Exposing New Guinea The early photographers, W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt Volume 1 Antje Carolin Lübcke A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University July 2016 © Copyright by Antje Carolin Lübcke 2016 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks must go to Chris Ballard, Bronwen Douglas, and Gael Newton who took me on as a PhD student and helped me to the finish line with this project – thank you, thank you, thank you. I also thank The Australian National University for financial assistance given in the form of travel grants to carry out extensive archival research in the UK and Europe in early 2013, and The Commonwealth Department of Education for the APA Scholarship that allowed me to come to Australia to undertake my PhD. One of the most heartening experiences of the past years has been meeting some of the superstar archivists, librarians, and curators in charge of the photographic records of our pasts. Their knowledge, passion, care, and dedication to preserving these valuable objects and ensuring they are accessible to the public deserve recognition. In particular, Rebecca Conway, Jude Philp, Kylie Moloney, Karina Taylor, Gael Newton, Alan Davies, Geoffrey Barker, Zara Krpata, and Jocelyn Dudding – thank you for sharing your knowledge and opening the doors to the collections in your care. For their interest in my project and the helpful and informative discussions about historical photographs and the representation of New Guinea, I am grateful to Max Quanchi, Jude Philp, Elena Govor, Joanna Sassoon, and Jane Lydon. You helped strengthen my resolve that the New Guinea photographs of W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt are worthy of a PhD thesis. And to my ANU CHL postgraduate colleagues, Coombs building officemates, and Braddon flatmates: you all made my PhD experience the best it could be. Thank you for the feedback on my writing, intense academic discussions (Andrew, Graeme, Nic, Latu, Siobhan, Dario), laughs, pints (Adam, Jack), and baking (Pyone). To Tiffany, Karen, Liz, Lorien, Karina, Siobhan, Kylie, Crit, Christopher, Meghan, and Kenton: nothing prepared me for this PhD Odyssey but you all got me through it. Your friendship and support (and keen proofreading eye, Kenton) means the world to me. Thank you (though ‘thank you’ doesn’t seem nearly enough)! Finally, to my parents, Hildegard and Ralf, my sisters, Eva and Lena, and my lovely Simon – your gentle encouragement and unfailing support will take me a lifetime to repay. May these bound pages be a start. for Karina ABSTRACT This thesis explores the early photographic representation of southeast New Guinea through a close examination of the lives and work of two of the first Europeans to fix the region and its inhabitants on glass plate negatives. It has been acknowledged that the London Missionary Society missionary William G. Lawes and the professional photographer John W. Lindt created images of New Guinea that have become iconic through their repeated reproduction in print media, their global dispersal, and replication by subsequent visitors-with-cameras to the region. However, the immediate circumstances of their photographs’ production have received little attention in the literature. Focussing on the nature of Lawes’s and Lindt’s photographic encounters, traces of which can be read from the images themselves as well as their writings, reveals the significance of the camera as well as the agency of Papuans in shaping the photographic record. The contemporary framings of their New Guinea images are also considered in order to understand fully the different trajectories for the promotion and influence of their photographs, which are now equally widely dispersed in archive collections around the world. In the chapters that follow I reconstitute the histories of Lawes’s and Lindt’s New Guinea photographs in order to better understand their production and circulation. The result of this investigation is a more nuanced visual history that encompasses the specific encounters, networks, technology, and texts that shaped the early photographic record of New Guinea. CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE Approaching W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt and the photographic representation of New Guinea 1 CHAPTER TWO New Guinea before the lens: European imaginings and images 30 CHAPTER THREE Bringing New Guinea into focus: W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt in New Guinea 69 CHAPTER FOUR Exposing New Guinea: W. G. Lawes’s and J. W. Lindt’s photographic encounters 114 CHAPTER FIVE Fixing New Guinea in the colonial imagination: J. W. Lindt’s ‘Picturesque New Guinea’ in Australia and Europe 150 CHAPTER SIX In print: Mission, anthropological, and other framings of W. G. Lawes’s New Guinea photographs 190 CHAPTER SEVEN Framing views: The legacy of W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt in the visualisation of New Guinea 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY 246 CHAPTER ONE Approaching W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt and the photographic representation of New Guinea In the late nineteenth century, New Guinea – and more specifically the southeast portion of present-day Papua New Guinea – took on a more distinct form in European imaginings through the relatively new technology of the camera (figs. 1.1 & 1.2). Though Europeans had engaged with this region of the world from the early sixteenth century, when Spanish voyagers first sighted the island’s coastlines, European footfalls were limited to its shorelines. The arrival of the London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary William George Lawes and his small family in Port Moresby in 1874 marked the beginning of more intense European-Papuan encounters, encounters that could now be captured on glass-plate negatives. It has been acknowledged that Lawes and the professional photographer John W. Lindt created photographs of New Guinea that have become iconic through their repeated reproduction in print media, their global dispersal, and replication by subsequent visitors-with-cameras to the region. However, the immediate circumstances and local contexts of the production of their photographs have received little attention in the literature. Taking my cue from the ‘material turn’ in the humanities, and the ‘visual turn’ that preceded it, in this thesis I examine the grounded encounters that shaped Lawes’s and Lindt’s pictures of New Guinea. Rather than select a few iconic images, the two men’s oeuvres are considered as a whole and alongside each other, a method that allows for more searching questions to be asked regarding the two men’s encounters with the people and the land. Focussing on the nature of Lawes’s and Lindt’s photographic encounters, traces of which can be read from the images themselves as well as their writings, also reveals the roles that local Papuans played in shaping that photographic record. What further crystallises from a close examination of the visual and textual documents produced by Lawes and Lindt is the different motivations the two men had for photographing New Guinea. Lawes, the pioneer missionary in Port Moresby, 1 was clearly driven in part by a desire to document the progress of his work amongst the ‘heathen’ population. As the first permanent European ‘settler’ in the region he also believed he could aid the work of anthropologists in the metropolitan centres by photographing the Papuans in his mission district, contributing to the steadily growing corpus of ‘portrait types’ that became a staple of anthropological studies by the late nineteenth century. Lindt, on the other hand, was driven to travel to New Guinea in 1885 as much by his curiosity about the island and its inhabitants as by his keen business sense and artistic aspirations. Lindt wanted to encounter and capture ‘savage’ Papuans and photograph the newest of Britain’s colonial ‘possessions’ in order to increase sales of his images at a time when photographic studios in Australia were beginning to struggle as a result of a financial crisis as well as the increased accessibility of photography to amateurs. Lindt’s images are certainly more accomplished than those of Lawes and he was more adept at advertising his work than the missionary. Despite these differences, both men’s photographs of New Guinea can be found in collections the world over. My archive story This thesis originated during a six-day topic-finding trip to Sydney in August 2011.1 Though I had begun my PhD in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University in March of the same year, my original thesis topic, which centred on the visual production of the Hamburg South Seas Expedition (1908–10), had fallen through as a result of the rather tight gate-keeping of the photographic collections of the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology that I needed to access to undertake my project. Having been thrown off-course, it was decided, in consultation with my supervisors, to turn to more accessible archives. I had yet to immerse myself in visual sources (as I had been planning to travel to Germany for 1 Though I have always been a self-reflexive researcher throughout my studies, I am here explicitly heeding Antoinette Burton’s, and other scholars’, call to tell my ‘archive story’ (Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). On the ‘archival turn’ see also, Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History’, in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith Axel, 47–65 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); Patrice Ladwig, et al., ‘Fieldwork Between the Folders: Fragments, Traces, and the Ruins of Colonial Archives’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers, Working Paper No. 141 (Halle/Saale, 2012): 1–23; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009)).