Photographing Samarai; place imagination and change Dr Max Quanchi School of Humanities and Human Services Queensland University of Technology
Paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century Conference Centre for Social Change Research Queensland University of Technology 27th October 2006
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Photographing Samarai; place, imagination and change Dr Max Quanchi School of Humanities and Human Services Queensland University of Technology
Abstract
The small island of Samarai was extensively photographed after Europeans settled on the Papuan coast in the 1870s because it represented the best that European colonialism, acclimatization and remaking could offer - tranquil seascapes, busy ports, neat bungalows, paved roads - and it was on the merchant and tourist route from Australia through the China Straits to Rabaul and the Islands. Samarai began as a European enclave with a single trader close to the shore in the early 1880s. By 1900 it was a cosmopolitan port town, administrative centre and major commercial centre. Samarai was well known for its role in shipping, tourism and administration, and smallness added to its allure. This paper blurs the lines between geographical imagination, landscape photography and the picturing of colonial space by suggesting that early 20th century images of Samarai offered access to the type of colonial presence administrations wanted to create, the ports that shipping lines wanted to advertise and the idyllic scenes tourists wanted to find in the South Seas. This photographic archive also allows social and physical change on Samarai to be documented as a visual narrative.
Contact Details: Dr Max Quanchi Centre for Social Change Research QUT Carseldine Brisbane QLD 4034 Tel: (07) 3138 4519 Email:
[email protected]
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Photographs taken between the 1880s and 1930s record the dramatic topographical, social, economic and cultural transformations that took place on Samarai Island, also known briefly as Dinner Island after a visit by John Moresby in HMS Basilik in 1873. In 1885, when it was occupied by sixty Papuans and one trader, JW Lindt’s photographs of a trader’s beach-front store and its nearby environs, recorded Samarai’s original aesthetic appeal, economic role and physical appearance. In the 1930s, when it was a bustling administrative centre and port, an aerial photograph recorded the reshaping of the shoreline through groynes, wharves, jetties and land-fill, the removal of a central hillock, the levelling of ground for tennis courts and a cricket field and the imposition of a grid of residential and commercial streets over what was once a swamp. In 1942, Samarai’s infrastructure was destroyed during the Pacific war, and although revived briefly as an administrative centre in the 1950s, it soon became a nostalgic backwater. The extensive archive of published picturesque, industrial and documentary style photographs from the 1880s to the 1930s allows a historical geography and an environmental history to be constructed for Samarai, based solely on visual evidence. The rise and fall of Samarai is paralleled by photographer’s motivation to freeze, but also to depict the changing colonial world. Samarai is a site where geographical imagination, landscape photography and the picturing of colonial space merge.
Samarai was often referred to as marvellous and as Stephen Greenblatt noted “the marvellous is a central feature then in the whole complex system of representation, verbal and visual, philosophical and aesthetic, intellectual and emotional” though which people apprehended and possessed the desirable. (Greenblatt 1991, 22-3) To European readers looking at a relatively unknown New Guinea on the far edge of the world, Samarai appealed on all these grounds – and photography made it visual. This “visualisation” as Swartz and Ryan note, produces “places, cultural identities and social categories of race, gender and class”. The published photographs of Samarai, “socially constructed, culturally constituted and historically situated” offered access to, and created an image of a tropical, distant, colonial place. (Schwartz and Ryan 2003, 4-5) Photographs in travelogues, magazines, illustrated newspapers, encyclopaedia and postcards depicted the colonial presence that administrations wanted to create, the ports that shipping lines wanted to advertise, and the idyllic scenes that tourists wanted to find in the South Seas. In this case study, following Schwartz and Ryan’s argument that “photography remains a powerful tool in our engagement with the world around us”, I want to show that photographs of Samarai, “represented the spaces, places and landscapes within their frame”, (Schwartz and Ryan 2003, 1 and 6). As Schwartz and Ryan note, “through photographs we see, we remember, we imagine; we picture place,” this paper argues that in photographing Samarai the intention was also to project and confirm a more generalised regional and colonial imaging of Oceania.
