The Journal of Pacific History Photography and Christian Mission

The Journal of Pacific History ISSN: 0022-3344 (Print) 1469-9605 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjph20 Photography and Christian Mission Helen Gardner & Jude Philp To cite this article: Helen Gardner & Jude Philp (2006) Photography and Christian Mission, The Journal of Pacific History, 41:2, 175-190, DOI: 10.1080/00223340600826086 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223340600826086 Published online: 12 Aug 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 158 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjph20 Download by: [Deakin University Library] Date: 11 September 2017, At: 20:50 The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 41, No. 2, September 2006 Photography and Christian Mission George Brown’s Images of the New Britain Mission 1875–80 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 HELEN GARDNER AND JUDE PHILP RECENT ANALYSES OF 19TH CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE PEOPLES OF OCEANIA HAVE turned from broad claims on the nature of colonialism, using a semiotic analysis of the image and the caption, to finer attempts, based on historical sources, to investigate the relationship between photographer and subject/s.1 The following paper reviews the early photographs of Methodist missionary, George Brown, taken during his residence on New Britain in the 1870s. While he rarely recorded the making of a photographic plate in his journals or letters, these texts nonetheless provide useful evidence of his subjects, and are suggestive both of Brown’s motives for photography, and the agency of his sitter/s.2 In the wet plate period of photography, the technology demanded a close negotiation between photographer and subject in order to create a successful image. The following paper contends that Brown, as with other photographers of the period, used photographs and photography to establish and maintain relations with local people. On occasion, sitters became the recipients of photographic prints and, well aware of the process and keen to participate, they sought out the photographer in order to be photographed.3 Brown’s captions for his photographs are mostly typical of generic captions of colonised peoples in the 19th century. The exceptions, however, are significant, particularly in the case of the portraits of the big-men from the immediate vicinity of the mission headquarters. While these men were important to the 1 Martha Macintyre and Maureen MacKenzie compared two photographers of Papuan people for their knowledge of and relationships with local people, ‘Focal length as an analogue of cultural distance’, in Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (London 1992), 158–63. See also Edwards, ‘Performing science: still photography and the Torres Strait Expedition’, in Anita Herle and S. Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge 1998), 106–35; and Jane Lydon, ‘The experimental 1860s: Charles Walter’s images of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria’, Aboriginal History, 26 (2002), 78–130. 2 Photographs of the colonised have been analysed for broad perspectives on the nature of colonialism despite warnings from commentators on the difficulties of determining both the intention of the photographer and the ways in which an audience reads images. For a recent discussion of this debate in relation to the Pacific Islands, see Max Quanchi, ‘The power of pictures: learning-by-looking at Papua in illustrated newspapers and magazines’, Australian Historical Studies, 35:123 (2004), 39. 3 Jude Philp, ‘Embryonic science: the 1888 Torres Strait photographic collection of A.C. Haddon’, in R. Davis (ed.), Woven Histories, Dancing Lives (Canberra 2004), 90–106. ISSN 0022-3344 print; 1469-9605 online/06/020175–16; Taylor and Francis ß 2006 The Journal of Pacific History Inc. DOI: 10.1080/00223340600826086 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 176 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY success of the mission most were never interested in Christianity, yet their images were all captioned with their names. Brown’s portraits of these men, described by his fellow missionary as ‘real live celebrities’, suggest the role of photography in winning them to the acceptance of the Christian party in their midst, if not the message. When considered in conjunction with journals and letters describing the actions of the big-men, the biographical details elicited illuminate the agency of these men as well as their relationship to Brown.4 Other photographs by Brown are also examined, with reference to Brown’s intended viewers and using details from historical sources. This methodology mounts a significant challenge to common analyses of mission images based primarily on visual analysis — the caption and the posing of the subject.5 The following paper argues that combining an analysis of the texts with that of the image allows the earliest of Brown’s photographs to be investigated as moments of intercultural negotiation that reflect both Brown’s motives for exposing the plate and the local interest in the photographic process. George Brown (1835–1917) was born in England but ordained in Sydney in 1860. He was with the Wesleyans in Samoa for 14 years until 1875, when he opened a new mission in the Duke of York Islands, New Britain, with a large group of mission teachers and their wives and children from Fiji and Samoa. In 1878, he was joined by Australian missionary Benjamin Danks. Throughout the five years of Brown’s intermittent residence in the region, mission