameworks”.7 • Paul Landau then warned that “the role of photography in the colonial project emerges not from who made the images nor even (and this is really the central point) from the graphic content of the images themselves. Rather it lay in the appropriation of tribal images into structures of distribution and interpretation”.8 Landau noted in 2002, as editor, that the collection Images and empires; visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa, demonstrated how “images change depending on who is looking at them and … how images have both underwritten, and undermined, the hierarchies that governed colonial Africa”.9 • Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson also argued in 2002 that “photographs operate as complex discursive objects of colonial power and culture”,10 but that those photographs are “still a littleunderstood aspect of modern cultural and social history” and that scholars have yet to tackle “the pervasiveness of the symbolic and scientific uses of photography for the verification and justification of colonial rule”.11 Their edited collection on Colonialist
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photography; imag(in)ing race and place¸ looked at the relationship between photographers and subjects and the “complex and varied circumstances under which the resulting photographs were and continue to be received and interpreted”, and included two studies of the Pacific.12 • Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, in a collection of essays in 2004 on the materiality of images and photographs as objects, suggested that “to inquire into photographs as objects makes it possible to address the issue of circulation and consumption ethnographically”.13 Nuno Porto one of these essayists argued that “through exploration of the uses of these photographs, native portraits with superficial similarities of image are revealed to be quite different objects, a difference that articulates with the indeterminacies, experiments and improvisations of colonial culture process”.14 This paper follows the earlier African research but shifts the focus to Oceania by examining postcards from four Pacific colonies during the postcard craze of 1900-14 and on to 1930. Following McKenzie’s approach, the categorisation of postcards by subject matter – the indexical value of historical detail within the frame might fall into three simple types; • actual people, places and objects; • mythical/stereotype images which have been edited, cropped, staged or posed; • news photography recording unusual or newsworthy, current events. Thinking historically of postcards in these three documentary, artificial or photo-journalist categories is useful but we need to seek contexts beyond the frame, interrogate photographically illustrated postcards as we would any other visual or non-visual evidence, avoid isolating specific evidence inside the frame and avoid exaggeration or invention of context, motivation or meaning in each image from our own ideological or theoretical positioning. In his study of postcards in the French territory of New Caledonian from 1900-1945, Phillippe Foucher identified fourteen subjects falling broadly into four categories – urban (images of Noumea), ethnographic
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(of villages), scenic (topography and fauna) and European activities (agriculture, mining, festivals, military and other activities).15 Elsie Stephenson created five categories for her study of Fijian postcards – buildings and landmarks, agriculture, other South Pacific Islanders in Fiji, miscellaneous (naval visits, posed tableaux and humorous) and Fijians (divided into twenty-six mostly ethnographic categories including costumes for men, bamboo rafts, meke and basket ware.16 Shekleton and Quanchi created nine categories for New Guinea postcards, dominated numerically by ethnographic imaging of bodies, dress, customs, dance, artefacts, weapons and utensils. Of 1227 English language Papua and New Guinea, in the locally produced cards (22% of all cards), ethnographic subject matter (64%) dominated views of towns, ports and harbours (24%). In comparison, the internationally produced cards (77% of all cards) reflected a broader range of European interests – Missions (17%), tourist/scenic (7%), police, mining and plantations (5%), views of towns and ports (4%) and other European activities (6%). Figure 1; Papua New Guinea Postcards17; Catalogued by subject matter and percentage of total Category No of cards (% of total) Ethnographic 657 53.5% Picturesque/scenic 94 7.6% Mission 142 11.5% Tourist activities 18 1.4% Plantation/Labour 35 2.8% Armed Native Constabulary 21 1.7% Mining 43 3.5% Towns/ports 103 8.3% Other European Activities 114 9.2% ___________________________________________ Total 1227 (100%)
The number of postcards on New Caledonia was about 3000, with 1500 for Papua and 3500 for Fiji.18 In the postcard boom, billions of photographically illustrated postcards were posted, enclosed in letters, pasted in albums, kept as a memento or traded among collectors. Some readers may have thought postcards were an authentic record of empire, proven by the stamp, scribbled message