The very smallest islands historically have attracted the attention of explorers, artists, ethnographers and fiction writers, and now we should add photographers. Nauru, Ocean Island (Banaba), Pitcairn, Niuafo’ou (Tincan Island) and Easter Island (Rapanui) have been popular literary topics, but it is the very small islets, cays and motu that capture the romantic and idyllic characteristic of the South Seas. The chiefly offshore island of Bua in Fiji, the former motu-uta in Papeete harbour, and various mushroomshaped, flower-pot, wave-cut coral formations exposed on fringing reefs across the Pacific have appeared regularly as postcards and illustrations in published material. For example, the coral islet of Motu Uta (L’Ilot de corail de Motu-Uta) was photographed by Lucien Gauthier and made into a postcard in Tahiti in the early 20th century and in Fiji, the small islet of Bau, with its chiefly houses, meeting areas and churches, was also photographed extensively in the late 19th century. Bau was the home of a powerful paramount chief, Ratu Seru Cakobau. Strangely, perhaps in deference to its high chiefly status, Bau was never photographed at sea level from the nearby mainland, even though it was only a few hundred metres offshore. Bau, like
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Samarai, was a closely settled and reshaped site, and the complex of meeting houses, churches, homes, paths and views were regularly photographed, including house interiors. As Bau was one of the most photographed places outside Suva and Levuka, photographs over several decades now provide a visual chronology of this important site. Samarai’s photographic archive has the same potential for creating a visual narrative of change over time, of cross-cultural encounters, and of the merging of traditional exchange networks and chiefly rule with an imposed but marginal colonial administration.
Samarai lies between the islands of Logea, Rogeia (Kwato) and Sideia (Sariba), to the south of Basilaki Island in the China Straits just off the mainland of southeast New Guinea. It was extensively photographed after Europeans settled on the Papuan coast in the 1870s because it represented the best that European colonialism and acclimatization could offer - tranquil seascapes, busy ports, neat bungalows, tree-lined streets - and it was easily accessible on the merchant and tourist route from Australia, Torres Straits and Port Moresby through the China Straits to Rabaul, Asia and the Islands. Quickly designated an administrative centre for the eastern Division, a Resident Magistrate and Court was appointed in 1888, and a naval coaling station established the next year. With the emerging trochus shell, beche-de-mer, copra and gold industries, by 1900, the China Straits were “a cosmopolitan highway” (Wetherell 1996, 11) and Samarai the early “commercial capital of British New Guinea’. (Kaniku 1989, 370) In 1911, the author Beatrice Grimshaw included four photographs of Samarai and thought it “a much more imposing town than the capital” and “surely one of the very prettiest places in the whole tropic world”. (Grimshaw 1911, 258 and 259) The four illustrations reinforced her claim, with palm-fringed views over the China Straits and surrounding islands and a view of the whole of Samarai taken at sea level from nearby Sariba. The anthropologist Malinowski, visiting in 1917 and looking past the industrial, commercial and residential remaking of the island, described the “pleasure of the landscape … everything immense, complicated, and yet absolutely harmonious and beautiful”. (Malinowski 1967, 44-5 and 112) After the war, the author and artist Ellis Silas visited and declared “the white population disports itself in much the same manner all over the world; with dances, tennis tournaments, cricket matches, soirées and so on” (Ellis 1926, 44) and in 1930, Beatrice Grimshaw, who had lived on Sariba and regularly sailed the two miles across to Samarai, declared it a “pretty island town”. (Grimshaw 1930, 190 and 209). Samarai was a safe, clean, well lit, busy, provincial town in comparison to the muddy estuaries of the Gulf of Papua, or going ashore in lighters through the surf elsewhere along the coast, or disembarking into the dusty, brown ridges and scrub of Port Moresby. Picturesque tableaux of mountains, over-hanging jungle, protected bays and tiny islands, as well as Samarai’s small size – a mere 24 hectares (50 acres) - added to its allure. In the 1880s and 1890s, it was also the first sight of New Guinea for Australian miners arriving direct from Cooktown and Cairns and heading for the eastern goldfields. For example, in 1897, around 500 miners landed at Samarai heading for Woodlark Island or the Mambare River (Nelson 1976, 86 and 114) and David Lewis accurately described a photograph of the Samarai wharf in 1905 as “evocative of other nineteenth century Pacific port towns”. (Lewis 1996, 126-27) In the early 20th century little distinguished Samarai from other colonial port towns and tropical European settlements in the Pacific, Australia or Africa. 1 Samarai’s importance faded as Port Moresby, Lae, Madang, Salamaua and Rabual became major centres, and German and Dutch shipping were curtailed by the war, 2 but it continued to be featured in travelogues, magazines and illustrated books on New Guinea well into the 1930s.
