"A name that featured once or twice a year; Not noticing French New Caledonia in mid-20th century British Australia"
(2004) "A name that featured once or twice a year; Not noticing French New Caledonia in mid-20th century British Australia". In Proceedings 6th Pacific History Association conference, University of New Caledonia, Noumea, New Caledonia.
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Abstract
Australian readers in the mid-twentieth century were offered a single-dimensional representation of New Caledonia as a European settler colony, integrated into world trade, modern and prosperous, and with a nearly invisible, presumably compliant indigenous population. The boom in the use of photographs for illustration in magazines, newspapers, serial encyclopaedia, postcards, stereographs, lantern slides, gift albums, exhibitions and museum displays between 1895 and 1930 offered the federated British colonies, recently united as Australia, the chance to acquire a visual familiarity with the neighbouring southwest Pacific. The conceptualisation of a region including the New Hebrides Condominium (Vanuatu), British Solomon Islands Protectorate, Australian Territory of Papua, German, and later the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and the British Crown Colony of Fiji encircled but did not include New Caledonia. Based on illustrated English language books and magazines such as National Geographic, Pix and Walkabout, this paper positions what Australians learnt-by-looking at and looking-past published photographs of New Caledonia in 1930 to 1970. Not acknowledging New Caledonia, or knowing it only through mediated, uncontested visual evidence, is then positioned against a background of broader Australia-New Caledonia histories and relationships.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper |
|---|---|
| Status: | Unpublished |
| Refereed: | No |
| Keywords: | New Caledonia, Australia, Photography, History, Pacific islands |
| Subjects: | 410000 The Arts > 410200 Visual Arts and Crafts > 410203 Photography 420000 Language and Culture > 420300 Cultural Studies > 420304 Screen and Media Culture 430000 History and Archaeology > 430100 Historical Studies > 430103 History - Pacific |
| ID Code: | 545 |
| Deposited By: | Quanchi, Max |
| Deposited On: | 09 November 2004 |
| Copyright Owner:: | Copyright 2004 (Please consult author) |