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and origin out in the colonies, but while the photograph did capture a singular, specific place and time, the audiences, interpretations and usage at the distribution end were multiple and unrestricted. Images taken a year before, or thirty years before, were read in diverse contexts and the meaning changed by captions, cropping, colouring and format. The manner of publication and distribution therefore affected an audience’s interpretation and meanings were imposed, different to those the photographer intended when the photograph was taken. The relationship between colonial administration, propaganda and the photography of colonial subjects was slowly taken up in Pacific History.19 Research on the educative and propaganda power of imaging in the public domain and the many meanings attributed to images of Oceania as they were distributed, re-packaged, re-used and exhibited is still at a formative stage.20 The earliest research projects to place postcards in the context of colonial propaganda and the deliberate visual construction of colonial subjects were in an African and Asian context. John McKenzie argued postcards were a “central element in the ephemera boom … the supreme vehicle for … the dissemination of news and views in images which heightened the actions of the age, pictures that encapsulated the world and brought it into even the humblest living room”. He noted the empire was a major category in French, German, British, and Dutch postcard production, recording “new buildings, visits of governors and royalty, colonial forces and frontier warfare, labour migration … pioneering farmers, prospectors and miners” and the “range of indigenous peoples under imperial rule”.21 Since then scholars have tackled specific locations and have typically claimed, for example, that postcards from Palestine were “circulating widely and avidly collected, they were a major means of communicating the visual imagery of the inhabitants of Palestine to a largely EuroAmerican public”.22 William Main has noted for New Zealand, that “it was argued that postcards added greatly to one’s knowledge of other cultures”.23 In Hawaii in 1900-1915, Keith Steiner has noted that “collecting postcards was much in fashion during this period and it was common to for a postcard album to have a prominent place in a parlour”.24 Robert Aldrich, in his study of French colonial expansion, claimed “postcards were among the most ubiquitous and widely distributed images of colonial life”.25 There were an estimated 8740 individual postcards produced for West Africa alone, mostly between 1901-and 1918 and in the history of Senegal, scholars have shown how postcards served as “personal memorabilia and ethnographic documents
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tying home and colony together for the European officials and middleclasses to which they presented Africa”.26 The expansion of Euro-American empires into Oceania and the naming and re-naming of Oceania’s disparate islands, atolls and archipelago was only just occurring when picture postcards became popular. • Eastern New Guinea was divided by British and German annexations in 1884, • Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was annexed by Chile in 1888, • the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) in 1892 and the Solomon Islands in 1893 became British Protectorates, • Hawaii was annexed and Guam purchased from the Spanish by the USA in 1898 and 1899, • Germany and the USA divided Samoa in 1900, • “Savage Island” (Niue) was added to the Cook Islands by the British in 1900 (but became a separate New Zealand protectorate in 1904) and the • New Hebrides (Vanuatu) became a British and French jointly administered condominium in 1906. During the postcard boom the list of colonial overlords included Spain (which sold or lost its Pacific dominions in 1898 after the SpanishAmerican war), France, Netherlands, Germany (up to 1914), Britain, USA, Japan (after 1914), Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and Ecuador. This paper takes 1902 as a reference point as it was • the year Australia took control of Papua from the British, • the last year of Governor Feillet’s France Australe decade in New Caledonia • and the first year after the Gordon-Thurston era ended and Sir George O’Brien became Governor of Fiji. By 1902, New Caledonia had been under foreign rule for 47 years, Fiji for 25 years and Papua and German New Guinea for 18 years. Each had experienced a different pattern of European settlement, exploration, resource exploitation and administrative policy and practice. The main purpose of this project is to decide whether the postcards produced in or about these four colonies presented a generic Oceanic “colonial” frontier. Fiji
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The Colony of Fiji was described by its European settlers as “an epitome of progress”. The Cyclopedia of Fiji in 1907 declared it was an integral part of the British Empire blessed with magnificent resources and tropic wonders. British audiences were told elsewhere in books, magazines and encyclopaedia that there was a harmonious blend of indigenous people secure in their villages and happy their long-standing customs and traditions were protected by British law, imported labour supporting capitalist enterprise and benevolent British administrators making the decisions. When the first few European traders and missionaries arrived in the 1830s and then settlers came in greater numbers in the 1860s, Fiji was ruled by thirteen competing chiefdoms and a fluid system of alliances and confederations. In 1875, Britain reluctantly annexed the Fiji Islands, or as Fijians put it today, their Chiefs offered Fiji to Britain in an act of cession. By the time Fiji’s first postcards appeared in 1898, a rigid system of colonial control had been put in place, known as the Gordon-Thurston orthodoxy after the first two Governors and the habit of successive Governors not initiating any further major changes. It was a system commonly described as a three-cornered