stations spread from the Duke of York Islands to the Gazelle Peninsula and New Ireland. In 1880, he returned to Sydney and, eight years later, he was named as generalsecretary of the Australasian Methodist Mission, a post he held until 1908. During regular voyages to Pacific missions, he photographed extensively, and his collection of over 900 glass plates is a rich record of Pacific life and Christianity in the late-19th century.6 From the 1850s, missionaries around the world had turned the new science of photography to the service of the mission. Missionaries to the Pacific Islands had taken photographs in the 1850s: E.R. Krause sent photographs back to the London Missionary Society in 1859 and possibly as early as 1855.7 Robert Codrington exposed plates at the Anglican mission on Norfolk Island in the early 1870s, while William Lawes from the London Missionary Society began photographing the Motu people of the Papuan coast from 1874.8 Brown’s photography began en route to Port Hunter in the Duke of York Islands, where 4 For discussion of the biography of subjects in similar portraits, see Brigitte d’Ozouville, ‘Reading photographs in colonial history: a case study from Fiji, 1872’, Pacific Studies, 20:4 (1997), 54. 5 For an example of visual analysis, see Prue Ahrens, ‘The missionary agenda and George Brown’s photography’, Masters thesis, University of Sydney (Sydney 2004). 6 Copy prints of many of these plates are held at the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. 7 A large collection of London Missionary Society (LMS) photographs is held in the LMS Archives at School of Oriental and African Studies London. 8 Robert Codrington to Tom Codrington, 23 Aug. 1871, R.H. Codrington, Miscellaneous Papers: Letters 1867–1887; Journals of Voyages: 1872, 1875, 1881, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, available on microform (Canberra 1978). Samantha Johnson and Rosemary Seton, ‘‘‘Fields of vision’’: photographs in the missionary collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 26:4 (2002), 165–6. Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 177 he landed a mission party of 18 Samoan and Fijian teachers and wives in August 1875. Over the next five years, in which he was intermittently resident at the mission station at Kinawanua, Brown exposed at least 80 glass plates using the wet plate collodion process that he had learned from Victorian photographer Charles Walter. In the 1860s, Walter had become known in Melbourne for a panel of portraits of Victorian Aborigines displayed at the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866 and his successful commercial album ‘Australian Aborigines Under Civilisation’.9 Walter joined Brown on the journey to the new field to collect botanical specimens and to photograph the inhabitants of the Bismarck Archipelago.10 His sympathetic portraiture was in line with Brown’s aims and was no doubt an early influence on the missionary’s images. Yet Walter’s time in New Britain was curtailed. During the first weeks of the mission he was caught in a fight between villagers on the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain. Determined not to go ashore again he left with the John Wesley. Brown purchased all Walter’s equipment and in a few days set up on his own account as a photographic artist.11 The collection of photographs from the five years of Brown’s intermittent residence at the inaugural mission reveal a range of subjects: images of villagers and villages are interspersed with those of teachers and their wives from the Methodist training schools of Piula in Samoa, Navuloa in Fiji and Vava’u in Tonga surrounded by their congregations. Many of the photographs include members of his family who joined him in the mission in 1877. The Wet Plate Process While most photographs are the result of some personal, contractual or service relationship, however slight, between subject and photographer, technical constraints in the period before the introduction of the dry plate process in the 1880s forced a level of cooperation between the two parties that was changed forever by faster shutter times, less intrusive cameras and easier development processes.12 In the 1870s the photographic process was cumbersome and complicated, and Brown’s range of images from many sites in the mission field is testimony to his determination to create a photographic record. Seeking contact with as many people as possible, Brown travelled constantly during his 9 Lydon, ‘The experimental 1860s’, 117–19. Walter’s foray into the Pacific predated his more famous Victorian colleague J.W. Lindt, who was the official photographer on Sir Peter Scratchley’s ill-fated expedition to the Protectorate of British New Guinea in 1885. His photographs, published in his Picturesque New Guinea (London 1887), were sold throughout the world. See S. Jones, J.W. Lindt: master photographer (Melbourne 1985), 11–12. 10 George Brown to Sarah Lydia Brown, 29 Jun. 1875, A1686–2 Sydney, Mitchell Library, (hereinafter MLA). We are indebted to Jane Lydon for definitively identifying the photographer as Charles Walter. See also Virginia-Lee Webb, ‘Illuminated views: photographs of Samoa by Rev. George Brown’, in C. Blanton (ed.), Picturing Paradise: colonial photography of Samoa 1875–1925 (Daytona 1995), 60. 11 George Brown, ‘Savage life in the South Seas’, A1686–30, MLA. 12 Some photographers, such as A.C. Haddon (1888, 1898) and Frank Hurley (1920–23) chose to develop plates in the field long after the demise of the wet plate process; Philp, ‘Embryonic science’, 94. See also Jim Specht and John Fields, Frank Hurley in Papua: photographs of the 1920–1923 expeditions (Brisbane 1984), 10. Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 178 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY residence at Port Hunter. His images reflect the cultural diversity and the breadth of the mission field in its early years, which covered hundreds of miles of the Duke of York Islands, New Ireland and New Britain coastlines. The heavy photographic equipment — chemicals, plates and camera — was stowed along with trade goods and food in the vessels of visiting traders, scientists and gunboats as well as the hull of the Henry Reed, the mission steam launch. All chemicals and equipment had to be carried to the point where the photograph was made though the following process. The plate was first coated with gun cotton and ether then immersed in a bath of silver halide before being exposed, for between 10 and 90 seconds, and immediately developed in the travelling darkroom while still wet with the emulsion.13 Subjects were persuaded or perhaps enticed with trade goods to stay still for the requisite period of time. Islanders were the audience to the cumbersome performance of wet plate photography and the ghostly image on the plate, which could be viewed immediately. Brown’s texts suggest that he used the making of a photograph to form relationships with local people and not simply for the purposes of later display or record. On an early visit to New Ireland, Brown sought out Le Bera from Kalil on the advice of the Duke of York big-men Waruwarum and To Pulu (also known as ‘King Dick’ by Brown and others) from whom he had purchased land for the mission at Port Hunter. Brown made an image of Le Bera and was gratified when the villagers ‘crowded round to see it and were quite excited when they recognised the likeness’. Delighted by the plate, one man placed a small branch on Brown’s shoulder, another handed him a bread-fruit leaf. Brown understood the gestures as tokens of appreciation of his skill and graciously accepted the small ‘gifts’ but found to his dismay, then anger, that he was expected to respond with a return ‘present’ and that ‘such a present would be preferred in the shape of beads and tobacco’. The moment of Brown’s photographic triumph was spoilt; Brown wryly noted, ‘Alas for my satisfaction and pride’.14 While the ghostly image on the plate did produce the expected awe, this response could not be turned to the service of mission. Far from leading the villagers to a sense of transcendence and the earthly benefits that might flow from conversion, Brown’s photography had merely triggered a seemingly base desire for material goods. Yet Le Bera and his fellow villagers were merely enacting the to-and-fro of reciprocity that accompanied all displays of economic, spiritual or technological ability in a region where payment was normally demanded for all sort of transactions, including spells, brides, anger, shame and novel forms of appealing to the spiritual realm.15 While Brown’s description of the events at Kalil suggest the trickery of the illusionist performing for the unsophisticated, his motives were perhaps more complex. Brown was well versed in the diluted fideism of 19th century Methodism. According to this theology, all knowledge, including 13 Appendix, ‘Photographic techniques: an outline’, in Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography, 264–7. George Brown, George Brown D.D. Pioneer Missionary and Explorer: an autobiography (London 1908), 136. 15 For a discussion of the economic mores of the New Britain people in the 1870s, and Brown’s response, see Helen Gardner, Gathering For God: George Brown in Oceania (Dunedin 2006), 138–9. 14 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 179 scientific discovery, was gained through Christian influences: ‘under the shadow of the cross, and under that shadow alone, flourish literary and scientific institutions of the highest character. Only in lands where the words of Christ give spirit and life do we find the grandest discoveries and the most useful inventions’, preached American Bishop Simpson to the Ecumenical Methodist Conference of 1881.16 Those who converted to Christianity would have access to these technological marvels. Yet despite the apparent failure at Kalil to bring villagers to God through photography, the range of images from around the mission field suggest that Brown persisted and became more familiar with the economic mores of the people and more accepting of attempts to incorporate him into local relationships. Indeed, he became acutely alert to the role of shell money in local economies and used the currency in the service of the mission.17 Many of the images from the New Britain collection are of unidentified groups of people in village scenes with no clear indication of their Christian purpose. Villagers were probably gathered for a range of activities connected with the missionary such as trading for food or artefacts. The display of the photographic plate may well have been a common and expected element of Brown’s visit. Framing the Big-men Those local people named in the captions of Brown’s photographs were almost all big-men, although few were interested in the Christian message. This disjunction between the aims of the mission and the photographic record might therefore chronicle the dependence of the missionary on local leaders and the use of photographs in the formation and maintenance of these relationships. Throughout the early years of the mission the Christians were especially reliant on the support and influence of the big-men where the mission was sited. Prior