“A Library of Photographs Covering the Entire Continent”: Walkabout Magazine and the Politics of Documentary in Post-War Australia

Abstract

Spanning five central decades of the mid-twentieth century (1934–1974), Walkabout was one of Australia’s best-loved illustrated weeklies. Photography played a crucial role in the magazine’s attempt to represent the vast Australian continent and its neighboring countries. While historians and critics have regarded the magazine as an example of boosterish nationalism and middle-brow anti-intellectualism, I argue that the periodical should be considered as an amalgam of reactionary and progressive ideals: Walkabout was a paradoxical combination of high-modernism and romantic anti-capitalism, conservative nationalism and left populism. Although it glossed over many of the problems facing the country, the editors’ emphasis on “factual photography” was indicative of a democratic impulse. I offer an examination of the magazine’s coverage of extractive projects as an example of Walkabout’s ideological contradictions. In particular, I look at Laurence Le Guay and Robert Emerson Curtis’s 1947 photo-essay about the mining town of Mount Isa to show how the periodical attempted to reconcile two antagonistic gazes: that of the corporate engineer and that of the miner.

Keywords:

• realism
• high modernism
• photography and work
• social documentary
• romantic anti-capitalism

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Anna Johnston for her insightful comments and Ingrid Finnane for her editorial help. Many thanks to the staff of the Australian National Library for providing digital access to Walkabout magazine. This essay would have not be possible without their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 Strikingly, Walkabout is not mentioned in Fay Anderson and Sally Young’s recent history of press photography in Australia (2016).

2 For its subject matter and tendency to exoticize foreign cultures, Walkabout shared some significant similarities with National Geographic. However, unlike its American counterpart, the magazine’s scope was limited to Australia and the Asia-Pacific. There has been a significant literature on the history of the National Geographic and its photography (Lutz and Collins 1993; Schulten 2001; Hawkins 2010) but not much research has been conducted on Walkabout. Most existing scholarship on Walkabout’s photography has focused on the representation of Aborigines. The magazine tended to portray them as debased, passive “Stone-Age” men, lacking moral, and intellectual skills (McGuire 1993; Ross 1999; Barnes 2007). However, Mitchell Rolls has called for a more nuanced reading of Walkabout’s politics of representation (Rolls 2009). The only comprehensive study on the periodical is Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls’ volume Travelling Home (Rolls and Johnston 2016). While the volume places the magazine well within its historical context, the authors’ analysis is widely focused on the literary component of Walkabout rather than on its photography.

3 ANTA’s public relation machine was, according to Holmes, extremely efficient. Between 1929 and 1935, ANTA had produced and distributed “a grand total of 2,670,000 folders and booklets, 165,700 posters and 55,000 photographs” (Holmes 1935).

4 For a review of the strengths and weaknesses of Willis’s book, see Geoffrey Batchen (2002) and Helen Ennis (2011).

5 Adopting a Foucauldian’s approach, in his seminal work The Burden of Representation, Tagg linked the documentary to the formation of the modern state. Documentary, he remarked, is “already implicated in the historically developed techniques of observation-domination” and “it remains imprisoned with an historical form of the régime of truth and sense” (Tagg 1988). Drawing on the writings of sociologist Pierre Bourdieau and semiologist Roland Barthes, Solomon-Godeau argued that “photography functions to ratify and affirm the complex ideological web that at any moment in historical time is perceived as reality tout court” (Solomon-Godeau 1991).

6 As Roger Osborne has pointed out, in the 1930s the market for periodicals in Australia—many of which were lavishly illustrated—was fiercely competitive and included a large number of American and English publications vying for attention in a media saturated public sphere (Osborne 2008). For an introductory overview of the major Australian popular magazines see Lindesay (1983).

7 Editorial, Walkabout, November 1934, p. 7.

8 “Photographs Wanted!” Walkabout, April 1947, p. 48.

9 The Ladies’ Home Journal, for example, helped to promote and reinforce the consumerism and patriarchal structure of American culture by adopting new graphic techniques (color, photography, serial cartoons, seriality) that blurred the boundaries between the rhetoric of romance and the rhetoric of scientific housework. In so doing, Stein argues, the periodical managed to pass off disciplined and regulated housework for romance, tying the pleasures of consumption with the social and moral duties of self-improvement (Stein 1991).