stool. Fijians provided the land and stayed in the village while imported Indian labourers did the work in the dominant sugar industry and the British provided leadership and management. In the 1960s, Britain announced rather unexpectedly that they were leaving. Within a decade Fiji was a newly independent nation and the fragile nature of the 19th century colonial orthodoxy was revealed. Several thousand different black and white and colour postcards of the former “Cannibal Isles” made Fiji well known to Euro-American audiences and projected an image of successful British colonisation. • Portraits of Fijians, and ethnographic views depicting Fijian customs and material culture made up 40% of all Fiji’s postcards. • Towns, harbours, shipping and European economic and social activities comprised 30% and • scenic views, picturesque or “nature studies” 10% of cards. • Mission-related (5%) • and voyeur cards (5%) were a minor category. Fiji was depicted 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 magimagi and how to sail takia. Fiji was also depicted as modern; • tourists took trips by car to inspect mountain forests;
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• gas lamps lit urban streets, • two storied, colonnaded public libraries and Memorial Halls lined the esplanades • and the harbour was home to two, three and four funnelled battleships, cruise liners and cargo steamers. • Fijians were shown performing at International Exhibitions, • serving in wars, • playing cricket • and serving their Church in foreign lands. Posted to friends and relatives, taken home as souvenirs by cruise passengers or traded around the world by a network of postcard collectors, these postcards showed that Suva, the subject of most postcards, was an expanding harbour city. But demographically, Fiji was overwhelmingly rural, with people scattered in villages thickly across the land maintaining the sa vaka viti (Fijian way of life). Suva was an enclave of British enterprise, administration, service and hospitality and the few Fijians in town were alienated and marginalised. Picture postcards of Fiji therefore reflected the interests of port town populations, postcard purchasers and postcard producers – all EuroAmericans. Postcard audiences would not have known • a third of the population were Indian immigrants and • that there was a sizeable Solomon Islander, Samoan, Chinese and European population. The postcard view of Fiji was also geographically limited. • Rotuma Island, 400 kilometres to the north, and a part of Fiji since 1886, • the Lau Islands to the east towards Tonga, • the western half of the main island of Viti Levu and • most of Vanua Levu were either ignored or only appeared irregularly. However we acknowledge now that all visual evidence is as susceptible to bias, exclusion and selective content, as is written or print evidence. This is highlighted in Julia Horne’s The pursuit of wonders, in which she reveals how novels, poetry and travelogues depicted the mountains, ravines, gullies, waterfalls, lakes and caves and created a natural, tourist Australia, ignoring the cities, wharves and suburbs.27 This pursuit of wonderment carried over to a small but distinctive category of Pacific postcards in which a tourist, place “in nature” was created without reference to colonial administration, settlement or commerce.
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The postcards of 1900 to 1930 contained few clues to the contemporary fear about what to do with out-of indenture Indian immigrants and the rising free settler Indo-Fijian population of tenants, artisans and small merchants, the disruption caused by the shift of the capital from Levuka to Suva, industrial problems, destructive cyclones, electoral and religious squabbles and alleged Fijian population decline. There were virtually no postcards of Indo-Fijians and the all-powerful sugar industry was rarely depicted. Instead, postcards overwhelmingly projected an image of two separate realms – a Fiji of happy villagers in river, coast and mountain retreats, and a second Fiji of bustling wharves, European enterprise and progress and urban growth. Despite being informed from other sources, such as parliamentary debates, missionary appeals, international exhibitions and popular novels, serials and travelogues, audiences may still have assumed from postcards that Fiji was indeed an ideal colony. There was considerable cross-purpose postcard marketing and mixing of subject matter and audiences. Many postcards had a multiple appeal both voyeur and ethnographic, missionary and scenic, naval and townscape or nature and village – in which subject (and historical evidence) overlapped. Many postcards also merged simple entertainment with documentary evidence, suggesting that postcard publishers were alert to marketing to as many audiences as possible. Specifically British symbolism were limited to a few views of botanical gardens, government house and warships in the harbour – but these were “Empire” signs that could have been photographed anywhere in the colonial world and only the caption directed audiences to know this was Fiji. Apart from a few postcards with explicit empire symbols, the Fiji in postcards was a colony – a frontier – but was not visually British. New Caledonia In New Caledonia the enigma of early twentieth century postcards is that, similar to Fiji, the use of postcards for official propaganda was rare. However, virtually every picture postcard from New Caledonia carried a message or sub-text about empire. • A club-carrying Kanak, for example, was on first appearance an uncontrolled savage but could also be read as a loyal subject dressing up to show French settlers the ‘bad old days”; • a village romantically and idyllically nestling in a grove of coastal palms was on appearances proof that the idyllic “South Seas”
