Contrary images: Photographing the new Pacific in walkabout magazine

Abstract

The pictorial magazine Walkabout offered readers a monthly lesson on the 'South Seas' for over forty years. From 1934 to 1974, Walkabout featured articles by travellers, officials, residents, journalists and visiting novelists. These liberally illustrated stories were accompanied by up to fifteen quarter, half and full-page black and white, sepia or colour photographs, which commonly focused on Papua New Guinea, volcanoes, the Kontiki voyage, the South Pacific Commission, travel promotion conferences, distinctive regional food, fishing and fauna, and frequently depicted the dependent territories as possessions benefiting from benign colonial rule. Nine out of ten issues of Walkabout contained articles and photographic essays on the Pacific, making potentially educative text and pictorial material both accessible and consistent in quantity for the forty years of the magazine's existence. At the same time, information about the South Seas from other sources increased: the growing number of daily newspapers and the heightened coverage the southwest Pacific received in international news coverage presented Australians with a complex view of a world reshaped by new ideologies, consumerism and industry.