Photography, Early Cinema

and Colonial Modernity

Frontispiece. Unknown photographer. Spencer’s Pictures at the Lyceum. ML a4816001.
Photography, Early Cinema
and Colonial Modernity
Frank Hurley’s Synchronized
Lecture Entertainments
Robert Dixon
 Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2013

by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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First published in hardback by Anthem Press in 2011

Copyright © Robert Dixon (1954– ) 2013

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Dixon, Robert, 1954–
Photography, early cinema, and colonial modernity : Frank Hurley’s synchronized
lecture entertainments / Robert Dixon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85728-795-3 (hardback)
1. Hurley, Frank, 1885–1962. 2. Photographers–Australia–Biography.
3. Photography–History–20th century. 4. Cinematography–History–20th century.
5. Photography–Social aspects. 6. Civilization, Modern. I. Title.
TR140.H8D59 2011
770.92–dc23
2011035640

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 063 2 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1 78308 063 9 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an ebook.

 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction
Australia’s Embrace of Colonial Modernity xv
Chapter One
The Home of the Blizzard: Douglas Mawson’s Synchronized
Lecture Entertainment 1
Chapter Two
Guided Spectatorship: Exhibiting the Great War 39
Chapter Three
Touring the Nation: Shackleton’s ‘Marvellous Moving Pictures’
and the Australian Season of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice 109
Chapter Four
Entr’acte: Sir Ross Smith’s Flight, Aerial Vision and Colonial
Modernity 147
Chapter Five
Colonial Modernity and Its Others: Pearls and Savages
as a Multimedia Project 165
Conclusion 209

Notes 219
Bibliography 239
Index 247
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Front cover Frank Hurley. Bioto (Man with camera). nla.pic-vn3301430.

Frontispiece Unknown photographer. Spencer’s Pictures
at the Lyceum. ML a4816001.
1.1 Herbert G. Ponting. Kinematographing in the Pack.
Photographic illustration from Herbert G. Ponting,
The Great White South, or with Scott in the Antarctic
(1921; London: Duckworth 1923). 79
1.2 Herbert G. Ponting. Lantern Slide Projector.
Photographic illustration from Herbert G. Ponting,
The Great White South, or with Scott in the Antarctic
(1921; London: Duckworth 1923). 80
1.3a–c Herbert G. Ponting. With Captain Scott in the Antarctic.
Handbill, MAC 7DM. 81
1.4 Andrew Watson (photographer). Crevasse with
lid fallen in. MAC P178. 83
2.1 Unknown photographer. Ivor Castle and Raines & Co.
Dreadnaughts of the Battlefield, 1918. IWM Q28580. 84
2.2 Unknown photographer. Australian room of the
Imperial War Exhibition, Royal Academy,
London, 1918. IWM Q30499. 85
2.3 Unknown photographer. Exterior of the entry
to the Australian War Museum, Exhibition Building,
Prince Alfred Park, Sydney. AWM P01936.001. 86
2.4 Unknown photographer. Part of the aeroplane display
in the Melbourne Exhibition Building. AWM J01239. 87
viii PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

2.5a Frank Hurley. View of the gateway to the battlefield

of Ypres through Chateau Wood, in the Ypres Salient.
Original glass negative. AWM E01237. 88
2.5b Frank Hurley. Death’s Highway. Re-shot glass
negative. nla.pic-an23478305. 89
2.5c Frank Hurley. Death’s Highway. Catalogue of an
Exhibition of War Photographs by Capt. Fr.
Hurley…at the Kodak Salon, Sydney (March 1919). 90
2.6 Frank Hurley. Death the Reaper. Black and white
composite print. AWM P02514.001. 91
2.7 Frank Hurley. Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres.
Re-shot glass negative. nla.pic-an23816566. 92
2.8 Frank Hurley. Battle of Passchendaele. Re-shot
glass negative. nla.pic-an23478227. 93
2.9 Frank Hurley. An Episode after the Battle of
Zonnebeke. Composite enlargement photographed
leaning against a wall in London, May 1918.
AWM P01438.001. 94
3.1 Sir Ernest Shackleton… Marvellous Moving Pictures.
Handbill, Philharmonic Hall, London, 26 December
1919. BFI, Sir William Jury Collection, Item 36. 95
3.2 Frank Hurley. In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice.
Cinema poster, New Olympia, Sydney, 29 November
1919. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33. 96
3.3 Unknown illustrator. View of interior of hut on
Elephant Island. nla.pic-an24039583. 97
3.4 Frank Hurley. In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. Handbill,
King’s Cross Theatre, Sydney, 1 December 1919.
NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33. 98
3.5 Frank Hurley. In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. Sydney
Sun, 23 November 1919. NLA MS883,
Series 2, Item 33. 99
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

4.1 Unknown photographer. A Close View of ‘Augustus

Wood’ near Passchendaele Ridge (Ypres), Showing
the Shell-torn Ground, 17 October, 1917. Photographic
illustration from F. M. Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps
in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War 1914–1918,
volume VIII of the Official History of Australia in the War of
1914–1918. (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1923)
(St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press in
association with the Australian War Memorial, 1984). 100
4.2 Unknown photographer. Section of a typical artillery
map, showing method of ranging by reference to
‘clock face’. Photographic illustration from F. M. Cutlack,
The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres
of War 1914–1918, volume VIII of the Official History of
Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (Canberra: Australian
War Memorial, 1923) (St Lucia, Qld: University of
Queensland Press in association with the Australian
War Memorial, 1984). 101
4.3 Frank Hurley. Sir Ross Smith’s Flight. Handbill for the
London season. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33. 102
5.1 Frank Hurley. Pearls and Savages. Glass lantern
slide, composite print. nla.pic-an23381987-v. 103
5.2 Frank Hurley. The Lost Tribe. Cinema poster for
US tour. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35. 104
5.3 Frank Hurley. The Lost Tribe. Handbill, Carnegie
Hall, New York, February 1924. NFSA, 353710. 105
5.4 Frank Hurley. McClure’s Magazine. Cover.
NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35. 106
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AWM Australian War Memorial, Canberra

BFI British Film Institute, London
FL Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane
IWM Imperial War Museum, London
MAC Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum, Adelaide
ML Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra
OED Oxford English Dictionary
NFSA National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first began working with Hurley material in the late 1990s while researching
my book about Australia and Papua New Guinea, Prosthetic Gods: Travel,
Representation and Colonial Governance (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press,
2001), which includes some discussion of Hurley’s involvement with the Ross
Smith Flight and his two expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. Although I did
not know it at the time, when I began my research for Photography, Early Cinema
and Colonial Modernity, at least two other major projects on Hurley were already
underway. These were Martyn Jolly’s PhD thesis, Fake Photographs: Making
Truths in Photography (University of Sydney: Sydney College of the Arts, 2003)
and Alasdair McGregor’s Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (Camberwell, Vic.:
Viking Penguin, 2004). I have learned a great deal from both of them, and
inevitably there are some overlaps between our three near-contemporary
projects. Yet Hurley’s body of work in print, photography and cinema seems
almost inexhaustible to the interests of contemporary humanities research,
and our approaches and purposes remain distinctive.
I am grateful to a number of colleagues from various institutions who have
either read and commented upon earlier versions of this book or created
enabling contexts for the presentation and publication of work in progress.
They include Natalie Adamson, Rex Butler, David Carter, Robert Clarke,
Barbara Creed, Martin Crotty, Melpomene Dixon, Simon During, Melissa
Harper, Toby Haggith, John Hay, Ian Henderson, Jeanette Hoorn, Andrew
Jack, Martyn Jolly, Veronica Kelly, Philip Kitley, Christopher Lee, Andrew
McCann, Stephen Martin, Margaret Maynard, Katherine Newey, Tom
O’Regan, Graham Smith, Graeme Turner, Richard Waterhouse, Elizabeth
Webby, Gillian Whitlock, Richard White and Tim Youngs. I am especially
grateful to my colleagues at the School of English, Media Studies and Art
History in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Queensland.
My research was greatly facilitated by the staff of the Fryer Library,
University of Queensland; the staff of the Mitchell Library, State Library of
New South Wales; Margy Burn, Graeme Powell, Marie-Louise Ayers, Sylvia
Carr and the staff of the National Library of Australia; Toby Haggith and
xiv PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

the staff of the Imperial War Museum; the staff of the British Film Institute;
Andrew Jack and the staff of the Australian War Memorial; Mark Pharaoh
and the staff of the Mawson Antarctic Collection, South Australian Museum;
Rose Docker and the staff of the Australian Museum, Sydney; and Carl
Bridge and Ian Henderson of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies,
King’s College London.
Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity was written at the same time
as its companion volume, The Diaries of Frank Hurley 1912–1941, also published
by Anthem Press, which I co-edited with Christopher Lee. The manuscript
diaries held in the Mitchell Library and the National Library of Australia
were professionally transcribed for that edition by Joan Garvan and edited
by Stephanie Owen-Reeder. I am also grateful to my research assistants at
the University of Sydney, Lachlan Brown, Meegan Hasted and Georgina
Loveridge, and to Tej Sood, Janka Romero and the staff of Anthem Press,
London, for their support during the production of the text.
The conduct of my research was supported by an Australian Research
Council Australian Professorial Fellowship (DP0346109), initially at the
University of Queensland (2003–06) and then at the University of Sydney
(2007). Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in articles published
in History of Photography, Journal of Australian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and
Film, and Studies in Travel Writing.
This book is dedicated to my granddaughter, Eila Brescia, born 10 March
2011, and to the memory of my mother, Eila Dixon (née Eglington), who before
my birth in 1954 worked with oils as a photographic colourist at Freeman’s
Studio, 318 George Street, Sydney. Freeman’s is Sydney’s oldest photographic
studio, established by William Freeman in 1848, and is a direct link to the
studio system in which Frank Hurley worked as a young photographer in the
early years of the twentieth century. In the late 1950s, well before Freeman’s
moved to its present location in Castlereagh Street, I distinctly remember
being presented to ‘Old Mr Waller’ (Valentine Waller), who in 1933 became
the sole proprietor of Freeman’s. To the best of my recollection, it was Mr
Waller who, as a gift to my mother, personally took a series of studio portrait
photographs of me aged 4–5 years.

Robert Dixon
University of Sydney
 Introduction
AUSTRALIA’S EMBRACE OF
COLONIAL MODERNITY

Sydney, 26 December 1909: The Lang–Fitzsimmons Fight

In the sweltering morning heat of Boxing Day 1909, thousands of Sydneysiders
climbed aboard the King Street trams, which were leaving at the rate of one
a minute, and rode out to the Stadium at Rushcutters Bay. They were going
to witness a major international spectacle, the heavyweight title fight between
‘Ruby’ Bob Fitzsimmons and Bill Lang. Following his brief early career in
Australia, Fitzsimmons had been taken to the United States by boxing
promoter Larry Foley and became the first man in ring history to win three
world titles. At his peak, he was said to have had ‘a mind like electricity and
a punch as hard as a rivet gun.’1 Since the 1890s, boxing had become not
only a very popular form of urban entertainment, but also a common subject
of the new actuality films. The Veriscope Company’s The Corbett-Fitzsimmons
Fight was one of the earliest of them, premiering at New York’s Academy of
Music in May 1897. Around one hundred minutes long and accompanied by
a lecturer’s commentary and vaudeville acts, the film made up one of the first
full-length entertainment programmes to feature moving pictures.2
The promoter of the Sydney fight, Hugh D. McIntosh, was another
Australian who had won international celebrity. Born in Sydney in 1876,
he began as a chorus boy at the Tivoli and promoted his first boxing match
between two visiting Afro-Americans in 1901. Coinciding with the visit of
America’s Great White Fleet in 1908, he opened the Stadium at Rushcutters
Bay, boasting that it was ‘the Largest Open-Air Hippodrome in the World’.
On Boxing Day of that year he achieved real international fame by staging
the World Heavyweight Championship fight between Tommy Burns and
Jack Johnson. Billed as ‘the Greatest Fistic Event in History’, it was promoted
as a contest for ‘Racial Supremacy’. Covered by more than two hundred
American journalists, Johnson’s victory provoked an extraordinary response in
the United States, including lynchings and race riots in southern states. As tie-
ins McIntosh sold postcards of incidents from the fight and staged post-match
exhibitions at his chain of Tivoli theatres. He also had the fight filmed, and
xvi PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

negotiated exhibition rights in Europe, Great Britain and the United States,
where he lectured to the silent film. He used the wealth and celebrity generated
by the tour to establish himself as a promoter in New York, Paris and London.
Nicknamed ‘Huge Deal’, he dressed like a prince, drove a Pierce-Arrow car
with his crest on the side, and bought an English country seat once owned
by Lord Kitchener.3 It was McIntosh’s international connections that secured
‘Ruby’ Bob Fitzsimmons for the Sydney bout in 1909. Supervised by hundreds
of police, 11,000 spectators paid up to £5 a seat to watch the now 47-year-old
Fitzsimmons beaten almost to death by the young, up-and-coming Melbourne
boxer, Bill Lang.4
Standing ring-side that morning was a young and as yet little-known local
photographer named Frank Hurley. Then 24, he would soon establish his own
celebrity as the camera artist with Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic
Expedition (1911–14) and Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic
Expedition (1914–17). Using a London-made Ross twin-lens half-plate
camera, one of only two in Australia, Hurley was experimenting with high-
speed photography by taking close-up shots of the fighters in action. Fifty years
later he told writer and sporting journalist D’Arcy Niland, ‘No time was lost in
replacing plates once a shot was taken. I could do it without losing the fighters’
image on the screen because the camera was fitted with a special magazine –
an Ernemann – which made the job of changing almost automatic.’5 Hurley’s
photographs of the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight were published in the illustrated
Sydney newspaper, the Lone Hand, on 1 April 1910. The aging Fitzsimmons’
face is sunburned and blistered, his mouth is cut, and the veins in his neck
bulge with effort. Lang’s nose is crushed on his cheek. The fighters’ faces
convey pain, bewilderment and exhaustion. In another shot, the referee is
caught in a moment of anguish as Fitzsimmons lies unconscious on the mat.
The Lone Hand was openly critical of boxing as a form of entertainment, citing
Hurley’s photographs as evidence of ‘the state…to which men are reduced in
the course of these unedifying spectacles.’6 Talking to Niland, Hurley recalled
the extraordinary effect his photographs had on people: ‘For weeks they
attracted crowds of curious and disputatious citizens around a Sydney shop
window where they were displayed.’7

Australia and International Modernity

This account of the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight resonates with much recent
research about Australia’s engagement with the experience of international
modernity in the fields of cultural studies, early cinema and photographic
history; the history of the nineteenth-century stage and urban entertainments;
and certain forms of social and cultural history. I want briefly now to begin
 INTRODUCTION xvii

teasing out some of these issues, as they will inform my analysis of Hurley’s
career in the chapters that follow. Even at this early date – 1909 – we can see,
for example, that the spectacular career of the mature Frank Hurley was not
something he created solely by his own talents, prodigious though they were;
it was also an artefact shaped by the emerging institutions and technologies of
international modernity, especially by the new forms of visuality, print culture,
mass media and urban commercial entertainment. Jill Julius Matthews
describes Sydney’s eager and at times delirious embrace of the modern world
as ‘a romance’ that began in the early 1910s with the arrival from overseas
of ‘a stream of amusing gadgets, scientific marvels and diverting ideas’.8 As
Michael Gray and Gael Newton recognize, Hurley was himself a product of
that time, ‘a child of the modern newspaper and magazine era, the musical
show, the cinema, and newsreels.’9 Yet this constitutive relation between his
career and the technologies, social formations and institutions of international
popular culture has only ever been incidental to writing about Hurley to date.
In fact his career both formed and was formed by the proliferating new media
of representation, of which he soon became a master. These include lantern-
slide lectures, photographic exhibitions, documentary and feature films,
advertising, newspaper and magazine articles, radio broadcasts, travel writing
and illustrated books.
As a photographer and showman working in Sydney in early the
1920s, Hurley was one of the mediators of international modernity.
And he worked in these media at a time when their institutional contexts,
commercial imperatives, aesthetic values and professional codes of practice
were undergoing profound and often incompatible transformations. Even
different kinds of photographer – the scientific photographer, the portrait
photographer and the news photographer, for example – did not belong to
the same institutional contexts, did not share the same social status and codes
of practice, or sell to the same markets, let alone the photographer and the
cinematographer, or the travel writer and the print journalist. We can sense
these discontinuities in the Lone Hand’s distinction between what constitutes a
‘spectacle’ in the field of urban entertainment and what is ‘edifying’. And yet
Frank Hurley, at one time or another, was all of these things. How did Hurley
chart his career across these different fields? How did he construct a persona –
what Boris Thomashevsky calls a ‘biographical legend’10 – that allowed him
to practise in these different media and their diverse institutional contexts?
Two further points to be drawn from the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight may
be taken together: these are the promiscuous intertextuality of the new
popular cultural forms, and the fact that the culture industries were at once
internationalizing – if not yet quite international – and locally inflected.
As theatre historian Veronica Kelly argues, ‘social identities within modernity
xviii PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

are typically posited on a multi-centered mobility: of traded goods; capital and

entrepreneurial initiative; popular images and texts; and – most crucially –
people themselves.’11 Not only were the new cultural professionals astonishingly
mobile, utilizing the international systems of travel and communication, but
their audiences themselves were fashionably cosmopolitan, familiarly ‘at home’
in a broad range of places, cultures and styles. In her study of the circulation
of visual culture around the Pacific Rim in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries – including cinema, photography and commercial design –
art historian Erika Esau argues that this was a cultural economy governed by
‘aesthetic exchange dependent on itinerancy, reproducibility and portability’.12
These general principles are well illustrated by the personnel involved in
the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight: they all had local, national and international
reputations which were fluid and mobile, depending on the context and
occasion. Like ‘Huge Deal’ McIntosh and ‘Ruby’ Bob Fitzsimmons, Frank
Hurley would also become a famous local on the international stage. Born
in Sydney’s Glebe in 1885, he went on to achieve international celebrity by
his involvement in one Australian and one British Antarctic expedition, but
when he marketed his films, photography and writing in the United States,
Canada and Great Britain, he always did so as a professional Australian. The
exhibition and reproduction of Hurley’s photographs of the fight, taken with
a British camera and the film stock of one of his earliest corporate sponsors,
Kodak, were inseparable from the public, staged spectacle of the fight and
its afterlife in the world’s cinemas and periodical press. An internationally
popular form of urban entertainment, boxing was already closely tied, both
in its staging and subsequent representation, to the new cinema programmes,
themselves made up of mixed media, including lantern slides, music and
theatrical performance.
The crowds who came to see the Sydney fight in 1909 brought with them
a set of competencies and expectations drawn from their experience as
consumers of a diversity of modern, commercial and above all international
urban entertainment formats. These were sophisticated, up-to-date, ‘knowing’
consumers. It was the same in the United States: as Jack Poggi points out,
provincial audiences there too expected to have the ‘very best’ that New York
offered.13 As Kelly argues, ‘the cultural life of Australia and New Zealand
at the start of the new century was scarcely a site of provincial belatedness.’
Impresarios like McIntosh and J. C. Williamson knew only too well that
so-called ‘colonial’ markets had cosmopolitan tastes fed by the impression
of simultaneity created by mass communication. Kelly points out that ‘it is
typical of dispersed societies in a modernizing world that these audiences,
like American ones, wanted “the best” and expected it as their prerogative.’14
Yet they must also have experienced a complex mixture of loyalties and
 INTRODUCTION xix

emotional investments. As Kelly warns, ‘it is not always useful to polarize the
cosmopolitan and the local, since each inter-actively constitutes the other.’15
McIntosh and Fitzsimmons had begun their careers locally but were now
international celebrities, and as such were as likely to incur the crowd’s
resentment as arouse its admiration. Sydneysiders took pride in witnessing a
local fighter, Bill Lang – who was actually from Melbourne – defeat a world
champion known to thousands in America through Veriscope’s film of the
Corbett–Fitzsimmons fight. But did they revel most of all in the immediacy
and local nature of their fight, or in their awareness of the simultaneous
connections it established between Rushcutters Bay and the great centres of
modern urban civilization in London, New York and Chicago? As Matthews
says of cinema audiences in Sydney at this time, they were linked in ‘to
a global community’; they were ‘part of a modern, cosmopolitan, global
audience’.16 The experience of social modernity produced by the new
media, then, can perhaps be described as an investment in the mobility of
cosmopolitanism that is at its most intense when felt locally.

Biography and the Social Life of Things

Let me turn now from this brief moment near the beginning of Frank Hurley’s
career to another near its end. Not long after he died at his home in Sydney
in January 1962, Hurley’s widow, Antoinette, sold the bulk of his personal
collection of negatives, lantern slides, transparencies, diaries, scrapbooks and
other papers to the National Library of Australia. This was nothing new. In
fact, parts of his vast body of work accumulated over his 50-year career had
been migrating discretely into the archives for some time. As early as 1927,
Hurley himself had sold to the Australian Museum in Sydney most of the
glass negatives and lantern slides from his two expeditions to Torres Strait
and Papua, conducted only a few years earlier, between 1920 and 1923. At
different times and following diverse pathways, other Hurley material has
found its way into the Mawson Antarctic Collection at the South Australian
Museum, the Australian War Memorial and ScreenSound (the National
Screen and Sound Archives) in Canberra, the Mitchell Library in Sydney,
the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, and the Royal Geographical
Society and Imperial War Museum in London.
In recent years, ‘the archive’ and ‘the museum’ have become important sites
of cultural analysis and critique. They are, as Tony Bennett and others argue,
places of disciplinary regulation and enclosure, where the diverse contexts
in which cultural objects were once produced, circulated and consumed
are suddenly destroyed by the curator’s practice of classification, storage
and exhibition.17 This destruction of context is certainly the effect caused
xx PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

by scrolling through the more than 11,000 Hurley images on the website of
the National Library of Australia.18 There, images sourced from a variety of
formats, including glass and plastic negatives, lantern slides and exhibition
prints, and with subjects as diverse as Antarctica, the Middle East, the Gulf of
Papua and Bondi Beach, resolve and tumble chaotically together on the screen
in a homogeneous format. It is a stunning example of time-space compression.
Elsewhere in the library, fragile glass negatives that have survived years of
world travel now lie side by side in cold storage, their brittle edges shielded
by masking tape, while in the manuscripts collection, alongside Hurley’s
diaries, thousands of articles and advertisements, press notices, photographic
illustrations, interviews and reviews culled from hundreds of newspapers and
magazines throughout the English-speaking world quietly crumble to pieces in
his scrapbooks, wrapped in acid-free paper and protective plastic.
It is important, of course, not to reify ‘the archive’ or to overestimate
the extent or duration of its regulatory effects. Like other actually existing
institutions, the National Library of Australia is not a theoretical construct,
but a vibrant and innovative public institution actively involved in opening
its collection to the sometimes unpredictable effects of public exhibition and
use. After varying periods of silence and stasis, many objects in the Hurley
collections there and around the world are on the move again, animated by
new forms of production, circulation and consumption that are often initiated
by the institutions that now house them. These forms include exhibitions,
websites, illustrated books, television dramas and documentaries, DVDs, video
collections and feature films, including films in IMAX format. In these new
locations, Hurley’s original texts enter once again into novel combinations and
produce new meanings.
Among these new things in the world – and confirming the growing
interest in his work – there are now four Hurley biographies.19 Each of them
decants the sometimes overwhelming evidence of Hurley’s 50-year career into
the manageable shape of a ‘life’. That life is divided, in turn, into phases
corresponding with the major events that shaped it: Mawson’s Australasian
Antarctic Expedition, Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition,
the Great War, the Ross Smith Flight, and so on. Given Hurley’s career
as a photographer, film maker, lecturer and writer, it is perhaps ironic that
what these biographies strive to bring before us is not the ceaseless work of
representation itself, but the life of the person and the originary events in
which he took part, as if Hurley’s photographs, films, lectures, books and
newspaper articles were so many windows on to his own being in the world.
So strong is popular biography’s interest in the categories of the person and
the legendary event that the most recent of them begins with an account of
the biographer’s own voyage to the Antarctic, his pilgrimage to Mawson’s hut,
 INTRODUCTION xxi

and his entry into Hurley’s old dark room, where he encounters the ghostly
traces of his subject:

And so we cut, dug and shovelled [away]...decades of accumulated drift… The

hut’s interior was gradually revealed, and the presence of its long-departed
builders and occupants seemed to return to that chill space. As the expedition’s
photographer, I naturally sensed the rather daunting presence of a young Hurley
looking over my shoulder… The darkroom in particular seemed almost to ring
with Hurley’s yelps of delight over his latest photographic triumph.20

Perhaps biography really does begin, as Stephen Greenblatt once said of

history, with a desire to speak with the dead.21 By contrast, Photography, Early
Cinema and Colonial Modernity emphatically is not a biography of Frank Hurley.
I have never been to the Antarctic and I have no plans to follow in Hurley’s
footsteps – as one British documentary film maker recently did – to outback
Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, South Georgia, Elephant Island
and the Middle East. There will be no conjuring of the dead. My intention
is not to write another biography of Hurley ‘the man’ – about whom, surely,
nothing of significance remains to be said – but of the social life of the many
marvellous and meaningful things he made: the negatives, photographic
prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles that
once enjoyed a very active life of their own. It was these objects, after all, and
not his unexceptional personality, that made Frank Hurley an international
celebrity, and which can give us an insight into Australia’s engagement with
the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the
twentieth century. The level of description at which I will work is not that
of personality or the originary events of Hurley’s life, but the other, media
events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. We will be interested
especially in Hurley’s stage and screen practice in presenting what he called
his synchronized lecture entertainments.
These shifts from the life to the career, from the originary event to the
social practice of its mediation, and from representation to presentation and
even simulation, are licenced, in part, by the late twentieth century’s interest
in questions of authorship and textuality – by what we now describe, for the
sake of convenience, as postmodernism. But they are also licensed by the early
twentieth century’s slightly different interest in what historians of the popular
stage and screen call the aesthetics of presentationalism. There are connections
between the late twentieth-century aesthetics of postmodernism and the early
twentieth-century aesthetics of presentationalism that will help us, here and
now in the twenty-first century, to understand that other, earlier time, but
there are also unbridgeable historical differences that we will need to respect.
xxii PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainments were always characterized by

a tendency to self-reflexivity, to promoting the novelty of the medium above
the message. In an influential phrase, early cinema historian Tom Gunning
describes this as ‘the cinema of attractions’: ‘the film lecturer focuses attention
on the attraction…the film then performs its act of display…[and] the key
role of the exhibitor showman underscores this act of monstration.’22 That
now rare word ‘monstration’ is defined by the OED, quite beautifully for my
purpose, as ‘a demonstration, a sign’. In pre-classical cinema, as Jeffrey Ruoff
puts it, ‘the cinematic apparatus is frequently displayed and appreciated…
The format itself is on display; it is the main attraction.’23 The aesthetics of
attraction were therefore distinct from postmodern forms of reflexivity: while
the latter is produced by our inability to suspend disbelief and our scepticism
about representation, modern attraction was produced by the spectators’
relatively ingenuous wonder at the display of the new media technologies.
The shift from events to media events also means that the chronology of
this book is different to that which organizes the four Hurley biographies. This
is because the order of the main media events Hurley staged at the height of
his career in the 1920s does not correspond, for various biographical reasons,
with the well-known expeditions and events they represent, or – it might be
more accurate to say – upon which they were based. And these media events
were at once national and international; they involved not just Frank Hurley
the biographical individual but an entire culture industry, comprising many
kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along
global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional
locations around the world. As we will see, this raises complex questions both
about the authorship of Hurley’s photographic and filmic texts – which were
often produced and presented by other people – and about their ontology,
since they were in a more or less constant state of reassemblage in response
to changing market opportunities. What I want to re-imagine from inside the
quiet and stillness of the archive is the prior social life of Hurley’s creations as
they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early
twentieth century’s rapidly internationalizing mass-media landscape. As a
way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things
within it, I will use the concept of colonial modernity.

From Modernity to Colonial Modernity

There is now a rich body of work that discusses social modernity as an
historical phenomenon.24 In The Culture of Time and Space (1983), for example,
Stephen Kern defines modernity as an historical period extending from about
1880 to the end of the Great War in which ‘a series of sweeping changes
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about

time and space.’25 In his influential study, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982),
Marshall Berman also approaches modernity historically, dividing it into three
distinct phases: a first moment from 1500 to 1789; a middle period, 1789
to 1900; and a third phase from 1900 onwards. These are successive stages
in the progressive development and realization of global modernity.26 And
in Melodrama and Modernity (2001), Ben Singer develops useful categories for
distinguishing the interlinked cultural phenomena of modernity as a ‘striking
explosion’ of industrialization, urbanization, migrations, transportation, mass
communication, amusement and consumerism.27
These classic accounts of social modernity as a ‘striking explosion’ of
innovation essentially emanating from Europe and then unfolding globally
can now be complicated in two important ways: that is, in their assumptions
about both time and space. As Lynda Nead has shown, accounts of modernity
as a progressive sequence that can be plotted in conventional terms of early,
middle and late have been rethought in more complex ways in the work of
such French theorists as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau
and Michel Serres. Modernity is no longer understood as a rupture or series
of ruptures with the past, but as ‘a set of processes and representations that
were engaged in an urgent and inventive dialogue with their own historical
conditions of existence.’ Serres, for example, compares modernity to a late-
model car, which is a ‘disparate aggregate’ of technical and aesthetic solutions,
dating from a multiplicity of historical moments. Nead explains:

This image of pleated time is literally visualized by Serres in his metaphor of the
handkerchief. Spread out and ironed, the handkerchief represents a metrical,
geometric concept of time, in which distance and proximity are stable and clearly
defined; but crumpled in the pocket, the handkerchief evokes a ‘topological’
concept of time, in which previously distant points ‘become close, or even
superimposed. Moreover, if the fabric is torn, previously adjacent points may
be rendered distant and unrelated… Modernity…can be imagined as pleated
or crumpled time, drawing together past, present and future into constant and
unexpected relations and the product of a multiplicity of historical eras.28

In this sense, modernity is multi-temporal and its spaces are heteronomous, an

amalgam of the past, the contemporary and the future.
As with the shift from historical sequence to multi-temporality, so too
with modernity’s relation to social space. Put briefly, theories of what
I will call colonial modernity take issue with the assumption that modernity
is first invented in the metropolitan centre and then exported to the colonial
peripheries, which are always, by definition, belated. Instead, it seeks to
xxiv PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

re-envisage the cultural landscape of empire or the world system as a set

of interdependent sites, as a network of relations rather than a one-way
transfer of culture and authority, or a writing-back to the centre which is
always reactive and supplementary. In her history of modernizing, middle-
class culture in what she usefully calls the nineteenth-century ‘Anglosphere’
(that is, Britain, Australasia and the United States), Linda Young, for
example, questions the imperial narratives of top-down or centre-margin
cultural distribution, demonstrating instead an interactive, transnational
network in which specific local conditions of metropolitan and other centres
are mutually formative of the responses of the whole economy.29 And in her
work on the exchange of popular visual cultures around the Pacific Rim,
Esau goes further, arguing that in the case of vernacular image making,
modernity first appears in the ‘cultures of the periphery’.30
One important context in which the idea of colonial modernity has been
developed and deployed is at the interface between three distinct disciplines
in the new humanities: postcolonial studies, the new, post–area studies scholarship
on Southeast and East Asia, and what has come to be known as the new imperial
history. Until quite recently, most accounts of modernity have been remarkably
insular and Eurocentric, seeing it as essentially European in origin, while most
accounts of colonialism, again until quite recently, have seen it in terms of a
dialectic between (European) modernity and (non-European) tradition. One
consequence of this Eurocentrism is what Antoinette Burton calls ‘the fiction
of the belatedness of non-western cultures’, according to which modernity is
first invented in early modern Europe and then ‘radiated outward’ to the rest
of the world.31 As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in Provincializing Europe (2000),
this concept of the belatedness of the non-European world is absolutely
foundational even in many key texts in postcolonial studies.32
Instead, Burton advocates a form of scholarship that takes as its point
of departure ‘the inseparability of modernity from colonialism’; the insight
that ‘modernity, in all its incompleteness and instability, was made through
colonialism.’33 The term colonial modernity was first used as the title for a
special issue of the journal, positions: east asia cultures critique, edited by Tani E.
Barlow in the fall of 1993, and again in Barlow’s edited collection, Formations
of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (1997):

‘Colonial modernity’ can be grasped as a speculative frame for investigating the

infinitely pervasive discursive powers that increasingly connect at key points to
the globalizing impulses of capitalism. Because it is a way of posing a historical
question about how our mutual present came to take its apparent shape, colonial
modernity can also suggest that historical context is not a matter of positively
defined, elemental, or discrete units – nation states, stages of development,
 INTRODUCTION xxv

or civilizations, for instance – but rather a complex field of relationships or

threads of material that connect multiply in space-time and can be surveyed
from specific sites.34

Following Barlow, Burton advocates ‘the commitment to a frame of analysis

which does not privilege one territorial site but insists on re-envisioning the
historical landscape as a set of interdependent sites.’35

The Transnational Turn

If our understanding of the de-centred nature of social modernity requires us
to rethink issues about modernity in time and space, it has also put pressure
on the very disciplines through which we approach the past, the more so
because so many of those disciplines have been associated with the nation –
Australian literature, Australian art history, American cinema and so on. In this
sense, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity participates in what can
be described as the transnational turn in recent humanities scholarship. It
is intended, in both its content and approach, as a contribution to a more
outward-looking, more international form of Australian studies.
In several recent papers I’ve recommended that Australian studies should
now move beyond the national focus that was a necessary part of its original
disciplinary formation, to embrace transnational perspectives.36 Since the
watershed of the Australian Bicentenary in 1988 and increasingly since the
new millennium, I think we’ve begun to see Australian studies as a discipline
whose origins lie in a period of cultural nationalism that in certain respects we
no longer feel to be contemporary. This has to do, among other things, with our
changing attitudes to issues of nation, race and gender, and with the effects of
globalization. These nation-based studies began – let’s say very roughly – in the
1960s; the peak of their growth was probably the decade from 1977 to 1987;
and we can sense their active transformation into new forms during the years
between the bicentenary and the beginning of the new century. In particular,
we are coming to see that the concept of the nation, which was needed to
establish Australian studies both intellectually and institutionally, is also, in a
sense, the problem, because it prevents us from exploring the connections that
exist outside of – or in a complex set of relations to – that national space.
Here, for example, is the historian David Thelen on the challenge to
American studies:

…people, ideas, and institutions do not have clear national identities. Rather,
people may translate and assemble pieces from different cultures. Instead of
assuming that something was distinctively American, we might assume that
xxvi PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

elements of it began or ended somewhere else. We may discover that what people
create between national centers provides a promising way to rethink many topics
in American history.37

What we are seeing is an impulse – and here I allude to the titles of some
recent books – to feel once more ‘at home in the world’; to ‘think and feel
beyond the nation’.38 It was just such an impulse that motivated the many early
twentieth-century Australians like Hurley, to whom the wider ‘Anglosphere’
(Australasia, the ‘British world’ and also the United States) offered mobility,
career opportunities and even new forms of social identity. Recognizing this
mobility does not mean that we need to abandon the category of the nation,
for it remains a fundamental unit of domestic policy and affect, and of inter-
national relations. Historian Tony Ballantyne offers a useful account of the
continuing role of the nation in transnational forms of historiography:

The best work in world history pays close attention to ‘bundles of relationships’
that shape any given object of study and is sensitive to the complex interplays
between different layers of the analysis: the local, the regional, the inter-regional,
the national, the continental, and the global. The nation state is not cast aside
entirely…but rather is put firmly in its place, as one, albeit an often significant,
structure that governs human action and cross-cultural engagements.39

Within those constraints, the transnational turn challenges us to imagine new

types of cultural history that are concerned with the traffic of people, capital,
practices, ideas and institutions within but also beyond the conceptual space
of the nation. It requires forms of cultural history that accept rather than set
aside divided affiliations and multiple identities. It would mean inquiring into
the way different forms of internationalism – both vernacular and elite – have
affected Australian lives both positively and negatively, and both within and
beyond Australia.