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existed but also could be read as evidence of the order, neatness and cleanliness imposed on villages by military, penal and civilian administrators and missionaries; • a velodrome showed the French overseas created enclaves of metropolitan life, but was also proof of the civilising mission (mission civilisatrice) and the Imperial creation of a France Australe. Robert Aldrich claims postcards of luxuriant tropical forests, monuments, colonial clubs and “fetching” natives were typical of the postcards sent home from French colonies.28 However, few of these types were produced in or about New Caledonia. Mining, shipping, farming, urban Noumea and churches dominated. Kanaks were virtually invisible, picturesque views and forests rare, and the French presence noticed only in an occasional flag-raising, bicycle racing (a national sport in France) and a few views of convict ruins. Nearly all the postcards about New Caledonia were colonial in their motivation and visual representation. The “line-up” of uniformed or partially uniformed indigenous men was a classic image of empire, and also emerged from the economic, legalistic and cultural incorporation of New Caledonia. The discipline demonstrated in the line-up was a popular propaganda format particularly when promoting the ordination of indigenous mission pastors, training school graduates or demonstrating the availability on a large scale, of indentured plantation labourers. The display of “native police” or WWI recruits visually symbolised successful possession, the remaking of colonies and the essential characteristics of colonial rule - order, authority and adherence to uniformity, benevolent European leadership and docile, strong-bodied loyal subjects. This colonial message was made more obvious if an expatriate officer was positioned at the side or front. Two postcards of the “Tirailleurs des Iles Loyalty”, (Loyalty Islands volunteer colonial infantrymen) depict Kanaks preparing to sail to the European theatre of operations in 1916. (371 indigenous military personnel from New Caledonia died in WWI). In these two postcards, several aspects of colonial rule were revealed to audiences, some deliberately and some inadvertently. • In one postcard the random arrangement of the Tirailleurs, variously posing with rifles, bayonets, bandoliers and pannikins suggests indigenous loyalty, enthusiasm and relaxed anticipation of military service. • In another postcard the Tirailleurs are configured aesthetically with the tallest in the middle rear of a symmetrical arrangement of
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kneeling and lying men in regulation military dress. In a deliberate colonial statement the expatriate sergeant takes a central position and dominates the image. The Tirailleurs are reduced to subordinates. By making the European the central foci the second postcard becomes “French” and a statement about empire, control, suppression and imposed authority. In direct contrast, the random informal arrangement of the Loyalty Islanders without their French officer is a statement of indigenous opportunity, loyalty to chiefs, agency, accommodation and enthusiasm. In thousands of homes and offices during the war years and throughout the colonial era, similar postcards were both a simple exchange of greetings and an educative lesson about empire – but always with multiple meanings and readings. Papua (and New Guinea) The full range of visual material on British then Australian Papua, and German then Australian New Guinea29, includes picture postcards, photographs, lantern slides, illustrated magazines, journals, newspapers, encyclopaedia and books as well as commercially published albums. Photographs were also the basis for engravings, woodcuts, art works and trade cards advertising manufacturers and their products on the verso (such as the famous Leibig cards from Switzerland). The Liebig cards released in the 1890s on “New Guinea”, often conflating Papua and New Guinea, and published in German, French and Italian languages, indicate the passage of images across visual formats, time and place. The artist’s rendition on one of the Leibig cards merges a c1880 photograph of pottery drying at Hanuabada, taken in Papua by an English missionary, the Reverend WG Lawes, with photographs by the German ethnographer Richard Parkinson in New Ireland and photographs of “types” and artefacts from other visiting photographers.30 By borrowing from English, German and other sources dating back to the mid-1870s, a Swiss food manufacturer with no connection to the Pacific, twenty years later, was able to depict a “Papua” for three European postcard audiences, including one that had no Pacific colonies. What does this transformation say about colonial regimes in Oceania? The visual message intended by the British missionary photographer (Lawes), the travelling German scientific observer (Parkinson) and the Swiss manufacturer (Leibig) are lost, overlap or merge. They are conflated by the passage of time, the rise and fall of various forms of popular media and distance from the original site of their making. A place