Samarai was an ideal option for photographers. It was able to be photographed from neighbouring islands, such as Sariba just two miles away, and from the mainland, and being small, traversed from end to end within minutes, especially after Campbell’s Walk
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followed the shoreline from the rotunda on the east tip back to the wharves and the main township area. As well as the physical characteristics of imagined, idyllic South Sea islands, Samarai was praised in travelogues and adventurer’s accounts for offering safe, controlled and easy access to “natives”. Challenging this claim, there are very few photographs of Papuans or New Guineans taken in the streets or wharf areas of Samarai. In 1934, Edmond Demaitre asked a "remarkably attractive" tattooed girl on Samarai for a photograph. She agreed saying; "Not good here with boxes behind. Go where be palms. Me against tree. Photo plenty more pretty. I want one shilling". (Demaitre 1936, 121) The identity of this girl remains a mystery as the original sixty Papuan inhabitants of Samarai were relocated when the site was developed as the main administration centre for eastern British New Guinea. She was probably from the nearby Milne Bay coast or Louisiade Archipelago as several Islanders moved to jobs in Samarai’s stores and hotels when the gold rush ended at Sudest in 1889. (Nelson 1976, 25) The girl’s appreciation of photography, alertness to the motivations of visiting Europeans, and knowing of Euro-American’s willingness to pay for certain poses, suggests Papuans in well-visited ports like Samarai took regular advantage of the situation. Her willingness to be photographed, the length of contact with Europeans and the size of the reward being offered, is yet another example of Papuan agency, manipulation and stage-management of Europeans.
Samarai Island, or Dinner Island, changed ownership twice; first, when the headman of nearby Logea Island, Paolo Dilomi, sold his gardening island to the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1878 so newly arriving European missionaries and Pacific Island pastors could establish their headquarters. (Wetherell 1977, 10-11) The LMS missionary Samuel McFarlane recalled in 1908, ‘I fixed on Samarai as the most central and convenient place from which I could superintend the Mission in that district”. He had acquired Dinner Island in 1878 for hoop iron and other commodities valued “altogether at 3/6d”. Papuans were brought in to clear the heavy timber to make space for the LMS settlement, the first of many flora and topographical changes to the island. Dilomi later recalled that Samarai was originally “thickly timbered with very big trees”.(Wetherell 1998, 111, 114, 115) In 1886, it was transferred between the LMS and the colonial administration and the LMS moved to nearby Kwato Island. When the Melbourne photographer, JW Lindt, photographed Samarai in 1885 during the Sir Peter Scratchley expedition, a trade store was already operating adjacent to the beach. 3 Lindt took several photographs and these were possibly the first taken of Samarai. Two of Lindt’s photographs of “Dinner Island” featured in the twenty photographs on New Guinea displayed in the Centennial International Exhibition in Melbourne in 1888, 4 and were available for purchase in Melbourne studios as part of a set of prints from Lindt’s book Picturesque New Guinea . 5
Samarai, soon reverting to its indigenous name, became an administrative centre for British rule and quickly grew into a larger and more important commercial centre than Port Moresby. 6 Although a visitor in 1890 described the swampy island as one of the unhealthiest spots in New Guinea (Pitcairn 1897, 47), the seven-acre swamp was soon drained and terraces cut into the hill. In 1906, when the twenty-year old Flora Shaw Young arrived to take up a job in a hotel it was the “jewel of the Pacific” and the most “thriving township in Papua”. 7 A busy trade in shell money (sapisapi from Rossel Island), shell necklaces and shell armbands, known as the “Papuan trade” also centered on Samarai. The well-known Mrs Mahony on Rossel, the use of motor vessels, and European middle-men at Samarai had “largely supplanted Rossel Island big men, sailing canoes and traditional exchange partners from Sudest Island”. (Lepowsky 2001, 135; Grimshaw 1911, 301) By 1915, a Resident Magistrates residence and a European hospital sat on the central 40 metre rise and overlooked impressive private residences, the busy port, goal, Customs House, Bond Store, three banks, trade stores, three hotels, churches, movie theatre, cricket pitch, lawn bowling green, tennis courts, shady streets, a
