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E-book Pacific Exposures

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Penilaian

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Sometime around 1915, a dozen Australian women paused for a photograph as they readied for a Japanese-inspired parade at Wallaroo Mines in Kadina on South Australia’s remote Yorke Peninsula (see Figure 0.1). The women are dressed in homemade interpretations of kimonos and obis and wear chrysanthemums in their hair. Two of them hold Japanese umbrellas and one a painted fan. A young child clutches a Japanese doll and large paper chrysanthemum as she sits in a sedan chair decorated with flowers. The Japanese war flag, the ensign of the powerful Imperial Navy, flutters somewhat limply near the front of this little procession. Japan, for the time being, was an ally if not quite a friend. Its navy was protecting Australia’s coastline and escorting Australian troopships to distant wars for and on behalf of Great Britain. This wartime connection is elsewhere apparent in the photograph. Towards the back of the pictured group, one woman has adorned her Japanese robe with the ribbon of the Australian Red Cross Society, formed in 1914 to provide comforts to serving soldiers overseas such as knitted socks, vests and chocolate bars.This photographic performance of Australian conceptions of women’s wartime duty using elements of Japanese culture speaks powerfully to the connections between Australian perceptions of Japan and photography at that time—connections that were to go through periods of rupture and reconciliation in the decades to come. Photography is an evocative means of crossing time and territory in imaginative and physical senses. The Wallaroo Mines photograph was likely taken as a memento of an Australia Day community pageant in 1915 in which participants demonstrated their imagined allegiance with the Allies by appearing in their national costumes. A group of so-called ‘geisha girls’ and ‘Japanese ladies’ received special mention in the local newspaper.1 Japanese decorative arts and textiles, moreover, were a la mode in Australian homes and it was not unusual for Australian women to identify with their Japanese sisters to the far north by posing for photographs in which they nterpret and adopt their dress at home.2 Such imagined connections are heightened by the physical movement of the photograph across time and space. Not long after it was made, the Wallaroo Mines photograph travelled as a postcard connecting its writer with her brother, who lived 150 km away in Adelaide. Her message wished her brother good health and, in pointing out a special someone among the group, allowed the photograph to bring them emotionally closer to someone far away. After moving from one private collection to the next for almost a century, shifting from personal keepsake to collectable, the postcard acquired new value as an object of public cultural heritage when it entered the National Library of Australia collection in 2013.This kind of complex, material and imaginative movement makes photography a valuable medium of historical analysis and cross-cultural interpretation. Photographs are highly adaptable objects of material culture that are equally at home in personal and public realms. Evident in their multitudes in immigration documents, government archives, the news media, postcards, tourism, advertising, art galleries and family albums, they also readily shift between and across these realms. Unbound by the limitations of written or spoken language, photographs are likewise well suited for moving between cultures. Their longevity means they can be revisited again and again, allowing them to acquire and shed meanings in often unpredictable ways. Yet, while they offer insight into the big questions of history—involving identity, place and conflict—there remains a quiet intimacy in historical photographs. When held in the hand, they offer a powerful material connection to other people, times and places.Australia’s historically ambivalent relationship with Japan—its oldest and arguably most significant regional partner—is fertile ground for analysing the critical nexus of photography, history and cross-cultural interpretation. While the connections between two such different countries should not be overstated, Australia and Japan share a certain geo-cultural commonality that lends itself to the kind of analysis that Pacific Exposures undertakes. Both Australia and Japan are uneasily located in the traditional East/West binary. One is ostensibly the most ‘Western’ country in the Asia-Pacific, and the other is in many ways the most Asian country in the ‘West’. Crossing the vast Pacific in literal and figurative senses has represented a major cultural challenge to Australians—one that has been enabled by and reflected in photographs. From the fascination with all things Japanese in the early twentieth century through the bitter enmity of the Pacific War and the tortuous path to reconciliation in the postwar period and beyond, Australians have used photography to express a divided sense of conflict and kinship with Japan.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

770 MIL p

Penerbit

Australia : ANU Press., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

266 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781760462543

Klasifikasi

770

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Photography and Photographs

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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