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- là bas, over there in New Caledonia, Fiji or New Guinea - was constructed visually but it was distant and normalized.31 In another example, the message to audiences in a postcard of twenty-one uniformed “Native Police” at Madang, or possibly Mioko in the Duke of York Islands, during the period of German colonial rule, was confused by variations in captioning, publication, purchase, posting and collecting.32 This staged line-up promoted the idea that efficiency, stability and security were established under German rule. There are sixteen similar postcards of Papuan and New Guinean armed and uniformed police and military line-ups in the Shekleton postcard collection. Because this lineup appeared in 1911 in Eine Reise durch die deutschen Kolonien,33 it was probably read as evidence of colonial practice, law enforcement methods and the loyalty of “Native Police” under German rule since 1884. But when it is revealed that an American tourist took the original photograph in 1901, possibly as a curiosity shot or a courtesy to repay German hosts, • does it turn into evidence of early international travel? • Was the tourist photographer praising or demeaning the practice of German colonial rule? • Would readers of the postcard outside German New Guinea interpret it as evidence of the success or failure of militaristic colonial practices, or the success or failure in terms of the training and discipline of colonial subjects, or of their exploitation? This example highlights the dislocation caused by separation of a photograph from its site of making and separation from the sites of distribution and use. There are not many Papua or New Guinea postcards of government patrols, oil, gold or specimen collecting expeditions and relatively few images of mining, labourers, seedling plots, plantations or line-ups of workers.34 This is surprising as these economic activities are well represented in the non-postcard photographic archive of this period and were used extensively in a boosting or propaganda fashion as illustrative support in official publications, illustrated newspapers and magazines and journals.35 Mission-related postcards in Papua and New Guinea fit into predictable content categories – commemorating martyrs, celebrating new deacons or a life of service by Polynesian pastors,36 the consecration of schools, churches and Mission ships and the ever-popular fund-raising appeal of supposedly exotic villages, unenlightened savages, heathens, cannibals
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and smiling or coy children. Postcards of Schools, churches and mission ships as well as line-ups of students, congregations and theological graduates, typically captioned as ‘some of our boys’,37 reflected the propaganda intention of Missions active in Papua and New Guinea.38 These were sold locally but the biggest markets were in Australia and Europe. Special series were produced for commemorative or fund-raising activities such as the travelling exhibition at St James Hall, Manchester in 190739 or major international expositions such as the Orient Exhibition in London in 1908.40 The London Missionary Society (LMS) had its own ‘Picture Postcard Department’, with the Reverend Charles Vine as manager at the time of the Orient Exhibition.41 The many postcards of the Methodist Mission’s Dogura station at Wedua, Bartle Bay are typical of missionary imaging.42 A scenic postcard of the bay with an imposing church high on a distant headland suggested a permanent and commanding presence. Other Dogura postcards were fore grounded by mission cutters or before-and-after juxtapositions of so-called heathens and Christians lined up on the beach below the mission. Angleviel and Shekleton have noted in regard to early postcards from Vanuatu that postcards were used to record events such as fires, shipwrecks or the visits by significant naval vessels.43 In Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua and New Guinea current affairs and recent events attracted little interest among postcard publishers and suppliers. One exception was the German New Guinea occupation force postcard series published in 1915 by Reeves and Ellis of Hornsby, a Sydney suburb. (The postcards carried an advertisement for the publication of Australians in action, an account of the early campaigns in the Great War).44 These twelve cards might be classified as commemorative, or as a propaganda series. By being sent home during the war they carried a sense of journalistic immediacy in the images of captured vessels, parade drills, flag-raising, and in two extraordinary postcards, a flogging and a public execution by hanging.45 The celebratory reporting of a quick and glorious victory in German New Guinea was undermined by other less laudable events including the flogging of a German Doctor, the flogging of New Guineans and the embarrassment of looting and vandalism by the occupying Australian troops.46 In one postcard from the occupation period, fifty-six naval electricians and officers are lined up on deck in front of a banner proclaiming service in ‘Rabaul, German New Guinea 1914, Samoa’. This card was sent home with a note that ‘the names on the superstructure are the names of the places we captured in the Pacific … we look on it pretty much as a joke as it was taken with little or no fighting’.47 This again raises the dissonance found when visual and