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school, a “Native” hospital, and frequently, photographers arriving on the wharf. One of the hotels was Clunn’s, which had been shipped in sections from the Cooktown goldfields in north Queensland when the Sudest gold rush began in the Louisiade Archipelago to the southeast of Samarai in the late 1880s. (Lewis 1996, 26 and 36-37 and 91-92) By the turn of the century, a European population of 120, or 200 around Christmas, (Lewis 1996, 265) was surrounded by a visiting or temporary worker crowd of Papuan “Native Police”, indentured labourers, LMS converts and pastors, and local Daui language speakers. Because long aperture times caused blurring if people moved, streetscape photography of Samarai often showed deserted footpaths and roads. The deserted streets outside the much-photographed Clunn’s and Cosmopolitan hotels were probably taken very early on a Sunday morning. To avoid blurring, a photograph of the wharf area in 1919, and another of Burns Philp’s huge warehouse taken in 1937 were similarly deserted, in contrast to the usual hustle of human activity when a ship was in port. (Wetherell 1996, 68-69; Gash and Whittaker 1975, 235)
Despite the presence of hundreds of alluvial miners as they passed through Samarai, called back for more supplies, made hospital visits, attended cricket matches or waited to hear of a new gold field opening, photographers ignored the miners and preferred individual and group portraits of officials, company men and respectable suit-wearing members of the Samarai Chamber of Commerce. This reflected on the photographer, and therefore the reading audience’s enthusiasm in celebrating late-nineteenth and early twentieth century order, progress and enterprise. Despite references in travelogues to Papuan and New Guinean canoes and to constant canoe traffic up and down the China Straits, canoes at sea or pulled up on the beach on Samarai, were rarely photographed. In comparison, all sorts of whaleboats, luggers, schooners and steamers were photographed lying in the roads, loading or unloading at the wharves or in the background of scenic vistas as this suited the photographers intention to depict Samarai as a “European” place.
A freelance journalist from Townsville, Thomas McMahon, visited Samarai in 1915 and published a series of photographs in the Cairns Post and Northern Herald in 1915-16, the Queenslander in 1916, Our Quarterly Magazine and Sunset in 1918 and the Illustrated London News in 1919. 8 These photographs, by the early twentieth century, were stock colonial propaganda images. One published photograph, a rare interior shot, recorded the five metre high stacked shelves of the British New Guinea Company’s store. Although there were several plantation developments on the mainland or on small islands within sight of Samarai, photographers like McMahon preferred to focus on European progress and the re-making of the frontier, represented by photographs of streets, hotels and wharves. Pictorial and picturesque tropes also affected the photographer’s selection. Two of the published photographs from McMahon’s visit depicted Campbell’s Walk, a paved tree-lined path around Samarai, which McMahon called a “promenade” and a “pretty walk”. 9 There are many different postcards of this pathway in the Shekleton Collection and it is the third most popular postcard image of Papua after the lakatoi and the littoral pile village of Hanuabada/Elevala near Port Moresby. (Quanchi and Shekleton 2001) Campbell’s Walk was also a popular book illustration, appearing as the frontispiece in AK Chignell’s Twentyone years in Papua, in Frank Burnett’s Through Polynesia and Papua (which he called “Crotons’s walk”, one of six Samarai photographs) and as one of three picturesque Samarai photographs in Beatrice Grimshaw’s The New New Guinea. 10
Photographers were providing the images their eager readers back home wanted and were already familiar with - picturesque ports bustling with Dutch, German and Australian cargo ships and passenger liners, a former swamp now drained, a promenade along the foreshore, a landscape remade in the European manner, and industrial progress
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represented by roads, 11 wharves, streets, shops and double-storied banks and hotels – all evidence of British and Australian energy, enterprise and colonial expansion.