Alternative Conceptual Geographies: Imperial

Networks, Webs of Empire
How, then, can the space of colonial modernity, with its flows of people and
ideas across and between national borders, be re-imagined from a transnational
perspective? What kinds of alternative conceptual geographies are available
to help us map the space of colonial modernity?
In his history of Britain’s South African colonies, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities
in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (2001), Alan Lester uses the metaphor
of imperial networks, arguing that identity formation in both metropole and
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

colonies is transactional rather than hierarchical, and embedded in ‘the

geographies of flow and connection within a broader imperial network.’40 This
spatial model is designed to move beyond a series of discrete colonial identities
as well as the assumption of a unidirectional flow of cultural practices from
metropole to colony:

Each of the colonial groups studied in this book strove continually to fashion
circuits of communication with vital metropolitan interests, and thus to shape
British understandings of the Cape’s places and peoples. Furthermore, each
colonial interest had a vital stake in maintaining correspondence with other,
similar interests elsewhere in the colonial ‘peripheries’.41

In researching such ‘imperial networks’, Lester is concerned with actually

existing, material flows of information, personnel and capital through the
‘actual’ spaces across which colonial discourses operated.42 He is committed,
in other words – as am I – to the ‘empircally grounded’ study of colonialism’s
culture. During the nineteenth century, shipping and later the telegraph and
rail were the crucial vectors of these flows, and shipping ports were ‘the nodal
points’ holding this expanded imperial web together. Along these vectors, in
all directions, colonial information flowed in the form of books, magazines,
newspapers and images, constituting a ‘metasystem’ of colonial meanings.43
Another useful attempt to describe the shape of colonial modernity is
Ballantyne’s approach to the formation of Indian national identity through
the model of ‘webs of empire’. Ballantyne proposes the web metaphor as
one way of moving beyond what he calls the ‘straitjacket’ of nation-focused
imperial history:

It is important to recognize not only that the empire was comprised of networks
and exchanges that linked the various colonies to the metropole, but also that its
very structure was dependent upon a series of crucial horizontal linkages among
colonies. I believe it is productive to conceive of the empire not in terms of a
spoked wheel with London as the ‘hub’, where the various ‘spokes’ (whether flows
of finance, lines of communication, or the movement of people and objects)
from the periphery meet, but rather in terms of a complex web consisting of
‘horizontal’ filaments that run among various colonies in addition to ‘vertical’
connections between the metropole and individual colonies.44

In urging imperial scholars to revisit the spatial models that underlie their
work, Ballantyne also suggests that this can lead to a reconceptualization of
the archive and how it might be used. Most historians, he believes, imagine the
archive as providing the means to study a carefully delimited concept or space
xxviii PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

such as a city, an individual life, or a nation: ‘effectively the archive comes to

stand as a proxy for the unit of analysis.’ In the case of Hurley’s papers and
photographs in the National Library of Australia, they have most commonly
been used to represent either an organic, national Australian culture or the
‘life’s work’ of the biographical individual. The metaphor of the web allows us
to see such an archive not as ‘enclosed, static, and discreet’, but connected, in
Ballantyne’s words, to ‘the constant circulation of information and the heavy
intertextuality of many forms of knowledge.’ By emphasizing the mobility of
colonial knowledge and the interweaving of the archives of empire, he argues,
‘we can place greater emphasis on the transnational cultural and intellectual
traffic that was the very life blood of empire.’45 Ballantyne’s web model, then,
underlines the relational or dialogic quality of imperial knowledge, which is not
a unidirectional imposition but the product of relations between ‘the multiple
positions that any given colony, city, community or archive might occupy.’46

The Industrial Landscape of Colonial Modernity

In addition to these alternative conceptual geographies, we also need a more
concrete understanding of how colonial modernity operates as a cultural
economy. What was the industrial landscape of colonial modernity? How
were the culture industries in which Hurley pursued his transnational career
structured – locally, nationally, globally? One field of scholarship that has
been particularly innovative in exploring these kinds of questions – which
are essentially questions about culture’s intimate relation with commerce – is
theatre history. In her path-breaking book, The Economics of the British Stage
(2000), Tracy C. Davis provides an account of the international interaction
of theatrical practices with the historically specific forms of business
entrepreneurship and company structures which circulated British theatrical
product through worldwide steam, rail and telegraphic networks – literally
‘trade routes’ – during the period to 1914. British theatre, she argues, was
essentially a ‘light industry’ that dominated its sector in the same way
that Britain dominated world production of coal, steel, cotton cloth and
manufactured goods.47 Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainments belonged
to this ‘light industry’, using the same trade routes and commercial structures
as they travelled throughout Australia, Great Britain and North America.
Davis characterizes the British theatre as an export industry, dominating
world production ‘in an almost unidirectional exchange’. Yet for all her
awareness of globalization, her book, like so much of the new imperial
history, tends to reinstate the very idea of the British nation whose borders
that industry is shown to overrun. As Burton suggests, it may well be scholars
working on polities other than Britain who are best placed to reverse this
 INTRODUCTION xxix

trend.48 Accordingly, the Australian theatre historian Veronica Kelly has

complicated Davis’s model of ‘unidirectional exchange’ through a detailed
study of business relations between Britain and Australia in the period to
1914. Kelly argues:

The international circulation of commercial theatre in the early twentieth century

was driven not only from the centres of Great Britain and the USA, but by the
specific enterprise and habitus of managers in ‘complementary’ production sites
such as Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The activity of this period
suggests a de-centred competitive trade in theatrical commodities – whether
performers, scripts or productions – wherein the perceived entertainment
preferences and geographies of non-metropolitan centres were formative of
international enterprise. The major producers were linked in complex bonds of
partnerships, family, or common experience which crossed the globe.49

Kelly’s spatial metaphor of a ‘de-centred competitive trade in theatrical

commodities’ is suggestive for my career biography of Hurley. ‘In a global
network,’ she argues, ‘energy, ambition and talent flow from multiple sites.’
While confirming that Australian theatre was generally an ‘import’ culture,
Kelly argues that:

The interpretations of their opportunities and constraints made by regional

national managements were a significant factor in the internationalizing of
live theatre, indicating how the conditions of imperial enterprise were made
possible by proactive energies and demands operating from a multiplicity of
consumption and production sites. The business networks set up by the major
producers were both national and necessarily international, with magnates in
Europe, Britain, America, South Africa, Canada, Asia, New Zealand, Australia
or Ireland exploiting personal and business contacts in a mobile and decentered
freemasonry wherein commercial competition and professional camaraderie
were held in a mainly productive balance.50

As I use it in this book, the term colonial modernity, then, refers to a series of
developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked
apparently provincial cultures like those of the Australian colonies into a busy
traffic in personnel, cultural practices, texts and intellectual property around
the English-speaking world, the Anglosphere. It also refers to an analytical
perspective, a ‘frame of analysis’, a way of asking questions, that focuses on
the totality of these cultural practices rather than on the single, isolated case –
whether a text, a biographical individual or a single national culture. The
effect of adopting such a perspective is to move, first, from textual commentary
xxx PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

or individual biography toward forms of social or career biography as part

of a poetics of colonialism’s culture; and second, to break with nation-based
approaches to social history which see the emergence of colonial cultures as
essentially self-contained. It is to see them, instead, as having always been
embedded in an ever-widening series of networks and flows, initially imperial
and then, with the formation of distinct national identities around the turn
of the century, transnational. It is for all of these reasons that my book about
Frank Hurley is not really about Hurley – or not just about Hurley. In the
chapters that follow he will flicker in and out of focus, like the figure of Wally
in the Where’s Wally? books, leading us deeper into the diverse and densely
populated spaces of colonial modernity.
The five chapters of Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity are
intended to describe the five main media events that Hurley and others created
in the increasingly international networks of colonial modernity during the
ten or so years when he was at his peak as a travelling showman, from the
early 1910s until the introduction of sound to the cinema in late 1920s. These
media events were based upon Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic
Expedition, Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the
Great War, the England to Australia air race of 1919–20, and Hurley’s two
expeditions to Torres Strait and Papua in the early 1920s. These case studies
are designed to illuminate a recurring series of questions about the nature of
colonial modernity, and the landscape and economy of the early twentieth
century’s mass media:

• What metaphors can best describe the movement of modernity within and
between nations, such as imperial networks, webs of empire, and the traffic
in colonial knowledge?
• What can theories of colonial modernity tell us about the relations between
modernity, imperialism and globalization?
• What were the main vectors of colonial modernity: trade routes, new modes
of transport, war, commerce and new communication technologies?
• What were its main technologies of representation: photography, cinema, newsprint?
• What kinds of intellectual, social and institutional formations allowed
individuals to move through the increasingly transnational flows of imperial
culture?
• Was colonial modernity a consequence of vernacular rather than elite forms
of modernism – the cinema, magazines and the popular stage, say, rather
than poetry and the novel?
• What was the industrial landscape of colonial modernity and how was
it organized locally, nationally and globally? How was the English-
speaking world divided into territorial rights arrangements by publishers,
 INTRODUCTION xxxi

manufacturers of technologies, entertainment agencies, theatre syndicates

and individual entrepreneurs?
• What were the spaces or sites of colonial modernity: the art gallery and the
learned academy, or the music hall, the picture palace and the illustrated
magazine?
• What was the temporality of colonial modernity? Were provincial cultures
doomed always to be belated, or did modern urban entertainment allow them
to be coeval with the metropolitan centre, to experience simultaneity?
• Who were the others of colonial modernity? What is colonial modernity’s
relation to the pre-modern?

In the chapters that follow, my methodology will be driven strongly by what

is often fresh archival research, as I seek to describe the personnel, venues,
and stage and screen practices associated with Hurley’s synchronized lecture
entertainments. But it will also be informed by these fundamental research
questions. In the conclusion, I will attempt to answer them in more general
terms, summing up some of the key concepts and principles that can be
deduced from these case studies in colonial modernity.
 Chapter One
The Home of the Blizzard:
Douglas Mawson’s Synchronized
Lecture Entertainment

At the height of Sydney’s summer theatre season in 1921, Frank Hurley was
presenting his latest entertainment, the Melanesian travelogue Pearls and Savages,
to record houses at the Globe Theatre in George Street. On 10 December he
wrote to Sir Douglas Mawson, who in 1911 had taken Hurley as his camera
operator on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Hurley had a deal to put to
him. He had been back from Papua, ‘the land of Headhunters’, for a couple
of months now and was bursting with ideas for a new show. ‘Briefly,’ he wrote,
‘my project is this. To produce an Evening’s “Antarctic Memories” using
Shackleton & your film in conjunction.’ Not given to modesty, Hurley went
on, ‘I would lecture with an assistant, & will have the presumption to say that
there is no one will make a bigger success of the picture than myself, as I am
well in with the Union Theatres & press & public.’1
Three months later and still on tour, Hurley was staying at the Oriental
Hotel in Melbourne’s Collins Street. He had received a positive response from
Mawson and replied, ‘I will be back in Sydney in a fortnight & will have an
agreement drawn up… The rights I presume will include N[ew] Z[ealand].
About the rest of the world – continental, UK & US… As I expect to be
over there in the near future fine business could be done.’ By now a seasoned
showman, Hurley got down to details: ‘To prepare & make slides, compose
lecture, arrange music etc will take me at least three months hard going &
I reckon to secure the most powerful “adventure & unique film”.’ ‘The past
experience of exploiting these attractions,’ he boasted, ‘has shown me the best
means of getting the best money.’ When, he asked, would the negatives be
available? The point was that Mawson still held copyright on the expedition’s
negatives and a show could not be produced without them: ‘Slide making
will take considerable time especially the colouring… in addition to the slides
I will run off a few hundred enlargements for Window Show Cards & I was
thinking of producing a high quality album of Antarctic scenes to be sold in the
2 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

theatres.’ ‘Also,’ Hurley asked, ‘could you loan me sledges, tents or equipment
of any description…for display purposes.’2 Finally, Hurley was worried that
Mawson might try to take control of the project. ‘It is imperative for the best
results,’ he warned, ‘that the entire show be left entirely in my hands – I have
had wide experience now in this form of synchronized lecture entertainment &
of “putting it over”.’3
As things turned out, Hurley never did mount a show called ‘Antarctic
Memories’ – it was just one of many such schemes he cooked up from time to
time – although in 1925 he did publish a travel book that had grown out of the
idea.4 What interests me, though, about his correspondence with Mawson in
the early 1920s is that it allows us to begin re-imagining the media landscape
in which he was working at that time. One historian of early photography
has described it as ‘fluid and polyvalent’, ‘complex and fragmented’, an ever-
changing mix of established media and emerging, ‘cutting edge’ technologies.5
In certain respects it forms the horizon of today’s mass-media landscape, and yet
there is also much about Hurley’s world that belongs to a slightly more distant
past, to the traditions of late nineteenth-century urban entertainment.
But what exactly were these ‘shows’ he had become so expert at putting
on? It is common to refer to Hurley’s major works by the titles of his ‘films’:
The Home of the Blizzard, In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, Sir Ross Smith’s Flight
and Pearls and Savages. But the stage and screen practices of the early twentieth
century were different to those of our own time. Hurley did not work in just
one medium. He was, as Julian Thomas argues, an old-fashioned ‘showman’
whose repertoire included both traditional and modern media, which
he used in both old and new ways.6 As his proposal to Mawson indicates,
Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainments were complex performance
events involving a combination of at least some but normally all of the
following media: photographic exhibition, including the sale of quality prints
and albums; saturation newspaper and magazine coverage in the form of
travel articles, serializations, advertisements, interviews and photographic
essays; the presence of a celebrity for the purposes of advertising or as a
lecturer; silent cinema projection, often involving several titles on a single
programme; projection of coloured glass lantern slides; painted tableaux and
drop screens; live musical accompaniment; advertising posters, illustrated
programmes and themed theatre decorations; the display of related historical
or ethnographic artefacts – in this case the sledges and other expedition
equipment; and finally radio broadcasts and mainstream book publication,
all coordinated, syndicated and, in the industry jargon, ‘tied-in’ to achieve
maximum advertising exposure and maximum revenue.
The number of venues and professions that might be involved in staging
such an event was daunting: theatres, art galleries, exhibition halls, museums,
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 3

book publishers, newspapers and magazines, printers, commercial artists,

cinema agents, lecturing agents, photographic equipment manufacturers,
companies specializing in the latest techniques for reproducing images,
new modes of urban and international travel and communication, and the
complexities of contract, company and copyright law. To the disapproval of
a scientist like Mawson, these events were entertaining as well as educational,
drawing as much attention to their own attractions as to the events they
purported to represent. There was about them a sense of self-promotion and
even opportunistic contrivance that smacked of what contemporary press
men called stunts. And finally, Hurley’s mass-media spectacles not only toured
Australia’s capital cities and regional towns; they often took place simultaneously
overseas by arrangement with the press and various entertainment agencies in
New Zealand, Great Britain, Europe, the United States and Canada. There
could be no hint of colonial belatedness. A Hurley event, wherever it was
staged, spoke from the centres of the English-speaking world; it was alert to
the very latest ebbs and flows of an increasingly international if not yet global
entertainment industry.
This ‘not yet global’ entertainment industry, existing on the cusp of older
and emergent worlds, was part of what I have called colonial modernity. As
Tracy C. Davis argues, theatre history in the period from the 1890s to the
Great War is best understood in terms of something like a world system,
an international interaction of finance, entrepreneurial personalities and
management combinations which increasingly circulated theatrical product
and personnel through worldwide steam, rail and telegraphic networks.7 And
as Veronica Kelly observes, in such a global network, the movement of energy,
ambition and talent is not always one directional, but flows from ‘multiple
sites’.8 Depending on the topic of his show and the location of his audience,
the modern entertainment experience Hurley offered to his public was either
a sense of the international felt locally, or of the regional or national projected
on to the international stage.
By the early 1920s, then, Frank Hurley had become not only the ringmaster
but also the leading attraction in his own travelling, international, multi- and
mass-media circus. In the language of today’s media theory, we might call
this an early or emerging form of the mass-media event.9 In this chapter
I examine the earliest development of Hurley’s multimedia stage and screen
practice in its national and international contexts. I examine how the young
Hurley came to acquire the various personal, financial and technical skills
that were necessary to stage such media events. And I approach this as an
historical not a biographical inquiry. As Thomas observes, ‘Hurley spent a
lifetime looking for adventure: the result was a career directly shaped by the
dynamics of twentieth-century imperialism. His work was carried along on
4 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

global currents of colonialism and war.’10 His career was also shaped by the
emerging institutions and technologies of colonial modernity, especially the
new visual technologies and their modes of exhibition, and the changing forms
of print culture. From whom did he learn the art of staging synchronized
lecture entertainments? How did he come to take artistic and financial control
of his own media events? How did he turn himself from a local Sydney
photographer into Mawson’s and Shackleton’s camera artist, and then into an
international celebrity in his own right?

The Travelogue
Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainments belonged to a tradition of
mixed-media stage and screen performance that was popular in Great Britain
and North America around the turn of the century, which came to be known
at that time as the travelogue. According to the OED, the first recorded use
of the term was the London Daily Chronicle report of 6–7 April 1903, that
‘Mr. Burton Holmes, an American entertainer new to London, delivered last
evening the first of a series of “Travelogues”.’ When we think of these early
travelogues today, we tend to think of the travelogue film, but it is precisely
the rich and complex relation between early cinema and other forms of
representation that I want historically to recover by returning to the term
synchronized lecture entertainment.
The travelogue film, as Jeffrey Ruoff observes, is a form that dominated the
early cinema from 1895, played a key role in the development of documentary
and ethnographic film during the 1920s and 1930s, flourished in the postwar
era of 16mm distribution, and continues today in the typical programmes of
IMAX theatres.11 But the travelogue is more than just a neglected form of early
cinema: as a performance genre, it incorporates a wide spectrum of other,
often pre-cinematic forms of representation, and stage and screen practices
that have been obscured, retrospectively, by cinema historians’ emphasis on
film as text. As Ruoff goes on to point out, ‘the travelogue often involves a
live component, embracing experiential and performative dimensions of the
cinematic experience that challenge our conceptions of the medium.’ The new
industrialized forms of representation, including photography, advertising,
the illustrated daily newspaper and the early cinema, arose together with
industrialized modes of transportation and communication, such as the
steamship, the train and the automobile, and telegraphy and telephony. But
they also existed alongside other, pre-industrial forms and practices such as
lantern-slide projection, lecturing, live musical performance, the hand-tinting
of cinema film, and hand-made stage props and theatre decorations. These
diverse components of the modern and pre-modern worlds intersect precisely
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 5

in travel, tourism and colonialism, and ‘in the vortex of these forces’, as Ruoff
observes, ‘lies the travelogue.’12
There is now a growing body of scholarship about the live, illustrated travel
lecture as an important pre-cinematic form of entertainment, though much
of it is written by American scholars and remains tightly focused on the stage,
screen and commercial practices of the American showmen. Charles Musser,
Carol Nelson and X. Theodore Barber, in particular, have done pioneering
work on individual travel lecturers Lyman H. Howe, John L. Stoddard and
E. Burton Holmes.13 Yet the globally dispersed nature of colonial modernity
meant that many of the early showmen travelled widely, and that some of
those who made successful careers in Europe and North America were British
and even Australian born.
Showmen had long toured with magic lanterns, projecting slides to
the accompaniment of a lecture, and sometimes live or recorded music
and sound effects. In the United States, the most important lecturers were
initially those who travelled the Lyceum and Chautauqua circuits, though
important institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the American
Museum of Natural History, and the American and Royal Geographical
Societies were also active in arranging lecture programmes. By the early
twentieth century a number of influential private lecturing agencies had
emerged, including the Lee Keedick Agency in New York and the Gerald
Christy Lecture Agency in London: Keedick’s letter-head proclaimed him
to be manager of ‘the World’s most Distinguished Lecturers, Readers [and]
Musicians’, and in 1915 he organized Sir Douglas Mawson’s tour of the
United States.14
The National American Lyceum was established in Millbury, Massachusetts
in the 1830s, and in 1868 James Redpath established the Redpath Lyceum
Bureau to provide lecturers for the many established lyceums that had spread
throughout the country. Moving from town to town, and speaking at public
buildings such as town halls, concert halls and opera houses, they typically
repeated the same lecture or course of lectures throughout the season. Until
the mid-nineteenth century, lantern slides were painted by hand, but the late
1840s brought the development of photographic slides, and by the 1860s
they were manufactured in larger quantities for commercial distribution. The
lectures – or ‘picture talks’, as they were sometimes called – covered many
topics, including the literary classics, but travel was always popular. Lecturers
could buy stock sets of slides and lectures without themselves being either
travellers or photographers, but it became increasingly common for the
lecturer to be a noted world traveller, to take or at least to commission his own
original slides, and to write his own lectures as original, first-person narratives.
With that practice came the rise of the showman’s personal celebrity.15
6 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

The most famous American platform personalities of the late nineteenth

century were John L. Stoddard and his successor, Elias Burton Holmes, whose
professional name contracted as his celebrity increased, initially to E. Burton
Holmes and then, definitively, to Burton Holmes.16 Unlike some of the earlier
showmen, Holmes was himself a photographer and personally took many
of the slides used in his shows. He was a charismatic performer, engaging
audiences from the lecture platform with dramatic accounts of his travels in
Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Appealing to the respectable middle classes,
he performed in quality, Lyceum-type venues, dressed in an evening suit and
was renowned for his well-modulated delivery. The lectures were published
annually as illustrated travel books, and by 1910 they were being sold in deluxe
12-volume sets.
Beginning in 1890 with Through Europe with a Camera, Holmes’s early lectures
were accompanied by lantern slides, but he reacted quickly to the challenge
posed by the motion picture’s popular arrival in 1896. His business partner
and projectionist, Oscar B. Depue, later recalled, ‘we had a growing rival – the
motion picture. As a result…at the end of the 1896 season, Mr Holmes sailed
for Sicily and Italy, and I sailed for London, the Mecca for motion pictures.’17
Their intention was to seek out the finest motion picture camera. Eventually
buying a 60mm Demeney from Leon Gaumont in Paris, they took their first
film of the crowd in St Peter’s Square in Rome. The footage was shown the
following season in Chicago as a novelty attraction at the end of a lantern-
slide lecture, but the two media were soon fully integrated into a single show.
Early cinema historian Rick Altman argues that the introduction of cinema
into the travelogue did not initially displace the centrality of the lecturer and
his stage patter. ‘When film entered the American entertainment industry,’
he observes, ‘it was heavily dominated by performers’ and ‘films often existed
only to the extent that they could be included in a live performance.’ Altman
therefore advocates an approach to the history of early cinema that would
highlight performance practice rather than the anachronistic concept of the
‘movies’. That premise has fundamentally informed my research on Hurley’s
stage and screen practice. To understand the travelogue, Altman argues, ‘we
must…put aside our firmly entrenched film-oriented approach to cinema in
favor of a performer-oriented position.’18 Burton Holmes’s seminal career
well illustrates this point. Although he came to be linked with the new term
‘travelogue’, he remained an exponent of what were always billed as illustrated
lectures. Altman explains that at first he treated his films as a novelty, showing
them only at the end of his lectures. Later they were interspersed throughout
his programme, but the advertisements for his performances continued to
stress his name and the term ‘lecture’, ‘consigning the illustrations – both
slides and moving pictures – to the small print.’19
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 7

The standard projection equipment was soon modified to allow for the
ease of cinema’s integration into illustrated lectures. Late nineteenth-century
projectors combined a lantern light source and transport mechanism with
an add-on ‘motion head’. This technical integration was reflected in the
style and content of the lectures. Because they were designed to replace
lantern slides when the lecture called for action, sequences of motion picture
accentuated movement. Altman cites as an example the 1903 travelogue,
Samoa: The Tropical Paradise of the South Pacific, by American ‘lecturer, traveler &
correspondent’, Dr Edward Burton McDowell. Billed as ‘Stories of Travel
illustrated by original motion pictures and lantern slides’, the programme
includes a series of episodes illustrated by motion pictures: ‘Samoan Dance’, a
‘Canoe Race’, a ‘War Dance’, and a ‘Food Offering and Processional March’.
Each of these sequences was intended to take the place of a lantern slide. In
this sense, Altman argues, ‘the films were still incorporated into the show as
“views”, according to the era’s conception of still photographs: they did not
yet constitute the standalone object that would later be understood by the
term “motion picture” (in the singular).’20
Burton Holmes’s guarantee of his films’ authenticity was a brief signature
appearance in each one, his presence on the platform connecting the time and
place of the subject with the time and place of the performance. Something
of his stage practice is suggested in this later account by Depue:

He was a very fast speaker, and had a beautiful voice, which he synchronized
perfectly to his films, and he’d show them on a huge screen. He never walked on
the stage; he used to pull the curtain apart, and run on. The people clapped him
and he talked rapidly, waving his arms about. Then the curtain would draw back
and he’d slap the film on. A spotlight shone on him; it was very dramatic.21

Frank Hurley would later acknowledge Burton Holmes to be world’s leading

practitioner of what Hurley himself sometimes called the ‘adventure film’.22
In the broad spectrum of late nineteenth-century urban entertainments,
travelogues were deemed to be educational. Paul Fussell notes in his pioneering
study, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), that ‘Before the
development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits
were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of
the judgement.’23 Early cinema historians have seen the travelogue’s claim
to be educational as one of its defining characteristics. Musser and Nelson,
for example, argue that ‘the travel lecture emerged as the antithesis of the
dominant film industry. The one appealed to a small elite seeking education
and entertainment, the other to a mass audience seeking amusement.’24 Yet in
reality their status was ambiguous, especially after the introduction of cinema,
8 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

and they were always regarded as a more popular form of entertainment than
the traditional slide lecture. The American Museum of Natural History in
New York, for example, had long run a public lecture programme using lantern
slides, and in the early years of the new century its programmes incorporated
cinema projection. But in its correspondence with the lecturers and their
agents, the Museum’s board revealed its suspicions about the new medium. In
1919, the board wrote to the New York agent Lee Keedick, requesting that in
their presentations at the Museum, his lecturers only screen moving pictures
after they had shown lantern slides. Keedick was warned that ‘the educational
must not be swallowed up by the popular aspect of our lectures.’25 What was
being revealed here was a lingering suspicion about cinematic illusionism
and an ethical concern about its association with debased forms of popular
entertainment. These shifting and uncertain values are mirrored in the range of
personae adopted by the showmen. The new type of adventurer-cameraman
who filmed native peoples as part of a whirlwind world tour was already being
lampooned for his commercial opportunism, as seen in a satirical cartoon in
the British trade journal the Bioscope in 1910.26 Similar accusations were to
haunt Hurley throughout his career, notably in his relationships with Mawson
and Australia’s official war historian, C. E. W. Bean.
Well before the end of the silent era, a number of developments, both
technical and commercial, worked to destroy the close connection that had
always existed between the travelogue and the platform personality. Altman
suggests that this began to happen in the United States from as early as
the 1903–04 season. With information previously provided by a lecturer
increasingly built into their inter-titles, films were able to enter into ‘a new
type of commercial configuration, where the films would do the travelling,
without the need for a lecturer to accompany them. No longer lecturers’
props, these films had now become industrial products.’27 One genre to resist
the trend, however, was the expedition film, which increased in popularity in
the years before the Great War. Beginning with The Alaska-Siberian Expedition
(1912), the genre included polar expeditions and adventure films, both of
which would set important precedents for Hurley’s aspirations at this time.
They include Jack London’s Adventures in the South Seas (1913), Rescue of the
Stefansson Arctic Expedition (1914) and In Amazon Jungles with the Captain Belsey
Expedition (1915). Altman explains that expedition films served to perpetuate
the role of the platform lecturer: ‘Always closely identified with a specific
explorer, who often made personal appearances and provided lectures in
conjunction with film screenings, these films were usually distributed by the
explorer himself…rather than by one of the era’s well-known production
companies.’28 But the rise of gazettes and newsreels, the use of longer
individual reels of film, and the increasing use of inter-titles gradually worked
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 9

to separate the lecturer’s personality and performance from the film itself.
A landmark case was the highly popular Durbar in Kinemacolor (1912), showing
King George V at that Delhi durbar. Initially presented by Kinemacolor’s
house lecturer in New York, it soon took on a successful exhibition life
of its own on a state’s rights basis. Also in 1912, Paul J. Rainey’s African
Hunt originally accompanied a lecture by the expedition’s photographer,
John C. Hemment, of the Smithsonian Institution, but in the following year
subtitles were added and the re-released film was offered for distribution
‘with or without lecturer’. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914,
the vast majority of feature documentaries about the war were prepared
for commercial theatrical distribution with explanatory inter-titles. ‘Once
tied ineluctably to a lecturer’s performance,’ Altman concludes, ‘films might
now be understood as separable and even separate commodities, a potential
source of income for any exhibitor, even in the absence of the film’s author-
lecturer.’29 That moment of separation between the film and the platform
personality will mark the end of my coverage of Hurley’s career in chapter
five of this book, which in his case occurred in the mid to late 1920s.
One important link between Hurley’s career and these international trends
was Lowell Thomas, who by the 1920s had become the leading American
presenter of travelogues. Thomas found his way into the business through
journalism. With America’s entry into the Great War, he made his reputation
covering what were regarded as its two most romantic events: Allenby’s
liberation of Jerusalem and T. E. Lawrence’s undercover operations in the
Middle East. After the war, Thomas developed illustrated lectures based on
these themes at Madison Square Garden. In 1919, he was invited by the
British impresario Percy Burton to appear at the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden, where he combined the two shows under the title, With Allenby in
Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. A bestselling illustrated book followed in 1925.
A contemporary account gives some idea of Thomas’s performance as the
ringmaster of a multimedia, synchronized lecture entertainment at the height
of the form’s popularity:

The Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London. A sixty-piece orchestra

playing exotic Oriental airs. Out before the rich Oriental stage-setting steps a
dancer, twists her body into strange postures. Off-stage voice softly intones the
Mahometan call to prayer… A silver screen descends. Before it there walks a
lithe, black-haired young man… Suddenly a troupe of mad-riding burnous-
clad Arabs whirls upon the silver screen. They are a hot-blooded horde under
the command of Lawrence, poet, archaeologist, soldier, ‘uncrowned King of
Arabia’. The young man before the screen begins to talk. Step by step he unfolds
the strange drama of Lawrence’s Arabian campaign… When he has finished, a
10 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

wind of handclapping swells the open house from pit to gallery. Celebrities hurry
backstage to congratulate him.30

It is not clear when Hurley met Lowell Thomas: whether in Palestine, where
they were both filming in the final year of the Great War, during the London
season of Thomas’s travelogue, or during Thomas’s subsequent tour of
Australia, but in 1920, the Lowell Thomas Travelogues managed the London
season of Hurley’s Sir Ross Smith’s Flight, while his later travelogue, Pearls and
Savages, began life as a collaborative venture between Thomas’s and Hurley’s
companies.31

Herbert G. Ponting’s With Captain Scott in the Antarctic

An earlier and more important mentor for Hurley’s career was Herbert
G. Ponting, Scott’s camera artist on the British Antarctic Expedition (1910–13).
Ponting was the first professional photographer and cinematographer to be
attached to an Antarctic expedition, and although mindful of the scientific
and historical purposes of his work, his instincts were essentially artistic and
commercial. British-born but a citizen of the world, Ponting’s own media
persona was poised between the urbane lecturer and the American-style
adventurer-cameraman.
Born in Salisbury in 1870, Ponting was Hurley’s senior in both years and
media experience, and Hurley would later acknowledge him as a professional
role model. Ponting left England as a young man in his early twenties to settle
in California, where he bought a ranch on the outskirts of San Francisco and
invested in various schemes, including gold mining. He took up photography
in 1900 as an amateur and was successful in competitions, including a prize-
winning entry in the Kodak exhibit at the 1900 St Louis World’s Fair. At this
time his farm and investments were failing, and so he entered the world of
professional photography, becoming one of the first of a new species, the
globe-trotting freelance photographer who sold his work to photographic
distribution agencies or worked on assignment for the illustrated press, which
had begun increasingly to use photographic illustrations. In 1901 he went on
a tour of the Far East for Leslie’s Weekly and the Universal Photo Art Company
of Philadelphia. He was then commissioned by Underwood & Underwood,
a major publisher of stereographs, to work in Japan, Korea and Manchuria.
When the Russo–Japanese War broke out in 1904, he was engaged as a war
photographer for Harper’s Weekly and the photographic agency H. C. White and
Company. After the war, he travelled extensively on assignment in Europe and
the Mediterranean, and in South, Southeast and East Asia. His images were
used widely in magazines and newspapers, sometimes without attribution, and
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 11

sold as photographic prints, stereographs and lantern slides for travelogues.

He also published illustrated travel articles under his own name in some of
the world’s best periodicals, including Harper’s Weekly, the Strand, Wide World,
the Sphere, the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Country Life.32
What is significant about Ponting’s career is that he was at home in the
emerging international mass-media landscape. He had worked with the world’s
leading magazines, photographic agencies, equipment suppliers, exhibitors,
galleries and publishers. He understood how to maximize publicity and profits
through syndication and tie-ins, how to work in more than one medium and
how to project his work in more than one city – or even continent – at the
same time. When Scott engaged him in 1909, Ponting was able to apply his
knowledge of the international mass media to exploiting a polar expedition
for the first time in a truly modern way.
In The Great White South (1921), his book about Scott, Ponting occupies
centre stage as the quintessential adventurer-cameraman. In the preface, he
quips that his life has been ‘comparatively uneventful’ – ‘save for…a couple
of voyages round the world; three years of travel in Japan; some months
as war correspondent…and…several years of travel in a score of other
lands.’33 In interviews, and in his published books and articles, Hurley would
later construct his own biographical legend in similar terms. In Ponting’s
book about Scott’s last expedition, the photographer’s own celebrity status
is announced by the frontispiece, a signed studio portrait of Ponting. Other
self-portraits illustrate the book’s leading theme: the adventurer-cameraman
at work in the challenging conditions of the Antarctic. ‘Kinematographing
in the Pack’ shows Ponting ‘spreadeagled’ with his heavy cinematograph
taking-camera on a platform specially built for him to film the Terra Nova’s
bows penetrating the pack (Fig. 1.1): ‘As the ship bumped into the floes,
I hung on as best I could, and with one arm clung tightly to my precious
camera lest it should break loose and fall into the sea, whilst with the other
hand I turned the handle.’34 Ponting devoted an entire chapter to these
stunts, turning his own recording of the expedition on camera into his
principal story. The most dramatic moment concerns Ponting’s near death
when he was attacked by a pod of killer whales while shooting at the edge
of the pack ice. He apologizes that there is no photograph, only an artist’s
impression, at the same time boasting that he was in too much danger to
take pictures. The story of his narrow escape from the killer whales would be
endlessly repeated in his public lectures and their associated advertising, and
in one later publicity photograph he mimicked the artists’ impression of his
escape while standing in a London park, dressed in a three-piece suit. Here
is the unmistakable signature of modern media reporting: the journalist as
his own subject.
12 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

During the long winter aboard Terra Nova, Ponting entertained the crew
with lantern-slide lectures on his travels. He had brought with him a compact
American-made lantern that he bought in California and 500 lantern slides of
the Far East made from his own negatives and hand-coloured in Tokyo, where
the photographic colourists were reputed to be the best in the world (Fig. 1.2).
This led to discussions with Scott about his plans for a show based on the
expedition. Scott had confided to Ponting his concerns about the expedition’s
financial viability and Ponting was stunned by the British naval officer’s lack of
commercial acumen. ‘During these intimate talks,’ he wrote, ‘I discovered how
totally inexperienced Scott was in dealing with the Press. He seemed to have
little idea of the value of photographs made at so remote a part of the earth.’
In lieu of a formal contract, they made a gentleman’s agreement that Ponting
could use both still and moving pictures to illustrate the lectures he proposed
to give at the conclusion of the expedition. ‘Such lectures,’ Scott believed,
‘would help to foster a fine and manly spirit in the rising generation.’35 In his
epilogue, Ponting explains how he fulfilled his promise to Scott:

In view of the tragic ending to the enterprise, I felt it more than ever incumbent
upon me, as the holder of the lecturing rights, to conform to the wishes my late
Chief expressed to me, by carrying out my original plans. A beautiful series of
films and lantern slides of the adventure...was therefore arranged, and to these
I lectured at a London Hall for ten months in 1914, until the outbreak of the
Great War ended what had been a highly successful beginning to a novel feature
in the entertainment world.36

Ponting’s show, With Captain Scott in the Antarctic, was indeed a landmark event,
one of the most modern and complete entertainments of its kind yet to
appear in London. In marked contrast to Scott’s old fashioned gentleman-
amateurism, everything was set up on a thoroughly professional footing.
A manager and press agent were engaged to coordinate events and arrange
publicity. Notices, photographs, puffs and celebrity interviews appeared in the
London press, billing Ponting as a ‘world-wide traveller, writer and camera-
artist’.37 The premier performance took place on Friday 23 January 1914
at the Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street, Mayfair, with Sir Ernest
Shackleton presiding as master of ceremonies.38 The Philharmonic Hall
was a quality venue, a cut above the other theatres and music halls of the
West End, and frequently included serious actualities in its programmes. The
audiences to which Ponting’s show appealed ranged from the highest levels of
London society to the aspirational middlebrow. On the evening of 12 May,
Ponting ‘gave a royal command representation of his cinema lecture…before
the King and Queen and the King and Queen of Denmark at Buckingham
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 13

Palace.’39 After the command performance, the advertising boasted that ‘The
patronage of the aristocratic and intellectual classes has been the greatest
in the history of cinema.’ At the same, the general public was advised that
evening performances at the Philharmonic Hall finished at half-past ten, ‘thus
giving suburban visitors ample time for returning home’.40
The illustrated handbill for Ponting’s show featured a selection of his
polar photographs and glowing press opinions (Fig. 1.3). The advertising
acknowledges that the event was in competition with London’s other stage
attractions while also placing it in a class above them. ‘There is nothing in
the theatres of London to approach this drama,’ claimed the Dramatic Critic:
‘There is no comedy so amusing, no play so poignant, no tragedy so heart-
rending as this tale in pictures.’ There were two shows daily, a matinee at three
o’clock and an evening performance at eight o’clock, each comprising two acts
separated by an interval, when tea and refreshments were served by Pagani’s,
a fashionable London caterer. In the foyer there was also a small exhibition
of photographic prints, and musical interludes were performed on a grand
piano. Ponting’s lecture was synchronized with sequences of moving pictures
and lantern slides. ‘To see Mr Ponting’s historic film and hear the brilliant
lecture which accompanies it,’ reported the Daily Sketch, ‘is to realize what
being an Englishman should mean. As he tells with gentle though clear voice
the story of Captain Scott’s journey to the South Pole, he holds the audience
in his power until…there are eyes wet with tears.’41
Advertisements tied the show in to sales of the book, Scott’s Last Expedition,
published in London by Smith, Elder in 1913, and to a related exhibition of
photographic prints in the galleries of the Fine Art Society at 148 New Bond
Street. The exhibition catalogue, sold separately, advised that 150 subjects
were available for sale in a range of sizes and prices, and printed in carbon,
‘the most beautiful process known’. Country Life considered them to represent
‘The final perfection of the photographer’s art.’42 Ponting’s choice of the Fine
Art Society was a significant one in relation to his self-promotion as a ‘camera-
artist’ as distinct from a scientific photographer. The Fine Art Society had
been founded in 1876, quickly establishing itself as one of London’s leading
art dealers, and it was particularly noted for having pioneered the ‘one-man
exhibition’. The most famous of these was the 1883 exhibition of Whistler’s
Venetian etchings, An Arrangement in White and Yellow.43 In choosing to hold his
tie-in exhibition at the Fine Art Society, Ponting was thereby making a strong
statement about the status of polar photography as art.
Today, the most visible and enduring legacy of Ponting’s work is probably
his illustrated book, The Great White South. In the major museums and research
collections, items such as exhibition catalogues and theatre programmes are
classified as ephemera, while the exhibition prints and glass lantern slides
14 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

are held in storage and rarely seen by anyone but specialist researchers. And
yet, collectively, the surviving records of Ponting’s With Captain Scott in the
Antarctic confirm that it was not just a book or a film in the modern sense, but
a synchronized, multimedia event. This suggests that in the first two decades
of the twentieth century, published travel writing entered the public domain
as perhaps never before or since – in the shadow of other media, including
photography, lantern-slide and cinematograph projection, and their various
combinations in the travelogue and the illustrated press.44 It was the era of
‘visual ephemera’.45
To understand the ontology of Ponting’s travelogue as a synchronized
lecture entertainment, it is therefore necessary to set aside modern notions
of textuality associated with the book and the film in their modern sense,
and to conduct an archaeology of these visual ephemera. This was a field
of cultural production characterized by the migration of content across
different formats, by the interplay of different kinds of media and styles of
career, by the enormous popular appeal of the new visual media, especially
the power of moving pictures, and by the migration of texts through
various disciplinary, institutional, commercial and generic domains. It
was a period in which the texts of travel writing were subordinated to
and even regarded as less real than the photography or cinematography
they accompanied and which, until the late 1920s, still had the power that
Tom Gunning calls ‘the cinema of attractions’. Ponting’s photographs and
films, after all, were for many the first time they had seen in any detail the
fauna of Antarctica, and the many varieties of ice formation and weather.
For this reason, advertising and newspaper reports not only featured the
camera-artist above the explorer, but also the role of the apparatus itself as
a recording device and a medium of presentation. In many advertisements,
the apparatus and the aesthetic of presentation take precedence even above
Scott’s noble sacrifice:

ANTARCTIC CINEMA
MR. PONTING’S PICTURES OF THE SCOTT EXPEDITION

‘With Captain Scott in the Antarctic’ is the title of a series of cinematograph

pictures of absorbing interest which are being shown daily at the Philharmonic
Hall… Apart from the stirring incidents that have given this so tragically successful
expedition its world-wide fame, and from the intimate pictures of the domestic
life of the explorers in the regions of eternal snow, there were also shown animal
and bird studies in the Antarctic. Another outstanding feature of the exhibition
was the beautiful natural phenomena observed in the frozen southern seas. Of
these, the picture entitled ‘Birth of an Iceberg,’ which shows a berg breaking
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 15

away from the parent glacier, and another, ‘Death of an Iceberg,’ were sublime
in their grandeur.46

As one reviewer noted of Ponting’s travelogue, ‘No history of the expedition,

however brilliantly written, could possibly enable us to realize what Polar
exploration means as do these living pictures.’47
The success of Ponting’s show confirms Altman’s view that expedition
films perpetuated the central role of the lecturer’s performance for some
years after it had begun to fade in other film genres. Although Hurley had
previously put on small shows and exhibitions of his own, including several
at the Kodak Salon in George Street, Sydney, he had not yet attempted
anything as ambitious as this. When he returned to London from Shackleton’s
Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in November 1916, Ponting’s show was
on again at the Philharmonic after an enforced break during the first years
of the war, and Hurley saw it at least four times. It was a revelation to him of
what might be achieved in his own career. Certainly, as Helen Ennis notes,
Hurley had no role models for his first essays in polar photography: ‘he didn’t
see Ponting’s acclaimed work for the Scott expedition…until the Shackleton
expedition was over.’48 But Ponting was a role model for both Mawson and
Hurley when it came to the art of the synchronized lecture entertainment.
On Saturday 18 November Hurley went along to Ponting’s show for the first
time with Shackleton’s business partner Ernest Perris, the proprietor of the
London Daily Chronicle, describing it in his diary as ‘the acme of photographic
perfection’. Hurley had yet to learn the craft of lecturing, especially how to
synchronize the words and images, and he noted, ‘Ponting’s manner & delivery
are excellent, his patter splendid, giving one the impression the penguins were
actually performing to his words.’ On Monday 11 December, after his third
visit, he wrote, ‘Went to Ponting’s lecture at evening, which I am more in
raptures over than ever. Everything harmonises & synchronises perfectly.’49

Douglas Mawson and The Home of the Blizzard

The first major synchronized lecture entertainment that is today linked with
Hurley’s name, The Home of the Blizzard, was in certain respects not his work
at all – or at least not solely his. This has to do with the legal and industrial
contexts in which he worked at that time, and with changing notions of
authorship and celebrity. Previous accounts of Hurley’s work, including the
two most recent biographies, present him as a gifted photographic artist
creating a corpus of work that expresses a developing personal aesthetic.50
Yet for specific historical reasons Hurley’s first important professional
appointment, to Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, did not exactly
16 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

coincide with these assumptions. As Rosalind Krauss argues, there has been
a tendency for contemporary historians of early photography to project on
to it inappropriate and anachronistic concepts derived from modern art
history.51 Early photographers attached to expeditions and surveys were
known as ‘camera operators’. They were contracted to provide ‘views’,
whose subjects were determined by the strategic or scientific purposes of the
expedition. They often remained anonymous, rarely held copyright in the
views they took, and usually had little or no control over their subsequent
exhibition and publication. Unlike a landscape, a view was not regarded as
the expression of an artist’s sensibility but as part of the systematic record
of an expedition’s scientific programme, of a geographical system, or a body
of disciplinary knowledge.
Krauss’s argument turns around two periods: the 1870s, when early
photography was still a distinct practice, and the 1980s, when a newly energized
history of early photography began to project a retrospective interpretation
designed to secure it as art. As we have seen from Ponting’s association with the
Fine Art Society, however, one important difference between the 1870s and the
1910s is that notions of high art were by then being imported into the discursive
space of early photography by the practitioners themselves. This was a period
of transition between what Krauss calls ‘views’ and ‘landscapes’, between the
prosaic job of the ‘camera operator’ and the inspired vocation of the ‘camera
artist’. While Ponting and Hurley were contracted to provide topographical
and documentary images for expeditions whose scientific objectives exceeded
their personal visions, they styled themselves ‘camera artists’, and often
prepared and exhibited their photographs as signed works of art. This was
especially so in the institutional context of the theatre or gallery, where the
celebrity cameraman was the centre of attention, while in the museum or
learned academy, their images were likely to be used more anonymously in the
service of science. Yet neither Ponting nor Hurley necessarily owned copyright
for the images he made, which were repeatedly published in contexts and
combinations beyond their personal artistic control.
The facts are that the synchronized lecture entertainments we now think
of as Hurley’s film, The Home of the Blizzard, were produced not by a single
author, but by a loose and shifting aggregation of personnel and corporate
entities spread over three continents. It was not a single, definitive text but a
dispersed entertainment event comprising multiple texts in several media –
live performance, cinema, photography and print – and different versions in
each medium were created at different times by different personnel, often in
different countries and for different audiences. Even individual sections of cine
film might be tinted differently when developed in different cities; they might
be screened in different sequences depending on the lecturer’s text, of which
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 17

there were several versions; or they could be interrupted at different points

by the lecturer’s anecdotes, lantern-slide projection and musical interludes, or
by the unpredictable participation of the audience. The textual and exhibition
history of The Home of the Blizzard is so complex that we may never know
the full story. Today, archivists at institutions such as the British Film Institute
and ScreenSound Australia struggle to describe the disorderly segments and
‘multiple versions’ of such ‘films’. The important point is to understand the
fluidity of the industry and its practices at this moment, suspended between
the conflicting effects of growing international mass production, a residual
craft industry of local performance by individual travelling showmen, and the
effects of simultaneous, territorial rights agreements. To do this, we need an
ontology of the text and authorship more appropriate to the early than the
late twentieth century. Our analysis needs to shift away from the categories
that have normally organized discussions of Hurley’s life and work, and of
polar exploration generally: that is, away from biographical individuals
conceived as authors, and from the originary and often mesmerizing events
of the expeditions themselves, to the technical, institutional and industrial
conditions of their representation. The point is to understand the AAE not as
an unmediated event but as a media event.
The AAE was constituted as a separate legal entity with Mawson as its
commercial principal. All members of the expedition, including Hurley, were
contracted to it as salaried employees and bound to respect the expedition’s
intellectual property. Failure to honour the contract could lead to forfeit of salary.
The clauses controlling copyright in each man’s contract related to all media,
specifically citing photography, cinematography, manuscript diaries, published
travel writing and lectures, and also anticipated the negotiation of regional
distribution rights on a worldwide scale.52 Mawson, then, would remain the
legal owner of all the expedition’s records and artefacts, including the film
and photographic negatives, in which he retained copyright for the purpose of
fund raising for a period of two years after the conclusion of the expedition.53
And although he had employed Hurley as the expedition’s photographer and
cinematographer, he did not rely solely on Hurley’s services.
In October 1911, during the preparation phase, Mawson had engaged
the international film agency, Gaumont, to underwrite the filming of the
expedition. Under the terms of the contract negotiated with Fred Gent, the
general manager of Gaumont’s Sydney office, Mawson ceded to Gaumont
all that might be thought of as artistic control, including the exclusive rights
to develop, edit and exploit the negatives for a period of two years, the net
profits to be shared equally. Gaumont were to ‘exhibit lease sell let or hire and
generally exploit commercially [the expedition’s] cinematograph films’, and
they were to do so ‘in accordance with their trade knowledge and uncontrolled
18 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

discretion.’ For his part, Mawson undertook ‘not to issue or permit to

authorize the issue of any cinematograph films…calculated to compete’
with Gaumont’s initiatives.54 Gaumont undertook to supply one Prestwich
cinematograph-taking camera complete with lenses and other fittings ‘for the
use of the Cinematographer appointed by the said Douglas Mawson.’ But in
1911 Hurley had no prior experience with cine cameras and so Gent arranged
for him to receive instruction from Gaumont staff: ‘by the time we get through
with Hurley,’ he reassured Mawson, ‘he will know perfectly well…how to get
the best results with the Cinematograph.’55

The First Australian Screenings

The first known public screenings of film from the expedition were organized
by the AAE’s secretary, Conrad Eitel, in conjunction with Gaumont and
Spencer’s Pictures, and without Hurley’s presence or artistic involvement. The
title, The Home of the Blizzard, did not yet exist and Hurley was in no sense its
author. On 18 January 1912, as the expedition prepared for its first winter
at Cape Denison, Aurora returned to Australia with the footage Hurley had
exposed since the departure from Hobart on 2 December 1911. With Mawson
in the South was screened for a week in May 1912 at Sydney’s Lyceum Theatre.
It was accompanied by a lecture, possibly given by Eitel, a ‘full orchestra’ and
‘effects’.56 Like the other American-style picture palaces recently built in Sydney,
Spencer’s Pictures at the Lyceum was a continuous house employing teams
of operators to work the cinematograph machines from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.,
repeating the show every hour and a half with a complete programme change
weekly or twice weekly. During the day, a ‘piano specialist’ performed, while
at night an orchestra accompanied the pictures. Since the early 1910s, feature
films, especially from the United States, were the mainstay of the programme.57
The first footage from the AAE was therefore edited by Gaumont, exhibited
by Spencer’s, introduced by one or more unknown lecturers, and took its place
as a short ‘topical’ in a varied and continuous programme of largely imported
material. Hurley’s work had entered the web of colonial modernity.
Eitel also organized a screening of With Dr Mawson in the Antarctic at His
Majesty’s Theatre, Hobart (another of Spencer’s houses) on the evening of
25 June 1912, where it was again part of a larger programme. Under the
patronage of the governor of Tasmania, the show began with an overture
by Spencer’s Symphony Orchestra. The Anglican bishop of Tasmania then
delivered a lecture on ‘The Work of the Mawson Expedition’, illustrated by
lantern slides and a series of 20 film sequences taken by Hurley, acknowledged
as the ‘Official Cinematographer of the Expedition’, and covering events
from Aurora’s departure from Hobart to the arrival at Commonwealth Bay.
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 19

After an interval, Spencer’s presented a series of six ‘Educative and Scenic

Films’, including The Golden Supper, Derwent Valley, Picturesque Niagra, The Bees
at Work, and The Fall of Troy. In conclusion, Eitel briefly returned thanks to
patrons on Mawson’s behalf.58
Immediately after the Sydney premier, Gent wrote to Eitel complaining
that ‘the result on the screen is…not up to the standard we expected from your
Cinematographer.’ ‘It is almost certain,’ he warned, ‘that Messers Spencers
Ltd. will protest at the price we have quoted for this picture owning to the poor
quality.’59 The reason, as Hurley had already discovered, was partly to do with
the chemical properties of the Eastman film stock supplied by Gaumont. But
Gent had another criticism: ‘A certain lack of anything really and especially
interesting in addition to the rather poor photographic quality generally has
made it a very up-hill work indeed.’60 In Antarctic films, something ‘really
interesting’ meant wildlife, especially penguins. The challenge to Hurley’s
artistic authority was clear, and within days of his initial complaint, on
15 May 1912, Gent forced Eitel to sign a new agreement. Its main purpose
was to ensure that a Gaumont ‘Cinematograph Operator’ would accompany
Aurora on her return voyage to Macquarie Island during the winter of 1912.
The operator was Richard Primmer, whom Gaumont had already sent to
Hobart to film Aurora’s departure in December 1911.
The terms of the second agreement were strongly worded. Should
Gaumont’s operator be required to break his journey, the whole of his
travelling and other expenses to Sydney were to be defrayed by Mawson. The
resulting negatives were to remain in the possession of Gaumont Australia or
their London headquarters, and the company was to have ‘an absolutely free
hand and liberty to market the Cinematograph Prints as may seem best to
them.’ In a final clause, Gaumont’s control was extended back from the editing
and exhibiting stages to the work of the operator himself: ‘The Gaumont…
Cinematograph Operator to have a free hand and every assistance given him
to take, what in his judgment appear to be suitable subjects for the production
of the Cinematograph.’61 It is likely that Primmer’s footage was incorporated
without acknowledgment into at least some later editions of Hurley’s film. On
12 June 1914, when Mawson was in London, he wrote to Gaumont’s British
manager, ‘I want to know what has become of the negative of Hurley’s (AAE)
film of the summer of 1911–12. Also have you the negative of Primmer’s taken
on our winter sub-Antarctic cruise of 1912? Not having copies of these has
been a disadvantage in my recent lectures.’62 Whatever the fate of Primmer’s
footage, Mawson’s request for it at this time indicates that he viewed the films
exposed by his camera operators not as an artistic expression over which they
exercised moral rights as authors, but as so much content to be incorporated at
his discretion into his own version of the synchronized lecture entertainment.
20 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

When Aurora, with Hurley aboard, returned to Hobart on 15 March

1913, it brought news that Ninnis and Mertz had perished on the ice, and
that Mawson would spend another winter in the south. In addition to the
expedition’s already substantial debts, funds had now to be found for a
relief voyage the following summer. Among the expedition’s few bankable
resources were Hurley’s negatives. Accordingly, his footage from the past
year was again developed and edited by Gaumont for public screening.
A version with Gaumont’s inter-titles was ready for preview by Eitel and
Professor Edgeworth David in April. The final cut was first exhibited in
Melbourne at one of West’s cinemas on 19 July 1913. It opened at West’s
Olympia in Adelaide a few days later and then in Sydney at Spencer’s
Crystal Palace Theatre De Luxe in George Street, where it ran from 4 to
14 August. Variously advertised at this time as Life in the Antarctic and With
Dr Mawson in the Antarctic, it was again a ‘topical’ comprising sequences of film
and lantern slides accompanied by a lecture, and inserted into the houses’
mixed, continuous programmes. Advertisements promised 3,500 feet of
completely new footage. At the Adelaide Olympia it was the star feature but
supported by a number of imported productions from Vitagraph and Pathé.
The Australian Kinematograph Journal noted that ‘with an array such as this, it
is not to be wondered at that the Olympia is the principal place of call for
the many who make a point of never missing a picture entertainment.’ Its
programme for the coming weeks would also feature the Reliance Company’s
drama, The Bawler Out, and ‘those skilled English musical comedy artistes,
Ellaline Terris and Seymour Hicks in a number of their latest and most
novel dance creations.’ A double page advertisement for the Mawson show
boasted ‘Unbounded Success’, ‘All Records Beaten’, ‘Houses Simply Packed’
and ‘Not Even Standing Room’, but in reality the public response was muted
with gross receipts at the end of the season standing at £242.63
The extent to which Hurley was involved is unclear. At the height of the
1913 winter season, he had accepted a commission from the Royal Dutch
Steam Packet Company to visit Java to take both still and cinematograph films
for the purposes of tourist promotion. The duration of his trip is uncertain.
Hurley was still in Sydney in June, though too busy to fulfil a request from
Edgeworth David for lantern slides, and returned some time in September.64
Although Mawson felt that Hurley let him down by repeatedly taking on other
assignments, this was not inconsistent with his contract. Mawson’s agreement
with Gaumont, after all, expressly stated that Gaumont was free to develop,
edit and distribute the film as it thought best. It may well be that at this point
in his career Hurley deliberately – and legitimately – left the film’s public life
to Gaumont, taking on other commercial assignments and concentrating his
personal ambitions at this time on his still photography.
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 21

The First London Season of 1914

If, as Jill Julius Matthews argues, ‘International modernity was gradually
adapted and Australianized in Sydney then proudly performed to the rest of
the country and returned to the world’, it was that ‘return to the world’ that
had now to be achieved in the social life of The Home of the Blizzard.65 When
Mawson returned to Australia in February 1914, the AAE was heavily in debt,
and his urgent need was to cash in on the expedition by exploiting it in the
world’s mass media. On 1 April, the day after his wedding to Paquita Delprat
in Melbourne, Mawson and his party, including Captain John King Davis and
Dr Archie McLean, sailed for London. They were met at Victoria Station on
3 May by Sir Ernest and Lady Shackleton, and representatives of the Royal
Geographical Society. They stayed and worked at the Grosvenor Hotel, though
Mawson later took an office at the Crown Chambers in nearby Regent Street.
It was the last London season before the Great War, yet as Mawson’s biographer,
Philip Ayers, notes, ‘money and power and their flagrant display seemed to be
all that counted.’66 At this time, before the changes soon to be brought about
by the war, the fame of polar explorers still equalled that of military heroes,
and they were lionized by the British public: they were in demand as speakers in
theatres and concert halls, books by and about them were popular with young
and adult readers alike, they endorsed advertisements for everything from
soup to clothing, while cigarette packets contained collector’s cards featuring
their portraits. Like Ponting before him, Mawson was received by the King
at Buckingham Palace on 13 May and by Queen Alexandra at Marlborough
House on 31 May; he was knighted in the Throne Room at St James’s on
29 June. He attended the opera at Covent Garden, concerts at Queen’s Hall
and the Albert Hall, and frequented the theatres. But Mawson’s main business
that summer was to begin exploiting the expedition as a worldwide media
event. In just two and a half months, from 3 May until his departure for
Australia on 20 July, he delivered a series of illustrated lectures, drafted a book
about the expedition, coordinated the production of prints, lantern slides
and cinematograph films in both London and Sydney, and began to conceive
of a complete synchronized lecture entertainment about the AAE modelled
on Ponting’s With Captain Scott in the Antarctic. At the same time, he opened
negotiations with various film and lecturing agencies in London, New York
and Europe that would eventually allow it to be performed simultaneously
around the world after his return to academic life in Australia. Although it
would take more than a year for some of the components to fall into place, this
was a substantial entrepreneurial achievement for a man who was by training
and inclination an academic scientist. Necessity – including the absence of his
camera operator – had turned the geologist into an impresario.
22 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Under contract to the British publisher William Heinemann, Mawson and

McLean worked together in their rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel writing the
two volume edition of the book, The Home of the Blizzard. It would appear under
Mawson’s name but like ‘Hurley’s’ films it was really a team effort, drafted by
Mawson from expedition records by numerous hands, substantially rewritten
by McLean, and illustrated with their choice of Hurley’s photographs.67 In
arranging the illustrations for the book and lantern slides for his lectures that
season, Mawson had to deal with the ever-mobile and elusive Hurley by mail
and telegraph. Even as Mawson travelled to London, Hurley was working on
the AAE negatives at the Kodak workrooms in Dalley Street, Sydney, but at the
very moment that Mawson most needed him, he was planning another stunt.
Having only just returned from Java, he now agreed to accompany Francis
Birtles on a photographic tour of Queensland and the Northern Territory
in a T-model Ford. Birtles was another of Hurley’s show business mentors. A
veteran showman and performer, he had staged a number of highly publicized
camera adventures in Australia with sponsors such as Gaumont and the Ford
Motor Company. On the day of their departure, 10 April 1914, Hurley
wrote to Mawson that he had left ‘the entire Conflation of the prints for the
Popular Edition also the lantern slides’ with a Mr Hawkins of the Kodak
Workrooms and also with a Mr R. W. Hedges, whom he described simply
as ‘an enthusiastic supporter of our Expedition’. While admitting that too
little time had prevented him from colouring the lantern slides, he nonetheless
admonished Mawson to ‘see that Heinemann reproduces in the best possible
[way] – good pictures will be ruined if this is not done.’ Hurley signed off, ‘Am
leaving for the Centre tomorrow.’68
Mawson replied from his office in Regent Street on 18 June, acknowledging
receipt of Hurley’s parcel but noting that he had failed to include a number
of important items:

There were a good many things I would like to have had which were not included.
…you omitted to send the autochrome plates… Nor have you sent the twelve
best negatives as arranged… Altogether the book will suffer considerably from
your rushing away into the interior of Australia before the work was adequately
arranged for.69

Mawson wrote again on 2 July, advising Hurley, ‘I am now negotiating for a big
exhibition of your photographs under your name in London’, and requesting
that he leave a specified set of slides and negatives for Mawson to collect from
Kodak on his return to Australia in August.70 But in the midst of the Birtles
stunt, Hurley accepted yet another appointment, this time as Shackleton’s
photographer on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, leaving Australia
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 23

for Punta Arenas in October 1914. His last letters to Mawson, on 10 and 11
September, confirmed that the slides and ‘selected Antarctic negatives for the
Exhibition’ would be left as requested, and specified that ‘all pictures reproduced
must bear the name in Small letters of “Frank Hurley”.’ Although Mawson had
so far taken the initiative in carrying out all aspects of the media exploitation
of AAE material, Hurley left him with a few parting shots of advice: ‘Re film…
have two copies for the lectures, as damage might easily overtake a single copy’;
‘see…that the blocks [for the Heinemann illustrations] are as large as possible
in full page illustrations, otherwise they will economise on the “Square inches”’;
and, with emphasis, ‘Watch the Gaumont crowd, they are pretty tricky.’71
The book, The Home of the Blizzard, was published in Britain by William
Heinemann on 21 January 1915 to coincide with Mawson’s lecture tour of
North America: it was distributed simultaneously by Lippincott in the United
States and Angus & Robertson in Australasia. In the early months of 1915,
Mawson discussed with Heinemann the marketing concept of ‘tie-ins’ and they
agreed on a number of principles. These were: that the book, the proposed
photographic exhibition and all future versions of the travelogue entertainment
should now have the same title, The Home of the Blizzard; that the catalogue
of the photographic exhibition should advertise the book and that copies of
the book should be available for sale at the gallery; that the programme
for the travelogue should also advertise the book; that a lantern slide illustrating
the book should be thrown upon the screen at the travelogue entertainments;
and that copies of the book be sold at the film screenings.72 Heinemann later
proposed that copies of the book be sent to film distributors on a sale or return
basis during regional tours.73 Finally, it was desirable that Mawson or someone
connected with the expedition be present at any Home of the Blizzard event,
though this was not always possible, and staff supplied by lecturing agencies
were often used instead. These were cutting-edge marketing techniques and
it is clear that Mawson took a leading role in formulating them. He wrote to
Heinemann, ‘Lloyds Film Agency asked me what sort of a title I thought we
should have on the film story, and I suggested the use of the title “The Home
of the Blizzard”… I should think to run a film show of the same title of the
book would help to popularize the name of the book and the book itself.’74
During the London season of 1914, Mawson lectured at the Royal
Geographical Society on 9 June and gave a public lecture on 12 June, also at
Queen’s Hall, and arranged by the Gerald Christy Lecture Agency. Shackleton
gave the vote of thanks at the first lecture, while Sir George Reid, Australia’s
High Commissioner in London, hosted the second. Publicity announced that ‘a
marvelous series of pictures’, both cinematograph films and lantern slides, would
be ‘thrown upon the screen’, featuring some of Hurley’s most dramatic work
carefully selected to tie in with the lecture’s central narrative interest, the deaths
24 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

of Ninnis and Mertz, and Mawson’s solo return journey. Even at the Royal
Geographical Society, the show was presented as a narrative of adventure rather
than a purely scientific lecture. Reviews described ‘the comfortable geographers
in Queen’s Hall, watching against the lantern screen a slim young man with a
boyish manner.’75 Mawson had become a platform personality. The poster for
the public lecture was illustrated by an artist’s impression of a lone sledger
lying tied to his sled and staring into a crevasse, further emphasizing the show’s
narrative content (Fig. 1. 4). It was noted that the Hurley photographs used
by the press appeared ‘by special arrangement with Mr. William Heinemann,
Dr. Mawson’s publisher’, thereby tying in the lecture to the forthcoming book.
The Daily Mirror even observed that ‘[full] details of that adventure will not be
known until the book of the expedition is published.’76
One surviving version of Mawson’s lecture – originally sent to his American
and British agents for adaptation by staff lecturers for the 1915 season –
reveals the procedural cues by which the lecturer and his operator negotiated
the evening’s numerous changes of medium and screen practice, particularly
the transitions between cinematograph film and lantern slides, and the
interpolation of anecdotes.77 The text refers to Mawson in the third person,
confirming that it was prepared for delivery by lecturers from the agencies –
Christy’s in London and the Lee Keedick Agency in the United States. The
performance began with the slide of a map of the expedition’s route as the
lecturer introduced the programme and then signalled to his operator to begin
the first reel of moving film:

As you will see shortly, the records of the expedition are unique in the number
of illustrations, and range and subjects. Towards these many of the staff
contributed, but none to the same extent, and excellence as Frank Hurley, the
official photographer. The film, and most of the photographs shown are Hurley’s
taking, and you will be able to judge for yourselves his special merit as a camera
artist.
I will now have thrown on the screen a moving picture illustrating salient
features of the first Antarctic voyage of the ‘Aurora’… The picture takes up the
story at the moment of departure from Hobart…

The sequences of moving film were of relatively short duration, some only a
few minutes, and the lecturer had simultaneously to speak about the content
of the images while also sustaining the narrative as he guided the audience
and his operator from one medium to another:

The still picture takes up the thread of the story. Here you see Aurora tied up to
the floe ice off Queen Mary Land…
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 25

When the colour Paget Plate slides were thrown on the screen, the novelty
of the medium itself provided a cue for the lecturer, reflecting the period’s
presentational aesthetic, as the medium, the subject matter and the narrative
were given equal prominence:

This tri-coloured photograph brings us back to Commonwealth Bay at the Main

Base Station in Adelie Land…

A sequence of black and white lantern slides introduced the next film
sequence:

One of Hurley’s ice pictures – near the shore. – Hurley spared no pains in
obtaining records of artistic ice forms…
We now have some films illustrating the winds which, throughout the greater
part of the year, never ceased to blow…

The lecturer’s comments about the difficulties and techniques of filming

were a constant theme, and this was complemented by references to the
present screening, and the presence and operation of the theatre’s projection
equipment, as in this description of the meteorologists at work in windy
conditions:

The meteorologists climbing out of the roof door of the hut… They are on their
way to visit one of the instruments… As they leave the screen you will see them
descend in the face of the wind and buoyed up by it, maintain equilibrium by
leaning at an angle upon the rushing air torrent…

The lecturer’s reference to the screen, which seems to threaten the illusion of
realism, suggests that early twentieth-century audiences were comfortable with
the mode of presentationalism in which the show’s medium could suddenly
become its content.
As a tie-in to the public lectures, Mawson was planning a photographic
exhibition modelled on Ponting’s at the Fine Art Society, though it did
not open until 15 January 1915, coinciding with the publication of the
Heinemann book and Mawson’s North American lecture tour. A master of
tie-in promotion, Heinemann wrote to Mawson, ‘The matter of the film
and the programme, also the programme of the Fine Art Society, has been
carefully attended to. The show opens today; and an advance copy of the
book is on show there, so that orders can be taken on it.’78 The galleries
of the Fine Art Society were associated with artistic rather than scientific
exhibition or commercial entertainment, and in this context Mawson worked
26 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

hard to promote Hurley – in his absence – as a ‘camera artist’. The Antarctic

photographs featured in the exhibition catalogue were not documentary
or scientific, but Hurley’s pictorially novel and dramatic scenes of men
‘leaning on the wind’, and the ever popular penguins.79 Mawson also secured
the gallery’s agreement to include a selection of the photographs Hurley
had taken on his trips to Java and Central Australia, thereby – in Krauss’
terms – giving the developing oeuvre of the young camera artist equal status to
the documentary requirements of the scientific expedition. Both the expansion
of the oeuvre and its personalized attribution were more appropriate at the Fine
Art Society, where one man shows were common, than at Mawson’s Lecture to
the Royal Geographical Society at Queen’s Hall. In an undated and possibly
unsent letter to Hurley, Mawson wrote, ‘I have really gone to a lot of trouble
to include those pictures…thinking it would help you; it has not helped our
exhibit as…public attention is consistently with the Antarctic ones.’80 Although
he was never quite at home in London’s entertainment circles, Mawson had
therefore done a superb job in arranging the exhibition. It was a model tie-in
event, not only serving to market the photographs from the expedition, but at
the same time promoting his new book and the forthcoming travelogue. On
the back cover of the exhibition catalogue is an advertisement for the new
Heinemann book, The Home of the Blizzard, described as ‘a popular story of the
adventures of the expedition’. In his catalogue essay, Mawson boosts Hurley’s
persona as an adventurer-cameraman, echoing Ponting’s earlier claims about
the unparalleled difficulties of polar photography: ‘The pictures exhibited
illustrate sufficiently the high merit of Hurley’s art…[and] these results were,
in many cases, obtained under circumstances and difficulties seldom paralleled
in the history of photography.’81
Before leaving London in July 1914, Mawson tried to set up firm
arrangements with several film and lecturing agencies to exploit the AAE
material as a synchronized lecture entertainment in Britain and North America.
That the idea was his rather than Hurley’s is suggested by his talk of making
‘a speciality of the film’ while they were still in Antarctica.82 His plan was first
clearly formulated in a letter to Hutchinson, his lawyer in London, on 20 June
1914, in which he proposed to put on ‘picture shows at which members of the
Expedition would officiate…such as Ponting has now established in London at
the Philharmonic Hall’.83 Ironically, the reason for his writing to Hutchinson
was the impending breakdown of his relationship with Gaumont, the very
agency he hoped might help him achieve this goal. There were several reasons
for the breakdown. Mawson had accused Gaumont of poor production
values in their screening of the film in Australia and of unnecessary delays
in mounting a London season. He told Hutchinson, ‘They have really missed
their chance by allowing the film to slip out of their hands without making
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 27

any attempt to push it here in Europe.’84 Gaumont’s solicitors claimed that

the only reason they had delayed was the competition arising from ‘the boom
in connection with the Scott pictures’, and reminded Mawson that they had
‘absolute discretion as to when they should bring them on the market.’85
On 20 July, the day of his departure from London, Mawson authorized
Archie McLean to sue Gaumont for the return of all films belonging to the
expedition and to negotiate a new agreement with the ITA Film Syndicate, at
13 Austin Friars.86 At the same time, he began discussions with the Lee Keedick
Agency in New York about a future tour of North America. Mawson wrote
from Regent Street on 19 July, ‘My dear Keedick, I trust you are preparing the
way for cinematograph lectures in the United States. It is a very big thing you
have in hand and if it is worked properly, with a reasonable amount of good
fortune, should be a valuable asset to both yourself and the Expedition.’87
Informing Keedick of his imminent return to Australia, he advised him how
to order the materials he would require direct from London: coloured lantern
slides from the Paget Prize Plate Company, black and white slides from Raines
of Ealing, photographic enlargements from the Fine Art Society, and the
films from Lloyds. When ordering sets of lantern slides from Geddes at the
Padget Prize Plate Company, he assured him that the Keedick agency was
renowned for its ‘high-class shows, and you may be sure that it will be a very
good advertisement for your colour plates.’88 But as the links in Mawson’s
entrepreneurial chain of command stretched around the globe, things began
to go awry. His London film agent, Harry Hughes of Lloyds, wrote on 27 May
1915, ‘With us in London, Keedick in America, and yourself in Australia,
the smallest difficulty which we encounter is magnified considerably.’89 The
more complex a synchronized lecture entertainment became in terms of its
production, the number of media and personnel involved, and the geographic
spread of its personnel and materials, the more unstable, unpredictable and
dispersed it became.
Mawson’s efforts to replace Gaumont as his agent in London at this time,
first with the ITA Film Syndicate and then with Lloyds Film Agency, are
revealing about the place of ‘picture talks’ within the broader landscape of
urban entertainments, their particular niche as an educational show, and their
difficulty in competing with and at times incorporating the values of more
popular forms of stage entertainment. Mawson was always less willing to
compromise than Hurley. On 6 July 1914, he submitted a business proposal
to ITA. The profits were to be allocated 50 per cent to the AAE, 5 per cent to
Hurley, and 45 per cent to the ITA, and an attempt was to be made to secure
the services of AAE members as lecturers. This and several other conditions
suggest that Mawson was trying to define the genre of the synchronized lecture
entertainment in his own terms, marking out its distinction from other forms
28 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

of entertainment. His proposal was to exploit the film ‘in the manner in which
Ponting has been so successful.’ He insisted that ‘The films are not to be shown
in ordinary cheap film houses until after they cease to be profitable as lecturing
concerns’; that ‘they be shown in proper style’; and that ‘the film is not to be
shown in conjunction with any other unless with my express permission.’90
The board of the ITA Film Syndicate agreed to Mawson’s proposal with
certain conditions and alterations that confirm the ongoing tension between
science and entertainment. The syndicate required:

1. A thorough revision, with certain deletions and additions, a careful

preparation as regards titles, etc., and the presentation of the whole so that
it tells a consecutive narrative.
2. A properly thought out press and general publicity campaign to arouse
public interest.
3. After the film has been revised and strengthened with other sections that
you have, a really popular and vivid lecture should be prepared telling the
whole story of the expedition.91

Because the syndicate did not feel competent to manage the lecturing
arrangements on a national scale, they proposed to conjunct with Gerald
Christy, who was to make available ‘his unrivalled practical knowledge of the
Halls of the United Kingdom, and the best way of engaging them.’ Finally,
because of Mawson’s imminent departure for Australia, the syndicate required
that he cede to them authority to make decisions about the exploitation of the
film in Britain without the requirement to consult a third party.92 Mawson
accepted the agreement on 19 July, but before the syndicate could have
contracts drawn up the war broke out, and the board ‘agreed unanimously
that it would be idle to think of bringing out the Film either in this country or
on the Continent during universal war.’93
The ITA Film Syndicate was in reality Shackleton’s own Imperial Trans-
Antarctic Film Syndicate, which his biographer, Roland Huntford, describes
as ‘little more than a paper company’, its few shareholders including Ernest
Perris, the proprietor of the Daily Chronicle and Shackleton’s business partner.94
Partly because of Mawson’s growing reservations about Shackleton and his
people, openly expressed in his correspondence with Hurley at this time, he had
decided by the end of 1914 to take Ponting’s advice and contract, instead, with
Ponting’s own agency, Lloyds. In his absence, he appointed as his agent Fred
Gent, formerly of Gaumont’s Sydney office, who was now working in London.
Still uncertain about the people who ran London’s entertainment industry
and with little sympathy for their values, Mawson suspected that Ponting
was colluding with Lloyds’ managers, George Cooper and Harry Hughes, to
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 29

delay the London season of The Home of the Blizzard while Ponting’s own show
continued at the Philharmonic. Gent was to act as a private detective, looking
into ‘the standing of the people in question’ and reporting to Mawson on their
motives. Gent wrote a series of reports to Mawson over many months, but soon
decided that Mawson’s suspicions were entirely unfounded. He later wrote, ‘So
far as I am able to judge the principal reason of delay in getting this Film going
arose through Hughes’ desire to perfect the Lecture & to select the Film so that
it should not only bear comparison with the other subject [that is, the Scott film]
but beat it… So far as I can find there has not been any collusion with P[ontin]g
to delay or interfere with the publication of your subject at present.’95

The North American Tour of 1915

The first Australian and British seasons of The Home of the Blizzard had therefore
been Mawson’s media events, not Hurley’s. Mawson ultimately hoped to stage
a complete multimedia travelogue like Ponting’s at the Philharmonic Hall,
but for the moment the arrangements were beyond him. He left England
on 20 July 1914 to return to Adelaide, where he had university teaching
commitments. To further reduce the AAE’s debts, he undertook a lecture tour
of Australia, beginning in Sydney in August 1914, using his own lecture and
slides, and a version of the cinematograph film. Then, in October 1914, he
left Australia for a demanding lecture tour of the United States and Canada,
arranged by the Lee Keedick Agency in New York. Supported by a tie-in
photographic exhibition at the Rallston Art Gallery on Fifth Avenue, the
lectures commenced at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC
on 15 January 1915 and then at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York two days later. Mawson then toured America and Canada by train,
including lectures in Philadelphia, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Cleveland,
Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore. William Heinemann may have been partially
responsible for the timing of events. When Mawson let him know that he
would next be in London in November 1914 on route to the United States,
Heinemann had warned that the war would by then be ‘in full swing’, and that
London audiences would not be interested in shows about polar exploration.
Heinemann wrote, ‘I strongly urge you to carry out your plan and lecture in
Australia and America before you come over here [again]… If you are going
to America, I want to arrange to get your book published over there at least to
synchronise with your arrival.’96
Mawson’s albums of press clippings from the North American tour,
professionally compiled for him by Lee Keedick’s staff, give a detailed account
of the lecture as a touring performance event.97 Everywhere he went, Mawson
was treated as a celebrity. His arrival in New York from Liverpool aboard the
30 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Cunard Line’s Orduna was widely reported in the press, and he was met in
Washington by Professor W. E. Lingelbach, the president of the Geographical
Society of Philadelphia, and his American publisher, J.B. Lippincott. According
to the Philadelphia Press, ‘One can tell in a glance how much of a cosmopolite
he is… Like all other titled Englishmen [sic] who come to America on special
missions of a semi-public nature such as his, he is delightful to meet.’ On stage,
Mawson was introduced by local VIPs. In New York, for example, he was
presented by Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of
Natural History, and John Greenough of the American Geographic Society.
His personal presence was central to the performance, the New York City World
noting, ‘His story was told throughout in a quiet, matter of fact style that made
it very real to his hearers, and he was frequently interrupted by applause.’ The
Philadelphia Ledger reported:

Here and there in the audience women were dabbing at their eyes with their
handkerchiefs. The men were shifting in their seats, feeling that after all they led
stupid, humdrum existences, which wouldn’t warrant any woman in thinking them
heroes. For the Hero was there on the stage, in Witherspool Hall, last night.

Despite the obvious publicity advantages of Mawson’s presence, the logistics

of touring meant that in several cities, repeat lectures had to be presented
by Keedick’s staff. In Boston, for example, it was noted that while the first
three days of lectures would be narrated by Sir Douglas, ‘the balance of the
engagement on account of previous bookings will have to be presented by
a representative of Mr Mawson with a duplicate set of motion pictures and
stereopticon views with which the lecture is illustrated.’
The show was marketed in the United States under several variants of
the melodramatic titles, The Race with Antarctic Blizzards, or Racing with Death
in Antarctic Blizzards. It was illustrated by what were described as ‘remarkable
three-color’ moving pictures, lantern slides and photographic enlargements.
The ‘three-color’ films were presumably hand-tinted sequences and the
lantern slides were the Padget colour plates. The Toronto Herald noted that ‘Sir
Douglas was very happy in his talk, which had nothing of the formality of a
lecture, and nothing of the stilted character of a scientific delivery. It was a
splendidly graphic and entertaining account of the work of the expedition
from the human point of view.’ One of the most detailed accounts of Mawson’s
platform persona and his stage and screen practice was of the performance for
the American Geographic Society in New York’s Aeolian Hall:

Dr Mawson told the thrilling story of his race with death in the Antarctic blizzards
between several reels of pictures which were shown. Maps of the expedition,
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 31

together with tri-color still photographs taken on route, were thrown on the
screen during his lecture… The first of the pictures thrown upon the canvas
showed the departure of the expedition from Hobart, Tasmania, in 1911…
Then followed some sensational sea pictures…
Dr Mawson then told the story of the life of the men at the winter quarters,
illustrating his talk with short runs of pictures. He gave unstinted credit, most
deservedly, to Cameraman Frank Hurley… Despite adverse weather conditions,
however, Hurley’s pictures of the country, the animal life, and even of the blizzards
themselves, are exceptionally clear bits of photography… The lecturer then
told of the expedition which set out from headquarters and worked to the east
and south… Following the recital of his fight for life, told in a calm, impersonal
manner which accentuated rather than diminished the vividness of the tale,
Sir Douglas showed his longest run of pictures. These dealt chiefly with the animal
life of the Antarctic, and proved perhaps the individual hit of the evening.