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textual evidence are contradictory and when an otherwise celebratory image of a naval victory is rendered uncertain by the text on the verso. Did audiences accept this as evidence of military campaigns, Australian sub-imperialism, or as a self-deprecating, satirical message from a serviceman overseas? Conclusion Denoon, Mein-Smith and Wydham claimed that between the 1880s and the Great War, which included the era of the postcard craze, settler governments in Australia, New Zealand and the southwest Pacific set about redefining relations between the colonies, “between themselves and indigenous peoples, between capital and labour and even between men and women”.48 There is little evidence of this redefining of relations in the millions of postcards purchased, collected, traded or sent from Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea and Papua. In these colonies, settler governments were entrenched. Possibly a ‘redefinition” of sorts was occurring, but this was not the perception that metropolitan audiences gained from photographically illustrated picture postcards. The postcards instead depicted indigenous peoples firmly positioned as exotic and interesting “others”, and European enterprise, progress and capitalism as untrammelled and boundless. Postcards, as John Mackenzie pointed out, were more than a tourist convenience and signifier of travelling.49 For example, a giant sugar mill in Fiji was a marker of the capitalist colonial economy, but was also posted, read, pasted or “swapped” (traded or exchanged) by a wide range of senders, recipients, travellers and collectors. The large number of sugar mill postcards in Fiji catered for the European employees of these enterprises wanting to send a personal message home, but British colonial officials also sent them to colleagues and departmental superiors back home to confirm that “our colony is doing well out here!” At the same time, travellers who had little chance of visiting remote mills, sent sugar mill postcards because they wanted to tell others they were surprised colonies had busy, developed economies, bright prospects and the latest industrial technology. Most of these postcards also had picturesque qualities, with mills fore-grounded by tropical rivers, verdant fields of cane and with tall chimneys silhouetted against lines of mountain ridges. These mill scenes demonstrate the multiple motivations for the sending of postcards, and upon receipt, multiple interpretations of the scene, people or events depicted. If we acknowledge these overlapping and contradictory meanings could occur in a single image, the picture
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postcard, in massive quantity, becomes important evidence for a new level of comparative historical analysis of the colonial era. In the four centuries leading to the postcard craze c1898-1914, EuroAmerican artists on trading, military and scientific expeditions had created a visual knowledge of Oceania but this was limited to a small circle of philosophers, thinkers and adventurers and to those in Europe and America who could afford to buy art, visit galleries or belong to learned institutions. Euro-American understanding of Oceania then expanded into the public domain • first with the pantomime, • then the invention of the camera (1839) • and finally the halftone reproduction technology in the 1890s that allowed the mass distribution of photographic images in illustrated magazines, newspapers, serial encyclopaedia and books.50 • The next phase saw photographs spread worldwide through the introduction of the picture postcard and a cheap penny-post often with three or more postal deliveries a day. But this visual assault in the form of postcards also developed parallel with five other phenomena – • the establishment of photography studios in the port towns of the Pacific, • travelling privately or along Pacific shipping lines, • the popularity of lanternslide and illustrated public address, • the worldwide popularity of collecting – or swapping postcards • and the practice of decorating lounge rooms, waiting rooms and office spaces with postcards, mounted prints and photographs cut from illustrated newspapers and magazines. French, British and Australian audiences were told in postcard captions about a specific geographic location. But, from contact with photographically illustrated sources in the public domain – books, magazines, illustrated weekend pictorial newspapers, serial encyclopaedia, lantern slide lectures, exhibitions and stamps – the audience’s understanding of Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua and New Guinea was not colony-specific. The visual evidence, in Denoon and MeinSmith’s words, was more a “totalising narrative” of a generic colonial frontier world - là bas - out there somewhere.
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Humanities Program, Carseldine Campus, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane. 2 The deconstructing of a monolithic colonialism in Oceania may be disoriented, reversed and undermined, or confirmed, when the metropolitan or national histories of France, Britain and Australia are treated separately or juxtaposed. Denoon, Mein-Smith and Wyndham acknowledged in their attempt to write a history of the region - Australia, New Zealand and the southwest Pacific – that a regional comparison might “elucidate puzzles which elude scholars working within national parameters”. Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein-Smith and Maravic Wyndham, A history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, London: Blackwell, 1 3 J. Mackenzie, Propaganda and empire: the manipulation of British public opinion 18801960, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1984, 3; for postcards generally see, 21-23. 4 loc.cit. 5 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s culture; anthropology, travel and government, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2-3. See also Partricia Hayes, Jeremy Sylvester and Wolfram Hartmann, eds, The colonising camera: photographs in the making of Namibia history 1915-1950s, Athens: Ohio University Press 1998. 