Postcards, panorama and movie film
In postcards of Papua between 1900 and 1930, excluding mission activities, roughly 26% of all images were of mining, plantations, post offices, hotels and urban street scenes. This suggests that for distant viewing audiences, a visual record established familiarity with colonial achievement, administrative roles and potential economic development. Depicting activities that a tourist might enjoy on the frontier was a low priority. In pre-1930 postcards, only a few depicted actual tourist activities, such as walking along a trail, standing by waterfalls or posing with children and dancers (1% of all cards). There are some images of Papua New Guineans trading from canoes alongside ships. When postcards of ships at anchor, wharves and harbours and scenic/picturesque cards are included, tourism is rather well represented. This broad category places tourism, with 17% of all New Guinea postcards, as the third most popular after ethnographic subject matter and images related to administration, infrastructure and economic development. That travelling was a search for the familiar, was shown by the postcard popularity of Samarai’s tidy street scenes, solid public and commercial buildings and veranda-fronted residences. The trader George Macdonald at Samarai and later at Salamaua offered a postcard series that was numbered to five hundred and sixty-two postcards. One of Macdonald’s advertisements, stamped on the back of a postcard captioned “three old women holding skulls,” noted that his series “numbers several hundred pictures portraying life and work in the territory; descriptive catalogue on application” and that photographs were available for reproduction if permission was sought. 12 Other postcards were available from Whitten Brothers at Samarai and Archie and Kathleen Gibson at their Port Moresby photography business. The panorama could produce remarkable results. A presentation album of the 1884 Proclamation expedition led by Commodore James Erskine, known as the New Guinea Protectorate Album, includes a two-print panorama of Port Moresby taken from the mission station. 13 AP Goodwin pasted two prints together to make a panorama of Mount Owen Stanley, the target for William MacGregor’s patrol in June 1889 and Harry Downing pasted together panoramas of Bululo Gorge and Rabual harbour. Patrol Officer NG Imlay created five panoramas of Port Moresby and Samarai (9cm by 40cm) and Archie Gibson six of similar size for Port Moresby. 14 At the same time Gibson, a keen still photographer, had experimented with "home movies" and in February 1929, Port Moresby residents saw themselves for the first time as a moving image. Shortly afterwards a visiting party of cinematographers filmed the opening of the Samarai War Memorial Hall and School of Arts building and this was screened at Samarai and Port Moresby. A third special screening followed at “Ryans Hotel and Picture Theatre” in Port Moresby in September with additional footage taken by Gibson during the Australian Governor-General's brief visit to the Territory. 15
Illustrated books and magazines
In the illustrated book and magazine boom at the turn of the century, Samarai was a popular subject. In 1911, the magazine, The Miner, published an illustrated story on “Mining in New Guinea” and Samarai featured among the five accompanying photographs, but readers were mislead in 1913 in Empire Magazine when it wrongly
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captioned a photograph of Elevala near Port Moresby, as “Samarai; the commercial centre of Papua”. (Bainbridge 1913) Publications such as the official Papuan Handbook in 1909 contained a photograph of a street scene in Samarai among its 22 illustrations and this was repeated in the 1912 Handbook. The handbook was published in 1907, 1909, 1912 and 1927. Samarai was not included in the 1927 edition but readers were told that streets and houses had electricity, that Samarai was served by five regular monthly steamer runs – the SS Montoro, SS Marsina, SS Morinda, SS Papuan Chief and the SS Queenscliffe and under the heading “tourism” that “the picturesque Island and town of Samarai , situated at the extreme south-east of the mainland, forms a most convenient base for excursions to the many islands and places of interest in the neighbourhood”. (Handbook 1927, 26, 40 and 55) In an appendix of 30 plates, rubber, sisal, copra, oil drilling and mining dominated, suggesting that by even by 1927 Samaria’s economic importance was about to change and that nostalgia and tourism were to be its fate. In early 20th century illustrated travel books a photograph of Samarai was nearly always included. In 1899, Burns Philp’s Handbook of information for the Western Pacific Islands (with 43 illustrations) featured five pages on Samarai, reflecting its importance on the main sea route to New Guinea. Samarai continued to feature in BPs (Burns Philp) travel promotion material. In All about BP and Company Ltd in 1903, of 82 photographs, 18 were on Papua including a photograph of the main street of Samarai with the comment, “Samarai settlement is the only really busy spot in British New Guinea”. In 1909, in the illustrated 52-page booklet (with ten photographs), Papua the marvellous; the country of chances, the opening photograph was “On the coral shore; Samarai” leaving no doubt in readers minds that, from the perspective of Campbell’s walk, Papua was indeed a tropical paradise. Samarai photographs appeared twice in another boosting-type publication in 1912, Papua; a grandchild of the empire (Inglis 1912, 21 and 29) and in 1913, AS Meek’s A naturalist in cannibal land opened with five photographs of Samarai. (Meek 1913, 44, 45, 46, 48,195) In 1914, Samarai featured twice in Mary Hall’s A woman in the antipodes and in several more books published in the late 1920s. (Murray 1925; MGCP 1926, Silas 1926, Keelaw 1929, Mordaunt 1930) In 1916, there was no doubting Samarai’s prosperity when the opening photographs of the British New Guinea section of Australia unlimited were of a small fleet nestled under Samarai’s sheltering shore and a group of well-to-do expatriates lounging on the veranda of their Samarai home. Readers were told “the beautiful island of Samarai is the base of an archipelago of great tropical beauty extending eastward to the Louisiades”. (Brady c1916, 786, 787 and 790) In BP’s Picturesque Isles of the South Seas in 1920, readers were told that “New Guinea is a vast treasure trove for the visitor possessed with an inclination for research or to collect and photograph”. Samarai was a defined, bordered, actual place, as well as a mythical island, and a site to visit that was picturesque and could easily be photographed – on the next BP’s voyage to the islands.