Other newspapers reported that ‘at the close of the lecture many of the
audience took the opportunity of meeting the explorer.’
Because of the rapid development of photographic and filming techniques
at this time, there was a good deal of variation and imprecision in journalists’ use
of technical terms. The word ‘pictures’, for example, was used indiscriminately
to refer to cine film, lantern slides and photographic enlargements. Several
US journalists explained that the lecture was accompanied by both ‘motion
pictures’ and ‘stereopticon views’. Although Hurley did take a stereo camera
on the expedition and there are surviving stereographs for viewing with
small, hand-held devices, it is most likely that these reports simply refer to
the lantern slides, as it was not technically possible to project stereographic
images for a large audience.98 The Buffallo NY Commercial noted precisely that
‘in addition to the motion-pictures in four reels there are fully 100 still subjects
shown.’ Many of the reports used the term ‘runs of moving pictures’, as in
the Chicago Daily Tribune’s ‘Flickerings from Film Land’, which noted that the
lecture ‘is illustrated at intervals by runs of moving pictures giving emphasis to
his narration.’ Tie-in references to the book were common, the Chicago Daily
Tribune noting, ‘In happy coincidence with Sir Douglas Mawson’s arrival in
town comes his two volume account of his adventures, “The Home of the
Blizzard”, fresh from the publishers, the J.B. Lippincott Company. The books
are filled with lovely illustrations…foreshadowing and reminiscing the pictorial
points of Dr Mawson’s lecture.’
After Mawson’s return to Australia, the Lee Keedick Agency continued to
promote the film. Now titled, Sir Douglas Mawson’s Marvelous Bird, Animal and
Travel Motion Pictures, it could be hired either with one of the agency’s lecturers
or with inter-titles. The show was presented in seasons of up to four weeks in the
32 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

major cities, and Keedick arranged some subcontracts on a states-rights basis.

He later sold the rights entirely to the powerful travelogue distribution company
of Lyman H. Howe, which toured the show well into the 1920s under the title,
Sir Douglas Mawson’s Marvelous Views of the Frozen South.99 Almost immediately,
however, arrangements began to go wrong for Keedick. When Mawson returned
to Australia he left Keedick with the worn set of films he had used on his own
tour, and instructed him to order a new set direct from Lloyds in London.
But Lloyds sent the films by mistake to Mawson in Australia. While awaiting
the arrival of the new prints, Keedick continued to use Mawson’s old set but
he had missed the best of the season. ‘Lloyds have certainly balled things up,’ he
complained. When the new films did arrive, he found that half of them had been
so poorly printed as to be unusable: ‘Lloyds either did not inspect these prints
before shipping them or else they thought they would work off on me some of
their unsuccessful experiments. I paid duty on this junk of $95.80.’100 Keedick
soon began to take losses. The film was shown at the Lyric Theatre in New York
from 1 to 26 June 1915, sustaining a ruinous deficit of US$2071.53. Keedick’s
expenses included rental of the Lyric Theatre, salaries to staff including the
lantern operator and electrician, the lecturer, theatre staff, and various forms of
advertising, including electric signs, subway advertising, window cards, posters
and newspaper advertisements. As in London, audiences were also declining
due to the war and films about the polar regions were no longer novel. ‘This
is a year of “wails” for everyone in the entertainment business,’ he wrote to
Mawson. ‘The theatrical season is fifty percent worse than last year’s, which was
the worst in history up until that time.’101
Keedick was also having little success in discharging another of his
commitments to Mawson: the distribution of the photographic enlargements
supplied by the Fine Art Society. Again, the war was partly responsible. ‘I have
not had nearly the success in disposing of the enlargements that I anticipated,’
he wrote. Even Museums failed to respond, all admitting that the pictures
would be valuable additions to their collections but pleading inability to raise
money while the war was in progress. To make matters worse, one of his
major outlets, the Rallston Art Gallery, had gone behind his back and bought
directly, and at lower cost, from the Fine Art Society. Keedick fulminated to
Mawson about the malpractice: ‘It seems incredible that a Firm of less than
crooks would stoop to such contemptible methods of doing business. I have
loaded up heavily on these pictures. I have paid for them and have advertised
them extensively at a considerable expense and now for the London Fine Art
Society to fill any orders that come to them from this country is despicable,
to say the least.’102 Having earlier engaged Gent to monitor Lloyds in his
absence, Mawson no doubt endorsed Keedick’s sentiments, if not his vigorous
American idiom.
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 33

The Second London Season of 1915

While on tour in the United States, Mawson had continued in his efforts to
secure a proper London season for The Home of the Blizzard. He corresponded
extensively with British film, theatre and lecturing agencies, and placed orders
with London’s leading photographic firms, including Raines of Ealing, the
Paget Prize Plate Company of Watford, the Fine Art Society of New Bond
Street, and the Autotype Company of West Ealing.103 But he was struggling
to understand the workings of London’s powerful entertainment industry.
As a scientist, he was also fundamentally out of sympathy with its values. In
Hurley’s absence, and from the other side of the Atlantic, he had to locate
the best developers, and learn to synchronize his lecture with the film and
lantern slides. And then there was the effect of the war in suppressing the
public’s interest in polar exploration. Ponting warned him, ‘I had to close up
my own lecture on account of the war… I cannot tell you what a lot of trouble
I had to get my Show started in London… This film business is really a most
difficult and dangerous thing to dabble in as I found out to my bitter cost in
my dealings with the Gaumont Company.’104
Mawson felt that he had already compromised the scientific value of the
expedition records by agreeing with Heinemann to publish a ‘popular’ edition
of the book. Now he found that the lecture he had used in Australia and
the United States was unsuitable for London. Hughes, the managing director
of Lloyds, whose background was in music halls, wrote explaining that the
lecture he had sent from New York would have been ‘a complete failure’ in
London. A trial audience had told Hughes bluntly that it was ‘rotten’, and
‘there was not enough Penguins’. A new version must be got up that tied-in
with the most exciting parts of the book. It should not be ‘dry and scientific’
like a university lecture but an entertainment realistically geared to the tastes
of the London audience.105
Hughes’ letters to Mawson at this time are particularly revealing of the
craft of putting together a show, which involved synchronizing the sections
of film with a dramatically interesting narrative, derived in this case from
the book with which the film was meant to tie in.106 The lecture must also
be geared to varying audience interests, coordinated with lantern slides and
with the personal celebrity and interests of the lecturer. All of this had to
be synchronized successfully before money was spent on printing and tinting
sections of film from negatives. The production process was further complicated
by the fact that Hughes was preparing a version for London audiences, while
Mawson himself was working in New York. Each performance was unique.
Hughes, a seasoned showman, was in effect educating Mawson about the
intricate technical and narrative skills needed to put on a successful show.
34 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

When Mawson accused him of delaying the premier of The Home of the Blizzard
to suit Ponting’s interests, Hughes replied, ‘Did I not thoroughly realize the
difficulty you have in appreciating what we are doing on behalf of your film
seeing that you are at such a distance from us I should be excessively annoyed
at the statements in your recent letter.’
Hughes advised, ‘As people who have been handling shows of different
kinds since we were in our teens Cooper and I can fairly claim that we know
what Londoners want especially as we are guided to a very great extent by
Ponting’s show.’ As Mawson could not come to London, Hughes suggested
they work with their own texts, each suited to the particular presenter and
his audience. By February 1915, Hughes had read Mawson’s book three
times and run through the films he had left in London at least a dozen times:
he had a ‘pretty good idea of the story’ and was just beginning to prepare
a lecture. He was alert to the localized, individual nature of each and every
performance, dependent as it was on the personality of the lecturer and
the tastes of different audiences: ‘you will inevitably have to deal with
different audiences to ours, and in a totally different manner, seeing that
the personal element enters into it. Would it not be best, therefore, for you
to arrange your own copies to meet your own requirements?’ Hughes also
understood the complexities of ‘synchronizing’. Experience had taught him
that an audience would only tolerate fifty or sixty slides in a single show. And
only when the narrative was established in the most dramatically effective
order would he go ahead with the costly development and tinting of film
sequences: ‘I have been solidly engaged on your Pictures for some twelve
weeks’, he wrote, ‘cutting, editing, censoring, writing and rewriting until it
was licked into shape.’
One of Hughes’ key professional insights was the need for pacing and
balancing of the narrative. As we have seen, in his North American shows,
Mawson had shown most of the location and wildlife pictures at the end after
this lecture. Hughes wrote, ‘There is … one material change in the lecture that
I propose arranging as compared with yours, and that is the Animal subjects.
I note that you put the whole of these at the end, my proposal is to bring
them in here and there.’ Mawson was appalled to learn that sequences of
his ship sailing into the pack ice were being used later as if she were sailing
out of it, and that sequences documenting scientific work must be relieved at
regular intervals by the comic and highly popular penguins. Hughes noted
that ‘[the] printers…have failed to get clear prints of the first section of the
pack ice…we are, therefore, going to use some of the sections showing the
ship returning through the pack which of course will suit our purpose equally
well and perhaps will be better, as…there are more birds and seals shown.’
‘In London,’ Hughes patiently explained, ‘a film lecture must be absolutely
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 35

popular as the majority of Londoners are quite superficial, and only go to

places of amusement to be amused.’
The Home of the Blizzard eventually opened at the Alhambra Theatre,
Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, on 20 April 1915, and afterwards
moved to a season at the Electric Pavilion, Marble Arch. It then toured the
provinces by arrangement with the lecture agent Gerald Christy. These venues
were closer, in every sense, to London’s theatre and music hall culture than
the Philharmonic Hall, where Ponting had opened his Scott picture. The
Alhambra, ‘The Theatre de luxe of the World’, was traditionally a music
hall, while the Electric Pavilion had recently begun to specialize in cinema.
In the contract signed between Lloyds and the Alhambra, Lloyds undertook
to provide the complete films, a ‘competent’ lecturer, lantern slides, lantern
and cinematograph operators, and ‘a first class pianist’ to perform during the
interval. The whole entertainment was to last between two to two and a half
hours. The printed advertising included tie-ins with the Fine Art Society’s
exhibition and sale of photographs, and with the Heinemann book, which was
sold to Alhambra audiences at a discount of twenty five percent.107 Heinemann
assured Mawson, ‘I have had a long discussion with the Managing Director of
Lloyds Film Agency and we have mutually agreed to push each others works.’108
The trade journal, Advertising World, singled out the promotional material used
for the London season of The Home of the Blizzard as striking ‘A New Note in
Kinema Posters’: ‘the smaller poster…is used for more general distribution
on the tube platforms and subways. In four colours it depicts an attention-
arresting, curiosity-arousing view of the Aurora Australis.’109 The Alhambra,
for its part, supplied the theatre, including projecting machines for films and
slides, electric current, the projection screen and all necessary attendants. It
also arranged and paid for publicity in some thirty London newspapers and
periodicals, including the Times, the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, the Daily
Mail, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Observer. Lloyds even invited the Queen to
patronize the first performance but the Palace regretfully declined, not wishing
to create a precedent.
The advertising poster for the Alhambra opening reveals how The Home of
the Blizzard was fitted as a three o’clock matinee into the larger daily programme
of the house. The main event, which began at eight in the evening, was the
review, 5064 Gerard! written by Cosmo Gordon Lennox and produced by the
theatre’s managing director, Andre Charlot. It was preceded by varieties, and
accompanied by a full orchestra, dances and ensembles, a ballet, and special
numbers by ‘The Two Bobs’. The notice for The Home of the Blizzard occupied
less than a quarter of the poster. So popular was 5064 Gerard! that the Licensed
Victuallers’ Gazette complained that daily exhibitions of The Home of the Blizzard
were preventing matinees of the revue being given.110 Other advertising played
36 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

up the show’s popular rather than its scientific and documentary appeal. The
programme featured a luridly coloured cover illustration of the aurora borealis,
while advertisements in the press featured Hurley’s wildlife photographs,
especially, as Hughes had foreshadowed, those depicting penguins and seals.
The Tatler printed a photograph of Hurley riding a Weddel seal, a reminder
of the old circus tradition of ‘beast men’, while the Evening News played up the
show’s music hall associations, captioning a photograph of two penguins with
the title ‘Darby and Joan’:

Two Million Comedians in One Scene!

Nature’s Greatest Comedian, the Penguin, provides the comic element in Sir
Douglas Mawson’s Picture Story
The Home of the Blizzard
at the
Alhambra Theatre…
Take the Children to see
The 5 ton Sea Elephant
The Penguins’ Bank Holiday
A Joy Ride on a Seal
Slipping the Slope and the
2,000,000 Penguins in one scene.111

A review in the Daily Sketch confirmed Hughes’ low opinion of the tastes of
London audiences:

Yesterday afternoon I blew into the Alhambra for an hour. The seats are
comfortable, one can smoke, and the lecturer, Mr Willis, chats pleasantly and
soothingly of the habits of that arch-humourist, the penguin. In the interval a
flapper plays Chopin. I can recommend the Alhambra after lunch for rest and
instruction.112

As Keedick was finding in the United States, the London houses were severely
affected by the war. Gent wrote to Mawson on 6 June 1915, ‘The war is
undoubtedly having a very disquieting effect on the Film business at Home.
Film buyers and Renters generally seem to be living from hand to mouth,
the Summer also now being on us tends seriously to depress Film business.
I hear from Hughes that to avoid bad biz or actual losses that he has for the
time being…withdrawn the Scott Film.’113 After the opening in April, Hughes
warned Mawson that although the reception was ‘warm’ the audiences at the
Alhambra were very small. By 7 May, the manager, Andre Charlot, wanted it
taken off ‘forthwith’.114
 THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD 37

Desperate to avoid severe losses, Hughes moved the show from the
Alhambra to the Pavilion, ‘a cinema theatre’, and began to recast its format
on a more modest scale. This was a significant move down market. Hughes
had begun to realize that The Home of the Blizzard was not attracting sufficient
interest as a two-hour show in its own right at the Alhambra, and for the move
to the Pavilion and the projected tour of regional cinemas he proposed cutting
the lecture down so that the show could be inserted into the main cinema
programme:

I have been thinking very carefully over the prospects of the film as a complete
show as compared with, say, an hour’s entertainment sandwiched in the ordinary
programme of a cinema theatre… [I] certainly think we are likely to make
considerably more money running the small show at a moderate figure at the
cinema theatres. I am, therefore, cutting down my original lecture… The chief
thing that I am eliminating is the slides which does away with the necessity of
travelling an operator, the local operator being able to put the film through
without rehearsal.115

As the full two-hour show declined in popularity at the Alhambra and later
at the Pavilion, the shorter version toured the regions. It enjoyed a brief
season at the Devonshire Park Winter Garden at Eastbourne, commencing on
14 June, where it was advertised as part of the Winter Garden’s comprehensive
summer programme. The Devonshire Park Pavilion was a large glass and steel
exhibition building decorated with fern gardens. In addition to the matinee, its
‘Summer Arrangements’ included a daily orchestral concert in the gardens, and
the Cintematograph Lecture at the Pavilion daily at three and eight. Patrons
Patrons were advised that the seawater swimming baths were open daily, and
on Sunday evenings performances by Phyllis Archibald, contralto, and the
popular tenor Joseph Cheetham were accompanied by the Devonshire Park
Orchestra. Other cinematograph screenings during the week at the Pavilion
included Pathé features and gazettes.116
Hughes wrote on 27 May, ‘We shut down at the Alhambra on the day that
the Lusitania was sunk and it was as well that we did so as the immediate
result of this news was a tremendous slump.’117 By July, Lloyds were themselves
in receivership. William Heinemann was similarly disappointed with sales of
the book. On 11 September 1914, he had written to Mawson in Adelaide,
‘I wonder if you can realize the change that has come over London since you
were here; and we all feel that the old life, as we have known it, will never come
back again. That does not, of course, mean that there will never be again an
interest in your work or in literature and geography generally, but it will take
some time.’118
38 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

In a letter to Hurley, Mawson would later describe his experiences

leading up to the Alhambra opening as a ‘nightmare’.119 He had learned
that a popular travelogue was not a definitive account of scientific facts or an
historical account of what really happened in the order that it happened. He
had learned that audiences liked to be ‘amused’. And he had learned some
of the well-established principles of ‘synchronizing’, the craft of preparing
a lecture to accompany the screening of lantern slides and film. The first of
these principles might be described as joint ownership or common authorship.
Because travelogues were often staged simultaneously in different locations by
arrangement with lecturing agencies, they were frequently modified to suit
the personal styles of the lecturers, the tastes of their local audiences, the
social status of different theatres, and the house style or professional interests
of particular host institutions – a former music hall like the Alhambra, for
example, as opposed to the Royal Geographic Society. A second feature
was that the lectures were modular and episodic, which facilitated rewriting
and rearrangement, and allowed for synchronization with the timing and
content of the images. The Home of the Blizzard was never a single text, but a
repertoire of mobile and modular components: films, photographs, slides and
printed matter that could be assembled in different combinations by different
companies and personnel in response to specific commercial opportunities in
unique local markets. It is best thought of not as an artwork but as a commodity
whose epitome is the photographic negative: cheap, impersonal, modular and
infinitely reproducible.
On the night of the Alhambra opening, the man we have come to think of as
the show’s ‘author’, Frank Hurley, was wintering in Antarctica with Shackelton’s
Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard the doomed Endurance. Ironically,
just a few weeks earlier Hurley had followed Ponting’s example by entertaining
his shipmates with a synchronized lecture entertainment. Endurance had been
equipped with a ‘Lecture Lantern’ powered by acetylene gas so that ‘shows’
could be given onboard.120 He recorded the event in his diary:

Saturday, 20 March 1915

During the evening I gave an illustrated lantern lecture on Java & across Australia
in the Ritz [Endurance’s saloon]. All hands, after-guard & fo’c’sle, rolled up to a
man. It was quite a relief to see some tropical vegetation & flowers, even though
they were but shadowgraphs projected on a screen. The lecturette began at
8 p.m. & concluded at 9 p.m. It was much appreciated.
 Chapter Two
GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP:
EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR

As William Heinemann explained to Mawson, with the outbreak of war in

August 1914 there was a sudden collapse in the popularity of shows about polar
exploration, including Ponting’s With Captain Scott in the Antarctic and Mawson’s
The Home of the Blizzard, and it was not really until the late 1940s that the
British feature film industry rediscovered Antarctic exploration’s heroic age.1
It was for this reason, as I discuss in chapter three, that Shackleton delayed
the premier of his own lectures on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
until the London season of 1919–1920. Almost at once, however, there were
plans for exhibitions about the war itself that also involved the synchronized
use of lectures, photographs, lantern slides, cinema, musical accompaniment,
tie-in newspaper coverage and the display of war relics such as flags, uniforms,
aircraft and artillery. While much has been written about representations
of the Great War in the emerging mass media, especially the cinema and
the periodical press,2 my focus in this chapter is on the use of Hurley’s war
photographs in these multimedia exhibitions. Between the final year of the
war and 1923 – when volume XII of the Official History of Australia in the War of
1914–1918, the definitive Photographic Record of the War, was published – there
were at least nine major exhibitions and related publications in which Hurley’s
photographs were used. These were preceded by a series of exhibitions held
by the Canadians and the British in London, which greatly influenced the
style and content of the Australian exhibitions.
In this chapter, I consider some of the uses to which Hurley’s photographs
were put in these exhibitions and their related publications. This reflects
recent thinking about the social life of photographs, which stresses the
fluidity of a photograph’s form and meaning as it circulates through different
social and institutional contexts. Hurley’s war photographs began with his
exposure of glass plate negatives on the battlefield. The negatives could
be used to develop positive prints either individually or in combination to
produce what C. E. W. Bean, the director of the Australian War Records
Section, disparagingly referred to as ‘fakes’. These were then reproduced
in a range of sizes and formats suitable for different purposes, from the
40 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

half-tone reproductions used in newspapers and magazines, to the finest

quality enlargements used in exhibitions, and for sale separately or in
commemorative albums. Like the many incarnations of The Home of the
Blizzard, the books and exhibitions in which Hurley’s prints appeared were
produced and organized by different people and institutions with different
values and objectives. These ranged from Australian War Records Section
(later the Australian War Museum), with its emphasis on historical accuracy,
commemoration and nation building, to the more commercial interests
of Hurley himself. The format and meaning of an individual photograph
were not fixed once and for all, but were fluid and context-dependent.
As Elizabeth Edwards argues, individual photographs circulate among
different ‘interpretive communities’; they follow different ‘trade routes’ as
they are reproduced, exhibited, collected and published. Their meaning
depends on the social contexts of their viewing, and their dependence
on written or spoken texts to control what Edwards calls their ‘semiotic
energy’.3 The Australian War Memorial today holds hundreds of Hurley’s
images, but how many of them were chosen for repeated exhibition and who
was responsible for choosing them? How were their meanings reshaped by
their changing titles, captions and contexts of exhibition? Which ones were
excluded and why? And what personal role did Hurley have in the social life
of his war photographs?

Exhibiting Nation and Empire

The Great War exhibitions in which Hurley’s photographs appeared continued
many of the practices associated with the international exposition movement,
whose grand events they came, in part, to replace, with the sudden end of
the belle époque in August 1914. From the Great Exhibition at the Crystal
Palace in 1851 to the Festival of Empire in 1911 and the Panama–Pacific
International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, more than thirty of these
major exhibitions took place in England, Australia, the United States and
India. In his study of the exposition movement, An Empire on Display, Peter
Hoffenberg argues that they were part of the self-conscious reworking of
fluid national and imperial identities within ‘the large transnational system of
the British Empire’.4 English, imperial and colonial societies actively invented
themselves as nations through these spectacles and displays, developing a
visual grammar corresponding to finely graded distinctions of identity. There
was a long-standing rivalry among the dominions, with Australia, Canada
and New Zealand each having its own distinctive imagery as a settler colony.
In these ‘festivals of nationhood’, national and even racialized differences
were rendered allegorically in the architecture and interior decorations of the
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 41

exhibition halls. In the Melbourne Exhibition Building of 1880, visitors looked

up to the transept and naves of the great dome to behold figures representing
the industries of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. This was imagery
of imperial concord, to be sure, but also of rivalry and hierarchy expressed
through the visual grammar of the evolutionary series.5
Despite the frisson of competition, the exhibition commissioners sought
a deeper moral justification for these grand shows by invoking their nation
and empire-building functions, which allowed different social groups to meet,
mingle and compare one another side by side as part of a family of nations,
an imperial federation. Hoffenberg argues that the production and circulation
of colonial knowledge through the exhibitions was ‘polycentric’, interactive
and contested rather than unilateral and hegemonic.6 This is another version
of what I have called colonial modernity, and Hoffenberg offers his own
metaphor for its spatial organization:

Commissioners…organized an extensive imperial superhighway by which the

exhibits were exchanged, reproduced, and studied at both the imperial core and
the colonial periphery… [E]xhibitions…were intended to reconcile tensions, but
often created and revealed conflicts between imperial and national economic
and cultural policies. The rise of colonial nationalism and the opportunities
to form national identities at the exhibitions also made public various internal
social questions.7

In dealing with the wartime exhibitions as conduits of colonial modernity,

I am therefore mindful of Tony Ballantyne’s injunction to pay close attention
to those ‘bundles of relationships’ that continue to exist between the different
layers of analysis: ‘the local, the regional, the inter-regional, the national, the
continental, and the global.’8
Since the first International Exposition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, the
six Australian colonies had sent their own representative products, crafts and
ethnological exhibits. Yet as Erica Esau argues, it was not until 1915 – the
year of Gallipoli – that participation in the Panama–Pacific International
Exposition in San Francisco provided ‘one of Australia’s first opportunities’
since Federation in 1901 ‘to exhibit internationally as a separate and unified
nation within the British Empire.’9 Alfred Deakin served as Commonwealth
Commissioner of the Australian contingent. The Commonwealth of
Australia’s pavilion, designed by government architect G. J. Oakshott, was said
to ‘symbolise the industrial cohesion of the six Australian colonies’, though
only New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland participated. The interior of
the pavilion featured elaborate display cases made from native timbers, while
the exhibition included ‘many paintings of merit’ on loan from the National
42 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Gallery of New South Wales and the Victorian Art Society, and a selection of
cinematograph films was screened daily.10
Within a few years of the San Francisco exhibition, the wartime exhibitions
in London would provide further opportunities for displays of Australia’s newly
minted nationhood. Like the international expositions, they were also convened
by a federation of imperial and national agencies, and for this reason they
continued both the centripetal and centrifugal trends of the expositions: they
memorialized heroic self-sacrifice in the name of King and Empire, but
they also fuelled competition and even conflict between the British, Canadian and
Australian contributors. These conflicts flared up, for example, around the issue
of whether war relics should be acquired for future imperial or national
collections, and through competition to use the latest technologies of visual
representation and display. It was just such a conflict between imperial and
colonial-nationalist interests that led to the establishment of the Australian
War Records Section in 1917 and, eventually, to the formation of the Canadian
and Australian War Museums independently of the Imperial War Museum
in London.
In September 1915, Charles Bean was appointed as official war
correspondent with the Australian Imperial Forces. After reporting the
defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, he began to formulate the idea of establishing a
permanent memorial to Australia’s contribution to the war, and on 16 May
1917 the Australian War Records Section was established under the command
of Captain John Treloar. Its immediate task was to manage the AIF’s growing
collection of documents, photographs and relics, but its deeper purpose was
to ensure that Australia would have its own collection independent of the
Imperial War Museum. After the war, the section evolved into the Australian
War Museum and eventually the Australian War Memorial in Canberra,
which was completed in 1941.11
Bean’s intention was that the Australian War Museum would house diaries,
photographs, cinematograph films, paintings, works on paper, and war relics
collected by the Australian War Records Section. But in the early years of
the war, these materials were still being directed to the British War Office,
as had been the case during the South African War. When Bean returned to
London early in 1918, there were rumours of a commitment having been
made by the Australian government that the recently created Imperial War
Museum should have the first pick of all relics. Bean was determined that they
should be preserved for his planned Australian museum, and he gained the
support of Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook). Beaverbrook had come to
Britain from Canada in 1910 and quickly risen to power through his wealth,
his media interests, and his links to leading businessmen and politicians. At the
outbreak of the war, he persuaded the Canadian prime minster to make him
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 43

official Canadian eyewitness. In January 1916 he was allowed to set up and

run the Canadian War Records Office. By the end of that year he had become
chairman of the British War Office Cinematographic Committee, and in 1918
he became Britain’s first minister of information.12 Despite his support for an
independent Australian War Records Section, however, there were conflicts
between Beaverbrook and Bean along national lines. Bean was angry, for
example, that Beaverbrook had not sought Australian representation on the
Cinematographic Committee, which nonetheless claimed authority over all
the cinema photographers working on the Western Front.
Bean’s biographer, Dudley McCarthy, observes that it was during this
period of mounting intercolonial rivalry that Bean gave the most coherent
expression to date of his vision for a nationally based Australian War Museum
that would house the most important of the Australian relics on an equal
footing with other ‘centres elsewhere’:

For us they are the foundations of our national museums; the beginning of a
series of national institutions, which I hope will equal anything in the world.
One wants to see in Australia centres of study and research or art and culture
which are not to play a secondary part to any others in the world, but which
are, as far as they can be, the most complete and efficient that our nation can
maintain. We want to encourage in Australian centres the principle that they
are centres and not appendages of other greater centres elsewhere. That our
capital is a metropolis and not merely a provincial city. We shall not get the best
out of our people until this attitude, this enthusiasm, and this national spirit is
established. Further, we are out to make our war museum, our gallery, and our
war library, if possible, not merely fine museums for Australia, but the finest that
the world contains, so that it may be in the interests of scientists and historians
and travellers to visit them for their own sakes.13

In response to Bean’s arguments, the Australian defence minister, Senator

Pearce, affirmed that no promise had been made to hand over Australian war
relics to the British, and the prime minister, W. M. Hughes, confirmed that all
such trophies would go to an Australian museum.14
The atmosphere of intercolonial rivalry and bourgeoning colonial
nationalism in the final years of the war was later expressed in Sir Bertram
Mackennal’s Phoebus Driving the Horses of the Sun, the massive bronze exterior
decoration at the apex of Australia House on the Strand, London. Mackennal
had been appointed to the committee to oversee designs for the new Australia
House as part of Edward VII’s plans for modernizing the Strand, and the
sculpture was commissioned before the war in 1913. When it was installed in
1924, the work was seen as a commemoration of ANZAC and a declamatory
44 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

statement of Australia’s coming of age as a nation, an assertion of its now

central place in the imperial imaginary. The Melbourne Argus noted, ‘Sir
Bertram Mackennal’s idea was to symbolize the future of the youngest
continent…so we see the Sun god, rising from the Southern ocean with the
Horses of the Sun and typifying the glorious day of Australia’s future.’15

The British and Canadian Exhibitions

of War Photographs in London
It was at this time of intense national rivalry that a series of propaganda
exhibitions of war photographs was held in London.16 There were two by
the Canadians at the Grafton Galleries, two of ‘British’ photographs and war
relics at the Grafton Galleries and the Royal Academy, which included both
the Canadians and the Australians, and a fifth by the Australians alone, again
at the Grafton Galleries. The driving force behind them was Lord Beaverbrook
in his role as head of the Canadian War Records Office and Chair of the
new Cinematographic Committee. As media historian Martyn Jolly argues,
Beaverbrook’s innovation was ‘to use the established film and photography
trades for the production and dissemination of propaganda’.17 Unlike Bean,
he made no distinction between ‘record’ and ‘propaganda’ photographs, and
all of the official Canadian photographs were licensed for distribution through
the existing picture agencies on a commercial basis. Unlike Scott and Mawson
in their attempts to promote polar exploration, Beaverbrook understood
that public opinion was best shaped by those with media experience, and in
mid-1916 he recruited Ivor Castle, a senior press photographer with one of
Britain’s most innovative illustrated newspapers, the Daily Mirror, to head the
Canadian War Records Office.
Founded in 1903, the Daily Mirror was London’s most populist, most fervently
patriotic newspaper. Its proprietor, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, had
used it to pioneer tabloid journalism in Britain, introducing the American-style
‘new journalism’, with its lurid headlines, crowded news and feature articles,
leaders, and advertisements. Photographs had been used in its illustrated
pages since 1904. Together with Beaverbrook, Northcliffe pioneered the
involvement of privately owned newspapers in official propaganda, and by
the end of the war he was made director of enemy propaganda. Despite their
influence, however, both Northcliffe and Beaverbrook were accused during
the war of corrupting the truth status of language and photographic imagery.
As early as November 1914, A. G. Gardiner, editor of the liberal Daily News,
claimed that ‘the democracy, whose bulwark is Parliament, has been unseated,
and mobocracy, whose dictator is Lord Northcliffe, is in power.’18 Another of
Northcliffe’s newspapers, the Daily Mail, was criticized for using ‘newspaper
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 45

language’ and ‘journalese’ in its exaggerated and melodramatic accounts of

German atrocities. The poet Ezra Pound described Beaverbrook, Northcliffe
and other members of their ‘press gang’ as ‘the betrayers’ and ‘perverters of
language’.19 And as Jolly has shown, there was a similar suspicion about the
way Daily Mirror photographer Ivor Castle ‘faked’ his war pictures through
staged enactments and combination printing.20
With Castle at the helm, the Canadian War Records Office held its two
exhibitions of war photographs at the Grafton Galleries in December 1916 and
July 1917. The choice of the Grafton Galleries immediately introduces one of
the many sources of institutional ambivalence that would frame the reception
history of war photographs for the next decade. Stylishly refurbished in 1893
and located at the corner of Grafton and New Bond Streets, the Grafton
Galleries were in a salubrious part of central London and had a distinguished
record of major exhibitions, including Roger Fry’s two landmark exhibitions,
Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910 and the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition
in 1912.21 Like Ponting’s decision to exhibit his polar photographs at the Fine
Art Society, the choice of venue therefore sent a strong signal that the war
photographs were to be taken seriously not just as a documentary record and
certainly not as mere propaganda, but as art photography. In reality, of course,
individual photographs could function independently – or at the same time –
as all three.
The two Canadian and two ‘British’ exhibitions featured hundreds of
prints of various sizes, but the core of each was a series of enlargements
made by composite printing from multiple negatives. These gigantic mural-
sized panels were made by London’s leading photographic laboratory,
Raines & Co. at Ealing, where they were artificially coloured, first with spray
guns and then in more detail by hand. In language more suited to a fairground
than an art gallery, they were proclaimed to be ‘the largest photographs in
the world’. The scale of these works, which could measure up to 6 by 3
meters, is best conveyed by a photograph of Castle standing on a ladder in
front of the composite enlargement, ‘Dreadnaughts of the Battlefield’, made
for the British Official War Photographs exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in
March 1918 (Fig. 2.1). Jolly aptly describes it as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk,
‘subsum[ing] into itself all previous and rival technologies: the humanity of
history painting, the magic carpet ride of cinema and the corporeally based
illusionism of the stereoscope.’22
A photograph of the Australian gallery of the Imperial War Exhibition
at the Royal Academy in 1918 immediately suggests the many continuities
between these wartime propaganda exhibitions and the earlier international
expositions, including the allocation of dedicated and implicitly rivalrous
national halls or exhibition spaces, and the use of signage to guide visitors
46 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

through the exhibition and even regulate aspects of their behaviour (Fig. 2.2).
These Great War exhibitions carried on the imperial expositions’ serious
pedagogic aspirations.
One of the principal roles of the exposition commissioners as cultural
professionals had been to teach visitors how to move through the carefully
regulated space of the exhibitions and how to ‘see’ what was presented to
them. The new photographic technologies were central to this instructive
process, providing a visual language and taxonomy of imperial knowledge,
but the centrality of vision was also reinforced by written texts in the form
of signage, captions and guidebooks that shaped the visitors’ experiences
and helped them make sense of the spectacles. Hoffenberg calls this ‘guided
spectatorship’, which he defines as the ‘public exercise of private vision’. This
was essential for the participatory objectives of the exhibition experience to
be realized, and required its own science and experts. In theory at least, it
was intended to ‘integrate imperial subjects and national citizens in a shared,
simultaneous experience at the shows’.23
As one of the new breed of cultural professionals, Beaverbrook fully
grasped the propaganda value of ‘guided spectatorship’. In an essay about the
work of the Ministry of Information written in the final year of the war, he
shrewdly described the propaganda value of visual imagery and its relation to
the written word:

It is hard for the civilian, on whose endurance to the end the issue of the world
war depends so largely, to realize conditions at the front: without photography it
would be practically impossible. But what the mind can’t take in by the reading
of descriptions, the eye can assimilate from the actual outline of the scene and
the men depicted on the plate. Besides, the great bulk of mankind soon wearies
of the word. At the bottom of his heart man feels of the war story that of the
makers of such books there is no end, and that much study of them is weariness
to the flesh. Photography has about it the convincing atmosphere of naked
reality. He has only got to open his eyes to see it. So is modern science applied to
the acts of war as of peace.24

For the second Canadian War Photographs Exhibition in July 1917, a catalogue
was designed to take visitors step by step through the galleries and teach them to
‘see’. There were detailed commentaries on individual photographs, including
a long essay on the correct way to experience the latest ‘largest photograph in
the world’, ‘The Taking of Vimy Ridge’:

No individual soldier taking part in a modern battle can have the faintest
idea of the scope of the battle, or the conditions of that battle. Distance and
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 47

perspective are necessary to secure the correct impression of the actual facts.
For this reason it is idle to stand close to this picture. It must be looked at and
studied from a sufficient distance to enable one to understand the immensity
and importance of the scene before one… Nonetheless the terrible nearness
of things in which the photographer stood, which enables one to, as it were,
‘watch the battle from the neighbouring hill’, at the same time sweeps one
into the conflict. One becomes absorbed in the picture. It is as though one
were on the battlefield itself. The picture of the battle is taken in profile. It is
taken from the flank looking along the line of attack. To the left of the picture,
beyond the frame, one must imagine the smoke of our guiding and sheltering
barrage fire… In the immediate foreground lie those who have already made
the supreme sacrifice.25

In his commentary on this passage from the exhibition catalogue, Jolly

perfectly describes both the phenomenology and the ideology of ‘guided
spectatorship’:

This extended description not only navigates the audience through the
abstracted, fragmented and disorienting experience of modern warfare, but also
instructs it how to experience the picture in the gallery space. The viewer is
asked to immerse himself within the battle, while also retaining a distance from
it. This phenomenological act of doubling attempts to project an experiential
bridge between those in London and those in the trenches. It links the two new,
modern experiences – warfare and giant photographic exhibitions – through the
mechanisms of nationalist empathy and the virtual space created by advanced
photographic technology.26

As we have seen, however, the ‘nationalist empathy’ inspired by these exhibitions

was fractured by rivalries among the dominions. As McCarthy argues,
Beaverbrook’s planning of the first four Canadian and ‘British’ exhibitions
had ‘effectively cut the ground from underneath a planned exhibition of
Australian photographs.’27 It was into this atmosphere of mounting rivalry that
Hurley was appointed official photographer with the Australian War Records
Section in August 1917. On 21 August, as he noted in his diary, he and Hubert
Wilkins, the second AIF photographer, crossed the channel to begin ‘the grim
duties of France’.28 Almost at once he was to undertake his major work of the
war, photographing the Third Battle of Ypres. In November, after mounting
conflict with Bean over Hurley’s practice of combination printing, Hurley was
reassigned to the Middle East, returning to London in May 1918, just in time
to curate the exhibition of Australian war photographs and paintings at the
Grafton Galleries.
48 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

The Australian Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries

For much of the past two years, Hurley had been in the Antarctic, initially
with the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and then on a short return
trip to South Georgia to gather additional location and wildlife footage for a
synchronized lecture entertainment he was planning with Shackleton’s business
partner, Ernest Perris. Due to a gap in his diaries we cannot be certain exactly
when he returned to London from South Georgia, but he was probably there
in late July or early August 1917 before crossing over to France with Wilkins
on 21 August. Had he seen the second Canadian war photographs exhibition
then showing at the Grafton Galleries?
It is quite clear from his war diaries, which commence with the channel
crossing on 21 August, that Hurley’s preoccupation during his months in the
field was not with dutifully recording events exactly as they happened, as
Bean expected him to do – the ‘record photography’ could safely be left to
Wilkins – but with assembling a powerful collection of photographs, lantern
slides and cine film suitable for mounting a show that might compete with
those Castle and the Canadians had already staged in London. ‘Canada,’
he noted, ‘has made a great advertisement of their pictures and I must beat
them.’29 This would involve Hurley competing with Castle in producing ‘the
largest picture in the world’. While filming near Ypres on 26 October, he
wrote in his diary, ‘Capt. Castle (the Canadian photographer) [sic]…stayed
with us last night & we all made for the Menin Rd. just after breakfast.’
Some years later, Hurley would reflect upon the difficulty of capturing the
effects of the battlefield on film, and the necessity of using combination
printing to build more dramatic detail into his images. As he explained in a
later essay on ‘War Photography’:

None but those who have endeavoured can realise the insurmountable difficulties
of portraying a modern battle by camera. To include the event on a single
negative, I have tried and tried, but the results are hopeless… On developing my
plate there is disappointment!… All I find is a record of a few figures advancing
from the trenches – and a background of haze… Now if negatives are taken of
all the separate incidents in the action and combined, some idea may be gained
of what modern battle looks like.30

Did Hurley discuss these technical issues with Castle, who had already
acquired expertise in combination printing by working with the staff at
Raines & Co.? Was Hurley here recalling the catalogue essay from the second
Canadian exhibition, still running in London at the time he met Castle on the
field of battle?: ‘No individual soldier taking part in a modern battle can have
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 49

the faintest idea of the scope of the battle, or the conditions of that battle.
Distance and perspective are necessary to secure the correct impression of the
actual facts.’31
In March 1918, while Hurley was still in Palestine, there had been a combined
Imperial War Exhibition at the Royal Academy on the Strand, Canada and
Australia each having its own gallery. The Australian photographs were
chosen and hung by Wilkins, who after the war edited a book: Australian War
Photographs, published jointly by Australia House and the AIF.32 The Australians
were at last able to hold their own exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, opening
on 24 May 1918. This fifth and final show in the series, which took place only
weeks after Hurley’s return from Palestine, is the first such event, including the
various versions of The Home of the Blizzard, in which he was directly involved.
He supervised the enlargement and colouring of the prints by Raines & Co.,
and their transport to London and hanging at the galleries, and organized
the lecturers whose talks accompanied the exhibition.33 It is even possible,
despite the public intercolonial rivalry, that Hurley and Castle collaborated,
or at least consulted over the production of the enlargements, since they were
both working with the staff at Raines & Co. There were 137 photographic
prints, many of them enlargements. The exhibition also featured music by a
military band, a display of colour lantern slides, and paintings and drawings
by Australia’s official war artists, including G. W. Lambert and H. S. Power. At
the same time, Australia House displayed large war relics from the collection of
the Australian War Museum, including an Albatros DVA biplane, several field
pieces, and uniformed mannequins.34 Hurley’s diary entries on the exhibition
suggest his own awareness of the theatricality of its synchronized, multimedia
presentation, and of the affective response of the audience:

The exhibition was well patronised today. The colour lantern is working
excellently. The colour slides depict scenes on the Western Front, Flanders and
also Palestine. They are gems and elicit applause at every showing. A military
band plays throughout the day… Our largest picture, ‘THE RAID’ depicting an
episode at the Battle of Zonnebeke [is a combination of twelve negatives] and
measures over 20 ft x 15’6” high. Two waves of infantry are leaving the trenches
in the thick of a Boche Barrage of shells and shrapnel. A flight of bombing
aeroplanes accompanies them. An enemy plane is burning in the foreground.
The whole picture is realistic of battle, the atmospheric effects of battle smoke
are particularly fine.35

In the official catalogue for the Grafton Galleries exhibition, the Australian
War Record Section began to build up the expertise in ‘guided spectatorship’
that would culminate in the interior design of the Australian War Memorial in
50 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Canberra. The catalogue includes an essay on ‘Australia’s Effort in the War’,

an account ‘from the pen of Mr C. E. W. Bean’ of the phases of Australia’s
engagement in the war, and a comprehensive list of the photographs and
paintings, some with brief explanatory notes. The principal pedagogic
thrust of the catalogue essay is to remind the British public of the relative
enormity of Australia’s commitment to the imperial war effort both in terms
of personnel and materiel. Underlying the spirit of imperial unity is therefore
the rhetoric of colonial nationalism, carrying on the old intercolonial rivalry
of the expositions:

Since the opening of the war Australia has mobilized, enlisted, or trained 400,000
soldiers, or about one-twelfth of the population…
The equipment, transport and maintenance of the forces abroad and at
home have been organized and paid for by Australia alone.
It must be remembered that the Commonwealth of Australia, while it has a
territory as large as the whole of Europe, had before the war a population barely
reaching five millions.36

A second theme of the catalogue is to announce the planning of a ‘National

Australian Collection of Pictures’ implicitly separate from the Imperial
War Museum in London, in which the works in the exhibition would find a
‘permanent home’. And underwriting both these claims to national distinction
is the innovation and technical quality of the photography itself, especially the
exhibition of colour slides shown throughout the day in the gallery’s lower
hall: ‘it is believed that this is the first occasion on which coloured photography
has been used to portray warfare.’37

Hurley’s Photographs at the Grafton Galleries

Which of his photographs did Hurley chose to hang at the Grafton Galleries,
and what do they indicate about his artistic response to the war? It is, of
course, too simplistic to say that the Great War caused a crisis in visual
representation: urbanization, the industrialization of time and space, and
new visual technologies, especially photography and cinematography, had
long since caused profound changes to ways of seeing. These changes were
already evident in the theory and practice of Impressionism, for example, well
before 1914.38 Yet those who saw the battle fields of the Western Front knew
immediately that they rendered most available notions of vision massively
redundant, not least the very idea of landscape itself. Paul Virilio argues that
1914 brought about ‘the apocalypse of the deregulation of perception’, ‘the
moment of panic in which the American and European masses no longer
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 51

believed their eyes.’39 Eric J. Leed speaks of a sudden ‘deterioration of the

visual field’.40 And although many of these changes were already underway
by the second half of the nineteenth century, Martin Jay argues that with the
Great War, ‘the ancien scopic regime of Cartesian perspectivalism lost what was
left of its hegemony.’41
For Hurley, this ‘deterioration of the visual field’ was perhaps even more
apocalyptic than it was for others. Although he would embrace some aspects
of modernity, such as motoring and flight, as a photographer, Hurley was
not and would never be a modernist: he saw with and for those masses who,
after 1914, could ‘no longer believe their eyes’. An exponent of pictorialism
with the commercial photographer’s keen instinct for popular taste, Hurley’s
aesthetic was not only old fashioned, but for two years prior to his arrival
in France he was isolated in the Antarctic. Coming to France from South
Georgia, Hurley was transported instantly, we might say, from the nineteenth
into the twentieth century.
On 21 August 1917, immediately after the channel crossing, Hurley
ascended a small rise near Ypres known as Hill 60 and experienced what
Virilio describes as ‘the apocalypse of the deregulation of perception’:

What an awful scene of desolation! Everything has been swept away – only
stumps of trees stick up here and there and the whole field has the appearance
of having been recently ploughed. Hill 60…[is] the most awful and appalling
sight I have ever seen. The exaggerated machinations of hell are here typified.
Everywhere the ground is littered with bits of guns, bayonets, shells and men.
Way down in one of these mine craters was an awful sight. There lay three
hideous, almost skeleton decomposed fragments of corpses of German gunners.
Oh, the frightfulness of it all. To think that these fragments were once sweethearts,
maybe husbands or loved sons, and this was the end.42

Hurley’s observations combine visual astuteness and bewilderment. In his

reference to ploughing, it is as if the familiar landscape of rural France
briefly materializes like an image projected by a magic lantern or a drop
screen in the theatre, only to be swept aside to reveal…what? Something
so appalling it exceeds all that is known. Yet there it is, this impossible thing
before the photographer’s eye, a massive smudge in the field of vision that is
and yet is not a landscape: his eye catches on ‘fragments’, and the word, or
its close correlates – ‘bits’ and ‘decomposed’ – is reiterated four times within
three lines.
A number of Hurley’s photographs taken during those first weeks in France
reveal a stark confrontation between the formlessness of the battle field and
the mathematical tidiness and familiarity of perspectival space. ‘A scene on the
52 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Menin Road beyond Ypres’, taken on 14 September 1917, struggles to assert

the authority of perspective over chaos.43 The lines of blasted trees, two ragged
columns of troops, the shapes of damaged railway lines and other debris in the
foreground gesture toward a notional vanishing point. But it was not only the
formlessness of the battlefield that disrupted the idealized, disembodied gaze
into Albertian space: there was also the returning German fire. In Hurley’s
diary and photographs, the seemingly shatter-proof window of classical optics –
in which the observer is the subject, not the object of vision – is rent by the
equally precise science of ballistics:

In spite of heavy shelling by Boche, we made an endeavour to secure a number

of shell burst pictures. Many of the shells broke only a few score of paces away,
so that we had to throw ourselves into shell holes to avoid splinters… I took two
pictures by hiding in a dugout and then rushing out and snapping.44

In the photograph sometimes captioned, ‘Death’s Highway’, a soldier is pinned

in the centre of the visual field by German artillery (Figs. 2.5a, b and c). Ballistics
and optics are here at cross purposes as Albertian perspective is pierced by the
gaze of the other, reincarnating the disembodied eye of the spectator at the very
moment that the body’s mortality is most nakedly exposed.
The shell burst in ‘Death’s Highway’, which stalks the soldier like a
spectre, is an example of Hurley’s technique of combination printing,
which led him into conflict with Bean. The story of Bean’s conflict with
Hurley over the photographer’s practice of combination printing is now well
known.45 Hurley found the speed and visual complexity of battle difficult to
capture on film, and he wanted to use combination printing to build more
dramatic detail into his exhibition prints. This involved the imposition of
images from two or more glass negatives on to a single positive print and
the making of a new negative by re-photographing the composite print.
The re-shot negatives were then used to make multiple copies of composite
prints. They can be distinguished from original negatives because the edges
of the first paper print are sometimes visible in the negative. Bean, who
regarded photographs as evidence of specific events and locations, dismissed
Hurley’s techniques as a falsification of reality. This was bound up with his
disapproval of what he called ‘commercial interests’, especially notable in
the way contemporary press photographers like Castle staged and otherwise
‘faked’ their photographs. Bean’s opinion was clear. He wrote in his diary,
‘[I] had a long argument with Hurley who wants to be allowed to make
“composite” pictures for his exhibition… I…will not have it at any price.’ In
the end, General Sir William Douglas Birdwood, the commander of the AIF,
granted permission for six combination prints to be made for the exhibition.
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 53

Bean was incensed, noting in his diary that although the exhibition was a
success, it contained ‘too much Hurley’.46
One of those composites was photograph number 10 in the Grafton
Galleries catalogue, ‘A Hit on the Road’, to which Hurley would later give the
more dramatic title, ‘Death’s Highway’. But the most spectacular composite,
as Hurley noted in his diary, was his own attempt at the ‘largest picture in the
world’, exhibit number 50, a composite titled (for the present) ‘A Raid’, made
from twelve individual negatives (Fig. 2.9). As in Castle’s ‘Dreadnaughts of the
Battlefield’, we can sense the convergence of new and existing forms of visual
representation. It is in one sense like a monumental salon painting. In another
sense it is, or aspires to be, cinematic: the two waves of men going over the top
in the foreground resemble two consecutive frames of cine film and introduce
the impression of narrative sequence into an otherwise static image. Despite
its size, the enlargement has an enclosed, perspectival space that is typical of
Hurley’s compositions, suggesting the space of dioramas and stage scenery,
and even contemporary film sets, all of which would influence the style of
museum exhibits after the war.
In his photographs of the ruined town of Ypres, Hurley reverts to the
conventions of the sublime to make sense of the chaotic scenes of urban
destruction. He saw a ‘somehow wildly beautiful’ character in that ‘weird,
awful and terrible sight’ which was ‘aesthetically…far more interesting than
the Ypres that was.’ This sentiment is expressed in his many romantic camera
studies of the ruins of the famous Cloth Hall (Fig. 2.7). As we will see in
chapter four, the presence of beauty in Hurley’s images of the Great War is
one of their most striking and controversial features, and he remained both
sentimental and melodramatic about the human cost of industrial warfare:
‘There is a touch of pathos and sadness in these new ruins, little patches of
clothing and domestic things; each speaks its own tale of suffering, of homes
wrecked, of death and ruination.’47
Hurley also used combination printing to produce effects that imply the
survival of a moral or spiritual dimension beyond the destruction of war.
These composites suggest a connection between the wartime epidemic of
spiritualism and one of its main forms of revelation, spirit photography.48
Although Hurley was too pragmatic to be a believer, he was enough of a
showman to see that the sensations of the spirit world held considerable
public appeal, especially at a time of national mourning. For one composite
print in the Grafton Galleries exhibition, he combined the image of the
corpse of a German soldier with a shell burst, calling it ‘Death the Reaper’
(Fig. 2.6) He noted in his diary, ‘this remarkable effect is made up of two
negatives. One, the foreground, shows the mud splashed corpse of a Boche
floating in a shell crater. The second is an extraordinary shell burst: the
54 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

form of which resembles death.’49 In the catalogue of his later Sydney

Exhibition, ‘Death the Reaper’ is given a new caption: ‘Attention is directed
to the remarkable wraith-like form of the shell burst, and to the outline of
a white skull surmounting it.’50 In the specialized language of spiritualism,
the wraith is the spirit body whose separate appearance from the material
body, occasionally caught on camera during photographic séances, was
believed to foreshadow death. Hurley’s allusions to spiritualism in his war
photographs suggest that the Great War did not cause a sudden break
with the past: the show spaces of colonial modernity, as Nead points out,
were heteronomous, their temporality folded and pleated rather than serial.
The evidence points to there being a range of continuities rather than
breaks between the modern and the pre-modern. These continuities can
be seen especially in the many connections between the (pre-modern)
psychic mediation of spiritualism and the (modern) technological mediation
of photography.
Hurley’s photographs of the Middle East, where he was reassigned in
November 1917 after his conflict with Bean, form a distinctive second
section of the Grafton Galleries exhibition. Here he was effectively beyond
Bean’s reach, and this left him free to stage re-enactments of some of the
key engagements that had already taken place, including the charge of
the Light Horse at Beersheba, and to continue making composite prints.
In the landscapes of the Holy Land, with its rich Biblical and medieval
associations, Hurley created highly romanticized images of Australian
airmen and the Light Horse. His fascination with the Middle East reflects
a deeply felt belief that the lands of the Bible and the Crusades were
part of the cultural heritage of the British peoples. Photographic historian
Kathleen Stewart Howe calls this sentiment ‘geopiety’, and it was widely
expressed in photographs showing British and Australian troops standing
proprietarily in the foreground of biblical scenes.51 In the official history
of Australia’s role in Sinai and Palestine, H. S. Gullett imagines the
campaigns as a modern crusade in which the British peoples reclaim the
Bible Lands from the Turk and make good Richard the Lionheart’s failure
in the twelfth century.52 The exotic locations and multicultural character
of the Middle East also provided Hurley with unlimited opportunities
to indulge his interest in travelogue photography, a genre that might be
characterized as Great War Orientalism. As Edward Ziter has shown, ‘the
Orient’ was a vivid and colourful presence on the popular Victorian and
Edwardian stage,53 and for Hurley, a child of the theatre and the music
hall, Cairo’s native quarter presented the familiar pleasures of the Orient:
‘Every turn a new picture is presented; every shop is a picture, every face
a study… How quaint and beautifully oriental it all is.’54
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 55

Hurley’s Sydney Exhibition at the Kodak Salon

The Grafton Galleries exhibition should have been an unqualified success for
Hurley, but he was frustrated by his lack of artistic control. Using his influence
behind the scenes, Bean saw to it that Hurley was denied permission to take
the exhibition on a national tour of Australia, as he had hoped to do, and
Hurley resigned from the AIF in disgust. When the Photographic Record of the
War was published in 1923, Bean made it clear that in his view Hurley had left
for home before the job was done.55
In theory, all of the glass negatives Hurley exposed during the war remained
the property of the Australian War Records Section, and when Bean returned
to Australia after the war, a complete set of copy negatives was lodged with
the Imperial War Museum in London. The originals were brought back
to Australia, eventually to become part of the present-day collection of
the Australian War Memorial. But it is clear that Hurley kept many prints
and negatives more or less illegally, which he used for his own exhibition in
Australia, and which were deposited after his death in the collection of the
National Library of Australia. Once Hurley left London in 1918, there was
therefore a distinct separation between his own subsequent career and the
public life of his images that were still under the control of the Australian War
Records Section. Roughly speaking, his photographs of the Great War have
two lines of provenance which lead down to and characterize the present-
day holdings of the Australian War Memorial and the National Library of
Australia. At the risk of generalization, we can say that the AWM holds his
record photographs and some of the composite propaganda photographs that
museum staff either chose not to use, or else attempted to re-caption as record
photographs. The NLA collection, by contrast, features a number of Hurley’s
most artful composites, some made after his return to Australia, which were
never officially part of the AWM collection. It is also worth noting that the
negatives held by the Imperial War Museum in London are relatively poor
quality duplicates deposited there by Bean and his staff immediately after the
war, and therefore have no particular authority in arguments about the format
and provenance of Hurley images held in the major Australian collections.
Once back in Sydney, Hurley mounted his own exhibition of war
photographs at the Kodak Salon at 379 George Street. It was authorized
by the minister for defence and the Repatriation Department, and officially
opened by Lady Davidson, the wife of the state governor, on 12 March 1919.
All expenses were met by Kodak (Australasia) Ltd, a long-standing sponsor,
and the profits from entrance fees and programme sales, amounting to nearly
two hundred pounds, were donated to the Red Cross. The famous giant
enlargements shown in London were not available: as Hurley lamented, they
56 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

had been used in a provincial British tour, damaged, and left in pieces in
the cellar of Australia House.56 Instead, Hurley made new, though smaller
enlargements from his own private negatives. There were 30 colour lantern
slides and 128 photographic enlargements, including what Hurley described
as ‘miniatures’ of the giant murals shown in London.57
Hurley also arranged a separate screening of a film he titled (perhaps with
Lowell Thomas in mind), With the Australians in Palestine, opening on 22 March
at the New Lyceum in Pitt Street. Press notices indicate the subjects of some
individual sequences: ‘from an aeroplane over Jerusalem, Jericho and Judea;
with the Light Horse in Jericho and Gaza; and with the Camel Corps in the
Desert.’ The newspaper notices include tie-in references to the ‘still’ pictures
‘creating such comment in this city at present’, although the word ‘pictures’
was used indiscriminately to refer to exhibitions in either medium. Hurley
does not appear to have lectured regularly at either the photographic or
cinema exhibitions, but he did address the Millions Club and the Photographic
Society of New South Wales on the subject, ‘Under and Over the Battlefield
with the Diggers’, and these talks would almost certainly have been illustrated
with lantern slides. In addition, there was extensive coverage in the illustrated
press, including photographic essays in the daily newspapers and specialist
magazines. Individual images, such as ‘The Morning of Passchendaele’ and
‘Over the Top’, were reproduced again and again in the various classes of print
media, ranging in quality from grainy half-tone illustrations in the Sydney
Sun and Telegraph to the finest hand-made exhibition prints. As they migrated
through these different locations, individual prints took on different meanings,
from news and ‘realistic’ records of war, to ‘epitomes’ of human emotion,
to examples of ‘superb [photographic] technique’. As always, Hurley’s texts
and images were modular and mobile, enjoying a life in public that was often
independent of their author’s intentions.58
Free from Bean’s constraints on combination printing, for the Sydney show
Hurley remade or reprinted a number of the composites that had been shown
at the Grafton Galleries, often exaggerating their effects. It is likely that all four
of the images he chose to illustrate the Sydney exhibition catalogue derive from
composite prints. ‘Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres’ includes an interpolated
cloud and sunburst (Fig. 2.7); ‘The Morning of Passchendaele’ (Fig. 2.8), which
exists in several versions, has here been reprinted with its most dramatic cloud
formation; and the shell burst in ‘A Hit on the Road’, now captioned ‘Death’s
Highway’ (Fig. 2.5c), is larger, darker and closer to the soldier than in the
version used in London. Even so, in his foreword to the exhibition catalogue,
Hurley insists on the realism and ‘record’ value of his work: ‘the pictures are
records, and except for several of the larger ones are faithful reproductions of
the scenes they portray.’ Perhaps still smarting from Bean’s criticisms, he insists
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 57

that even his composites have been made in the interests of accuracy: ‘In order
to convey accurate battle impressions, I have made several composite pictures,
utilising a number of negatives for the purpose.’
What Hurley seems to have understood by realism, though, is not so much
documentary accuracy as a kind of emotional realism, and he believed his
practice of composite printing to be vindicated by the strong popular response
to his work. ‘The Dawn of Passchendaele’ was singled out by the Sydney Morning
Herald as being representative of the collection’s ‘poignant realism’:

This is a very striking picture, with all the sinister suggestiveness appropriate
to that dreadful day it was taken under machine-gun fire at a spot where some
stretcher-bearers had laid down their stricken burdens over night to wait for
a relief party. The recumbent, shrouded figures – the attitude of complete
exhaustion in which a guarding bearer leans against a wall tell a mute story
of suffering and endurance which gives the heart a sharp pang and stirs the
imagination to a perhaps more intimate realisation of what prodigies of devotion
and sacrifice those shell-swept trenches of Flanders witnessed.59

Through their power to move, Hurley’s images therefore served a mediating

role, linking a moment in Sydney in March 1919 with their recent exhibition in
London: ‘In much enlarged form the pictures in this collection were exhibited
by the High Commissioner in London last year.’ Although the exhibition of
war photographs was presented as an educational, commemorative and high-
cultural event, it therefore played the same role as the boxing match Hurley
had photographed ten years earlier in the summer of 1909: both exhibitions
allowed Sydney audiences to experience that sense of ‘being there’ that defines
colonial modernity, two of whose global vectors were sport and war.

The Melbourne Relics and Records Exhibition

Although Hurley’s Sydney exhibition had the backing of the New South Wales
state governor and the minister for defence, it did not have the support of the
Australian War Museum and its senior staff, who shared Bean’s disapproval
of his commercial motivations. Four years later, its director, John Treloar,
expressed the view that in selling copies of official photographs through
Kodak, Hurley had ‘acted illegally and in defiance of the statement…signed
before the termination of his A.I.F. appointment.’60 Although Hurley publicly
claimed patriotic motives, the main purpose of the Sydney exhibition was in
fact to launch his postwar career in Australia as a photographer, film maker and
travelling showman, which I discuss in subsequent chapters. This commenced
with a national tour of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, his film of Shackleton’s
58 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, in the summer of 1919–20. In June

1920, his film of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight from England to Australia premiered in
Sydney in advance of national and British tours. And then, for the next five
years, while Bean and his assistant John Bazley worked on the Official History,
Hurley’s energies were absorbed in the production and exhibition of what was
to be his most internationally successful travelogue, Pearls and Savages.
Meanwhile, the Australian War Museum was planning its own official
travelling series of Great War exhibitions. They began in August 1921
with an Exhibition…of Official War Photographs, initially at the Melbourne
Exhibition Buildings,61 where the AWM had its temporary headquarters,
then toured to the Adelaide Exhibition Buildings62 and the Sydney Town
Hall.63 Although many of Hurley’s photographs were used in this travelling
exhibition, he was by then in Papua shooting Pearls and Savages and played
no part in its preparation.
The major event in this series was the 1922 exhibition of The Relics and
Records of Australia’s Effort in the Defence of the Empire.64 This was a full-scale,
multimedia event, involving large and small relics, photographic prints
and enlargements, paintings and drawings by the Australian war artists,
costumed mannequins, maps, and scaled dioramas or ‘picture models’. It
opened at the Melbourne Exhibition Buildings in April 1922, and in April
1925 it moved on to the Sydney Show Grounds, where it remained until
1935 when preparations were made for the final move to the new Australian
War Memorial in Canberra (Fig. 2.3).
Visitors to the Melbourne exhibition experienced a series of displays that
recalled the great nineteenth-century international exhibitions, including the
Melbourne Centennial Exhibition of 1888 and the International Exhibition
of 1880, for which the Exhibition Buildings had originally been built. In
dealing with such venues, Simon During recommends a ‘topographical’
approach, by which he means a diachronic awareness of the different kinds of
entertainments that have been held in a single show space over time. In this
way, the historian can gain access to what During calls ‘an occluded logic of
cultural equivalence’.65 It may be, for example, that a single show space has
consistently been used to host similar types of events; or it may have hosted
seemingly different types of events to which audiences nonetheless bring a
common set of competencies and expectations. As we have seen, one of the
traditions of the expositions was their serious pedagogic purpose, realized
through ‘guided spectatorship’. Accordingly, the Relics and Records exhibition
was accompanied by a substantial illustrated guidebook, written by Treloar and
his staff, intended to conduct spectators through the exhibition and help them
to absorb the story that it was intended to tell. A large fold-out floor plan and
accompanying essay explained the spatial and narrative logic of the exhibition.
After alighting from the tram in Nicholson Street, visitors approached the
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 59

Exhibition Buildings across a landscaped garden featuring a maze and flower

beds, where the largest of the war trophies, including guns, trench mortars,
pontoons, tanks and other heavy military and naval equipment, were laid out
on display. Other large trophies were housed in several pavilions annexed to
the main buildings, which visitors were invited to inspect prior to entering the
main hall. They entered the Exhibition Buildings through the Eastern Annex
or Aquarium, which housed an aquarium, a fernery, a space for performing
seals, and a small gallery and museum. Twelve months earlier, at the smaller
Exhibition of Enlargements of Official War Photographs, the Museum had taken
advantage of its location in the Aquarium to offer ‘A Special Vaudeville
Programme for the Children’, commencing each afternoon at three o’clock.
The programme comprised ‘Performing Seals and Sea Lions, Performing
Animals and Birds, A Magic Performance and a Musical Entertainment.’66
Upon entering the main hall, visitors passed through a series of exhibition
courts, each dedicated to a particular campaign and set out in chronological
order. Here, in museum-style glass and timber display cabinets, were the
relics and trophies of each campaign in which the Australians had served. On
the walls were photographs, maps and art works illustrating the campaigns
and contextualizing the relics. The hall’s iron, gothic-revival pillars were
hung with flags and pennants, photographs and framed documents. In the
adjoining Aeroplane Hall were aeroplanes, bombs and other large relics
associated with the air service (Fig. 2.4). On the walls were hung spectacular
photographic enlargements. The exhibition was therefore a vast, multimedia
text that Treloar compares to an illustrated history book: ‘Each court is…a
unique and compact volume of history, of Australia’s war effort.’ The
exhibition was open seven days a week, but visitors were warned that ‘to
prevent over-crowding, admission will, if necessary, be regulated.’ Patrons
were also warned that ‘Peanut shells, fruit skins, papers, and other litter must
not be dropped upon the floor of the exhibition halls’, a reminder of the
sometimes uneasy relationship between education and entertainment. In
guiding patrons through the exhibition and teaching them to see it – and
indeed to comport themselves – in appropriate ways, Bean, Treloar and
Bazley were continuing the pedagogic role of the exhibition commissioners
as the experts in ‘guided spectatorship’.
Although the Museum’s exhibition occupied the same show space as
Melbourne’s Centennial Exhibition, there were a number of differences
between the way the military relics and trophies were displayed, and the way
technology, raw materials and manufactured goods had been displayed at the
expositions. Hoffenberg’s study of the exposition movement is again useful here
in understanding both the continuities and differences. Superficially, at least,
the war exhibition appeared to carry on the tradition of displaying varieties of
industrial technology. Since the first exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851,
60 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

there had been dedicated industry courts for the display of manufactures
and what were known as machines-in-motion. These courts were usually
laid out on national lines, though some machines-in-motion which required
special arrangements, such as steam power, were concentrated in one spot
in much the same way as the large war trophies were grouped on the lawns
and in the pavilions outside. Hoffenberg suggests that the machines-in-motion
performed ‘the spectacle of technology’, promoting ‘the ideal of the rational
and self-regulating factory as a metaphor for society, and the general ideology
of industrialism.’ At the same time, he argues, these self-acting machines
‘mystified the social process of industrialism by hiding common workers and
their forms of often hand-powered labor.’67 The exhibition courts offered
‘idealized visions of a self-regulating industrial system with limited human
agency and labor.’68
While the industry courts at the Great Exhibition of 1851 did not feature
displays of military technology, this became increasingly prominent later in
the nineteenth century. Commentators noted the change at the 1862 London
International Exhibition, which included a military court featuring guns,
models of ships and fortifications, and military maps illustrating the ‘Art
of War’. One journalist noted the contrast between the sense of peace and
progress in 1851, and the militaristic tone of 1862: ‘Ten short years have
passed, and the most attractive court in all this Exhibition will be devoted to…
military engineering, ordnance and accoutrements.’ In response to models of
‘ironsides’, another critic noted that a ‘terrible beauty’ had been born since
the Crystal Palace, and expressed the view that the ‘chiefest handiworkers
in the world’ no longer built cathedrals but ships of war.69 Hoffenberg argues
that the marked aestheticization of these displays constitutes a ‘mystification
of the relationships between military power, industrialism, national
consolidation, and imperial expansion.’ Machines of power and destruction
were ‘recontextualized and clothed by art in seemingly peaceful modes of
beautiful self-action and monumentality.’70 Large guns, for example, were
arranged in geometrical patterns, or assembled into shapes resembling obelisks
and pyramids. One commentator wrote of the Whitworth and Armstrong gun
exhibits that ‘Cellini never wrought more painfully at his metal-work than the
gun founder has done at his.’71 Hoffenberg also notes that while these displays
often testified to the relation between the state and private industry, the role
of defence was strictly reserved to ‘the mother country’, since the colonies
focused on their engineering interests and industrial applications in the forms
of mining, agriculture and railways, the only weapons of war being those of
‘savages’, exhibited as ethnographic curiosities.72
The Australian War Museum’s exhibition of its large and small relics
continued these conventions of display but it also broke from them in at least
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 61

two main ways: first, in that the tools of war were no longer aestheticized or
mystified, as if they functioned without human agency and human victims;
and second, that as one of the dominions, Australia was now exhibiting
as a military power in its own right independently of the mother country,
marking its coming of age as a nation – an armed nation – within the imperial
federation. In contrast even with some of the recent exhibitions in London,
this was an explicitly national, not an imperial exhibition.
Under Bean and Treloar’s guidance, exhibits were intensely personalized
and, in one sense at least, de-mythologized. Among the large trophies exhibited
in the external pavilions, for example, was a German field gun captured by the
Australians at Pozières. Where guns had previously been exhibited in freshly-
cast condition and in large, decorative displays that masked their true form
and function, Treloar directs the visitor to individual guns that have a known
history of use, and which carry the marks of combat:

Just before entering the Museum, the visitor may see on the right the first gun
captured by the Australians – one of a battery of four taken in the copse at
Pozieres by the 1st Division in July, 1916. Its shell-torn appearance bears
testimony to the fury of the artillery action during this battle.73

While the older-style machines-in-motion exhibit depersonalized the

machinery, mystifying labour by removing signs of individual work, the war
exhibits and associated signage strove to connect weaponry and warfare to the
suffering of individual diggers, represented by uniformed mannequins:

To show the appearance of an Australian infantryman in battle, there is presented

on the figure at the left of this case the actual uniform in which one of our
soldiers fought at Morlancourt. The mud of that battlefield is still thick upon
the clothes and helmet (carefully preserved by the Museum in the condition in
which they came out of the fight), and rents made by barbed wire can be seen
near the knees.74

As with early cinema, the aesthetic was one of presentation rather than
representation, a striving to bridge the distance in time and space between
visitors in Melbourne in 1922 and the actual events of battle in 1916. This
bridging of distance is the same principle, applied here to a physical object,
that had been applied earlier in the Canadian catalogue to guide interpretation
of the photographic enlargements: ‘One becomes absorbed into the picture.
It is as though one were on the battlefield itself.’ In many of Treloar’s
comments, the personalization of objects tends to merge with the effect of
presentationalism, the provision of highly individualized information about
62 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

particular relics serving more immediately to bridge the distance in time and
space between the visitor and the person involved in the originary event:

The visitor now comes to a large case (No. 31) containing relics connected with
prominent members of the A.I.F. Here are shown…the tunic which General
Birdwood wore in Gallipoli and France, and a walking stick he carried at Anzac,
where it was suddenly knocked out of his hand by a bullet, which was discovered
long afterwards, embedded just above the ferrule.75

It is as if the bullet magically provides a physical link between the originary

events of battle and the moment of exhibition. This presentationalism not
only links the principles of spectatorship of photographs and objects – as if
photographs have the status of the objects they represent – but also invokes
the spectral quality of these physical manifestations.
The same effort at personalization was evident in the display and marketing
of photographs. The largest display was in the Aeroplane Hall, where there was
a sales counter at which visitors could buy souvenir reproductions of the official
war photographs in a range of sizes, including enlargements suitable for framing
and display in the home. The guidebook has a 30-page appendix listing the
171 photographs on display, grouped according to campaigns, each with a code,
title and short description. The code had been developed at Bean’s suggestion while
the War Records staff were still working in London, the intention being to make it
easier for the public to buy souvenir photographs. The guidebook includes a blank
order form on which visitors were advised to ‘Note down Exhibition Number of
Photographs in which you are interested.’ A series of headings solicit the visitor’s
attention and affective engagement: ‘You can buy Copies of these Photographs’;
‘there are 20,000 Photographs from which to Select. Enquire at Counter’; ‘The
Names of Soldiers in these War Photographs are Recorded and Indexed’.
The Museum’s research staff had painstakingly compiled a record of
the names of most soldiers appearing in its photographs. Ironically, it was
here that the commemorative, educational and documentary intent of
the ‘Official’ exhibition was most likely to be haunted by more sensational
traditions, including the association with spiritualism exploited by Hurley in
his composites in the unofficial Sydney exhibition. Visitors were promised a
personalized, deeply moving experience. Not only could they purchase prints,
but museum staff were on hand to locate or identify images of the dead:

The names of 60 per cent. of the members of the A.I.F. are…recorded, and are
indexed in such as way that, given a man’s name and unit, it is possible for the
staff at the counter to produce, within a few seconds, any official photograph in
which he appears.76
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 63

A number of Hurley’s prints shown in the exhibition were ‘keyed’ in this

way, with handwritten numbers identifying individual personnel.77 These
modern curatorial, exhibitionary and marketing techniques suggest that the
photographs had more than an evidentiary, historical or even commercial
purpose: they also allowed people to see and personally identify the dead, who
manifest their presence through the photographic image. Although the séance
and the exhibition of documentary photographs belonged to different phases
in the history of modernity, they shared some techniques, had a common
purpose, and produced a similar affective response. Again, the show spaces of
modernity were heteronomous.
Spiritualism has not always been a legitimate topic of military history,
and modern discussions of war photographs often fail to grasp this aspect of
their first reception. To understand it better we might look to the Melbourne
newspapers, which carried advertisements and notices of Bean’s earlier, 1921
exhibition. The fact that they also carried dozens of advertisements for séances,
often in the same columns, is a reminder that photography was not the only way
for this community in mourning to see its war dead. The Age of Saturday 16 July
1921, for example, advertised a busy schedule of spiritualist lectures, services
and séances for the following Sunday. The Victorian Association of Spiritualists
held a medium’s meeting at the Masonic Hall in Collins Street from 3 p.m.,
and at 7 p.m. Mr Bloomfield presented a public lecture on ‘Materialisation: Its
Effects and How Produced’. Such lectures were often illustrated with lantern-
slide projections of spirit photographs, the same technique also used during
the exhibition of war photographs at the Grafton Galleries. On Saturday
20 August, at the Occult Church, the Reverend Parker lectured on the topic,
‘Do loved ones return?’ His lecture was followed by ‘DIRECT MESSAGES’.
This refers to the technique known as the ‘direct voice’, when a spirit speaks
through the medium. Meanwhile, at the Lyceum, opposite Trades Hall, Fred
C. Bradborne lectured on spiritualism, after which Madame L. de Bradborne
gave ‘Messages’. Finally, on Sunday 21 August, at the Masonic Hall, Collins
Street, Mr Nicholson lectured on the topic, ‘WHERE ARE THE DEAD?’78
This is just a small sample of the many spiritualist activities conducted in inner
Melbourne at the time of the 1921 war photographs exhibition, all within a
few blocks of the Exhibition Buildings, and samples only the public activities
as distinct from private spiritualist circles.
The relics and trophies in the official exhibition were so intensely
personalized that many seem to conjure the presence of the dead. In the
Pozières, Bullecourt, and Messines court were relics of the first entry of the
Australians into the line in France, including ‘the kilt of a “Jock”…who fell on
this battlefield. It was evidently cut away to allow his wounds to be dressed’;
‘[here is] some body-armour worn by an Australian and pierced by a bullet.’79
64 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

The mud-stained uniform torn at the knees and the fabric of the kilt recall
French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman observation that fabric –
especially folds, pleats and openings in fabric – have long been used to evoke
spiritual presence, from oil paintings of the deposition of Christ to the use of
gowns in full-form materialization séances during and after the Great War.80
As fashion historian Margaret Maynard observes, costumes displayed in
museums are often used to ‘magically summon up’ the life of the past or to
‘irradiate the aura of the original wearer’.81
Although Bean objected to Hurley’s spectral images, his own exhibition
therefore had its séance-like associations and uses. In promoting his project
for a future Australian War Memorial, Bean himself often used the language
of spiritualism: he spoke of the ‘relics’ his team had brought back from the
battle fields and the ‘emanations’ they gave off to the Australian public.
In July 1918, for example, he had two diggers fresh from the trenches
photographed in the style of anthropometric photography. According
to McCarthy, ‘Everything that was taken from these soldiers, with all the
emanations evocative of battle…was to be sealed up, just as it came from
these men, and sent back to Australia so that their countrymen might feel
these emanations.’82 Bean’s brother Jack was secretary of the Theosophical
Society of Australia, and believed that the spirits of the war dead would be
reincarnated in the next generation of Australians. Although Charles Bean
was not himself a Theosophist, Jill Roe argues that he was sympathetic to
his brother’s beliefs.83 Even more significantly, Bean had struck up a close
friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when they met in September 1918,
when Doyle toured the battlefields with a party of leading British newspaper
men. They met again in Sydney in 1920 during Doyle’s lecture tour to
promote modern spiritualism, which took place at the same time as Hurley’s
Sydney exhibition of the war photographs.84
Another form of visualization widely used in the exhibition was the three-
dimensional scale model, which derived in part from nineteenth-century
proto-cinematic devices such as the diorama and the panorama, or cyclorama.
Here again, there is a striking continuity between the exhibitionary techniques
used by the War Museum and those used earlier in the same show space. As
Mimi Colligan has shown, from 1892 until about 1918, when it was used
as a hospital during the influenza epidemic, the Aquarium was the home of
The Cyclorama of Early Melbourne, an illusionistic device representing the city
as it was in 1841.85 Cycloramas, also known as panoramas, were large, 360-
degree illusionistic paintings that were displayed in circular, purpose-built
structures. The painting was viewed under special lighting conditions from a
central platform reached by a concealed stairway, and from which the floor
fell away to create the illusion of continuity between the spectator and the
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 65

scene depicted in-the-round on the walls. Overwhelmingly, the two preferred

subjects were great cities and historic battles.
In the Pozières court there was a large ‘plan model’ on a scale of 12 inches to
the mile, showing the country in which the Australians fought during the First
Battle of the Somme. There was also a ‘picture model’ of the capture of Mont
St Quentin, actually a diorama, which was accompanied by a plan model.
A photograph of the diorama is reproduced in the guidebook, and Treloar gives
precise instructions for the visitor to gain the maximum illusionistic effect:

The visitor now comes to what many will consider the gem of the collection – the
large inset picture model showing the final phase of the Australians’ magnificent
feat of arms which resulted in the capture of Mont St. Quentin. The general idea
of the operation depicted can, perhaps, be most easily understood by an inspection
of a plan model which stands to the left and in front of the picture model.
This plan model shows the marshes of the Somme River at Peronne, together
with the heights of Mont St. Quentin and the town of Peronne at their foot…
Having obtained a general idea of the operation from the plan model, the
visitor should study the picture model. The position in the foreground is the old
German trench, known as Elsa Trench, to which, after reaching the crest upon
the 31st August, 1918, the 5th Brigade was driven back by a German counter-
attack… The model shows the attack at the moment when the bombardment
ended and the infantry began to leave the trench.86

In his commentary on the diorama, Treloar seeks to bring alive the action
depicted by the figures, suggesting the convergence of several different forms
of representation at this time, including the older techniques of the diorama
and the newer modes of photographic enlargement, composite printing and
cinematography. As he modulates into the present tense, the action Treloar
conjures from the model is proto-cinematic, serving to create the simultaneity
characteristic of colonial modernity:

Probably this model…more than any other exhibit at present in the Australian
War Museum, will bring home to those who did not take part in it, the actual
nature of the fighting during this last phase of the war. No live Germans, except
prisoners, can be seen, but in the scrub and ruins on the mount, within a hundred
yards or so, are German machine guns which had begun to fire and are already
causing casualties. The chalky trench, the battered trees, the German defences,
the German machine-gunners lying where they had been killed the day before
about their machine guns…the gallant Australian youngster who, 12,000 miles
from his home, has been hit by an enemy bullet and fallen across the wire which
he was trying to surmount; others struck in the trench and lying there with home
66 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

letters beside them, and the packs of cards with which they had whiled away
the tedium of waiting; Lewis gunners and Vickers gunners with their respective
machine guns, the trench mortar crew serving their Stokes gun – every attitude,
incident and detail of this model will vividly recall to those who were present at
this and other battles of 1918 the complete setting of the stupendous drama in
that terrible terrain.87

Treloar’s account of the Villers-Bretonneux model in the Amiens Court

affirms that the model’s accuracy was made possible by ‘minute attention
to maps, land and air photographs and sketches’, suggesting the strong
intertextual relationships between the different media of exhibition. His
precise instructions on where the viewer must stand to achieve the desired
effect of simultaneity also describe the ideal connections between verbal and
visual forms of information:

The following description is based upon the assumption that, when inspecting
the model, the visitor stands with his back to the case containing British and
Dominion uniforms. There, and at the opposite side, are illustrated descriptions
of the model and the military situation it represents, which will enable him to
grasp the main features of the two attacks made here by the Germans.88

These representational techniques and practices provide an appropriate context

for appreciating Hurley’s composite photograph, ‘A Hop Over’ (originally
captioned, ‘A Raid’, in the Grafton Galleries exhibition), which was hung
nearby. Its strong perspectival arrangement suggests the enclosed space of a
diorama, while the figures advancing to action resemble the sculptured figures
in the Mont St Quentin model, and the successive waves of men suggest the
frames of cinema film in their attempt to create an illusion of action.
The catalogue Treloar prepared for the Melbourne exhibition therefore
provided a narrative context for the individual images and objects on display
that aspired to organize their potential meanings into an official account of
Australia’s role in the Great War. This was reinforced by the physical arrangement
of the exhibition space and the guided movement of visitors through its courts,
which represented the individual campaigns of the war in chronological order.
The reception of individual photographs was controlled by their presentation
in a context of exhibition that involved captioning, narrativization and other
techniques of guided spectatorship. As Alan Trachtenberg has demonstrated
in his reading of albums of American Civil War photographs, the meaning
of individual images is overdetermined by the contexts in which they are
placed.89 In this sense the Melbourne exhibition was beginning to develop
that context of narrativization that would be consolidated in the publication
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 67

of the Photographic Record of the War and eventually find material expression in
architectural interior of the Australian War Memorial.