6 James Ryan, Picturing Empire; photography and the visualisation of the British Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997, 26. 7 Loc.cit. 8 Paul Landau, “Empires of the visual: photography and colonial administration in Africa”, in Images and empires: visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa, edited by Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, in 161. 9 Paul Landau, “An amazing distance: pictures and people in Africa” in Landau and Kaspin, op.cit., 1. 10 Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson, eds, Colonialist photography; imag(in)ing race and place, London: Routledge, 2002, 1. 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Ibid., 10; see Michael Hayes, “Photography and the emergence of the Pacific cruise; rethinking the representational crisis in colonial photography”, 172-87; Patricia Johnson, “Advertising paradise: Hawaii in art, anthropology, and commercial photography”, 188-225. 13 Nuno Porto, “Under the gaze of the ancestors; photographs and performance in colonial Angola” Photographs objects histories: on the materiality of images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London: Routledge, 2004, 129. 14 Loc.cit. 15 P. Foucher, Nomenclature cartophile de Nouvelle-Calédonie cartes postales anciennes 19001945, Privately printed 1984; No pagination. 16 E. Stephenson, Fiji’s past on picture postcards, Suva: Caines Janiff 1997. 17 Based on 1227 separate postcards in the Shekleton Collection, Noumea. 18 Elsie Stephenson lists 1707 cards in her 1997 Fiji catalogue. The gap between her list of known cards and full production is highlighted by the fact there are 3500 Fiji cards in the Shekleton Collection. Full production for Fiji could therefore be as high as 4000-4500 individual cards. These estimates are based on a comparison in the 1890-1940 period of the estimated production of picture postcards for the Falkland Islands (425 cards), Togo (600), Ivory Coast (2900), Reunion (2500-3000), Senegal (4000-4500) and French West Africa (8740). 19 The study of colonial photography began in the 1990s, following the lead of ground-breaking research in the nexus between anthropology and photography and a series of wider research projects in what became known as Visual Anthropology. In North America, revisionist, critical visual histories by, for example, Faris, Fleming, Luskey and Johnston, placed the imaging of Native Americans in the context of oppressive, alienating and marginalising power relationships. The critical appraisal of National Geographic Magazine by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins was followed by incidental reference to postcard photography in the context of World’s Fairs, International Exhibitions and museums and in reference to territorial expansion by Carol Williams in Framing the west. The impact of photography on metropolitan and colonial audiences has been examined in relation to colonial regimes in Africa, Latin America, North America and India. See, Williams C, 2003, Framing the west;
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race, gender and the photographic frontier in the Pacific Northwest, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For India, for example, see, the work of John Falconer, Ray Mackenzie and Christopher Pinney. For Africa see the work of Stephen Sprague, Vera Viditz-Ward, Gwyn Prins, James Faris, Julia Ballerini, Eric Allina, Wolfram Hartman, et.al., Christraud Geary, Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, and Nuno Porto. 20 Max Quanchi, 2000, “Imaging, representation and photography in the Pacific Islands”, Pacific Studies, Vol 20, 4, 1-12; Max Quanchi, 2006, “Photography and history in the Pacific Islands; Visual histories and photographic evidence”, JPH, Vol 41, 2, 2006, 165-75. 21 John Mckenzie, Propaganda and empire; 21-23 22 Annelies Moors, “From women’s lib to Palestinian women; the politics of picture postcards in Palestine/Isreal”, in David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, eds, Visual culture and tourism, Berg, London 2003, 23-40 23 William Main, Send me a postcard; New Zealand postcards and the story they tell, Nelson: Graig Potton, 2007, 7; William Main, Facing an era, postcard portraits from a century ago, Wellington: Exposures, 2006. 24 Keith Steiner, Hawai’i’s early Territorial days; viewed from vintage postcards by Island Curio, Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2001, viii. 25 Robert Aldrich, Greater France; a history of French overseas expansion, London, Macmillan, 1996, 258 26 Hudita Nura Mustafa, “Portraits of modernity; fashioning selves in Dakarois popular photography”, in Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, Images and empires, 175 27 Julia Horne, The pursuit of wonder; How Australia’s landscape was explored, nature discovered and tourism unleashed, Melbourne: Meigunyah, 2007. 28 Robert Aldrich, Greater France, 258 29 This paper is based only on English language cards. The full output of German produced cards for the German speaking market must have been large, and suggests the need for further research comparing German and British postcard representations of New Guinea. 30 There are six Liebig cards in the Shekleton Collection, Noumea. The various images appeared in earlier German publications; F. Christmann and R. Oberlander, Oceanien die Inseln der Sudsee, Leipzig: Otto Spamer 1873; W. Sievers, Australien und Oceanien, Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institüt 1895. The original Lawes photographs are well known and were reproduced many times over the next fifty years as prints, postcards and book illustrations. 