10 Although the term documentary is full of ambiguities, insofar as, historically, it has encompassed various attitudes and contradictory definitions, it describes Walkabout’s photography well. Education and conservation have been central to the discourse on documentary since the beginning of the twentieth century. For a discussion of the different meanings of the term “documentary,” see Olivier Lugon (2008). Lugon writes that in the early twentieth century in France the “film documentaire” referred to a cultural or travel film of an edifying character.

11 Even archives have a “style” and deal in veiled rhetoric. As Robin Kelsey has argued, the state-sponsored nineteenth-century photographic surveys of the American west developed a pictorial style that was distinctive and that mixed romantic tropes with instrumentality. The new “archival style” developed by photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan responded to the problems of providing “objective” information about the country’s remote regions while satisfying the needs of advertising the work of scientists involved in those expeditions (Kelsey 2008).

12 The first article illustrated by color photography—“Highway Number One” by George Farewell with photographs by David Beals—appeared in the December 1965 volume. According to Sally Stein, in twentieth century illustrated periodicals, black and white printing was associated with “Truth” and instruction, whereas color with pleasure and consumption. Color printing was, also, one of the most privileged visual rhetoric of women’s magazines (Stein 1991).

13 Environmental historian Libby Robin has discussed the importance of aerial photography in mid-twentieth century representation of the Australian desert. This visual trope, Robin claims, reinforced the optimistic, utopian vision of a future Australia whereby the desert would have been turned into the fertile, prosperous heart of the nation. From the vantage point of the sky, “it seemed that it was just a matter of water points to civilise the country, allowing agricultural and pastoral possibilities to redeem the land” (Robin 2007, 108). On the dystopian and utopian discourses surrounding aerial photography, see Paula Amad (2012). On the history of aerial vision in Australian cinema, see Robert Dixon (2001, 2012).

14 Aerial photography could satisfy both scientist and the would-be artist-photographer. It pleased the scientist, for it provided the illusion of a comprehensive and objective bird’s eye view; it also pleased the discriminating eye of the amateur, for it dovetailed a modernist fascination with flatness and geometric patterns. Aerial photography was praised by readers for its “superb quality” (Rolls and Johnston 2016).

15 Bulletin of the Australian Geographic Society No. 5, 27 February 1948.

16 Ibid.

17 Editorial, Walkabout, October 1947.

18 The subject matter of these inventories varied. Typically, this ranged from geological formations to wildlife specimens and architecture. When the subjects Ire people, these tended to be Aborigines and other indigenous groups. One of the most astonishing camera supplements of the period is a series of pictures documenting the different uniforms of police officers (1950 March edition).

19 Editorial, Walkabout, March 1935, p. 9.

20 “Notes and Letters,” Walkabout April 1947.

21 The expression “Australia Unlimited” harks back to the work of poet and journalist Edwin Brady, who chose the phrase as the title of his 1918 monumental book. In it, Brady claimed optimistically that the desert interior of Australia could have been transformed by technology into a prosperous fertile land supporting a population of 200 million. Importantly, the volume relied extensively on photographs and, for its scope and encyclopedic ambition, can be considered as a sort of precedent of Walkabout. Like Walkabout, Brady’s Australia Unlimited was rife with statistics and technical information but also aimed to provide the “Romance of Facts” in “a cheerful literary fashion”. Like Walkabout, Brady’s magnum opus was a “mixture of travel adventure, journalism, propaganda, government statistics, biographies of prominent Australians, official reports, and nature writing” (Mirams 2012, 277).

22 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1944.

23 Le Guay’s pictures must be read in the context of Australian post-War documentary cinema and photography. Between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s the Federal Labor Government sponsored the production of documentary features through the establishment of the Australian National Film Board (1945) and the Film Division. As Albert Moran has remarked, Australian documentary filmmakers focused on the figure of the worker following the idea of a universal humanism for which “people everywhere Ire ‘just like ourselves’ and inherently deserving of our interest.” (Moran 1988, 62). Influenced by the principles of British filmmaker and theorist John Grierson, Australian filmmakers and photographers, including Le Guay and Dupain, advocated a realist art that should have spoken on behalf of the every man.

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Paolo Magagnoli

Paolo Magagnoli is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland. He has written widely on modern and contemporary art with a focus on documentary photography and cinema. He is the author of Documents of Utopia (Columbia University Press: 2015). His essays have appeared in Philosophy of Photography, Third Text, Afterall and Oxford Art Journal.