to Brown’s arrival, Waruwarum (Figure 1) and his brother To Pulu (Figure 2c) from the Port Hunter region had grown wealthy in St Georges Channel through the control of trade with navy vessels, whalers and other ships seeking water and food on the route between the Australian colonies and Asia.18 Brown was directed to Port Hunter specifically because of the power of the brothers, and he established the mission headquarters at Waruwarum’s home village of Kinawanua in an effort to harness their influence.19 Being on the brothers’ land drew the Christians into a trading bloc that extended across the region. The relationship between mission and the trading alliance was often strained for the big-men tried to contain the movement of the Christian party to affiliated 16 Rev. H. Gilmore, Proceedings of the Ecumenical Methodist Conference, September (London 1881), 277. Helen Gardner, ‘Assuming judicial control: George Brown’s narrative defence of the ‘‘New Britain raid’’’, in Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Law, History, Colonialism: the reach of empire (Manchester 2001), 156–69. 18 On the power of the brothers, see Heinz Schütte, ‘Topulu and his brothers: aspects of societal transition in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea during the 1870s and the 1880s’, Journal de la Socie´te´ des Oce´anistes, 1–2 (1989), 53–68. 19 Brown, George Brown D.D., 370–1. 17 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 180 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY FIGURE 1: ‘Waruwarum and sacred canoe.’ Waruwarum with the decorated pidik canoe (Australian Museum V6409). Reproduced courtesy of the Australian Museum, Sydney, and digitally enhanced by James King, Australian Museum. villages only, thus ensuring that trade goods, which included the prayers and hymns taught by the mission teachers, flowed to trading partners. The symbiotic relationship between the mission and the big-men is suggested by the farewell feast for Brown in December 1880, which was organised by the big-men to ‘show that they loved him’.20 Most of the photographs of those islanders named in Brown’s collection of plates were taken during this feast which drew 400–500 Islanders. Waruwarum and Kaplen from Kinawanua, Liblib from the affiliated village of Waira, To Pulu from Makada and Maruwaruno from an unidentified Duke of York village made up the portraits of the big-men from the home islands of the mission. Danks described them as ‘real live Duke of York celebrities — men who had played no unimportant part both in the history of the island and in our own work — whose favour it was necessary to secure in the early days of this mission’.21 Yet texts reveal that the relationship between the big-men and the mission, while essential to the success of the latter, was based more on Duke of York economies and alliances than on Christian principles. Five years after the mission began, To Pulu remained a threat to the spread of the new faith. Just three months prior to the feast, Brown discovered that To Pulu and an armed party had disguised themselves as Christian teachers looking for food. After luring his enemies down to the beach, To Pulu shot three of them. Unable to completely separate himself from To Pulu’s control of the region, or the perception that he was affiliated with the big-man, Brown paid shell money 20 21 Benjamin Danks, In Wild New Britain (Sydney 1930), 144. Ibid., 146. 181 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 2: From top to bottom: (a) ‘Ilaita, a Chief of New Britain’; (b) ‘Samoan women’; (c) ‘To Pulu (King Dick) & wives’. Reproduced from a page in George Brown’s ‘Album of Papua New Guinea’ (PXA925 MLA), courtesy of the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. FIGURE Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 182 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY 3: ‘Kaplen.’ One of the first converts, nephew of To Pulu and Waruwarum (Australian Museum V6415). Reproduced courtesy of the Australian Museum, Sydney, and digitally enhanced by James King, Australian Museum. FIGURE to the relatives of the dead to avoid future bloodshed.22 The image of To Pulu (Figure 2c), accompanied by two wives and holding a pipe, is suggestive first of the failure of the Christian message to move the most important of the big-men but also suggests a number of other possible readings. As To Pulu was aware of Brown’s distaste both for polygamy and smoking, it is possible he deliberately included those elements in his portrait as a gesture of defiance to the missionary. But it is also possible that Brown invited To Pulu to include the pipe and the wives to frame an image of heathen evil and the dangers of the trader.23 Danks’s acknowledgement that To Pulu was a celebrity whose allied villages were the first to accept Christian teachers reveals the complexity of this image of an important man who, while he directly contradicted Methodist doctrine, was nonetheless a primary figure in the establishment of the faith in the region. Portraits of the few big-men who did convert might have become a record of mission success, but this is not directly apparent from the visual image. However, one aspect of the portraits of the converts differs from those of other big-men. Kaplen was both a big-man and an early convert to Christianity (Figure 3). The nephew of To Pulu and Waruwarum and son of deceased big-man Tamantiunt, 22 Brown, George Brown D.D., 382. To Pulu’s pipe was almost certainly the result of Hernsheim’s ‘smoking schools’ set up to introduce villagers to tobacco; Stewart Firth, ‘German firms in the Western Pacific Islands’, Journal of Pacific History, 8 (1977), 13. 