The Making of the Photographic Record of the War

Volume XII of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, the
Photographic Record of the War, was published in 1923.90 Edited by Bean and
Gullet, it was the culmination of the research on guided spectatorship that
had informed the series of Great War exhibitions with which the Museum had
been involved since 1917. It was also the definitive expression of Bean’s vision
of the role that modern war photography – including Hurley’s – might play in
the twin tasks of historical commemoration and nation building.
From the early 1920s, while Hurley was establishing his postwar career as a
film maker and travelling showman, Bean and his secretary, John Bazley, were
based at Tuggranong near Queanbeyan in the new Federal Territory, preparing
the multi-volume Official History. The Australian War Museum’s photographic
archive was then in Melbourne under the charge of its director, John Treloar.
During the three years they spent preparing volume XII, Bean and Bazley wrote
to Treloar on an almost daily basis, guiding the selection and reproduction of
the photographs, and the research into their contexts. Bean had overall control,
though Bazley’s role was more than secretarial. There were clear guiding principles
that set this project apart from Hurley’s own competing exhibitions: using
approximately seven hundred photographs they would tell the story of the war in
its key phases and theatres; each photograph should be authentic and accurately
researched; catalogue numbers would be used to allow readers to buy their own
commemorative copies; and to prevent the cult of celebrity, the contributions of
individual photographers, such as Hurley, were not directly attributed.
From Tuggranong, Bean and Bazley also wrote to other institutions –
notably the Imperial War Museum – to British and Australian newspapers,
and to private individuals, seeking photographs to supplement the official
collection, and permission to reproduce them, as well as factual details such as
the maker, time, location and subject of photographs, including the identity
of individual personnel. In the early stages of their research they used a form
letter to secure permissions and supporting information:

Dear Sir

In the ‘Photographic’ volume of the Official History we are anxious, in 700

photographs, to cover the whole ground, and on going through the Australian
War Museum Collection I found one of your photographs, which seems better
than any to cover the subject, namely… 91
68 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

The pro forma went on to seek permission to publish, details of the date, time,
personnel and location, and occasionally requested a better print or even a
different shot if one were available.
Replies to the letters generally show that contributors felt great pride in
being represented in what was understood to be both an act of commemoration
and nation-building. For example, on 29 November 1921, E. W. Lacy wrote
to ‘The Historian’ from the Springs Hotel, Mount Wellington, Tasmania: ‘In
reply to yours of 22nd inst. asking my leave to reproduce a Photo “Table Top,
showing Light Horsemen descending”. I gladly give same and feel a pride in
the fact that I shall have assisted, even in so small a way, to help you in the
important task you are engaged in.’
As production of volume XII progressed, Bean drafted a preface, which
Bazley sent to Treloar on 29 October 1921 for his editorial comments. In both
the draft and the final, published version, there are two important indicators
of their relationship with Hurley and their attitude to his work. The first is
Bean’s explanation of the distinction he made in the day-to-day work of the
photographic unit between record and propaganda photography, and his
corresponding preference for the work of Wilkins above Hurley:

Experience having taught that the obtaining of photographs for historical record,
and the taking of them for propaganda or for the press, were to some extent
conflicting activities, Captain Hurley devoted himself to the latter work, while
Lieutenant Wilkins was charged with obtaining an accurate and complete record
of the fighting and other activities of the A.I.F.92

The second is Bean’s commitment to the ideal of anonymity. When Treloar

suggested that Bean’s own name should be included with Hurley’s in the list
of official photographers, Bazley wrote back, ‘My dear John… I am afraid there is
no possibility of Mr Bean including his own name amongst the photographers –
he always keeps in the background.’93
Bean and Bazley tried to exclude Hurley’s composites when they could, the
more so when Bean was directly involved. Surprisingly, one or two fakes still got
through. Whether this is because Bean did not recognize them or because he had
delegated the work to Bazley is uncertain. But Bean was committed to maintaining
what he understood to be the authenticity of record photography. On 31 July 1922,
while the book was in press, he made an extraordinary – and costly – intervention:
he sent a cable to the Defence Department, halting production at the government
printer’s in Melbourne.94 A long letter of explanation followed:

Throughout my time in France, I fought a continuous struggle to keep the official

photographs free from faking, and I laid down as a fixed principle in editing
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 69

the History that any suspicion of alteration must be avoided… Retouching…

detracts from the rigid accuracy which I intend to maintain, and my ruling was
therefore given absolutely prohibiting it…Of this I am, and intend to be, the
only judge.95

The government printer dispatched his chief process engraver to confer

with Bean at Tuggranong, and 39 plates were pulled for remaking. A month
later there were further problems and Bazley advised the publisher, Angus &
Robertson:

You will notice that in [photograph no.] 403 the four shell-bursts are to be painted
out. This is because the photograph, one of Hurley’s, was a fake, the four shell-
bursts having been printed on to it from another photograph.96

The image that eventually appeared as plate 403, ‘The First Battle of
Passchendaele’, shows a group of wounded Australian soldiers gathered in the
shelter of a blockhouse near the ruined Zonnebeke railway station. It was exposed
by Hurley on 12 October 1917. Comparison with the original glass negative in
the Australian War Memorial indicates that the print has been cropped to lower
the skyline.97 Not a trace remains of the offending shell bursts.
It is difficult now to say which have been more significant, the record
photographs or the composites. On the one hand, as Martyn Jolly points out,
none of the record pictures has really become iconic in the way that Hurley’s
composites have.98 On the other hand, it could be argued that the focus on
the relatively small number of composites – both then, by Bean, and now, by
photographic historians – has overshadowed the fact that many Hurley images
were used by the AWM in its projects, albeit mainly in their original rather than
composite forms, and then re-titled and re-captioned to reflect its values of accuracy
and anonymity, and to downplay Hurley’s commercial instinct for sensationalism.
Of the more than seventy plates used to illustrate the Third Battle of Ypres in
volume XII, a very significant proportion can be attributed to Hurley.
For his part, Hurley had long since moved on to new projects. From their
first meeting, Bean had summed him up as primarily a ‘commercial’ man,
while Hurley would later describe Bean, perhaps equally unfairly, as ‘purely
a chronicler’.99 What we see in Bean’s and Hurley’s careers over this period is
two distinct kinds of professional behaviour: that of the historian, dedicated
to nation building through diligent public service; and that of an entrepreneur
out to make a name for himself in the world of modern commercial
entertainment. Hurley’s individual photographs wandered in and out of these
different spaces and practices, where they came to have distinctively different
forms and meanings.
70 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Treloar’s insistence in a letter to Bazley that the preface should record the
dates of Hurley’s resignation from the AIF and his departure from England
before the end of the war is revealing of Hurley’s lack of commitment to the
public task, and of their view of his conduct during and after the war. In his
comments on the draft preface, Treloar had suggested:

…in mentioning that Captain Wilkins became responsible for the Photographic
section when Captain Hurley returned to Australia, it seems to me it might be
worthwhile to mention the date, thus making it clear that Captain Wilkins was
responsible during the strenuous fighting in 1918, when probably our most
striking photographs were taken.100

Bazley’s handwritten annotation provides the requested information. Hurley

resigned in England ‘in consequence of termination of appointment in
A.I.F. 12/7/18’, and then he ‘left England to return to Australia 6/10/18’.
The date and Wilkins’ promotion to ‘officer-in-charge’ were duly noted in
the published preface.
Hurley not only resigned before the war was finished, but during the early
1920s, when Bean and his staff were doing the hard work of assembling the
photographic volume, Hurley was in Papua making Pearls and Savages. Hurley
paid lip service to the ideals of patriotism and nation-building but was not
committed to carrying out the work. As so often in his career, he disappointed
the visionary and idealistic people with whom he worked by moving quickly
on to the next commercial opportunity before their tasks were completed.
His disagreement with Bean and his eagerness after 1920 to pursue his new
travelogue projects exactly repeated the pattern of his relationship with
Mawson before the war. As we have seen in chapter one, in 1914 he went
on film-making tours to central Australia and Indonesia, and then back to
the Antarctic with Shackleton, leaving Mawson to arrange publicity for the
AAE in London and New York. A letter written to Mawson on 11 August
1917, on the eve of his crossing over to France, reveals that his thinking at this
time was focused on the short-term, commercial – and, to be fair, artistic –
opportunities (for the two were inseparable) that his relatively brief posting to
the AIF presented, not the long-term goals for a national collection then being
formulated by Bean:

I’m off next Saturday to take over the Photographic work… Will be in France
about 4 months & then in London about another month to complete a show [at
the Grafton Galleries]… I can get the Press to boost things & it might assist all
concerned… By the way, are there any film Commissions due to me?101
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 71

Hurley had another spurt of interest in putting on his Sydney war photographs
exhibition in 1919, but his commercial opportunism was in dramatic contrast
to the work ethic of the AWM staff, driven by the ideals of anonymity and
public service.
One of the most eloquent statements of Hurley’s relation to the AWM
is a photograph he took of the new building around 1950, some years after
its opening in 1941.102 Hurley had positioned his camera at a slight distance
from the entrance, and the building is sharply exposed by the strong light.
The effect falls just short of monumentality and is strangely empty of human
presence and affect. Significantly, the negative is held today by the National
Library of Australia, which means that it came to that collection posthumously
via Hurley’s estate and was never part of the AWM’s own collection. In this
impersonal, almost forensic photograph, the invisible cameraman confronts
not just the entrance to the building but also, by implication, the possibility of
entering it. Hurley well knew that many of the photographs he had exposed
on the battlefields of Flanders more than thirty years earlier – and over which
he had lost control in 1918 – were stored and exhibited there. There is no
evidence to suggest that he ever stepped inside.103

Spotting the Fake: The Social Life of Hurley’s

Composite Photographs
As a coda to this chapter, I want finally to illustrate the shifting nature of
photographic form and meaning by tracking a handful of Hurley’s most
famous composite images of the Western Front as they migrated through
the various books and exhibitions that followed on from the original Grafton
Galleries show, culminating in their inclusion in – or exclusion from – the
definitive Photographic Record of the War in 1923.

‘Death’s Highway’
I’ll begin with the image to which Hurley gave the title, ‘Death’s Highway’. The
original full-plate glass negative, held at the AWM, was exposed on 5 November
1917, and now has the plain title, ‘View of the gateway to the battlefield of
Ypres through Chateau Wood, in the Ypres Salient’ (Fig. 2.5a).104 It depicts a
soldier hiding behind a tree on the Menin Road. The road and the landscape
are otherwise empty. Although Hurley claimed authorship, the collaborative
nature of his photographic unit’s field practice makes attribution uncertain. The
shot was probably set up by Hurley and then exposed either by him or Wilkins
or one of their staff, depending on who posed for the camera. The soldier might
72 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

even be Hurley himself. But why would he photograph a soldier hiding on an

empty road? As Hurley explained in his essay on ‘War Photography’, one of
the greatest risks he took was photographing shell bursts at close range. It is
likely that he staged this shot under safe conditions to create the foundation for
a later composite incorporating a shell burst.
Hurley used the negative to make one of the six composite prints he
was allowed to prepare – against Bean’s wishes – for the Grafton Galleries
exhibition, where it was titled, ‘A Hit on the Road’. The soldier is now hiding
from a large shell burst. The AWM holds several composite prints made from
one of Hurley’s re-shot negatives that probably correspond to ‘A Hit on the
Road’.105 They also correspond closely with a re-shot negative held at the
National Library of Australia, in which the tell-tale leading edges of the first
composite print can clearly be seen well inside the bottom left-hand corner of
the negative (Fig. 2.5b).106
No version of this image, either the original or the composite, was used in
Hubert Wilkins’ book, Australian War Photographs. Hurley did include ‘Death’s
Highway’ in his own exhibition at the Kodak Salon in Sydney. It was one
of the four composites he chose to reproduce in the catalogue. But the shell
burst in the Sydney version is significantly larger, darker and closer to the
soldier than in either the AWM composite or the NLA re-shot negative
(Fig. 2.5c). This suggests that Hurley made a new composite print for his
own Sydney exhibition, exaggerating the shell burst for what Bean would
call ‘commercial’ reasons.
What choices did Bean and his staff make in their own, later uses of
this image for the official events? Surprisingly, perhaps, given Bean’s views,
a version was used in both the 1921 Melbourne photography exhibition
and the 1922 Relics and Records exhibition.107 But its title, ‘The Gateway
to the Ypres Battlefield’, is less sensational than Hurley’s, and the caption
was purely informative. Given Bean’s long-standing objection to Hurley’s
combination printing, the print made for exhibition was almost certainly
taken from the original negative, and neither the title nor the caption refers
to the presence of an interpolated shell burst.108
In the definitive selection for volume XII, neither the original nor the
composite version of ‘Death’s Highway’ was used. This may be because the
image was associated in Bean’s mind with the composites used in the Grafton
Galleries and Kodak exhibitions, and in the many newspaper illustrations
associated with Hurley’s activities, or simply because of the staged appearance
of both the original and the composites. The photographs of the battle of
Menin Road selected for volume XII, such as no. 366, are probably Hurley’s
but appear, by contrast, to be less staged and more action-filled, and without
Hurley’s trademark attention to composition.109 I say ‘appear’, because
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 73

ironically it is quite likely that this is also a composite that escaped Bean’s eye.
Its shell burst is probably an interpolation and is remarkably like the one in
the National Library’s version of ‘Death’s Highway’, although reversed. This
is another tell-tale sign of the composite process. Reversing a plate means that
the developer can place the emulsion-side of the second negative face down
on the print, thereby eliminating any inconsistency of focus caused by the
2–3 millimetre thickness of the glass.110

‘Death the Reaper’

The title, ‘Death’s Highway’, was probably meant to resonate with others in
the Sydney Exhibition, such as no. 33, ‘Death the Reaper’, in which the shell
burst suggests a spectre, pandering, as we have seen, to the upsurge of interest
in spiritualism during and immediately after the Great War (Fig. 2.6). This is a
composite print showing a corpse in a shell crater in the foreground and a shell
burst in the distance. It was one of the six composites Hurley was allowed to
make for the Grafton Galleries exhibition, and in the catalogue he expanded
on theme: ‘The earth thrown up by the explosion assumed the form of a
skeleton with the skull looking down towards the battle-torn earth.’ One of
the sources is a negative showing the corpse in the crater, but this was never
exhibited officially by the AWM.111 The other original plate, showing the shell
burst alone, was used by Hubert Wilkins in his Australian War Photographs. For the
Sydney exhibition, Hurley wrote a new caption, again playing up the ghostly
implications of his creation: ‘Attention is directed to the remarkable wraith-
like form of the shell burst, and to the outline of a white skull surmounting
it.’ Neither of the source images or the combination print was used in volume
XII. This is probably because both separately and together they have little
record value, and show Hurley using his skills as a composite printer for the
most blatantly sensational effects.

‘Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres’

‘Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres’ appeared as plate 346 in volume XII, where
it introduces the long and important sequence of photographs recording the
Third Battle of Ypres. It is a view of the ruins of the town’s famous cloth hall
seen through a gothic arch. In the middle distance is a military vehicle and in
the background a spectacular Hurley sky featuring a large cloud back-lit by
sun rays. It has all the hallmarks of a fake, yet the full-plate glass negative held
by the AWM was labelled on accession as an ‘original’ and includes the cloud
and sun-ray formation.112 While there is insufficient forensic evidence to make
a definitive statement about the negative – such as the absence of shadows in
74 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

the foreground cast by the sunlight – curatorial staff at the AWM suspect it is
a re-shot negative.113
‘Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres’ had a busy public life during the period
1918–23. It was used in the Grafton Galleries exhibition,114 and again in
Hurley’s Sydney exhibition. Like the other illustrations in that catalogue, it
there has a heightened tonality and highly detailed appearance that make it
look more like a composite than an original print.
Was it, then, another composite that escaped Bean’s eye? The NLA holds
a full-plate glass negative of this image with ‘some hand-painting’ (Fig. 2.7).115
It includes the cloud formation. Like many glass negatives now under
preservation, its edges have been secured against chipping by masking tape.
On the top and on both sides, the image extends to the edges of the glass,
but on the bottom, the edge of the first composite print can clearly be seen
inside the edges of the glass plate. It is a re-shot negative. This means not only
that the composite print escaped Bean’s attention during the production of
volume XII, but that it was also incorrectly labelled as an original on accession
by the AWM staff. The perfectly placed cloud and sunburst are interpolations.
And there is more. Hurley often used interpolated archways to provide a
foreground vignette for his middle-distance subjects: a variation on the theme
is his composite print of Mawson’s ship Aurora seen through an ice cave on the
Australasian Antarctic Expedition.116 It is therefore likely that ‘Ruins of the
Cloth Hall, Ypres’, Bean’s prelude to a major sequence in volume XII, was
a multiple composite made by interpolating both the distant sunset and the
foreground gothic arch.

‘The Morning of Passchendaele’

Another composite suggesting a spiritualist interpretation of the war is ‘The
Morning of Passchendaele’. This is one of Hurley’s most complex composites,
and there are at least four extant versions, two at the AWM and two at the
NLA. In volume XII it appears as plate 403, where it was the cause of Bazley’s
indignant letter to Angus & Robertson in September 1922, demanding the
removal of four allegedly interpolated shell bursts. The source is an original
glass negative at the AWM in which there are indeed several faint marks
in the sky, though whether they are shell bursts, smoke or clouds is open to
interpretation.117 It is possible, then, that in this case Bean and Bazley did
Hurley an injustice, mistaking these faint marks on the original negative for
composite interpolations.
One of the AWM’s composite prints includes another of Hurley’s cloud
and sun-ray formations.118 To accommodate this interpolation, the format
has been rotated from landscape to portrait, and the horizon lowered from
 GUIDED SPECTATORSHIP: EXHIBITING THE GREAT WAR 75

near the top of the image to half way down. Hurley’s severe treatment of
the horizon suggests how important it is to have a clean line for the joining
of images from two separate negatives. The source of this interpolation is an
original full-plate glass negative, one of many cloud and sunburst formations
Hurley apparently took expressly for use in composite printing.119
These AWM composites resemble two more at the NLA. One is a re-shot
negative (Fig. 2.8).120 In this version, the original cloud formation is reversed
and four shell-bursts have been added to the horizon. It is very similar to the
version used in Hurley’s Sydney exhibition catalogue. This was the most tonally
and visually elaborate composite of all, and confirms that much of the NLA
material is Hurley’s later exhibition work, distinct from the official collections,
to which he had no access after leaving London in 1918. By contrast, the
version used in the 1921 AWM Melbourne Photography exhibition was the
original, unembellished print, and it was not used at all in the 1922 Relics and
Records exhibition.
The history of this image suggests that while Hurley continued to develop
more and more elaborate composite prints for his own purposes, which came
into the NLA collections through his posthumous estate, the original negative
held by the AWM remained the preferred source for official exhibitions,
with Bean and Bazley finally insisting – probably unfairly – that the version
appearing in volume XII be cropped to exclude any suspected signs of Hurley’s
serial composite printing.

‘A Hop Over’ or ‘Over the Top’

Finally, the image variously captioned ‘A Raid’, ‘The Raid’, ‘A Hop Over’,
‘Over the Top’ and ‘An Episode after the Battle of Zonnebeke’ was Hurley’s
most highly publicized, most ambitious and certainly his largest composite print
(Fig. 2.9). It appeared in the Grafton Galleries exhibition, his Sydney exhibition,
and countless newspaper reproductions. Hurley personally supervised the
making of the Grafton Galleries composite enlargement at London’s leading
photographic firm, Raines & Co. It was this first exhibition print that he was
denied permission to bring to Australia, and it was left in Australia House at
the end of the war. Surprisingly, perhaps, this most publicized of Hurley’s
composites was not selected to illustrate his own Sydney catalogue. The preface
is slightly defensive about the issue of composites, and he may have declined
to reproduce it for this reason. It is listed in the catalogue as no. 41, ‘A wave of
Infantry going over the top to resist a counter attack, Zonnebeke.’
Equally surprising, given Bean’s aversion to Hurley’s practice, was the use
of ‘A Hop Over’ in both the 1921 Melbourne Photographs exhibition and the
1922 Relics and Records exhibition. The 1922 catalogue even includes a full-page
76 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

illustration with a notice that copyright in the image is held by the Australian
War Museum. By contrast, the version reproduced most often by the Sydney
press at the time of Hurley’s Kodak exhibition is copyright of Captain Frank
Hurley.121 Clearly, ‘Over the Top’ not only fuelled the original conflict between
Bean and Hurley, but continued to be something of a sore point between them
well into the 1920s. Despite this, the AWM may have used the image because
Hurley’s own publicity made it so famous that it was difficult to ignore in a
series of exhibitions that were meant, after all, to inspire public enthusiasm
and raise funds for the Museum project. It was therefore a kind of switching
point for some of the most intense personal and institutional conflicts that
swirled around Hurley’s war photographs in their various incarnations and
determined the different uses to which they were put. As we might expect, this
most famous and widely reproduced of Hurley’s composites does not appear
in Bean’s precious volume XII.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 1.1. Herbert G. Ponting. Kinematographing in the Pack. Photographic illustration from Herbert
79

G. Ponting, The Great White South, or with Scott in the Antarctic (1921; London: Duckworth 1923).
 80
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 1.2. Herbert G. Ponting. Lantern Slide Projector. Photographic illustration from Herbert G. Ponting,
The Great White South, or with Scott in the Antarctic (1921; London: Duckworth 1923).
a b
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
81

Figures 1.3a–c. Herbert G. Ponting. With Captain Scott in the Antarctic. Handbill, MAC 7DM.
82 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figures 1.3a–c. Continued.

c
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
83

Figure 1.4. Andrew Watson (photographer). Crevasse with lid fallen in. MAC P178.
 84
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.1. Unknown photographer. Ivor Castle and Raines & Co. Dreadnaughts of the Battlefield,
1918. IWM Q28580.
Figure 2.2. Unknown photographer. Australian room of the Imperial War Exhibition, Royal Academy, London, 1918. IWM
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Q30499.
85
86 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.3. Unknown photographer. Exterior of the entry to the Australian War
Museum, Exhibition Building, Prince Alfred Park, Sydney. AWM P01936.001.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.4. Unknown photographer. Part of the aeroplane display in the Melbourne Exhibition Building.
87

AWM J01239.
88 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.5a. Frank Hurley. View of the gateway to the battlefield of Ypres through
Chateau Wood, in the Ypres Salient. Original glass negative. AWM E01237.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 89

Figure 2.5b. Frank Hurley. Death’s Highway. Re-shot glass negative. nla.pic-
an23478305.
90 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.5c. Frank Hurley. Death’s Highway. Catalogue of an Exhibition of War

Photographs by Capt. Fr. Hurley…at the Kodak Salon, Sydney (March 1919).
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 91

Figure 2.6. Frank Hurley. Death the Reaper. Black and white composite print.
AWM P02514.001.
92 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.7. Frank Hurley. Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres. Re-shot glass negative.
nla.pic-an23816566.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 93

Figure 2.8. Frank Hurley. Battle of Passchendaele. Re-shot glass negative. nla.pic-
an23478227.
 94
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 2.9. Frank Hurley. An Episode after the Battle of Zonnebeke. Composite enlargement photographed
leaning against a wall in London, May 1918. AWM P01438.001.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 95

Figure 3.1. Sir Ernest Shackleton… Marvellous Moving Pictures. Handbill, Philharmonic
Hall, London, 26 December 1919. BFI, Sir William Jury Collection, Item 36.
96 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 3.2. Frank Hurley. In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. Cinema poster, New
Olympia, Sydney, 29 November 1919. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
97

Figure 3.3. Unknown illustrator. View of interior of hut on Elephant Island. nla.pic-an24039583.
 98
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 3.4. Frank Hurley. In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. Handbill, King’s Cross Theatre, Sydney,
1 December 1919. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 99

Figure 3.5. Frank Hurley. In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. Sydney Sun, 23 November
1919. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
100 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 4.1. Unknown photographer. A Close View of ‘Augustus Wood’ near

Passchendaele Ridge (Ypres), Showing the Shell-torn Ground, 17 October, 1917.
Photographic illustration from F. M. Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps in the Western
and Eastern Theatres of War 1914–1918, volume VIII of the Official History of Australia
in the War of 1914–1918. (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1923) (St Lucia, Qld:
University of Queensland Press in association with the Australian War Memorial,
1984).
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 101

Figure 4.2. Unknown photographer. Section of a typical artillery map, showing

method of ranging by reference to ‘clock face’. Photographic illustration from F. M.
Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War 1914–1918,
volume VIII of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (Canberra:
Australian War Memorial, 1923) (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press in
association with the Australian War Memorial, 1984).
102 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 4.3. Frank Hurley. Sir Ross Smith’s Flight. Handbill for the London season.
NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
103

Figure 5.1. Frank Hurley. Pearls and Savages. Glass lantern slide, composite print. nla.pic-an23381987-v.
 104

Figure 5.2. Frank Hurley. The Lost Tribe. Cinema poster for US tour. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35.
PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY 105

Figure 5.3. Frank Hurley. The Lost Tribe. Handbill, Carnegie Hall, New York,
February 1924. NFSA, 353710.
106 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Figure 5.4. Frank Hurley. McClure’s Magazine. Cover. NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35.
 Chapter Three
TOURING THE NATION: SHACKLETON’S
‘MARVELLOUS MOVING PICTURES’
AND THE AUSTRALIAN SEASON OF
IN THE GRIP OF THE POLAR PACK-ICE

In the last of his diaries from the Great War, Frank Hurley recorded his final,
hectic days in London in July 1918. From his rooms at the Imperial Hotel
in Russell Square, exhausted and ill with influenza, he was coordinating
preparations for the AIF’s exhibition of war photographs at the Grafton
Galleries. At the same time, he was negotiating to secure distribution rights for
three films of Antarctic exploration: his own films of Mawson’s Australasian
Antarctic Expedition and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition,
and Herbert Ponting’s film of Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition. ‘I am keenly
anxious to leave,’ Hurley wrote, ‘…but the securing of these films should
enable me to form the nucleus of a considerable business in Australia, and so
I am doing my utmost to drive a bargain.’1 After several years playing second
fiddle to Mawson and Shackleton, Ponting, Castle and Bean, this would be
the start of Hurley’s career as a platform personality in his own right. In this
chapter I examines Hurley’s emergence as an independent show business
entrepreneur, and how he set up that ‘considerable business’ in Australia after
the war. It all began with his national tour of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice in
the Australian summer of 1919–20.

Exploiting Polar Exploration

Despite their sometimes nominal connections with institutions like the
Admirality and the Royal Geographical Society, and with the British, Australian
and New Zealand governments, the polar expeditions of the so-called classic
era were in fact funded from a variety of sources, including private patronage,
commercial sponsorship, and advances for the rights to books, photographs,
newspaper articles and films. In building his early career in photography
and cinematography through involvement in polar exploration, Hurley was
110 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

therefore able to exploit an already well-established conjunction of geographical

discovery and sensationalism in the new media of popular entertainment.
As an Australian, furthermore, polar exploration and its media exploitation
gave him access to international commercial entertainment networks operating
mainly, though by no means exclusively, through London and New York.
As Beau Riffenburgh has shown, explorers and their adventures were promoted
through a number of powerful media: ‘They were widely desired and highly
paid as public speakers. They…were featured in both theatres and music halls
[and] most importantly…explorers were assiduously promoted in print…[in]
popular biographies, juvenile literature, and the popular press.’2 Michael Gray
and Gael Newton go further, asserting that ‘it was this public consumption
of…[the books, interviews, lectures and films] that enabled the explorations
to take place.’3
In its commercialization, Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic
Expedition was typical of this pattern, though it had been exceptionally
slipshod in its financial organization and conduct, drawing sharp criticism
from the British, Australian and New Zealand governments. A few months
before sailing, Shackleton had formed the ITA Film Syndicate Ltd, with
Ernest Perris of London’s Daily Chronicle as one of its few substantive
shareholders. This commercial link between the expedition and a major
illustrated newspaper was central to turning it into a media event. As we
have seen in chapter one, Shackleton’s biographer, Roland Huntford,
describes the ITA Syndicate as ‘little more than a paper company.’4 Its main
purpose was to exploit Hurley’s growing fame, as bait for the expedition’s
other private backers, and to secure the rights to his work as a means of
guaranteeing an adequate financial return.
In the aftermath of the ill-fated expedition, Hurley arrived at Liverpool
aboard the Orrisa at 6 a.m. on 11 November 1916. He was met by a Mr
Bussey, who had been sent by Perris to shepherd him through customs with
the expedition films and negatives, and then bring him directly to London.
After passing through customs, where the films attracted £120 in duties, the
pair boarded the 4 p.m. express to London, where they arrived at 8:30 p.m.
Even before allowing Hurley to register at his hotel, Bussey took him directly
to Perris at the Daily Chronicle, where Hurley formally ‘handed over the film’
and they had a lengthy discussion about ‘expedition affairs’. Only then was he
free to settle in at the Imperial Hotel.5
In contrast to his neglect of The Home of the Blizzard, which he largely left
to Mawson, Hurley threw himself into the task of producing a synchronized
lecture entertainment for the ITA Syndicate. He liked Perris, finding that he
had a lot to learn from him about the business side of the new mass media:
unlike Mawson and Bean, they were both ‘commercial’ men. He was also
 TOURING THE NATION 111

stimulated by London’s vibrant media and entertainment industries. Despite

the war, this was a time when London led the world in the facilities it had
to offer, not only in its world-class newspapers, but also in its research and
development of cinematic and photographic technologies, and in the range of
shows and exhibitions that were available to Hurley as models. It was during
this period that Perris took him to the Philharmonic Hall to see Ponting’s
With Captain Scott in the Antarctic, which provided the immediate formal model
for their thinking about the Shackleton film. The two photographers met
subsequently and had long conversations about their craft. Hurley haunted
London’s cinemas, music halls and theatres, going repeatedly to the Marble
Arch Picture Hall and the West End Cinema, Piccadilly. In addition to return
visits to Ponting’s show, he went with Hubert Wilkins to the film, The Battle
of the Somme, at the Scala Theatre, and an African travelogue, The Macklin
Expedition, at Notting Hill. Hurley responded to the exotic subject matter
of the African film but found the quality of the camera work disappointing
after Ponting’s.6
Hurley went almost daily to the Chronicle offices, working closely with staff
photographers in its well-equipped darkrooms and getting to know how a
modern newspaper was produced: ‘For the first time, I beheld the stupendous
organization & machinery necessary to produce a London daily.’7 On
15 November, he recorded in his diary that he had ‘deeply considered’ the
film project, ‘arriving at the decision that it would be inadvisable to have it
projected or marketed in any way whatsoever until an addition of suitable
animal life, in which the film is lacking, be secured.’ He put this view to Perris,
who agreed to Hurley’s returning to South Georgia for that purpose as soon
as a passage could be arranged. Under a new contract with the ITA Syndicate,
Hurley set about ordering the finest cinema and photographic equipment that
Perris’s money could buy.
He also saw his own work appear in print. On 5 December 1916 a selection
of his photographs was featured on the illustrated front page of the Daily
Mirror. These included a composite print, made in the darkroom at the Daily
Chronicle, purportedly showing the rescue on Elephant Island but derived from
an image of the crew bidding Shackleton farewell on his departure for South
Georgia. On 15 December, the illustrated magazine, the Sphere, published a
second instalment in its series of Shackleton Pictures.8 Hurley was pleased
with both the quality and extent of the coverage, noting in his diary, ‘It is a
fine tribute and exceptional advertisement for the Expedition to be given such
attention with practically unlimited space in the leading press, when its pages
could be outcrowded with war and Ministerial photographs.’9
Not only was Hurley artistically inspired by Ponting’s show, but from a
commercial perspective he sensed great opportunities in the entertainment
112 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

industry. On 9 January 1917, he transcribed into his diary an article from that
day’s Daily Chronicle on the economics of the British cinema:

‘Mr. F. R. Goodwin, Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Assoc., said that at the end of

1914 £15,456,800 had been invested in the cinema business… Much private
money was also invested which did not appear in the official figures. The
attendance at the 4,500 cinema halls during one year worked out at 3,375,000
each week-day.’ Bodes well for my efforts.

