Contrary images: Photographing the new pacific in<i>walkabout</i>magazine

Contrary images; photographing the new Pacific in Walkabout magazineThe 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, 1 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. 2 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 3 presented Australians with a complex view of a world reshaped by new ideologies, consumerism and industry.Tourism to and from Australia also expanded in the post-second world war period, creating another level of interest. 4Walkabout was patriotic and informative about economic opportunities and infrastructure development in the southwest Pacific.The magazine celebrated early political advances as the colonies moved from nineteenth-century colonial rule to self-government and independence.After the 1939-45 wars, Walkabout reported on decolonisation, yet at the same time visually portrayed the 'South Seas' as though the pre-war colonial era had not ended: photographs on elections, wharves and new industries sat alongside a frontier Pacific depicted by partially clothed 'natives' and picturesque villages.Photographs of Papua New Guineans accustomed to new technologies, occupations and political responsibilities were often accompanied by text full of naive, primitivist and racist phrasing.This contradictory visual and textual format makes it difficult to define Walkabout's place in the history of Australian relations with the Pacific Islands. The history of WalkaboutIn the 1930s and 1940s, rural Australians were visually as familiar with Papua New Guinea as with the streets, galleries and parks of Sydney and Melbourne.Conversely, for urban Australians, familiarity with the 'South Seas' was possibly greater than for the Outback, Central Australia and the Northern Territory.[Can we have a sentence about why this may have been?Why did the Pacific receive such attention at this time, why was it more significant to Australia/ns than depictions of the Outback?]The Pacific Islands had been extensively illustrated since the 1890s in touring missionary lantern slide shows, postcards, serial encyclopaedia, magazines and illustrated weekend newspapers like the Australasian, The Queenslander, The Sydney Mail, Lone Hand, Sea Land and Air, and Town and Country Journal.By 1934, when Walkabout began, photographs of canoes, costumed dancers, suspension bridges, villages, partially clothed men and women, plantations and tropical port towns were not extraordinary. 5Mick Leahy's twenty highlands photographs and the twelve other un-attributed photographs on Tahiti and New Zealand in the first edition

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