The decline of popular interest
In 1919, there were 293 Europeans living on Samarai, which was a considerable presence considering there were only 2078 recorded in all of Papua in 1921. In the 1930s, except for rubber, Samarai was still the major exporting centre as eastern Papua produced the bulk of the gold, copra, trochus and desiccated coconut exports. After the war it, despite being initially made the administration centre in 1950 for the merged Eastern and Southeast districts, it was bypassed and Alotau become the district centre in 1968. Samarai was still Papua’s second biggest town (with a population of 2468 in 1966) but the fall in status and importance was so dramatic that in 1972, when the Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea was published, the entry on Samarai was less
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than one page. As Samarai began to decline in shipping, administrative and economic importance, it lost its appeal to photographers. Despite the establishment of two desiccated coconut processing plants and the long overdue improvement to the wharves, in the 1930s and more so after the war, visual interest shifted to the newly-mapped highlands, mining development and the expanding European centres of Port Moresby, Salamaua, Bulolo, Rabaul, Lae and Madang. The most significant factor in declining photographic interest was the increasing popular demand for ethnographic photography, particularly in the illustrated magazine, newspaper and encyclopaedia market. Knowing the “native” through portraits, villages, tree houses, canoes, costumed warriors and vine bridges – which Samarai lacked - had more reader appeal than the quiet port towns that had become backwaters in terms of trade, tourism and administration. In two albums probably compiled after going south at the end of their bank appointment on Samarai between 1929 and 1938, William and Miriam Park carefully pasted up a narrative sequence of their working and social life, and environs, but which we can now use to follow the transformations on Samarai over the previous fifty years. 16 These 268 photographs, taken when Samarai was not yet in decline as a port and administrative centre, projected a sense of ordered, progressive, calm, familiar colonial settlement and achievement – and the Park’s personal or emotional attachment to place, to Samarai. The albums demonstrate the impact that colonial island life had on the residents and visitors who compiled albums like these, and the friends and neighbours back home to which they were displayed. Maria Lepowsky claims correctly that “Samarai … brings out strong emotions in expatriate visitors”. (Lepowsky 2001, 140) However, the albums, and the wider published archive of Samarai photographs also have a narrow focus, and therefore deny other histories. Lepowksy noted 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 eastern Papua and this is very noticeable in the photographic record. Lepowsky adds that well known women from the “commercial class” of traders, storekeepers, hotel keepers, planters and goldrushers, often women who took over their deceased husband’s claim, land or business, were the most visible European women in eastern Papua. (Lepowsky 2001, 127) They are also mostly absent from the photographic record. Papuan and New Guineans also appear only occasionally, clearing land or working on the wharves. Papuans in nearby mainland villages, for example, in the two 1930’s Park albums, only appear well to the back in the designated “ethnographic” pages. Just before the war, when WC Groves visited in 1936 he exaggerated Samarai’s appeal by saying it was still “beautiful little Samarai with mixed population of Europeans and fuzzy-headed natives, her trim bungalows set on the green hillside facing the harbour with its fleet of pearling and trading schooners”. The accompanying photograph was a classic South Seas romantic composition framed by the context of the recently promoted, twentieth century “Islands” tourist trade – it showed Campbell’s Walk and overhanging palms in the foreground and a passenger liner off-shore. (Groves 1936, 31 and 32) Two years later, Samarai had disappeared from Burns Philp travel advertisements. BPs now offered New Guinea “by way of … Salamaua and Rabaul. Romantic South Sea Islands, palm fringed shores …” 17 Three years later Samarai was destroyed by bombing in 1942 during the Pacific war, and after the war it declined further when Alotau at Milne Bay became the district centre, utilising a wartime airstrip. Samarai was no longer in the photographer’s lens and no longer an idyllic, island gem. Seventy years of European photography meant that memory of the small heavily timbered island occupied by Papuans and a trader in the 1870s was lost. By the 1950s there was no interest in documenting its faded glory and economic decline. Photographers were no longer interested in constructing it in ways that appealed to Euro-American audiences. It was no longer a place that shaped the European reader’s imagination.