31 The expression là bas was often used by the French about their colonies. It meant not knowing the actual location of a place, but knowing that it was a long way away, foreign and marginal. 32 ‘Miokosen-Schutztruppe in Kaiser Wilhelms-Land, Gefechsubung’, H25b, MSC, Noumea; also reproduced in N. Gash and J. Whittaker, A pictorial history of New Guinea, Brisbane: Robert Brown 1989, 78 Plate 152; and S. Firth, New Guinea under the Germans, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1882, opposite page 114. Firth identifies this as “Police troop at Madang’ c1910, on the basis of it appearing in Eine Reise durch die Deutschen Kolonien in 1911.The photograph could be at either Madang or Mioko, or of a Mioko troop stationed at Madang. A future match of the house in the background with other photographs will provide a solution to its location. The postcard is Numbered 124921 in a large series of sepia coloured German postcards of German New Guinea and Papua. 33 Eine Reise durch die Deutschen Kolonien, Vol 5, p.46, in Firth S, 1982, op.cit., p.x. 34 An exception is the series of 46 postcards of the Highlands, made from photographs by M.J. Leahy. Leahy was a prolific photographer, film maker and self-promoter, stamping “copyright” on his images, and preventing other expedition members from bringing cameras so he could monopolise the post-patrol commercial opportunities. Thomas Olsson of Wau and E.A. Hawnt of Rabaul offered mining postcards including a series of 24 cards on Edie Creek-Bulolo. Olsson offered a series of six cards on mining towns, three on exploratory mining camps and six on dredging operations. 35 For the use of photography in promoting plantations, mining and tourism see, M. Quanchi, ‘Thomas McMahon; photography as propaganda in the Pacific Islands’, History of Photography, 21, 1, 1997, 42-53; and M. Quanchi, ‘Jewel of the Pacific and planters paradise; the visual argument for Australian sub-imperialism in the Solomon Islands’, Journal of Pacific History, Vol 39, No 1, pp.43-58. 36 In the Shekleton Collection there are 22 Mission cards featuring pastors, teachers, catechists or early converts. Ten males are named. 37 ‘Heathen-Christian’ (H71b) and ‘Some of our boys’ (H79d), Shekleton Collection, Noumea.
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For photographic imaging of Missions see, Max Quanchi, ‘The imaging of pastors in Papua’, in Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley, eds, The covenant makers: Islander missionaries in the Pacific, Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1996, 158-72; and Max Quanchi, ‘The invisibility of gospel ploughmen: the imaging of South Sea pastors in Papua”, Pacific Studies, 20, 4, 1997, 77-102; Christine Weir, ‘Fellow labourers in the vineyard of the Lord; representing Methodist Islander missionaries in Melanesia in word and picture 1870-1930’, unpublished paper presented at the 12th Pacific History Association conference, Honiara 1998; Christine Weir, 2003, The Work of Mission: race, labour and Christian humanitarianism in the south-west Pacific, 1870-1930, unpublished PhD thesis, ANU, Canberra; Virginia Lee Webb, ‘Missionary photographers in the Pacific Islands; Divine Light’, History of Photography, 21, 1, 1998, 12-22. 39 The travelling exhibition created by the LMS had two ‘courts’ on Papua (and one each on China and Madagascar) and during 1910-11 was displayed for 36 congregations across England; The Chronicle (London Missionary Society), (August 1910), 116-17 and (November 1911) 194. 40 For Exhibition postcards see; Rydell RW, 1998, op.cit., pp.47-64 and fn1, and p.62 for a review of exhibition literature. 41 The manager’s name and position, but not the photographer, is printed on the cards. His role included changing captions to suit new audiences. A black and white card of canoes pulled up on a beach was captioned on one card, ‘New Guinea. A coast village’ but for the Orient Exhibition the original black and white photograph was coloured and changed to ‘A seaside resort. New Guinea’. 42 There are seven different postcards of the Dogura Church in the Shekleton Collection, Noumea. 43 F. Angleviel and M. Shekleton, op.cit., 1997. 44 L.C. Reeves, Australians in action, Sydney: Australasian News Company 1915. 45 The Shekleton Collection includes several postcards sent home to Australia by the crew of HMAS Endeavour during its tour of duty. C.N. King was the photographer. 46 This flogging was punishment for the assault of an Australian Missionary, the Reverend W.H. Cox in November 1914. By January 1915, postcards of the flogging were circulating in Sydney. Hermann Hiery, The neglected war: the German South Pacific and the influence of World War 1, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995, 37 and 38. Copies of postcards from the Expeditionary period in New Guinea are also held in the Australian War Memorial Photograph database; for the public caning see P0095/03/01, 02 and 03. The captions noted that ‘natives’ had not been allowed to witness the caning of the Europeans. H.J. Hiery, op.cit., 1995, 45-115; C.D. Rowley, The Australians in German New Guinea 1914-1921, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1958; S.S. Mackenzie, The Australians at Rabaul, Melbourne: Angus and Robertson 1927. 47 Anon., n.d., c1914, H65d, Shekleton Collection, Noumea. 48 Denoon, Mein-Smith and Wyndham, A history, 202 49 J. Mackenzie, Propaganda and empire, op.cit. 50 This is the subject of my book, Photographing Papua: representation, colonial encounters and imaging in the public domain, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