23 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 183 Kaplen held considerable status both in Duke of York society and among the emerging Christians. He was Brown’s frequent companion on his voyages around the region, protecting him, translating and collecting specimens.24 In contrast to the images of his uncles, who are portrayed with wives and kin, Kaplen’s portrait shows him alone. On this point, perhaps a semiotic analysis can be mounted. Attempts by Evangelical Christianity to transform the heathen entailed negating the moral order of the heathen culture and asserting the autonomy of the individual in order for this new person to articulate the truths of the faith separate from traditional relationships and morality. Kaplen’s status as a Christian cannot be identified by his clothes, for many coastal Islanders were wearing European clothes by then, nor by his gun, though its presence in the image suggests how much he valued it. The most powerful visual clue for Brown’s understanding of his most important convert is that Kaplen is photographed alone, separated from his culture.25 Similarly Ilaita (Figure 2a), the ‘New Britain chief’, is photographed alone though in almost every other respect the image is visually similar to To Pulu’s portrait (Figure 2c). Both are dressed in European clothes and both are posed against the same tree at Kinawanua. Yet again texts reveal distinctions between the two and the spread of the Christian message. Villagers from Kininigunan, on the Gazelle Peninsula, had requested a teacher soon after Brown’s arrival but the missionary was constrained by the directives of the big-men of Port Hunter to stay within their trading alliance. Peni Raivalui was finally posted there after Brown returned to the field in 1877.26 Ilaita was one of the first converts and was baptised in March 1880.27 He began to hold services in his own village, and Brown arranged for him to preach in the neighbouring villages of Davaon and Karavia. Accustomed to the stumbling efforts either of Brown, who only preached in New Britain in Pidgin with the help of translators, or the South Sea teachers, the congregations were astounded by Iliata’s sermon given in Kuanua. Instead of his own services where the congregation asked questions, talked among themselves and wandered in and out, Brown reported that those hearing Iliata preach on ‘The earth is full of the goodness of God’ listened with ‘ears, mouths and eyes’.28 While this is an image of mission success and Iliata is remembered among the Christians of the Gazelle Peninsula, he is not identified as a convert in the image or the caption. The portraits of Kaplen and Ilaita are suggestive of Brown’s visual representation of conversion, for verbal explanations accompanied his lantern-slide lectures. 24 See e.g., Brown, Journal, 1 Dec. 1875 and 5 Dec. 1878, A1686–3, MLA, and idem, George Brown D.D., 289. 25 This topic has been covered extensively in theological and anthropological literature but is perhaps less closely examined in the literature of photography. For a theoretical discussion on individuation in relation to Christian mission, see K.L. Burridge, Someone, No-one (Princeton 1979), 192–212. 26 Neville Threlfell, One Hundred Years in the Islands (Rabaul 1975), 50. 27 Brown, George Brown D.D., 381. 28 Ibid., 402. 184 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 Recording Photographs, Brown’s Audiences Brown’s journal records of his photographic moments were sparse. His captions, similar to the labels on his large collection of artefacts, were brief and descriptive and often haphazard. Names of subjects were only occasionally provided, and dates gave a single year or often a range of years. Even though language groups differed within islands and trade alliances penetrated natural island borders, Brown rarely recorded more detail than the island’s name, though village names were sometimes included. There are a number of possible reasons for this sparse captioning. First, the realism of the print gave the illusion it was self-referential, thus precluding the need for interpretation or long and detailed descriptions in the caption. Second, Brown toured with his photographs, and it is possible this information was given anecdotally. The Mitchell Library has an album, separate from their many copies of prints, that gives some clues to Brown’s ordering of images.29 The 81 photographs in the album are labelled in Brown’s hand and were almost certainly collated by him following his return from the field. They depict the New Britain Mission and include a number of images not represented elsewhere.30 The album is important, as it hints at a narrative connecting the people, missionaries and places not found in other sources. It is also deceptive as it suggests that all the subjects were of equal importance to Brown, yet there are more non-Christians than converts among them. The very sparseness of the captions is revealing. Titles such as ‘natives and houses, New Ireland’, ‘sacred canoe’, ‘Samoan women’, ‘canoe and natives, Duke of York Island’ suggest Brown’s photographic motives to provide a wide range of images from many locales and for a range of audiences. Indeed, there are striking similarities between Brown’s garnering of photographic images and his gathering of natural history specimens or material culture. The images, birds, insects and plants as well as the baskets, spears and ornaments were labelled and classified using the same principles and in the service of the same interests. Nineteenth-century science was far less concerned with the manufacture or the use of items than with their dispersal and adaptation across a given geographical region. In an effort to identify the parameters of customs or peoples, Brown’s photographs could be used to plot the geographical boundaries of ‘types’ of peoples or activities. This aim mimicked efforts by students of natural history to establish the range and adaptation of a particular zoological or botanical species. For the labelling of objects and photographs, therefore, Brown confirmed their type, based on their external form, and their provenance, based largely on the natural island boundaries where they had been gathered or exposed. 