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In 1952, James Sinclair arrived in Samarai to collect his belongings while in transit to his next patrol officer posting. His description of Samarai followed the “jewel of the Pacific” trope of before the war. There were 250 Europeans living on Samarai and it was still the administrative centre for the Milne Bay District. The mining towns of Wau with 360 Europeans and Bulolo with 600, indicated where development was occurring in the Territory, but Sinclair thought Samarai “a tiny jewel of an island … an entrancing place … full of authentic South Seas atmosphere,” noting that it was the entrepot for a rich plantation trade and home to “mostly traders, missionaries and administration officers and their families”. Two classic photographs accompanied his text – a view through palms from Samarai across the China Straits and a steamer (the MV Shansi) just off the wharf. (Sinclair 1981, 98, 99 and 100) Sinclair’s romantic, nostalgic comments in the early 1950s were made at the end of an era and reflected past glories. Samarai still held aesthetic, picturesque and imaginary appeal but it was no longer symbolic of colonial synergies and dynamism. Photographers had moved on to more prosaic depictions of progress, as indicated in the photographs in Sinclair’s book Kiap, - Junkers laden with mining equipment, airstrips, kiaps on patrol and be-wigged, armed, feathered and newly pacified highland tribes. Readers of magazines and travelogues and prospective tourists looking for Sinclair’s “authentic South Seas atmosphere” would no longer find it in Samarai.
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Mordaunt, Elinor 1930 The further venture book. London: John Lane. Murray, Hubert 1925 Papua of today, or an Australian colony in the making. London: King. Nelson, Hank 1976 Black white and gold; gold-mining in Papua New Guinea 1878-1930 Canberra: Australian National University Press. Newton, Gael 1988 Shades of light; Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Canberra: Australian National Gallery. Park WHK and Miriam Park c1930 Photographic album E-177788-0. Brisbane: Queensland Museum. Park WHK and Miriam Park, c1930 Photographic album, E-17789-0. Brisbane: Queensland Museum.
Pitcairn, WD 1891 Two years among the savages of New Guinea. London: Ward and Downey Quanchi, Max 1997 Thomas McMahon: photography as propaganda in the Pacific Islands. History of Photography, 21, 1, 42-53. Quanchi Max 2004 The power of pictures: learning by looking at Papua in illustrated newspapers and magazines. Australian Historical Studies, 35, 123, April 2004, 37-53. Quanchi, Max and Max Shekleton, 2001 Disorderly categories in picture postcards from colonial Papua and New Guinea. History of Photography, 25, 4, 2001, 315-333. Roberts, Jan 1996 Voices in a lost world. Alexandria, NSW: Millenium Books. Ryan, Peter, editor 1972 Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press Silas, Ellis 1926 A primitive arcadia; being the impressions of an artist in Papua. Boston: Little Brown. Schwartz, Joan and James Ryan, eds, 2003 Picturing place; photography and the geographical imagination. London: IB Tauris. Sinclair, James 1981 Kiap; Australian patrol officers in Papua New Guinea. Sydney: Pacific publications. Smith, H Staniforth, compiler 1909 Handbook of the Territory of Papua. Melbourne: Government Printer.
