School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemAustralian Photography and Transnationalism(Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), 2020)Until very recently, histories of Australian photography have remained primarily (and some would say stubbornly) nation-based, but this trend has begun to change under the impact of studies aimed at exploring the wider cultural influences impacting on the literature and artworks produced in the late colonial period. In this paper, I explore some of the more obvious transnational features of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian photography using examples drawn from the two most popular genres of the day – portrait and landscape photography. Although I draw on only a few examples, it is enough to show that Australian photographers of the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries were not just reliant on British conventions, they were also deploying the styles and conventions used by photographers in the other Pacific-based settler colonies of Canada, USA and New Zealand, a phenomenon that points to the increasingly connected world that was formed by what Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen have classed the white settler societies or ‘new world states’ of the Pacific region.
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ItemThilly Weissenborn: Photographer of the Netherlands East Indies(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2021-04-30)Thilly Weissenborn (1883–1964) was one of Indonesia’s first woman photogra- phers of significance. She was born in Java but schooled, like most Netherlands colonials, in The Hague. At the age of eighteen, Thilly returned to Java where she trained in the famous Atelier Kurkdjian before opening her own studio in the province of Preanger. For more than two decades, she supplied the colonial government’s tourist bureau with photographs featuring Java’s exotic-looking scenery and Balinese temples and dancers. She also supplied Dutch dignitaries, colonial officials and wealthy Dutch families with souvenir albums featuring scenic photographs and Bali’s governors and royalty. I argue that although her growing obsession with light was a feature shared by many contemporary American photographers, her photographs differed from theirs by dint of their connection to Netherlands colonialism. I further argue that this is most evident in their focus on the beauty of the landscape and the seeming tranquillity of life under colonial rule, but also their strong allusions to the Mooi Indië style of paintings popular among Dutch settlers. In the twenty-year period leading up to Japan’s invasion of Indonesia, Weissenborn’s images were widely sought after and reproduced by the Dutch East Indies Tourist Bureau; however, their strong connection to Netherlands colonialism means that they are today not just regarded ambivalently by photographic historians, but are frequently overlooked.
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ItemEmpire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist JW Newland(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-07-03)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEugenics and photography in Britain, the USA and Australia 1870-1940(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2022-04)This essay traces the main ways in which photography was taken up and used by supporters of the eugenics movement, from the time that Darwin's cousin, the British polymath Francis Galton, first used it to demonstrate the role played by heredity in human intelligence, to the early 1940s, when the eugenics movement lost much of its appeal. It is argued that Galton's composite photographs of the socially "fit" and "unfit" members of British society only broadly determined the pattern for how American and Australian eugenicists deployed photography, and that each country's differing social tensions caused them to evolve their own diverse set of photographic practices aimed at promulgating the eugenic cause. Using photographic examples drawn from Britain, the USA and Australia, the essay identifies the leading persons and eugenics organisations that deployed photography, the different kinds of photographic genres they used and the different ideological and statist ends to which their images were put. It concludes that compared to Britain where class differences were highlighted, the USA and Australia's strong respective histories of slavery and colonisation led to a more robust emphasis on race and in particular the preserving of racial purity and expansion of the white population.
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ItemEncountering the Cultural Other: Virginia Woolf in Constantinople and Katherine Mansfield in the Ureweras(John Hopkins University Press, 2007)
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ItemReview of A place in the sun: Africa in Italian colonial culture from post-unification to the present(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2005)
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Item'Oceana' Revisited: J.A. Froude's 1884 Journey to New Zealand and the Pink and White Terraces(Cambridge University Press, 2009)In his popularRomance of London(1867), John Timbs refers to Thomas Babington Macaulay's oft-repeated metaphor of a “New Zealander sitting, like a hundredth-century Marius, on the mouldering arches of London Bridge, contemplating the colossal ruins of St Paul's” (290). Originally intended as an illustration of the vigor and durability of the Roman Catholic Church despite the triumph of the Reformation, Macaulay's most famous evocation of this idea dates from 1840, the year of New Zealand's annexation; hence it is reasonable to suppose that this figure is a Maori (Bellich 297–98). For Timbs and subsequent generations, however, the image conveyed the sobering idea of the rise and fall of civilizations and in particular of England being invaded and overrun, if not by a horde of savages, then by a more robust class of Anglo-Saxons from the other side of the world.
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ItemPostcolonial Criticism, Ecocriticism and Climate change(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2009)