29 Reverend George Brown 1890–1905, Album of Papua New Guinea, PXA925, MLA. Of particular note are three images of Mrs Danks breastfeeding. The inclusion of these intimate photographs is perhaps due to the trauma of this birth and Lydia Brown’s assistance. It is also possible that breastfeeding the child was the only way to ensure the image was not spoiled by a moving baby. Again a picture potentially showing domestic harmony is given greater potency through a close reading of Brown’s texts, George Brown D.D., 394–8. 30 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 185 Of all the items gathered from the new field for popular or scientific purposes, photographs reached the widest range of audiences through mission-produced postcards, exhibitions, illustrated books, lantern-slide lectures and illustrated magazines. Brown’s photographs of houses, villages, canoes, ornaments and dress were therefore useful to his relationships both in the field and at home. The images could serve a number of purposes: they could be shown as lantern-slide lectures for fundraising among Methodist congregations, or be sent as data on New Britain customs to anthropological interlocutors. Brown began publishing anthropological articles in 1877, and Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison, who joined Brown on the Fiji leg of the inaugural voyage to the field and whose ethnology of the Kamilaroi and Kurnai people was published in 1880, introduced Brown to his growing network of anthropological theorists.31 During Brown’s final year on the mission, he carried a copy of the first edition of British anthropology’s Notes and Queries On Anthropology.32 This text provided the questions and structure for Brown’s monograph Melanesians and Polynesians (1910), which is illustrated with his photographs.33 Anthropological theorists were keen for Brown’s images. Henry Giglioli, curator of the Florence Museum of Zoology, wrote to Brown in 1878 requesting photographs. By return post, Brown regretted that he had sent his few plates to China to be printed and that he therefore had none to send.34 The trade between the Pacific Islands and Asia ensured a steady flow of trading ships through St Georges Channel, and the port cities of southern China were the natural suppliers of services for the mission so strategically positioned on the Duke of York Islands.35 Images were also sent to scientists as cultural data: the Australian Museum in Sydney acquired seven images for ethnographic exhibition in 1904.36 The eminent Oxford ethnologist, Edward B. Tylor wrote to Brown as he left for Tonga in 1888 wishing him ‘success in examining stone monuments in Tonga. The photographs of mounds of stone entrances may prove instructive in working out Tongan civilisation’.37 Of the images Giglioli eventually obtained, one was sent to the Cambridge ethnographer A.C. Haddon for his research.38 Such images became part of the flow of ethnographic knowledge around the scientific world. Some images, such as that of Waruwarum and the pidik canoe, could satisfy a wide range of audiences (Figure 1). The pidik canoe was a ceremonial vessel 31 George Brown, ‘Notes on the Duke of York Group, New Britain and New Ireland’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 47 (1877), 137–50. 32 E.B. Tylor (ed.), Notes and Queries on Anthropology: for the use of travellers and residents in uncivilised lands (London 1874). 33 George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians: their life-histories described and compared (London 1910). 34 Webb, ‘Illuminated views’, 61. 35 On the whaling trade in the area, see Alastair C. Gray ‘Trading contacts in the Bismarck Archipelago during the whaling era, 1799–1884’, Journal of Pacific History, 36 (1999), 23–43. On the bêche-de-mer trade in east New Guinea, see Clive Moore, New Guinea: crossing boundaries and histories (Honolulu 2003), 127–8. 36 Australian Museum Archives, Donor Schedule, dated 15/3/1904, Australian Museum, Sydney. 37 E.B. Tylor to Brown, 24 Sept. 1888, Scientific and Ethnological Papers A1686-22, MLA. 38 Photographic Archive P.3065.ACH1., Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 186 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY purchased by Waruwarum and then displayed to villagers who paid the big-man diwara (shell money). Benjamin Danks reported a similar occasion in 1881 when Waruwarum brought out the canoe and ‘turned Barnum for a time, [and] made a pile of Diwara out of it for hundreds came to see it’.39 This versatile image with its minimal contextualising caption could serve as an illustration on ethnography, heathenism, colonialism or economics. The many photographs of Tongan, Fijian and Samoan teachers, who accompanied Brown to the Bismarck Archipelago or joined him later, record the explosion of Pacific Methodism in the 1860s and 1870s following mass conversions in Fiji and the successful reintroduction of Methodism in Samoa. Indeed, the 34,000 Pacific