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Smith, H Staniforth, compiler 1927 Handbook of the Territory of Papua. Canberra: Government Printer. West, Francis 1968 Hubert Murray; the Australian Proconsul, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Wetherell, David 1977 Reluctant Mission: the Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea 18911942. St Lucia, Qld: University Of Queensland Press. Wetherell, David 1996 Charles Abel and the Kwato Mission of Papua New Guinea 18911975, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Wetherell, David 1998 First contact Mission narratives from eastern New Guinea. Journal of Pacific History, 33, 1, 111-116. Wetherell, David 2003 Accounts of fighting and cannibalism in Eastern New Guinea during the missionary contact period 1877-1888 as told to Charles Abel. Pacific Studies, 26, 1/2, 37-52.
1
For a photograph, taken from the top of the island’s radio mast, “View of the island of Samarai,” see Roberts 1996, 79. This photograph is reproduced in Gash and Whittaker 1975, 198. Roberts cites the Bunting Collection as the source, and Gash and Whittaker the Stephenson Collection, demonstrating the wide dissemination of prints among travellers, collectors and editors. It was a commercially available print. For another copy see the album of WHK and M Park, E-17788-0, Queensland Museum. 2 Before the war Hubert Murray, the Lt Governor of Papua, noted complaints that Samarai’s wharves were falling into disrepair and need upgrading; West 1968, 138, 190, and 244. Murray complained in 1925 that a lack of shipping was slowing development, Murray 1925, 142. 3 Prints, EH-7945-0 and EH-7963-0, Queensland Museum, Brisbane. 4 In “Class 12 Photographic Proofs, etc”; Anon, Catalogue of the exhibits in the New South Wales Court, Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne 1888. 5 Prints 111 to 115, in a Melbourne catalogue of 124 prints for sale from JW Lindt’s Picturesque New Guinea. (Held at 1964.280.07, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii.) Special Commissioner John Douglas owned the set of prints displayed in Melbourne, and the next year donated them to the Queensland Museum; EH-7945-0, EH-7951-0, EH-9782-0, EH-9783-0, EH-9895-0, E-9896-0, E-9897-0, E-9898-0, E9899-0 and E-9910-0, Queensland Museum, Brisbane. 6 Port Moresby, Rigo and Samarai were the first three districts to be established with a Resident Magistrate. By the end of the MacGregor era there were six – following the establishment of Mambare, Nivani and Daru. Wetherell, 2003, 38 and 40; West 1968, 147. 7 She later became Mrs Flora Gofton but was more famously known in Samarai and the goldfields as “Tiger Lil”; Roberts 1996, 50; Lepowsky 2001, 143-44. 8 For McMahon’s Papua photographs see, Quanchi, 1997 and 2004. 9 Cairns Post and Northern Herald, 23.12.1916, 26; Our Quarterly Magazine, Aug 1918, 7.
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Chignell, 1913, frontispiece. The photographer was the missionary, PJ Money; Frank Burnett 1911, 148, 149, 157, 160 and 176. Burnett’s spelling of “Samurai” was inaccurate, or perhaps an editor’s mistake; Grimshaw 1910, 258, 260 and 274. 11 The European constructed, tree lined and gravelled road was a popular colonial symbol. Examples of this photographic iconography can be found in postcards from African, Asia and Pacific colonial territories. The colonial road signified successful development and ‘penetration’ of the landscape well into the 20th century. 12 For Macdonald’s advertisement and eight other postcards see Leahy M, 19301934, “Print Collection”, PRI055845 and PRI055846-850(e), Royal Geographical Society, London. 13 Examples of the 500 presentation albums are held, for example, at Cambridge University and the National Library of Australia (Album 440b). See, Robert Holden, Photography in colonial Australia; the mechanical eye and the illustrated book (Sydney 1988); Gael Newton 1988, 57-60. 14 Anon., n.d., Papua New Guinea, Y3084A Plate 2, Commonwealth Library, Cambridge; AP Goodwin, n.d., Large Print Collection, PR1042956-57, Royal Geographical Society, London; Harry Downing, n.d., Collection ON54, Numbers 199 and 200, Mitchell Library, Sydney; NG Imlay, n.d., “Photographs of Port Moresby and Samarai c1910-1920”, Mss 3754, Australian National Library, Canberra; Archie Gibson, n.d., Uncatalogued collection, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 15 Papuan Courier, 8/2/1929, 2/7/1929 and 6/9/1929. 16 WHK Park and Miriam Park, Photographic album E-177788-0, and WHK Park and Miriam Park, Photographic album, E-17789-0, Brisbane: Queensland Museum. 17 Advertisement, Walkabout, June 1938, 11.
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