communicants in that period far out-numbered the mere 6,000 Methodists of the combined districts of New South Wales and Queensland.40 Fundraising among the Pacific congregations was important to the success of the mission, and home villages received prints of their missionaries: in 1891, Brown reminded himself to send a photograph of a teacher who had died on the Duke of York Islands to his widow in Samoa.41 The Photographs of 1880 As the previous section suggests, Brown’s sparse captions might have been the result of a range of influences: scientific theories, the realism of the photographic print or Brown’s familiarity with the subjects. Most of the surviving plates and prints from the new mission were taken during his final year of residence in the islands. Brown had returned to the colonies to convalesce in 1879 and came back in early 1880 to the news that his two youngest children had died of malaria, leaving only Geoffrey, the oldest and his wife Lydia. The diminished family travelled together around the islands in their final year of residence, for Lydia’s grief was such that she could not spend long periods alone in the mission house.42 The remarkable image of Lydia surrounded by women in an inland New Ireland village was exposed during this period (Figure 4). Seeking an overland route from the south to the north coast of New Ireland, Brown ventured beyond the coastal regions where traders and other Europeans had become commonplace. On the arduous journey across the rough New Ireland terrain, Lydia Brown became ill with fever and had to be carried over the 15 miles between the coasts.43 While the photograph could be read in isolation as typical of attempts by ‘white’ civilisation to impose the prudery of mission over the naked ‘native’, 39 Danks, quoted in H. Schütte, ‘Topulu and his brothers’, 57. Wesleyan Chronicle, 20 Feb. 1874. For a discussion about the use of such letters for Samoan London Missionary Society missionary-teachers, see Nokise Uili Feleterika, ‘The role of London Missionary Society: Samoan missionaries in the evangelisation of the South West Pacific 1839–1930’, PhD thesis, The Australian National University (Canberra 1983). 41 Max Quanchi, ‘The invisibility of gospel ploughmen: the imaging of South Sea pastors in Papua’, Pacific Studies, 20 (1997), 77–102. 42 Brown, George Brown, D.D., 381. 43 Ibid., 382–96. 40 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 187 4: ‘Lydia Brown and women, New Ireland.’ Taken on a journey across New Ireland, 1880 (Australian Museum V6392). Reproduced courtesy of the Australian Museum, Sydney, and digitally enhanced by James King, Australian Museum. FIGURE texts reveal that Lydia, sick and grief-stricken, was only present because of the great trials of mission life in the Bismarck Archipelago during this period. The photograph titled ‘Tongan teacher, wife and natives’ (Figure 5) can be dated to 1880 through the presence of the lone figure of Geoffrey and was probably taken in July of that year when George, Lydia and Geoffrey arrived at Kabakada on the Gazelle Peninsula to take Benjamin Danks down the north coast of New Britain. Danks and his wife Emma had established a European presence in the village two months earlier. The Tongan teachers were almost certainly Mesaki and his wife (unnamed) who lived at the nearby village of Vunairoto. The other teacher may have been Sanapalati who had been sent to Kabakada following the attack and death of the Reverend Sailiasa Naukukidi, the previous teacher.44 Kabakada became known throughout the colonies as the mission station of the martyred Naukukidi.45 Here was the photograph to prove the success of mission and to justify Brown’s highly controversial raid on those he deemed guilty of the attack. Standing by their solid home of native materials, Geoffrey Brown and the South Sea teachers presented a peaceful tableau in the heart of the town that had become infamous for its alleged cannibalism and savagery. While Mesaki was dependent on his New Britain hosts at Vunairoto for food and for some measure of protection, he was still a formidable presence. Danks described how the Tongan broke up a fight between Vunairoto and 44 45 Danks, In Wild New Britain, 90–1. Gardner, ‘Assuming judicial control’. Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 188 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY 5: ‘Tongan teacher, wife and natives, Kabakada.’ The Tongan teachers Mesaki and probably Sanapalati with Geoffrey Brown, an unnamed Tongan woman and New Britain villagers (Australian Museum V6411). Reproduced courtesy of the Australian Museum, Sydney, and digitally enhanced by James King, Australian Museum. FIGURE Kabakada by beating the protagonists with the flat of a spear saying ‘Go home you bad fellows, go home I say’.46 The image captioned ‘Samoan women’ (Figure 2b) is one of a disproportionate number of photographs of Samoan women in the collection, for they were greatly outnumbered in the mission by Fijian women. While this might be explained by Brown’s fluency in Samoan after 14 years in that group, this is not a particularly satisfactory explanation. One of the women can be identified as Tatera, the wife of Malate, a missionary couple who worked on the islands 1876– 80. There are no less than four images of these women, more of Tatera, seemingly taken on the same occasion. The photographs could have been used in fundraising in the Pacific, as family mementos or for their ‘ethnographic’ appeal (the women are not clothed in a European fashion). While it is probable the other women were affiliated with the mission, it is also possible they were wives of copra traders. In October 1875, only weeks after Brown arrived, German trader Eduard Hernsheim and his employee Blohm established the first successful copra station in the region. Blohm’s Samoan wife was delighted to find two Samoan women in the mission party. By 1878, there were nine new traders around the coasts. Hernsheim noted that all were accompanied by a ‘sturdy Samoan wife’.47 The missionaries were not the only foreigners in this rapidly expanding economy: traders and plantation owners were building homes in the area and purchasing land. The famous Samoan-American ‘Queen’ Emma Coe, accompanied by 46 47 Danks, In Wild New Britain, 104. Ibid., 29. PHOTOGRAPHY AND CHRISTIAN MISSION 189 members of her extensive Samoan family and her partner Thomas Farrell settled permanently at Blanche Bay at this time.48 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 Lantern Shows Brown’s images were used in lantern shows in the Pacific, the colonies and in lectures and missionary meetings in Britain. In a tour of British congregations, Brown gave talks on the Pacific missions in Bradford, Manchester, Rochdale, Stockpool, Sheffield and Liverpool and illustrated his talks with lantern shows.49 In 1892, Brown toured New Zealand and gave 25 lectures over a period of 27 days. One evening in the coastal town of Timaru in the South Island Brown lectured on ‘Picturesque New Guinea, to a sizeable audience, who testified to their delight with his racy and stirring utterances, and the pictures exhibited, by frequent rounds of applause’.50 Heathen and Christian audiences in the Pacific were treated to similar shows. While it is often presumed that the before/after images of conversion were for the benefit of European audiences eager for evidence of the success of missions to which they had contributed, Brown, believing such benefits to be self-evident, showed heathen Solomon Islanders images of people in Fiji, New Guinea and ‘other places . . . before the introduction of Christianity, and what they were afterwards’ as an inducement to worship.51 In 1891, villagers on the new Methodist field of Dobu were shown a ‘Lantern Lecture’ comprised of plates made the year earlier when Brown first travelled to the region: ‘there was great excitement among them when they saw their own photos on the screen . . . they called out the names of each person as they recognised them and were all both pleased and surprised at the entertainment.’52 Prints were sent to Christians in the Pacific for whom the images were a record of mission life and sometimes sacrifices: in Brown’s notebook for 1897 he reminded himself to ‘send photo of Elikapo at Waira to his widow at Gataivai . . . The mission sisters in Dobu all want a picture of those taken in Dobu and Goodenough’.53 While a semiotic analysis of the image and the caption is one means of investigating the photographic artefacts of the New Britain Methodist Mission, such a narrow focus denies the rich source of evidence on Brown’s subjects in his texts: journals, letters and printed media. For various reasons, Brown inscribed his photographs and negatives with minimal contextual information. Yet other texts hint at the role of the subject in the creation of the image well beyond their physical presence. In practical terms Brown was reliant on the cooperation of his photographic subjects to make effective images using the wet plate process. Yet Brown was also dependent on his subjects for the success of the mission as well as 48 Peter Sack and Dymphna Clark (eds and trans), Eduard Hernsheim South Sea Merchant (Boroko 1983), 64. Brown to L. Brown, 17 Sept. Letterbook 1886–1889, A1686–4–5, MLA. 50 New Zealand Methodist, 27 Aug. 1892. 51 Brown, George Brown D.D., 520. 52 Missionary Review, 1 Oct. 1891. 53 Brown, notebook 1897, Notes of his 3rd visit to New Guinea and the islands east of it, A1686-17, MLA. 49 190 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:50 11 September 2017 the welfare of the entire Christian party. Just as the image of ‘King Dick’ (To Pulu) with his wives is a document of a tenuous friendship built from necessity, the image of Lydia in the inland village is a document of the fragility of the missionaries’ situation. Without a thorough examination of the texts, these readings could be reversed to become images of the assertive civilising missionary and the alleged faltering of Bismarck cultures under threat from European influences. What is apparent is that Brown used his photographs in a variety of contexts throughout his life. By looking again at the moment of photography and the performance of its creation, these images document an historic encounter between the missionary and the peoples of the Bismarck Archipelago. ABSTRACT In 1875, Methodist George Brown arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago to establish the New Britain Mission. Based in the Duke of York Islands, Brown’s territory covered New Ireland and the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain. The mission was one of the first to be photographed from its inception. The Australian Museum holds 96 plates from the first five years of the mission. Brown’s photographs are a visual record of conditions and peoples of the time. Analysed in relation to Brown’s writings they are indicative of the relationships and bonds established through photography both in the mission field and across wider scientific and church audiences. The methodology employed here also challenges the kinds of interpretations of photographs that can arise from visual analyses relying solely on the caption and the posing of the subject.