Working at the Chronicle with a staff stenographer, Hurley dictated his ITAE
diaries by day and corrected the typescript at night. He would later use them
as the basis for a lecture to accompany the film. Perris had a lantern-slide
projector installed so they could run through the slides together, and Hurley
set up a cinema projector so that he could edit the films – ‘joining up,’ as he
called it. A typical diary entry from these weeks is that for 7 January 1917:
‘Afternoon at Daily Chronicle actively engaged in piecing together film &
writing up lecture for same.’
In wartime London, like Mawson before him, Hurley found himself
at the centre of major advances in the research and development of
visual technologies. An initial point of contact was the Eastman Kodak
Company on the King’s Way, whose Sydney office had sponsored his earliest
photographic exhibitions. Almost immediately, he wrote informing them of
his return from Antarctica with ‘a unique series of pictures taken with the 3A
Kodak’, and hinting at future advertising opportunities.10 He went regularly
to the Paget Plate Company at Watford, where the colour lantern slides
from the expedition were being made. Still a relatively new process, these
had not yet been used commercially in synchronized lecture entertainments
(Hurley would use them at the Grafton Galleries the following year) and he
took a keen interest in the development of the new projection equipment
that was required. He went out to Watford in a taxi on 21 November to
get the work ‘in hand’, and on 5 December he and Perris projected the
slides at the Chronicle office: ‘They are beyond my sanguine expectations.’ On
16 January, he went to Highgate Hill to see them projected on to a large screen
for the first time and recorded, ‘I was highly satisfied with the pictures, the
colours being exquisitely bright and vivid.’ Clearly working toward his own
conception of a synchronized lecture entertainment, he commissioned the
firm of Newton’s, who specialized in making lantern projectors, to construct
a lantern that could project both colour and ordinary monochrome slides,
for both were to be used in the performance. By 24 January 1917, they were
ready for projection at full size, and Perris booked the Polytechnic Hall for a
trial run. To project the colour slides at exhibition size meant throwing them
 TOURING THE NATION 113

over a long distance, which in turn required a very high current that had the
potential to overheat and crack the fragile glass slides. In collaboration with
Perris and the technicians at Paget’s and Newton’s, Hurley was pushing the
boundaries of current screen practice:

Had display of Paget Colour Plates in the Polytechnic Hall. The pictures were
projected 75 ft. on to a screen about 18ft. square, though the size of the picture
was 25 ft. The size of the slides is ¼ plate, with a current consumption of
60 amps. The projected image was magnificent. The slides stood the test
splendidly, only just warming up with this current & left me no doubt as to the
unqualified success of this project.11

Hurley also wanted the very finest quality for his exhibition prints, and on
20 November he went for the first time to Raines & Co. at Ealing, who
specialized in enlargements and the finest quality carbon prints. They were to
be used in three sets of presentation albums, one of which was presented by
Frank Wild to the King on 6 February.12 In preparation for the forthcoming
trip to South Georgia, Hurley also went to the Jap motor works at Tottenham
to order a new ‘cinema machine’. The quality of their instrument making,
he noted, was of ‘world wide fame’. During December he went by train to
Leicester to visit the optical instrument makers Taylor, Taylor and Hobson,
who presented him with two lenses. Back in London he visited the Gaumont
film studios at Shepherds Bush to see the AAE films projected, and to Barker’s
studios at Ealing, which he regarded as ‘the most modern and excellently
equipped studios & works of the production of Cine film in London.’13
Despite the intensity of his preparations of the show for Perris, Hurley’s
direct involvement in its development ceased abruptly when he left for South
Georgia aboard the whaling supply ship Pentaur on 11 February 1917. He
took with him 15 hundredweight of equipment, including two purpose-built
cine-developing tanks, and returned to London some time in April or May
1917 with a hundred more colour plates and 4,000 additional feet of cine
film. McGregor speculates that ‘no doubt he worked as diligently as before,
cutting film, making prints and lantern slides,’ but there is no extant diary
for this period.14 The diaries resume with his setting out for France as official
photographer with the Australian Imperial Forces on 21 August 1917.
When he returned to London from France and the Middle East on 6 May
1918, Hurley was committed to supervising the exhibition of war photographs
at the Grafton Galleries, as I have described in chapter two. But he was
also formulating a new business plan in relation to the Shackleton material.
Apparently fully engaged with his work on the war photographs exhibition,
his thinking about the unexploited potential of the polar material intensified
114 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

dramatically during the period between his resignation from the AIF on
12 July 1918 and his departure for Australia. Frustrated by Bean’s refusal to
allow him to take the war photographs back to Australia, his plan was now
to form his own distribution syndicate and to negotiate for the Australasian
rights to the three polar films. As business partners he took on Fred Gent,
formerly of the Gaumont office in Sydney, who had now joined the Fraser
Film Company in London, and W. Tod Martin, a former Fraser man, also
from Sydney, whom Gent had introduced to Hurley in the weeks before he
left for South Georgia. Gent was to be the company’s agent in London, while
Martin, with his ‘unsurpassed knowledge of the film business throughout
Australasia,’ would manage commercial matters at the Sydney end, leaving
Hurley free to concentrate on ‘all producing and lecturing matters.’15 Not yet
fully clear of Bean’s influence, Hurley was beginning to find his feet beyond
the military as an independent show business entrepreneur.
Negotiations with Ponting were relatively straightforward, and by 17 July,
only days after resigning from the AIF, Hurley and his partners had secured
the Australasian rights to the Scott film. Mawson, too, seemed willing. The
sticking point was Perris, who was driving a ‘hard bargain’. Almost immediately
after his return to London from the Middle East, Hurley had tried to cut a
deal with Perris over the exploitation of what he referred to as the Endurance
films, which still had not been shown to the British public. But on 2 May
1918, Perris and Shackleton’s ITA Syndicate had sold the British rights to
Sir William Jury’s Imperial Pictures Ltd for £5,000.16 Born in 1870, William
Jury had entered the film business at its very inception, working from 1897 as
an itinerant exhibitor. By the end of the Great War, his company, Imperial
Pictures, dominated British film renting, and he also had a major interest in
exhibition as director of the Weisker Brothers cinema chain.17 Shackleton had
retained rights to the film for lecturing purposes only.
After a month’s negotiations, Hurley at last secured the Australasian
rights to the Shackleton pictures and a one-off payment of £250 in return
for rescinding his one-fifth share in the world rights. He worked closely with
Ponting and Mawson in selecting slides and writing up the lectures. For
the Shackleton film he had his own lecture, prepared from his diaries. This
would become his normal practice, for these were a rich source of copy to be
reworked in the form of lectures, books, articles and advertising. He left Gent
and Martin in charge of producing the films, slides, posters and other publicity
materials, and of shipping them on to him in Sydney. It was a demanding task.
The Shackleton lecture used 100 slides, the Mawson 150, and the Scott 80.
As five sets of each were required, this meant that 1,650 slides had to be made:
‘Quite a tall order to make each perfect,’ Hurley remarked. In addition, two
copies of the films for each expedition had to be printed, each one totalling
 TOURING THE NATION 115

approximately 5,000 feet: ‘30,000 feet film, and all to be carefully toned
and stained.’18 Having secured the Australasian rights for the three films,
their associated lectures and lantern slides, but feeling ‘pretty fed up’ with
Shackleton and his people, Hurley left London for Sydney on 3 August 1918.
‘I consider we have scored an achievement,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The three
films…over here are antagonistic, and to have secured the entire three in one
mutual interest is indeed something to be proud of.’19

‘Shackleton and Marvellous Moving Pictures’:

The London Season of 1919–20
Perris and Shackelton’s own plans to exploit the ITAE material and so
discharge their considerable debts were meanwhile delayed for up to a year
by the war, which effectively killed off any interest in polar exploration –
as Mawson and the publisher William Heinemann had also found to their
cost. In any case, as Huntford observes, ‘the burgeoning legend of Scott,
encapsulating the cult of the glorious death, was more in the spirit of the
times.’20 Shackleton had lectured briefly in New Zealand and Australia in the
immediate aftermath of the expedition before crossing over to the United
States for a month-long lecture tour organized by the Lee Keedick Agency
in New York. Commencing in San Francisco on 9 April 1917, it coincided
with the United States’ entry into the war. Taking in San Francisco, Seattle,
Portland Oregon, Tacoma and Chicago, the tour culminated at Carnegie
Hall in New York on 28 April. One member of the audience that night,
Sir Shane Leslie, a cousin of Winston Churchill, described it as ‘the most
exciting, tremendous meeting I have ever attended… The emotion between
[Shackleton] and his audience was such as you very seldom feel… I’ve never
felt the audience played on like an organ by a man talking except Winston
and Shackleton, and…it hardly mattered what they said.’21
Shackleton’s belated London season roughly coincided with Hurley’s
own Australian tour. It began in the lead up to Christmas 1919 under
the management of Gerald Christy of the Lecture Agency Ltd. Located
in the Outer Temple, Christy’s specialized in lectures and other platform
events, and had managed the London season of The Home of the Blizzard
for Mawson – as the Lee Keedick Agency had its North American tour.
Shackleton opened with a special performance at the Royal Albert Hall at
3 p.m. on the afternoon of Friday 19 December 1919. The performance
was given with the permission of Sir William Jury, who now owned the
British rights, and in the presence of the Right Honourable Earl of Athlone,
since the proceeds were to be dedicated to his Middlesex Hospital Appeal
Fund.22 Newspaper advertisements and reports describe the event not as a
116 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

‘film’ in the modern sense but as a stage and screen performance, focusing
on Shackleton’s personal presence, his ‘narrative’ (as opposed to the more
formal mode of a lecture as such), and his use of a range of props, including
cinema film, lantern slides and maps, and the James Caird itself – the boat in
which Shackleton had made his legendary 800-mile voyage from Elephant
Island to South Georgia – displayed on stage. While acknowledging the
quality and novelty of the films, the reports speak of them in the plural and
do not focus on a single film text, which at this stage was untitled precisely
because it was just one component in a coordinated, multimedia platform
performance centred on Sir Ernest Shackleton.
While the Times considered that the films did not have quite the same
‘poignant note which made Mr. Ponting’s pictures of Captain Scott’s
expedition for ever memorable’, they were deemed not without their own
‘tragic’ quality,23 and the pictures themselves, especially those presenting
the animal life of the Antarctic, were ‘quite as fascinating as Mr. Ponting’s
pictures taken with the Scott Expedition.’24 An advertisement in the Times
noted that Shackleton’s lecture would be ‘illustrated by a remarkable series
of pictures and films’, and that ‘on the platform at the Albert Hall…there
will be the 20ft boat in which Sir Ernest sailed from Elephant Isle to search
for help’: prior to the performance, the Caird was exhibited outside the
Albert Hall, and was subsequently moved to Middlesex Hospital in support
of the Appeal Fund. The Times believed that ‘the pictures’ would at last
give the public ‘a very good idea of the hardships which Shackleton and
his comrades suffered, for in the turmoil of war their plight possibly did not
attract sufficient attention.’25
While the headlines announced ‘Shackleton on the Screen’, it was the man
himself, his stage presence and his ‘narrative’, that was the star attraction. In a
letter to the Times published the day after the performance, Captain Edward
Evans, who had been second-in-command of the British Antarctic Expedition,
described ‘Sir E. Shackleton’s Story’, focusing on the explorer as an epitome
of British manly virtue:

The enterprise was a failure, but a glorious failure, and in listening with other
Antarctic explorers to Shackleton I was amazed at the courage, pluck and
determination shown by Shackleton, Frank Wild, and the other members of
the expedition. Having explained how the Endurance was crushed, how the
members of the expedition watched her masts and top-hamper collapse on to
the ice, and having told us that all their hopes, all their scientific ambitions, and
practically all the necessities of life itself, vanished with the disappearance of
the little ship – their home – Shackleton accepted it all; and one feels, without
losing a vestige of his spirit, he summed it all up in the one word ‘However,’ and
 TOURING THE NATION 117

dismissing it as almost a trifle, he proceeded to tell us the most extraordinary

story of the persevering efforts to get his men from the heart of the pack ice back
to civilization… The story as he told it makes one proud to be a British sailor,
and every Briton should hear that story, accompanied as it is by pictures that
can, even in this advanced age of camera and cinematograph, be described as
marvellous.26

While the Times stressed the ennobling qualities of Shackleton’s performance,

advertisements and notices appearing in the illustrated popular press,
including the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, billed it more explicitly as
an entertainment, and the language stressed the novelty of the ‘pictures’, the
sensations and attractions of the apparatus:

World’s Wonder Film.

First Exhibition of Shackleton’s Pictures of Antarctic Voyage.
… As a story it surpasses fiction; as an historical and scientific record the film is
among the wonders of the world.27

Sir Ernest Shackleton

Will show for the first time the marvellous
MOVING PICTURES.
See the moving picture of the tragic end of the gallant ENDURANCE, crushed
to pieces by the polar ice.
See the moving pictures of the faithful dogs, the droll penguins, and the delightful
seals…
The most thrilling of narratives most beautifully illustrated.28

After its premier at the Royal Albert Hall, Shackleton’s lecture was
transferred to the Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street, where it
opened on Boxing Day, 26 December 1919 and ran through until May
1920. Newspaper advertisements indicate that it was immediately preceded
at the Philharmonic Hall by Percy Burton’s presentation of Lowell Thomas
in With Allenby in Palestine, which transferred to Queen’s Hall, also opening
there on 26 December.29 This suggests that there was some continuity in the
types of performance events offered at the Philharmonic Hall, featuring
platform personalities, travelogues and other ‘realities’ at set times of the
day. Filling Thomas’s place in the programme exactly, Shackleton lectured
twice daily, at 2:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., six days a week. A letter from
Shackleton to Sir William Jury during the planning stages indicates that
he used two ‘lantern operators,’ one for the film and one for slides, and
that they were collectively paid £10 per week. Rent at the Philharmonic
118 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Hall was £200 a week, and net profits were split 40 per cent to Jury, 5
per cent to Christy and the remaining 55 per cent to Shackleton, who
paid for advertising, management, rent and ‘lantern’ from his own share.30
Billed as ‘The Best Entertainment in all London’, the publicity featured
Shackleton and his lecture first, and only then the ‘marvellous pictures’
which accompanied it. The handbills for the Philharmonic Hall season
were dominated by a studio portrait of Shackleton, not the images of
Endurance caught in the ice or the portraits of Hurley that would feature
so prominently in Hurley’s Australian tour. They proclaimed that ‘SIR
ERNEST SHACKLETON will PERSONALLY show Marvellous Moving
Pictures and tell the story of his latest ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION’
(Fig. 3.1).31 What was advertised was not a film with a distinctive or
consistent title – for none had yet appeared in the publicity – but the personal
appearance of a celebrity explorer: ‘SHACKLETON’. Like Ponting’s
show about Scott, Hurley’s Australian performance would have partly to
displace the explorer by centring on Hurley’s own role as an adventurer-
cameraman, and on the modern attractions of the cinema itself.
South, the title that would eventually be given to the film once it had detached
itself from this live performance event, began as the title of Shackleton’s
book about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Published by William
Heinemann in 1919 at the start of the London season, it was conceived as
a tie-in to his stage performance. Like Mawson’s The Home of the Blizzard, it
was not written by Shackleton himself but initially ghostwritten for him in
New Zealand and Australia by Edward Saunders, a young reporter from the
Lyttleton Times whom Shackleton engaged as his secretary and amanuensis,
and then largely completed by Saunders and Leonard Hussey in London
after Shackleton declined to take further part in it.32 In synchronized lecture
entertainments, the practice of multiple authorship was therefore common to
both the performances and the written texts.
Given the circumstances of its writing, Saunders was generally very
successful in crafting a strong tale of the expedition, especially in his pacing of
the narrative and descriptive episodes, and the noble directness of his accounts
of its great events: the loss of the Endurance, the voyage of the James Caird
from Elephant Island to South Georgia, the crossing of the interior mountains
and glaciers, and the eventual rescue of the men from Elephant Island. He
was also broadly successful in creating a convincing first-person narrative
apparently in Shackleton’s own voice, although his dependence on a variety of
sources, both oral and documentary, is betrayed at times by an unevenness
of tone. That voice is characterized by its elevated moral tone, its repertoire of
quotations from the British poets, and a certainty about the ‘Providential’
relation between virtue and ‘adventure’ that seems elegiac and even defensive
 TOURING THE NATION 119

in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. This is evident in the preface,
with its famous invocation of ‘White Warfare’:

…though failure in the actual accomplishment must be recorded, there are

chapters in this book of high adventure, strenuous days, lonely nights, unique
experiences, and, above all, records of unflinching determination, supreme
loyalty, and generous self-sacrifice on the part of my men which, even in these
days that have witnessed the sacrifices of nations and regardlessness of self on
the part of individuals, still will be of interest to readers who now turn gladly
from the red horror of war and the strain of the last five years to read, perhaps
with more understanding minds, the tale of the White Warfare of the South.33

On 17 January 1920, while on tour in regional Victoria, Hurley noted in his

diary, ‘Shackleton’s book is now Out & has been well reviewed by the Argus
(Melbourne).’ His own published account of the expedition, Argonauts of the
South, would not appear until 1925, too late to be an effective tie-in to his
own show.34
On 24 February 1920 the Times reported the occasion of Shackleton’s
one-hundredth lecture at the Philharmonic Hall, which was attended by a
number of the expedition members. The account is especially interesting for
its description of Shackleton’s platform style and patter:

There was a large audience at the Philharmonic Hall yesterday, when Sir Ernest
Shackleton, for the hundredth time, told the thrilling story of his last Polar
expedition, illustrated by films and pictures.
This entertainment has become one of the most popular in London, and
thousands of people have listened with the closest attention to the wonderful
tale of adventure and endurance. Sir Ernest makes no attempt at an elaborate
lecture; he just talks in simple, homely language, relieved by jokes and witticisms,
and yet he succeeds in making his story ‘live’, keeping his audience almost too
enraptured to cheer…
Sir Ernest makes a point of inviting questions and yesterday he had several.
One member of the audience asked… ‘Was there not any use for a properly
trained nurse?’ and the lecturer contented himself with saying that women had
never been taken on any Antarctic trip yet.
In order to mark the occasion, Sir Ernest Shackleton had invited as many of his
old colleagues as he could reach to be present, and at the conclusion of the lecture
he had them up on the platform, and introduced them… Sir Ernest insisted on the
production of the old banjo which played so great a part in keeping up the spirits
of the men who were marooned on Elephant Island for a dreary 4½ months.
Hussey played some of the tunes he used to cheer up his comrades.35
120 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

What is striking here is not just the obvious emphasis on the performers and
the subsidiary roll of the films and other props, but also the impromptu and
unpredictable nature of the performance event. Ever since pre-recorded
materials were introduced into platform events – including lantern slides,
phonograph recordings and cinema film – it had been an essential part of
the exhibitor’s showmanship to have a ‘feel’ for his audience, and to vary both
the timing of his presentations and the relationship between pre-recorded
materials and live patter, between educational content and pure entertainment.
In deference to the great American showman, P. T. Barnum, this craft of live
embellishment came to be known as ‘humbug’.36 Shackleton probably did use
a script for his lectures, and his cinema and lantern-slide operators would
have insisted on working to a more or less determined schedule of screenings.
Yet the Times’ account of his stage patter – ‘Sir Ernest makes no attempt at
an elaborate lecture’ – indicates that there was a good deal of variation in
the twice-daily performances, certainly in the timing and possibly even in
the content of the lecture, films and slides. This recalls remarks made by the
American and Canadian press that Mawson’s narrative for The Home of the
Blizzard had ‘nothing of the formality of a lecture.’ It is difficult to say whether
the use of stand-in or agency lecturing staff made variation more or less likely.
As we have seen in chapter one, when multiple lecturers were used for The Home
of the Blizzard the potential for differences to emerge in the timing and even
running order of performances increased, with Mawson, Hughes and Hurley
developing quite distinct versions to suit themselves and their audiences in the
United States, Britain and Australia. Commenting on the flexibility of early
travelogues, Alison Griffiths argues that ‘as an interpretative agent, the lecturer
provided a metacommentary on the slides and films featured in the program…
using audience reaction to specific images as a cue to depart from the prepared
narration with extemporaneous comments about his experiences.’37
Although no version of Shackleton’s own lecture is known to have survived –
if indeed he required a written text – the British Film Institute holds a complete
typescript of a lecture in the Sir William Jury collection.38 This was almost
certainly written for the use of agency lecturers from Christy’s on regional
tours after Shackleton’s own season at the Philharmonic Hall had finished,
because it speaks of Shackelton in the third person, as one among the other
subjects of the films and slides.39 The text is carefully marked up with a column
of cues down the left-hand margin referring to slides and films, slides one and
two being ‘Portraits of Sir E. Shackleton’. The text corresponding to these cues
reads, ‘Allow me to introduce to you Sir Ernest Shackleton the leader of the
expedition. You will hear all about his exploits later – but here is a photograph
of him that you will like to see.’ So precise are the cues that it seems likely that
the agency’s lecturers and their projectionists kept very closely to the script and
 TOURING THE NATION 121

its running order because they were not personally involved in the story and
had no anecdotes with which they could embellish the lecture. Even so, the
typescript is heavily marked up by hand with extensive alterations both to the
text and projection list. There are, for example, extensive cuts to the number
of slides and films to be projected, with crosses beside many numbered slides
and films, and the accompanying text struck out, clearly indicating substantial
variation in running times. There are also subtle changes to the text, which
suggest that the lecturer has modified it to suit his own delivery style. The
text beside slides one and two cited above, for example, originally read,
‘I need say nothing about Sir Ernest Shackleton in introducing him to you.’
The text accompanying the second film sequence, ‘Deck of the “Endurance”,
etc.’ has been changed from ‘We will now go aboard the “Endurance” with
the explorers’ to ‘We are on the deck of the “Endurance”.’ The accounts
of the ordeal on Elephant Island and the open boat voyage in the James Caird
are given in the form of verbatim reports ‘in the words of ’ Frank Wild and
Tom Crean, suggesting that the presentation may have been less personal and
more professional in its delivery than Shackleton’s own. When the last film
was shown – ‘Yelcho arrives at Punta Arenas’ – and after the projectionist had
turned the house lights up, the lecturer read his final paragraph:

Thus ends the story I have to tell you of the doings of the Shackleton Expedition
in the Weddell Sea. Although it failed to achieve its object it accomplished more
than it could ever have hoped to do. It explored and revealed in the British
character a vast ever-stretching continent of heroism and disciplined endurance,
of cheerful patience in battling against difficulties that seemed insurmountable,
of calm valour at the prospect of certain death, miraculously warded off; of
staunchness in the face of suffering and privation and of self-sacrifice in the
name and cause of a country’s honour.

These live performance practices of the 1910s and 1920s have profound
implications for the modern practice of restoring what we now think of as the
‘films’ from this period. Sir William Jury died in 1944, and in 1955 the British
Film Institute acquired from his estate the rights and all surviving materials
associated with Shackleton’s performance, including the films, lantern slides,
handbills and the typescript lecture.40 In 1994, the BFI’s National Film and
Television Archive commenced the ‘restoration’ of what was then thought of
as ‘Frank Hurley’s film of the Endurance expedition…first shown as South in
1919.’41 The restored film is now distributed commercially by Milestone Film &
Video. What is striking about the explanatory notes that accompany this
restoration is the number of anachronistic assumptions about the ontology
of the film that have been introduced retrospectively into the period of early
122 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

cinema, including the assumption that there was a single filmic text that had a
single author, and that existed in a consistent and coherent form independent
of the vagaries of early stage and screen practice:

Frank Hurley’s film of the Endurance expedition was first shown as South in 1919, in
a version used by Shackleton to accompany his lectures. It was thereafter shown in
various forms as both a lecture film and a conventional theatrical release abroad,
including in Hurley’s Australia where it was released under the title In the Grip
of the Polar Ice [sic] in 1920… In 1994, the British Film Institute’s National Film
and Television Archive began the daunting task of restoring a definitive version
of South from a wide range of available (and sometimes contradictory) materials,
including the original print and negative material deposited by the distributor Sir
William Jury, a tinted print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and a set of glass
slides that originally accompanied the film and lecture. Preliminary examination
revealed that all the materials were in different order. Then began the painstaking
task of matching all the versions scene by scene, to establish continuity…a task
further complicated by the fact that no reliable record of either the original
footage or running time exists. Added to this were the printing anomalies such as
variations in framelines, and the complex variety of source material. The NFTA
then needed to re-create and perfect the tinting and toning to match the original
prints. This epic restoration took nearly four years of intense work.42

The assumption that the film was subject to ‘conventional theatrical release’
in Australia is incorrect, suggesting that once detached from Shackleton’s
‘authorial’ presence as a lecturer it was screened as a silent film, implicitly
with inter-titles. In fact, it was simultaneously appropriated and adapted
by Frank Hurley as a prop for his own platform appearances in Australia,
where it became part of a new and different performance text. And what
might Hurley have thought about this modern philosophy of ‘restoring a
definitive version’ as he set out, initially in London and then on the return
voyage to Australia, deliberately to write his own lecture about the Imperial
Trans-Antarctic Expedition so that it would be distinct in every way from
Shackelton’s version, drawing on the ‘wide range of available (and sometimes
contradictory) materials’?
The point is that the work undertaken by the BFI was not the ‘recreation’ of
a ‘definitive’ film text that once existed and has since been lost, as if through a
process of accidental disaggregation, but the modern creation of a consistent
version of a work that did not exist in 1919. Shackleton’s performance was
not the screening of a modern film, but a synchronized lecture entertainment
comprising a diversity of materials used in different combinations at different
times. The title South was not yet applied to the ‘pictures’ and would not, in
 TOURING THE NATION 123

any case, have signified their consistency across individual performances. In so

far as a consistent title was used by the British press during the London season
of 1919–20 it was ‘Shackleton Marvellous Moving Pictures’ or ‘Shackleton
and Marvellous Moving Pictures’, both emphasizing the performer and the
performance rather than the film as a discrete text or event.43 Not only were
Shackleton’s North American performances of 1917 different to his London
performances of 1919, but those later performances varied considerably
among themselves between December 1919 and May 1920, and were in
turn quite different from the subsequent performances by lecturers from the
agency. As we will see in the following section of this chapter, Shackleton’s
performances also varied considerably from Hurley’s in Australia at much
the same time, so that it is quite misguided to seek to correlate them. And
although Hurley did expose the original cinematograph films, he was not the
‘author’ of Shackelton’s performances in the modern sense of that word, since
those synchronized lecture entertainments comprised various media, including
films and lantern slides prepared by a variety of experts working for different
London firms, and the texts of at least two quite distinct lectures – Shackleton’s
and Hurley’s – neither of which was necessarily delivered in exactly the
same way on every occasion. As the Times’ description of Shackleton’s stage
performance indicates, there was no ‘reliable record’, no ‘continuity’, and no
authoritative ‘running time’ to recover through modern historical research
because the performances varied from one occasion to another depending on
the performer’s partly improvised patter and the response of his audiences.
What appear to be ‘anomalies’ of format merely confirm that the production
of visual materials at this time was still a cottage industry, its partly hand-
made products not yet rendered uniform by fully industrialized techniques of
manufacture and distribution. As Griffiths observes, ‘the uncertain provenance’
of films used during an exhibition programme complicates ‘questions of
authorship’, since film negative was subject to manipulation by a range of
personnel such as those Hurley engaged in London, including film developers,
editors and colourists, who hand-painted individual frames.44 It seems futile, she
argues, ‘to impose contemporary notions of authorship’ and textuality on early
cinema, since the meanings derived by audiences depended as much on ‘the
films’ promotional and exhibition contexts as on their authors’ qualifications
or affiliations, their profilmic settings,’ and so on.45 These questions about the
authorship of the visual texts are comparable to questions about the written
texts: if the book South, for example, largely written by Saunders and Hussey,
could be read as the first-person voice of Shackleton, then the still and moving
pictures exposed by Hurley could serve a similar purpose in Shackleton’s stage
performance. For all of these reasons, the BFI’s film South is not the recreation
of a definitive lost ‘original’ – there was no such thing – but the creation
124 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

of a new object whose ontology reflects late twentieth-century concepts of

authorship, textuality, and stage and screen practice that are anachronistic in
the context of early cinema.

Hurley’s Australian Tour of 1919–20

One reason why Shackleton’s and Hurley’s lectures differed from each
other is that each showman had to forge from the same originary events
and repertoire of materials a synchronized lecture entertainment that would
uniquely support his own biographical legend. Back in Sydney, the ‘intrepid’
Captain Frank Hurley began further to develop the distinctive public persona
that would launch his new career as a platform personality in his own right.
He wrote to Mawson on 14 November 1918, ‘We only arrived yesterday…
On the trip out I devoted myself to altering the lecture to suit my needs
of presentation… It reads well & have arranged the words to synchronize.
I anticipate we will start operations about January.’46
To begin this important new phase of his career, Hurley set himself
up in a rented office in Banking House at 228 Pitt Street, in the heart of
Sydney’s central business district. But as McGregor explains, his plans to
show the three polar films in Australia, recorded so confidently in his diary
before leaving London, got off to a shaky start when the distribution syndicate
he had negotiated with Gent and Martin began to fall apart.47 Hurley had
apparently misled Martin into believing that Mawson would contribute to the
cost of the AAE pictures they hoped to use in Australia. Martin had gone
to New York to buy back copies of the films and slides made for the North
American season of The Home of the Blizzard and still held by the Lyman
H. Howe Company. He returned to Sydney in January 1919, having incurred
£144 in outstanding costs, and he wrote repeatedly to Mawson asking for
reimbursement.48 Mawson replied, ‘REGRET NEVER ENTERTAINED
FINANCING FILMS SLIDES’.49 In the meantime, Hurley had begun to
suspect that The Home of the Blizzard was already overexposed in Australia to
the point where it might not be commercially viable. Mawson himself had
given a number of lectures, but there were rumours that copies had also been
shown illegally in Australia during the final years of the war. Hurley wrote,
‘I have some sound reason to believe it has already been lectured and shown
throughout this state. Laseron saw the film shown at Wagga. It was recently
shown as “Capt Hurley’s Popular Pictures” at Chatswood, and a lecturer who
actually spoke to the film on the screen called in last week.’50 Hurley now
began to make excuses for not following up on The Home of the Blizzard and
to focus his aspirations on the Shackleton material instead, which had not
been screened at all to Australian audiences. One immediate consequence
 TOURING THE NATION 125

was that he alienated Mawson. By early 1920, Mawson was considering legal
action against Hurley’s company for its failure to exploit the AAE film in
Australasia. ‘As you know,’ Mawson wrote, ‘the attempted exploitation of the
Expedition film has been a very up-hill game for me... It yields no profit…
and certainly no pleasure… I now thoroughly detest [it] and [it] will remain
with me always as a sort of nightmare.’51 Seeking to distance himself from The
Home of the Blizzard, Hurley expressed the view that it had been overexploited,
and deflected any impending legal action on to Martin: ‘You accuse me of
humbugging you. No partnership agreement existed with Martin. You will
have to go for him if you wish to institute proceedings.’52 Summing up the
conflict, McGregor concludes that ‘Without actually blaming him, [Hurley]
inferred that Mawson had overused the film himself by giving more lectures
in Australia than were understood in their original agreement.’53 The rupture
only confirmed Mawson’s long-standing reservations about Hurley’s character,
and in September 1919, when Hurley attempted to enlist his support in floating
his own ‘Hurley Australian Film Production Company Limited’, Mawson
declined to take part.54
In preparing to exploit the Shackleton pictures, Hurley’s new business plans
also brought about his final breach with Martin. Instead of working through
the syndicate he had put together in London, Hurley now contracted with
Australasian Films Limited to perform his shows through Wests and Union
Theatres in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, Wagga Wagga, Adelaide, Geelong
and Melbourne. Union Theatres’ chairman, Stuart Doyle, would become one
of Hurley’s closest business associates in the years to come. These arrangements
effectively spelled the end of Hurley’s syndicate. As McGregor observes, the
arrangement was in breach of his commercial relationship with Martin and
Gent, and meant that their syndicate was now in ruins.55 Martin complained to
Mawson, ‘Hurley is exploiting the Shackleton Film…first showing this coming
Saturday. This last was arranged without my knowledge or consent, and bears
out your opinion of the photographer. I have placed the whole matter in the
hands of my Solicitors.’56 Early in the new year Mawson wrote to Hurley,
‘I hear that you have been coining money on your Shackleton film.’57
Hurley’s diary and press clippings allow us to reconstruct the exhibition
practices and reception of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice on its summer tour
of Australia from November 1919 to January 1920.58 It opened at Sydney’s
New Lyceum Theatre on 22 November, with Hurley lecturing at each evening
session and two assistant lecturers at the morning and matinee sessions:
William Mazengarb and another man identified in the diaries only as Pollock.
Here and throughout the tour, the travelogue was not shown as a standalone
feature, but integrated into the theatres’ variety programmes, often preceded
by gazettes, or newsreels, and followed by one or two feature films. Sessions
126 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

at Melbourne’s Majestic, for example, included Clara Kimball Young in the

feature film, The Better Wife, plus the ‘Usual complement of Scenics, Comics
and Gazettes’. In the Union Theatres’ publicity, ‘Frank Hurley’s Wonderful
Picture Story of SHACKLETON’S POLAR EXPEDITION’ took third
billing to Vitagraph’s five-act drama, The Spark Divine, and ‘the famous
Broadway Beauty MOLLIE KING IN SUSPENSE’. The remainder of the
Lyceum bill was a ‘5-act Metro’ including The Island of Intrigue. The show was
so successful that it was soon playing additional matinees at the New Olympia
in Darlinghurst and at the Kings Cross Theatre at the top of William Street,
again using assistant lecturers (Fig. 3.2). At the evening session on 3 December,
which closed the Sydney season, there were more than 2,200 patrons, ‘filling
seats, stairs & standing’.
For the week-long Brisbane season, Hurley travelled interstate by train,
taking with him Mazengarb as assistant lecturer and Terry O’Shea as lantern
operator. While they were in Brisbane, his other assistant, Pollock, performed
at the Strand Theatre in Newcastle. Hurley, Mazengarb and O’Shea left
Sydney’s Central Station for Brisbane on the afternoon of 4 December 1919.
It was an unusually hot summer and they found the country to be ‘drought
stricken & pitiable’. In Brisbane, Hurley had no sooner registered at the
Australia Hotel than he was whisked away by the Union Theatres’ ‘publicity
bug’ to the Mail office where he was interviewed for a tie-in promotional article
about his previous adventures.
The next day, Hurley and O’Shea made an early start at the Olympia
Theatre, where they were to open the Brisbane season, checking the
acoustics and the projection equipment. Using other people’s equipment
and performing in unfamiliar venues was an unpredictable and sometimes
physically challenging experience. Hurley wrote scathingly in his diary about
the poor equipment and maintenance standards of West’s theatres. The
Brisbane Olympia was ‘a characteristic big barn, typical of West’s theatres’; it
was ‘a filthy, ill kept, dirty & dusty house & the last place in the world to go in
a decent suit of clothes.’ O’Shea found an operating box made of galvanized
iron and ‘installed with two primeval machines, which had to be rewired &
adjusted & got as hot as an oven.’ The lens of the slide lantern was held in
by sticky tape, and Hurley worried that it might fall out during the show.59
Although he shared the lecturing duties with Mazengarb, his voice was often
strained from the demands of projecting it in large houses with poor acoustics:
‘My throat would not allow me to indulge in elocutionary embellishments, as
it was tired after the afternoon. In these big barns one has almost to shout the
whole time & pitch the voice high to overcome resistance.’60 And in the days
before air-conditioning, these theatres at the height of the Australian summer
were appalling: ‘The heat!’ he wrote, ‘Thank heavens I am showing ice
 TOURING THE NATION 127

pictures & even they thaw on the screen.’ The responses of different audiences
were unpredictable. On the hot afternoons, the house filled ‘with a prolific
assemblage of children & second rate adults,’ and Hurley found it ‘an ordeal
that had to be gone through as arranged in my contract.’ In the evenings, by
contrast, the audience was keen and appreciative.61
On Sunday 7 December, Hurley moved to the Strand Theatre, where the
remainder of the Brisbane season was to be held. When they arrived they
found the ‘scenery merchant’ hard at work converting the theatre’s portico
into an iceberg with Endurance tossed up on the crest of a pressure ridge in
her last throes. It was a poor substitute for the James Caird herself, which
Shackelton had on display for his own premier at the Royal Albert Hall.
Above Endurance was a representation of the Aurora Australis done in such
lurid colours that Hurley thought the scenic artist must have been drunk or
had ‘a very strong attack of hallucinations.’62 There were three sessions daily
at 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Hurley performed each evening, and at the
Wednesday and Saturday matinees, while Mazengarb lectured at other times.
During the mornings and afternoons, while Mazengarb performed, Hurley
went sightseeing around Brisbane – ‘not of course that there is anything to
see’ – or lounged about the hotel in the subtropical heat drinking jugs of
home-made lemon squash. He went often to the botanical gardens, where
a brass band sometimes played, reminding him of a ‘Gippo Band’ in the
gardens at Cairo: ‘each instrument vying with each other to make itself
prominent.’63 Hurley found the Queensland climate enervating, and while
performing, ‘the perspiration oozed as though I had been in a Turkish bath.’
The ‘Brisbanians’ were a weary looking lot, ‘minus dash & energy & the
women do not suffer from good looks to any noticeable extent.’ The houses,
though, were always filled to capacity and word-of-mouth was so effective that
Hurley considered the paid advertising superfluous: ‘The picture story has
stormed Brisbane & gripped the popular imagination. As usual autographs
are the curse of “fame” “wow wow”.’64 On Sunday 14 December, the short
Brisbane season over, Hurley and Mazengarb motored out through parched
bushland and pineapple farms to the village of Cleveland on Moreton Bay,
greatly enjoying the sea breezes after the ‘swelter’ of the city. They returned
to Sydney by train the next day, relieved to cross over into ‘the home colony’
at Wallangara, and the countryside improved as they headed south like ‘a
parkland to a desert.’
After a single day at home with his young family, Hurley and the team left
Sydney again on Thursday 18 December for Wagga Wagga via Cootamanundra
and Junee, where they were to do a single evening performance. Wagga
Wagga’s Strand Theatre was the first sensibly constructed house of the tour,
its roof having been designed so that large skylights could be opened to allow
128 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

for ventilation. After a successful performance, they were up again at 5 a.m. to

board the train for Adelaide via Melbourne.65
In Adelaide, they were met by Percy Correll from the Mawson expedition,
who took them directly in his car to the Gresham Hotel. They spent the next
day, Sunday, on a ‘motor run’ to the botanical gardens, Mount Lofty and
Glenelg. The show opened at the Olympia Theatre on the Monday evening,
and again Hurley found ‘the usual great barn, typical of Wests Theatres’,
but this one was at least ‘kept clean & in order’. Again there were problems
with the projection equipment, in this case a poorly matched pair of lenses
that made the cinema picture much larger than the lantern slides. The next
morning, Hurley scoured Adelaide for new lenses, eventually finding some at
Kodak, but they caused further complications. To make the slide projections
the required width of 30 feet, they had to be projected over 120 feet, which
required 50 amps of current, and Hurley was worried that the heat would crack
his expensive London-made lantern slides. ‘The audience,’ he considered, ‘is
not worth the risk. They were the most apathetic & phlegmatic crowd I have
ever spoken to.’66
Noticing that one audience might be wildly appreciative and another like
‘logs of wood’, Hurley was beginning to study ‘the psychology of audiences’.
Brisbane, he reasoned, has no seaside, and in consequence ‘finds amusement
at the movies irrespective of the thermometer.’ In Adelaide, on the other hand,
‘a hot spell drives the population to the seaside & practically empties the town.’
Under those conditions, ‘one becomes a pure automaton – a mere mechanical
gramophone.’ He even began to consider that the vogue for travelogues may
have run its course and that in future, to compete with the imported British
and American features, he should make ‘squashy romantic films to suit the
quixotic mob.’67 Meanwhile, Mazengarb was doing parallel performances at
the Royal Theatre, and when half the film was run through, the spools were
couriered across between the theatres: ‘the arrangement worked without a
hitch’. After several consecutive nights of unresponsive audiences, Hurley
concluded, ‘Adelaide for culture! I don’t think.’68 During a walk through the
botanic gardens on Christmas Day he decided that ‘Adelaide for culture,
consists more in the culture of trees & flowers than the culture of its people.’
Saturday 27 December was Hurley’s last night at West’s Olympia – ‘thanks
be to heaven’ – and on the following Monday they moved to the Pavilion,
a continuous house of 1,200 seats that depended on rapid circulation of
audiences for its turnover. There were six and sometimes seven performances
a day, usually two each evening from 7:15 to 8:35 and again from 9:00 to
10:30, and each was filled to capacity: ‘it is a gold mine’, Hurley wrote. On
their final night, a hitch occurred during the projection of the pictures, which
were thrown on the screen very poorly and slightly out of focus. O’Shea had
 TOURING THE NATION 129

been drinking, and Hurley threatened him with the sack, mindful of his own
reputation and that of the film as being ‘to some extent educational’.69
Although audiences for travel films were usually people of the middle classes
seeking both education and entertainment, Hurley was finding that they varied
considerably, both in their makeup and in their responses to his performance.
Prior to going on tour, while the film was showing at the King’s Cross Theatre,
Pollock had found the houses so unruly that he had resorted to blowing a
whistle when he wanted to attract attention: Hurley noted that ‘it ended in
nearly all whistle and incoherence.’ As the tour went on, he became fascinated
by ‘the sociology of crowds’ and noted, ‘I intend scientifically investigating the
problem.’70 His observations, carefully recorded in his diaries, were to provide
the basis for an article on the subject, ‘Adventure Films and the Psychology of the
Audience’. He noted, for example, that audiences responded differently for no
apparent reason to what appeared to be identical performances: ‘This evening I
repeated precisely the same words, projected the same pictures…& yet last night
the audience were on the crest of enthusiasm & tonight they fell into the trough
of apathy.’71 Although different types of theatre might be expected to attract
different classes of audience, this could not always be predicted. The Pavilion in
Adelaide, for example, was a large, ‘continuous’ house and Hurley had ‘qualms
about putting on a picture like ours at the “Pav”’, but to his relief the audience
‘were all of the middle class’ and seemed highly appreciative.72
In Melbourne, Hurley found not only some of the best appointed houses of
the tour, but also the greatest range. By 2 January, with O’Shea forgiven and
charged with drinking only water, they were comfortably ensconced at Scott’s
Hotel, ‘a place where one pays for tooth picks & “swank”.’ They opened at
the appropriately named Majestic Theatre, which Hurley considered ‘by far
the best house we have spoken in so far.’ For one thing, the audiences were
‘splendid’, and included friends from the Mawson expedition who told Hurley
that his synchronized lecture was the best they had seen. This was high praise
indeed coming from Captain John King Davis, who had seen Ponting’s show
in London. The theatre was also clean and well fitted out: ‘the general finish
& furnishings of the theatre is particularly fine & the class of people attracted
are all that could be desired.’ Even the acoustics were good, allowing him to
speak in an ‘ordinary voice’.73
When Hurley moved from one theatre to another in mid-season it was
usually because of the weekly change of programme. This was the case at
the Majestic, where the programme change left them without a venue for
the night of Saturday 10 January. Hurley persuaded the Union Theatres
management to book the Melbourne Town Hall, offering them £50 from his
own pocket to cover the additional rent. The accommodations were nothing
short of ‘aristocratic’, and with a full house and seats booked at two shillings
130 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

for the cheapest and three for the rest, he considered that Union Theatres
did very well out of the arrangement. Surprisingly, Hurley was disappointed
in the acoustics, which he found ‘wretched’: ‘it is a great echoing drum but
I quickly got in touch with the house & made every word clearly understood.’74
After the Majestic and the Town Hall, Hurley moved to the Britannia, another
large, continuous house, and this time his worst expectations were realized:

From the aristocratic heights of the Town Hall we have descended to the dungeon
confines of the Britannia Theatre a continuous house where we give four shows
a day to a very mediocre crowd chiefly of servant girls, roughs & squawking kids.
Outside an organ drones away & a parasite sings… One just goes ahead – like the
Endurance – hearing nothing – grinding away at the ice pack – the audiences just
as cold & as capable of comprehension until with a sigh of relief the end comes.75

The platform or ‘table’ from which the lecturer ‘spouts’ had been erected in
a corner about twenty feet from the picture, and Hurley felt ‘more like an
auctioneer babbling away than a “dignified” orator.’ It was ‘a matter of grind
away! Grind away!’
The Britannia’s manager, whom Hurley at first took to be a ‘Yankee stiff ’
or ‘pub expeller’, turned out to be an old theatrical acquaintance called
‘Diablo’, ‘the man who used to perform the “loop the loop” stunt on his
bicycle.’76 Hurley’s occasional references to these other forms of urban
entertainment – the organ grinder, the singer, the bouncer, the attractions
of the fairground – indicate that however much travel films aspired to be
educational, they were also a form of entertainment and had to compete
with vaudeville, the music hall, feature films and even the fairground itself.
Hurley’s equivocation after the performance at the Adelaide Pavilion is
revealing: the picture is ‘to some extent an educational one’.
The worst of the Melbourne venues was the Palais-de-Danse at St Kilda,
where Hurley had to compete with the noisy attractions of the next-door Luna
Park. At this point the team was again running parallel performances, with
Mazengarb at the Royal in Richmond and Hurley at the St Kilda Palais. The
proprietors, Phillips and Solomon, he took to be Jews, ‘judging by appearance
& name’: ‘Solomon looks like a sea elephant that has swallowed a barrel…
Phillips is a needle – a minnow’. The theatre itself was ‘nothing so much as
like a huge circular tank cut in halves & planted by the sea beach’:

The sides are open all around & canvas fragments try to keep out the weather.
The seats have seen better days but they still earn their money in spite of the
decrepit appearance & old age. The seating accommodation is about 4000!…
I did my utmost to be heard by bellowing as loud as I could. Outside the cable
 TOURING THE NATION 131

trams charged & the hum of the cable filled the hall with a continuous din. With
straining vocal chords I pitched above this bass rumble: but there was another
unexpected din caused by a switchback railway in Luna Park just next door.
These unrehearsed effects were farcical & disconcerting in the extreme. Just as
the Endurance was charging through the pack ice the rumble of the approaching
railway echoed through the theatre & as the vessel came close & looked
as though she was going to leap out of the picture there was an ear piercing
chorus from the passengers in the train as it dived into one of the abysmal dips
of the switchback. Every minute this recurred. When the dogs were killed it
synchronised remarkably.77

The noise from the fairground was so distracting that Hurley envied the house
orchestra, ‘for the noise they produce certainly filled the hall. They played
from a gramophone-like recess in the side of the house about half way up.
I spoke also from this place & did my utmost to be heard by bellowing as loud
as I could.’78
In ‘Adventure Films and the Psychology of the Audience’, the article he
eventually wrote on ‘the sociology of audiences’, Hurley used these experiences
to illustrate the unpredictable nature of the exhibitionary moment:

… the film was being screened in one of the poorer parts of Sydney & my
managers had stage managed accordingly. I arrived on the scene ten minutes to
zero hour. To my horror there was a burly spruiker* attired in apropos regalia.
Blaring forth zoo like on the portal, ‘Ear y’er are, com’n roll up and see the bloke
as been to the South Pole’… The crowd rolled up & overflowed the house – there
was a riot to cram in. The women were carrying parcels & bags from the markets
for the Sunday ‘beano’. A gazette opened the programme & the packets were
untied & the shelling of peas began. There was also a great cracking of peanuts.
Then a football item met with disapproval & the screen was lustily pelted with
peapods & peanuts. The audience was at least demonstrative! I wondered if they
would pelt carrots or spuds at Shackleton.79

Hurley’s reference in this passage to his ‘stage managers’ and to his own
arrival on the scene just before show time is one of the few indications
in his diaries of his using other personnel in his shows beyond the usual
projectionist and assistant lecturers. In their discussion of American
showmanship at this time, Musser and Nelson note that the use of
‘advanced representatives’, who handled arrangements with local
organizations, generated advance publicity and set up the exhibition

* A speaker employed to attract customers to a sideshow.

132 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

prior to the arrival of the showman himself, was a way of preserving his
aura and mystique. For this reason, showmen often went by the title of
‘professor’, which ‘emphasized the showman’s special knowledge and
gave him greater opportunity to manipulate it for his own ends.’80 As he
well knew from his experience of deferential treatment on the battlefield,
Hurley’s honorary title of ‘Captain’ had a similar effect. He knew that his
shows had the power to move audiences – this, after all, was their most
immediately commodifiable feature. Yet he could not predict what effects
might flow from that power to move, even patriotism and the respect a
hero like Shackleton was said to inspire. ‘The psychology of audiences,’
Hurley had come to realize, ‘is extremely capricious.’

Hurley’s In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice

As we know from the North American and British seasons of The Home of
the Blizzard and the London season of ‘Shackleton’s Marvellous Moving
Pictures,’ a synchronized lecture entertainment like In the Grip of the Polar
Pack-Ice did not have a single author or a stable textual form. It combined
a number of different media, and different versions of the performance
event were created at different times by different personnel, often for diverse
audiences. In the case of The Home of the Blizzard, the surviving text of one
version of Mawson’s own lecture, used during the North American season,
gives us some idea of that particular realization of the programme. However,
the text of the lecture and the running order of projection were changed by
Harry Hughes for the London season, and again by Hurley for his planned
Australian tour. In an essay written for the Sydney press around this time,
when he was actively writing his lecture for the Shackleton material, Hurley
explained some aspects of what he called the ‘Art of Synchronising’. It is
addressed to ‘the layman who cares to take a peep inside a moving picture
studio’, and explains the ‘serious business’ of making ‘a descriptive picture –
usually dubbed “a scenic” – that is, screened in conjunction with a lecture.’
Initially, the scenes are taken with the cinematograph camera: there might
be as many as 40 different scenes, each of which is developed and tinted
separately:

But it is when the film is complete and the lecturer sits down to complete his stuff
that the greatest difficulty comes in…he measures the length of every scene,
and writes his lecture accordingly. But it’s hard and annoying sometimes. There
might be only 40 feet of film on a very interesting incident, an incident about
which he could talk for perhaps 10 minutes…but he still could not possibly say
more than 80 words… And there is another phase to be considered. At some
 TOURING THE NATION 133

stages the audience would be sure to applaud. They might applaud at one scene
or incident for a minute…so it is essential for him to go right through the film
and make allowances as his guesses suggest.81

In the case of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, no text of Hurley’s own lecture
survives as evidence of the running order of his Australian show. The publicity
materials surrounding the event, which he supervised himself, clearly indicate
his attempt to differentiate his own biographical legend from Shackleton’s,
and we know that each used his own script. So how did Hurley structure and
conduct his live performance? Fortunately, although there is no surviving text
of his lecture, there is a remarkably detailed account based directly upon it.
On the evening of Thursday 18 December 1919, Hurley, Mazengarb and
O’Shea pulled in to the regional town of Wagga Wagga on the southwestern
slopes of New South Wales, where they performed at the Strand Theatre. After
sleeping at a hotel, they left again at 5 a.m. for Melbourne. The performance
was attended by a journalist from the Wagga Wagga Daily Express, who
persuaded Hurley to lend him the text of his lecture, promising to hand it
back to him the next morning at the railway station:

…it was our good fortune to secure the lecturer’s kind permission to publish as
much of it as appealed to us – and it all did. At midnight on Thursday he left
with us his manuscripts to complete before train time, 5 am. It was finished with
20 minutes to spare, after writing through the night, but seldom does such a
stirringly interesting story fall to one’s lot to chronicle.82

Occupying five columns on a full broadsheet page, ‘With Shackleton at the

Pole’ was published in the Daily Express on Saturday 20 December 1919.
Because the unnamed journalist had attended the show and then transcribed
Hurley’s lecture, his article gives an unusually detailed and authoritative
account of Hurley’s stage and screen practice, including the order of
material, and the cues to changes in medium between lecture, cinema
and slides, and includes both descriptions of and some quotations from
Hurley’s on-stage patter. It conveys the rhythm of the performance event
as it modulates between slides, cinema and patter, and from relatively static
episodes concerned with artistic effects or character to more dynamic story
telling. The use of subheadings to break up episodic blocks of description
also illustrates the close relationship that existed at this time between the
formal principles governing a synchronized lecture entertainment and
the layout of newspapers, especially illustrated newspapers: subheadings
include ‘Leader and Lieutenant’, ‘The Endurance’, ‘The First Glimpse of
Ice’, ‘Penguins – Star Performers’, ‘Entering the Pack’, and ‘An Impressive
134 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Panorama’, indicating the essentially episodic structure of the entertainment

and the strong relation between its narrative and visual components. Like
the American journalists who reported on Mawson’s lecture, however, the
reporter tends to use the words ‘pictures’ and ‘films’ indiscriminately, and it
is not always possible to be certain when he is referring to cinema projection
and when to lantern slides. This is complicated by the grammar of screen
practice, in which lantern slides and cinema film perform much the same
function: while the slides are static and the films used for action sequences,
they are both visual episodes used in illustration of the lecturer’s narrative.
It is in this sense, as Altman argues, that films were incorporated into the
show as ‘views’.83
In his opening remarks, the reporter for the Daily Express explains the
significance Hurley’s performance held for its provincial audience of ‘many
hundreds’. There was a shared sense that the night’s entertainment allowed
them to participate simultaneously in the experiences of metropolitan
audiences: ‘No finer set of remarkably unique, life like and realistic pictures was
ever screened, and Wagga was honoured by their presentation here even before
showing in some leading cities, for Captain Hurley broke his journey here on his
way through from Brisbane to Melbourne and Adelaide.’ In fact, such was the
modernity of the moment that the citizens of Wagga Wagga were experiencing
Hurley’s In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice only one day after the charity premier of
‘Shackleton’s Marvellous Moving Pictures’ at the Royal Albert Hall in London
on 19 December 1919, and only six days before the opening of Shackleton’s
season at the Philharmonic Hall on Boxing Day, 26 December.
While he had met the challenge of colonial modernity – providing regional
audiences with a sense of simultaneity rather than belatedness – Hurley’s
other challenge was to present himself as what Musser and Nelson, in the
North American context, call a truly ‘national entertainer’.84 Although the
development of the previously separate state railway systems was beginning
to allow the logistics of a ‘national’ Australian tour, the tastes of urban and
regional audiences might vary: even Hurley himself had a pronounced sense
of the difference between being in Queensland and returning to New South
Wales, ‘the home colony’. Hurley’s role and the ideological work of his
performance can be compared to that of contemporary American showmen
such as Lyman H. Howe, who used the American rail network to conduct
interstate tours in the late 1890s and 1910s. In the regional towns, Howe’s task
was to reconcile the diverse interests of different social classes and their values.
As Musser and Nelson observe, ‘Howe’s position found him mediating among
local, regional, and national levels of cultural activity and between active
and passive participation in cultural production.’85 In America, this involved
mediating between the ‘urban pleasures’ and ‘amusement-oriented’ tastes of
 TOURING THE NATION 135

city audiences and the more conservative, often church-based audiences in

the regional towns – between amusement and edification. In transcending
these divisions, in finding common ground among these ‘often antagonistic
cultural clusters’, the challenge was to offer a balanced programme that was,
in a literal sense, nation-building. Musser and Nelson call this ‘an ideology of
reassurance’, bringing diverse groups together ‘into a unified audience using
patriotism, enthusiasm, and a sense of national destiny.’86
Hurley’s performance that night in Wagga Wagga probably began with a
lantern slide of Endurance ready for departure on the Thames, which set the
immediate context for his ‘narrative’ on the eve of the Great War:

It was in the fateful month of July, 1914, when the war clouds were gathering
over Europe, that the little vessel of 250 tons, with her Commander, Sir Ernest
Shackleton and the 28 members forming the Weddell Sea party, lay anchored
in the Thames in readiness for departure. The leader at once volunteered his
services and the services of his men for the war. The authorities urged, however,
that the Expedition, which had the full support of the British Government,
should proceed.

In the first sequence of projected images, Hurley introduced the main

personalities in his story: the ‘Leader and Lieutenant’, Shackleton and Wild,
Captain Frank Worsley and the members of the crew. This section of the
performance was probably quite static, using monochrome lantern slides,
and based on short character sketches rather than narrative or action, but the
lecturer and his projectionist needed to be alert and responsive to audience
involvement, which could affect their timing. The reporter noted that ‘The
opening films…were loudly cheered.’
Having introduced his cast, Hurley then threw upon the screen a map
of the expedition’s route, almost certainly a lantern slide, as was customary
in travelogues: ‘A chart was next screened showing the route to be followed,
with explanation by the lecturer.’ This was followed by the first sequences of
cinema film, ‘The Endurance’, showing the ship leaving Buenos Ayres, and
‘The First Glimpse of Ice’, which was essentially a location shot. The reporter
describes the panning effects of Hurley’s camerawork: ‘The film took us close
in coast [sic] and skirted along the sea face of a great glacier that tumbled
down in crevassed cascades from the wild interior.’ The alliterative language
undoubtedly echoes Hurley’s patter: ‘Sparkling, glistening, and dazzling, these
crystal cliffs rose to a sheer height of 120 feet. A deep rumbling, the lecturer
said, convinced them of the glaciers moving seaward.’ Next, another film
sequence, ‘The Whaling Station’, illustrated the scenery of South Georgia
and the whaling operations at King Edward Cove.
136 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

In the episode, ‘Penguins – Star Performers’, Hurley did exactly as Harry

Hughes had advised Mawson to do, breaking up the narrative of the expedition
with wildlife shots, especially the penguins and seals, which had proven so
popular during the London season of The Home of the Blizzard. It is likely that
Hurley used both films and lantern slides here: ‘The lecturer embodies in
the film a remarkable collection of pictures of penguins, disclosing the most
interesting and human characteristics… The birds of the Antarctic provided
other unique films.’ Although he did not acknowledge it, this wildlife material,
which functioned essentially as an entr’acte to sections of the main story, was
almost certainly not filmed at the implied time or location, but after the
expedition, in February and March 1917, when Hurley returned from London
to South Georgia to shoot extra wildlife scenes.
In the sequences, ‘Entering the Pack’ and ‘Cinema Man Aloft’, Hurley
used illustrations of Endurance breaking ice to advance the narrative, but also
to introduce for the first time the theme of the photographer working under
Antarctic conditions: ‘Captain Hurley gained many of his views from the
masthead of the vessel and from this precarious position gained remarkable
pictures of the ship cracking up the ice.’ In his commentary, Hurley attempted
to compensate for the lack of sound effects, suggesting that ‘Coleridge’s Ancient
Mariner must have done a little exploring in the Weddell Sea for his words,
“It cracked and growled and roared and howled”, were superbly expressive.’
‘Cinema Man Aloft’ recalls Ponting’s signature stunt, ‘Kinematographing in the
Pack’: ‘The next picture showed the lecturer himself out on the yard arm, from
which precarious elevation, he said, he was on more than one occasion nearly
precipitated into the sea by the violent impact when the ship struck the ice.’
Before returning to South Georgia, while Hurley was working with
Perris to prepare films, slides and exhibition prints for the ITA Syndicate’s
exploitation of the expedition, he had colour slides made by the Paget Plate
Company. He first saw them on 24 January 1917, thrown on to a large screen
at the Polytechnic Hall, and declared them ‘magnificant’ and an ‘unqualified
success’. They were a popular feature of Shackleton’s London season, and
now Hurley was using them in Australia. ‘Sunrise and Sunset’ suggests that
Hurley introduced the colour slides as another feature in his show, breaking
from the narrative to focus on the work of the camera artist and the novelty
of the new colour medium with an emphasis on the presentational aesthetic:
‘The “Endurance” was sometimes held up for days, when nothing could be
done but await the opening of the icefields. In these periods the sunrise lit up
the fields of desolation tinging pack and sky with a rosy flush of pink.’ The
novelty of filming in the Antarctic is also featured in the episode ‘Antarctic
Football’, in which Hurley ‘screened’ one of the midwinter matches between
the crew and the scientists. The rhythm of the performance allowed him to
 TOURING THE NATION 137

introduce a moment of humour in which the cameraman is again the star

performer: ‘Captain Hurley claimed the world’s record for a long distance
kick. He booted the ball in a 90 mile an hour wind – it sailed heavenwards and
was never seen again.’
One of the great climaxes of the story was of course the entrapment
and crushing of Endurance by the ice. This crucial event, already familiar to
audiences through press photographs and cinema posters, was represented
by all of the media at the showman’s disposal: still photographs, sequences
of cinema action, and Hurley’s own narrative account. He begins by setting
the scene of midwinter. ‘Flaring Sunsets and Aurora’ suggests Hurley’s word-
painting in illustration of a lantern slide, possibly another colour Paget plate:

With midwinter upon them the long dreary hours of the Polar night settled in
silence over the frozen sea. Over the northern sky, the dying sunsets glared and
blazed – over the south the wings of night had spread. Like a specter the gaunt
outlines of their frozen shrouds glistened in the moonlight – a weird and awesome
scene. When the moon had gone the waving curtains of the Aurora Australis lit
up their vacant world with a feeble glow. All was hushed and dead.

Immediately after this still moment, the long section ‘The “Endurance”
Doomed’ introduces a narrative account of the working of the ice upon the
ship, in which Hurley pulls out all stops: ‘The timbers creaked and groaned,
and,’ said the lecturer, ‘I might add, so did we.’ There is now a dramatic switch
from slides to cinema, from scenery to action: ‘A great wave of ice bore down
and they knew the end had come… Here a film was screened showing the
movement of the ice forcing the ship up and over.’ This was also the moment
for a return to theme of the cameraman, and to remind the audience of the
presentness of the cinematic medium: ‘Captain Hurley next screened his
search in the wreck for his precious film record.’
Although the section ‘Adrift in Mid-Sea’ may have included film of the
men hauling the James Caird and Dudley Docker over the ice, Hurley was now
coming to the end of his cinema material, and as the great drama of the open-
boat voyage to Elephant Island approached he had to rely more and more on
the few remaining slides he had been able to take with his small pocket Kodak,
and on his own narrative. There was now a return to non-narrative themes,
such as the character of the leader:

Sir Ernest and Captain Hurley were shown on the screen as camp mates, and the
lecturer paid a fine tribute to his leader as a fine type of English gentleman, who
infused all with hope and courage by his grand personality, a man, a comrade,
and a leader of men. (Applause)
138 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Like the images of Endurance crushed in the ice, this lantern slide was one of
several images from the expedition that had become iconic through repeated
reproduction in the press and advertising material, and the applause may well
have involved an element of recognition, as audiences saw images already
familiar to them from newspapers or advertising posters, now presented
authentically on the big screen. Contrary to the photograph’s technically
infinite reproducibility, individual photographs could therefore acquire an
aura of authenticity that allowed them to function something like the originary
events they represented: here, as it were, was the ‘real’ or ‘original’ version
of that famous image already seen by many in the grainy and less authentic
medium of half-tone newspaper illustrations. The performance event, then,
involved a contract between the showman and his audience to produce an
illusion of the presence of the original events as well as the presence of their
previous representation.
In abandoning the ship, Hurley had been forced to leave behind his Prestwich
No.5 cinema-taking camera and his large glass-plate still cameras, taking only
a small folding pocket Kodak FPK camera with a limited quantity of film, and a
selection of exposed film and glass negatives for later media exploitation. As
a consequence of these events, as Helen Ennis observes, there was no cinema
coverage of the expedition’s later episodes, and Hurley’s ITAE photographs
form two distinct groups: those taken with a tripod-mounted large-format
camera, which are ‘technically finer in quality’, and a second group taken
with his pocket-camera that are more ‘rudimentary’.87 What effect did this
have upon In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice as a staged event? Hurley’s lantern
slides held today by the National Library of Australia include several hand-
painted scenes illustrating episodes after the loss of the ship, such as camping
on the ice floes at night and an artist’s impression of the interior of the hut on
Elephant Island (Fig 3.3).88 Hand-painted slides had been used extensively to
illustrate Antarctic scenes prior to the introduction of the camera – as we have
seen in chapter one, Ponting included some in his book The Great White South –
and this was not too far from Hurley’s own practice of combination printing.
Ennis suggests that by constructing these images combining drawing and
photography, Hurley made good the lack of material: ‘This flexibility enabled
him to create an extended visual narrative of the Shackleton expedition’s final
stages that could be performed to an eager public.’89
This is not born out, however, by the account of Hurley’s performance in
the Wagga Wagga Daily Express. The article indicates that the performance
reached a natural climax with the crushing of the Endurance, which was covered
by both cinema and photographic cameras, and which features prominently in
the promotional material. It also formed the climax of Hurley’s narrative on
stage. In the absence of cinema coverage, the remaining events – the months
 TOURING THE NATION 139

adrift on the ice at Ocean Camp, the voyage to Elephant Island, Shackleton’s
voyage to South Georgia and his several rescue attempts, the ordeal of those
remaining behind on the island, and the final rescue – are dealt with in a
relatively compressed and mainly narrative account under the subtitles ‘To
the Boats’, ‘Land! Land!’, ‘Shackleton Goes for Help’, and ‘A Vessel in Sight’.
Stretched to cover the absence of visual material, and despite the inclusion
of some hand-painted slides, Hurley’s patter seems to have worn thin, and he
resorted to platitudes and increasingly abstract formulations:

The Caird was at last launched, the crew already spent by seven days in the
boats, facing this terrible voyage with hearts of true British seamen. They
ventured their lives to succor their comrades. They accomplished their mission
after untold suffering. It was a glorious achievement.

As a live performance, these final episodes must therefore have seemed

something of an anticlimax, the main presentation centring on the crushing
of the ship, which could be shown fully in all media.

The Cinema of Attractions

In accounting for the appeal of Antarctic films, Michael Gray and Gael
Newton suggest that ‘For the public, the stirring stories of heroic struggles in
the far-off ice…were both a model of courage and a respite from the horrors
of the first war of the industrial age.’90 Yet the cinema itself was also the
leading entertainment medium of that new industrial age and, as Hurley
was beginning to find, urban audiences, especially working-class audiences,
expected to be entertained as well as uplifted and edified. This is not to say
that a film’s ideological, affective and narrative content were unimportant, but
that equally important were its qualities as performance and spectacle. The
promotional materials for Hurley’s In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice suggest that it
belongs as much to what Tom Gunning has called ‘the cinema of attractions’
as it does to the genre of the educational film, and that Hurley himself was
perhaps torn between these two different sets of values.
In his seminal article, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, Gunning argues that
the nature of pre-classical cinema has been obscured by considering it from
the perspective of the hegemony, after about 1906, of narrative films. Early
cinema, he argues, was primarily an ‘exhibitionist cinema’, grounded in an
‘aesthetic of astonishment and stimulation’ that revealed its close historical
relationship with other forms of turn-of-the-century popular entertainments
such as theatre, vaudeville, magic shows and fairground attractions. In its
early years, the cinema was itself an attraction, giving many of the actuality
140 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

topics a self-reflexive quality. A good example is the Hale’s tours that were
popular until the early 1900s: non-narrative sequences taken from moving
vehicles, usually trains, and screened in theatres set up as train carriages with
appropriate sound effects. Such viewing experiences, Gunning points out,
‘relate more to the attractions of the fairground than to the traditions of the
legitimate theatre.’91 It is precisely this aesthetic that informs some of Hurley’s
earliest known photographs, such as his signature shots of trains steaming
from tunnels toward the camera.92
Gunning’s argument has an even greater relevance to Hurley’s exhibition
practices when he turns to consider the fate of the cinema of attractions
after 1906. The period from 1907 to about 1913, Gunning argues, ‘represents
the true narrativization of the cinema’. Yet the earlier aesthetic was not
completely replaced, going underground, as it were, in ‘a synthesis of
attractions and narrative’, a ‘dialectic between spectacle and narrative’ that
can be seen particularly in the language of film advertising: ‘The Hollywood
advertising policy of enumerating the features of a film, each emblazoned
with the command “See!”, shows this primal power of the attraction running
beneath the armature of narrative regulation.’ The cinema of attractions
also survived in the exhibition context, in the mixed programmes in which
even educational films appeared: ‘Just as the variety format in some sense
survived in the movie palaces of the 20s (with newsreel, cartoon, sing-along,
orchestra performance and sometimes vaudeville acts subordinated to, but
still coexisting with, the narrative feature of the evening), the system of
attraction remains an essential part of popular film-making.’93 The cinema
of attractions was to return with a vengeance in the late twentieth century
with the increasing sophistication – and often gratuitous display – of digitized
special effects and the IMAX format.
Gunning’s suggestive account of ‘the dialectic between spectacle and
narrative’ precisely describes the format of Hurley’s shows, with their
predominantly episodic structure, their modulation between showing and
telling, and their sometimes gestural narrative impulse. It also suggests the
reason for Hurley’s ambivalence about those moments in his performances that
brushed up against the old fairground traditions – his meeting with ‘Diablo’,
his professed horror at the spruiker in Sydney, the women shrieking on the
switchback railway at St Kilda’s Luna Park, and the comic grotesquery of
those music hall London Jews, Phillips and Solomon. And yet in his advertising
he was always keen to play up the performative, self-reflexive and spectacular
qualities of his own shows. This uneasy meeting in Hurley of the modern,
to some degree modernist, camera artist and the old-fashioned showman is
perfectly caught in his mockery and faux-disdain for the lurid advertising in
 TOURING THE NATION 141

the foyer of Brisbane’s Strand Theatre, whose real purpose he nonetheless

grasped only too well:

Sunday morning to Strand to fit up appointments for coming season. We found

the scenery merchant hard at work converting the portico into an iceberg with
the Endurance tossed up on the crest of a pressure ridge in her last throes. Over
all waxes & wanes the aurora. I think the scenic artist must have had a very
strong attack of hallucinations & drained ‘many a draught’. His interpretation
of an aurora is eloquent of the fiery squirms that haunt the brain of a delirium
tremens. The entire arrangement is calculated to draw forth a 1/- entrance from
even the most reluctant.94

The many reviews, advertisements and promotional newspaper articles

relating to the Australian tour of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice reveal two
recurring features of its post-production life: the importance of Hurley’s
own persona and celebrity – his biographical legend – and the dialectic
between, on the one hand, its narrative and ideological themes of imperial
leadership and courage, and, on the other, its popular appeal as a cinema
of attractions.
The concept of the biographical legend was proposed by Boris
Thomashevsky to distinguish between a writer’s actual life and personality,
and the fictional persona he creates as part of his industrial self-promotion.
‘The biography that is useful to the literary historian,’ Thomashevsky argues,
‘is not the author’s curriculum vitae’, but ‘the biographical legend created by
the author himself.’95 This concept has been applied to film history by David
Bordwell, who argues that ‘we can situate a filmmaker’s work in film history by
studying the persona created by the artist in his public pronouncements, in his
writings, and in his dealings with the film industry.’96 Hurley personally wrote
much of the copy that was used to promote his films, and it regularly features
an account of his own attainment of celebrity, accompanied by portrait
photographs of the adventurer-cameraman in the style he had learned from
Ponting. Articles were often signed with a facsimile of his autograph, signifying
his star presence in the exhibitionary moment. As he learned in Brisbane,
‘autographs are the curse of “fame”.’97
Hurley had already been accused by Bean of promoting his own name
above others in the official exhibition of war photographs at the Grafton
Galleries: ‘Our exhibition,’ Bean wrote in his diary, ‘is easily the best I have
seen, although there is too much Hurley in it – his name is on every picture with
few exceptions – including some that Wilkins took.’98 Bean had no sympathy
for what he himself described as the ‘commercial’ side of the entertainment
142 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

industry. But the commercial reality was that Hurley had won the distribution
rights for Australasia and that the exhibition of his film in London had
been indelibly associated with the biographical legend of Shackleton – the
association persisted in the British NFTVA’s choice of the title South for its
1998 restoration above In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice for what it nonetheless
believed to be ‘Hurley’s’ film. Shackleton’s biographical legend was not only
different to Hurley’s but potentially in commercial competition with it. It was
in Hurley’s interest to establish his own biographical legend in association with
the Australian performances.
As his dealings with the Wagga Wagga Daily Express demonstrate, Hurley
was by now quite experienced at using the media, often providing journalists
with copy as well as photographs. Many of the articles associated with the
Australian summer tour were specifically devoted to promoting his biographical
legend as an adventurer-cameraman. For example, on 1 September 1919, the
Melbourne magazine Life announced a series of articles that would describe
the many ‘thrilling exploits’ of Hurley’s career. The subject was effectively the
development of Hurley’s fame. A portrait of Hurley at home in his study places
him in the company of his own photographic portraits of Shackleton and
Mawson, trading on the imagery of fame and the meaning of the individual
hero in a finely calibrated series of distinctions:

Shackleton and Mawson face one another across [Hurley’s] mantel-shelf…

comparing the portraits, one marks the different types they represent. Shackleton’s
face is that of a perfect specimen of the British race – strong, virile, courageous.
Mawson’s fine cut features are rendered almost delicate by the width of his brows
and the height of his head. One is the typical man of action and endurance; the
other the typical scholar and man of highly trained intellect.99

As a performer himself, Hurley was no longer content to be the faceless

medium for these other celebrity portraits, but like Ponting, put himself
forward as a third carefully constructed ‘type’, the adventurer-cameraman
who is likely at any moment to be ‘setting out for some little-known quarter
of the globe…or in company with some noted explorer – for his fame as a
photographer is world-wide.’100
In the show’s many reviews, it was extremely rare for it to be treated
purely or even primarily as ‘educational’, as Hurley himself only half-
convincingly described it in his diary. The advertisements normally reversed
this emphasis, promising entertainment first and education second. It was
in the tabloid newspaper advertisements that the cinema of attractions
featured most strongly. Sydney’s populist Sunday Sun, for example, featured
the self-reflexive qualities of the cinematic experience, its thrills and
 TOURING THE NATION 143

‘realism’ – that is, not its transparent verisimilitude, but its aesthetic of
presence or presentationalism:

‘A Cool Resort’
Thrilling Film Story
Battle Against Nature
No matter how summery the weather, the Sydney-ite, during the next few
weeks will be able to find a cool place to spend the evening, and right in the heart
of the city. It is at the Lyceum Theatre, Pitt-Street, where Captain Frank Hurley
is exhibiting his films, taken with Sir Edward [sic] Shackleton’s last Antarctic
expedition… ‘It looks like ice!’, said a man, as he saw an iceberg towering
hundreds of feet into the air. ‘Beautiful!’, said the woman beside him.101

It is significant that this advertisement gives Sir Ernest Shackleton’s first name
incorrectly as Edward. What matters is not so much the purpose or meaning
of the expedition, or even – more scandalously, perhaps – the values of
leadership and courage, but the ‘thrilling’ nature of the cinematic experience
itself. The man and woman described in the advertisement are like those early
cinema spectators who were said to have ducked below their seats as trains
appeared to leap out at them from the screen – Hurley had described Endurance
‘leaping out of the picture’ in his diary entry on the St Kilda performance.
The advertisement stresses the sensational nature of the cinematic experience
rather than its educational value in informing the audience accurately about
the Antarctic. This is exactly what Harry Hughes meant when he explained to
Mawson that ‘the majority of Londoners are quite superficial, and only go to
places of amusement to be amused.’102
The promotional material Hurley designed for his Australian tour brings
together all of these attractions in an exorbitant display of text and imagery.
The handbill printed for the season at Sydney’s King’s Cross Theatre in
Darlinghurst, for example, was one element of the entire multi- and mass-
mediated experience that audiences could actually possess and take home
(Fig. 3.4).103 It features another portrait of Hurley, invoking his biographical
legend by its caption, ‘THE INTREPID PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE
ANTARCTIC’. His autograph is a token of his authentic, ubiquitous presence.
A half-page advertisement in the Sun of 23 November 1919 is illustrated by
a large drawing of Endurance with the aurora in the sky overhead, a tabloid
interpretation of the scene painter’s hallucinatory work in the foyer of
Brisbane’s Strand Theatre (Fig. 3.5).104 In its very busy-ness, the advertisement
suggests the popular entertainment values of thrills, variety and spectacle, and
a knowing appeal to multimedia and even media convergence. The newspaper
text strives through its own excess to convey the actual stage and screen
144 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

experiences it advertises. It stresses the novelty of the images and the star
presence of Hurley: ‘Unparalleled Pictures of Real Thrills! HEAR FRANK
HURLEY’S THRILLING STORY! Captain Frank Hurley talks to you as the
pictures are showing.’ The illustration features Hurley with his cinema camera
in the foreground, suggesting that this is not just a film about the wreck of
Endurance, but pre-eminently one about the making of the film of the wreck
of Endurance, and its survival and subsequent screening in Australia by the
‘intrepid’ Hurley.
To promote this aspect of the film’s attractions, Hurley told and retold the
story of his rescue of the negatives from the submerged ship, which became
the core of his promotional strategy. One Brisbane journalist thought the
story ‘reads like a chapter from a sensational novel.’105 He was partly right,
but the genre Hurley sought most to imitate in his newsprint material was the
travelogue performance itself, which his journalism was meant to publicize.
It was also meant to carve out a space for Hurley’s celebrity as distinct from
Shackleton’s, and to foreground the material presence of the film – its making,
rescue and current presentation:

In narrating the story of the rescue of the Shackleton Polar Expedition, I ask
my readers to imagine the awfulness of the disaster which overtook the party
of which I was official cinematographer… I had premonitions of the doom of
the ‘Endurance’ a month prior to the disaster… I had sealed up the films I had
already taken in double hermetically sealed tins. It was due to this precaution
that the pictures were saved… The darkroom was crushed in…the wreck was
still held up by the pressure ice, and with one of the sailors I paid a visit… After
hacking our way through the wreckage, we located the cases of films beneath feet
of mushy ice… I tossed up with Seaman Howe as to who should dive in.
I lost – and dived!
The ice-clad cases were passed up one by one. The wreck was groaning under
the pressure, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Keep cool!’…
Those film cases and I became inseparable during the six months we drifted
on the ice-floe…but our luck held out, and we reached England safely. On
opening the cases the Antarctic air came out with a hiss, and I found all my films
and negatives to be intact. Not a single foot of film had been lost. Not a single
negative broken!106

The major theme of Hurley’s travel writing is therefore the practice of picture-
making and exhibition, to which it is always tied-in.
Because of this intimate connection between the performance event and
its written texts, it is not possible to regard Hurley’s travel articles as a genre
separate from the travelogue as a staged event. The fact that they exist for
 TOURING THE NATION 145

it and in relation to it is thematically inscribed in the writing. Another tie-in

article in the Sydney Sun, ‘Saved from the Antarctic’, features a signed portrait
of Hurley. His autograph is a token of his authentic ‘presence’, just as the
first-person narrator of the article mimics the theatrical voice of the lecturer.
This punning relation between text, voice and image, between Hurley, his
writing and his film, is echoed in the title, which implies that what was ‘Saved
from the Antarctic Ice’ was both Hurley and the film he stands before us to
present. This culminates in an attempt to collapse the originary events of the
expedition into the performance event that is based upon them by deploying
a common metaphor of theatricality:

Those were the conditions under which I took the films which will be shown at
the New Lyceum next Saturday. Of them one critic remarked:
‘Drama was never more tense than those films of yours, Hurley. The reality
of them absolutely terrifies me.’
Drama as tense? Surely there can be no tenser drama than one such as
that wherein we were the unwilling actors in Antarctica. Love of life was our
prompter; and the unkindly critic who glared at us from the front row of an ice-
girt dress-circle was – Death!107

In his advertising, Hurley was therefore playing a self-reflexive game about

cinematic mimesis that harks back to cinema’s initial appeal as an attraction
in itself – the presentational aesthetic of early cinema. His patter and stage
humbug suggest that a major appeal of his show was its apparent collapsing
of the distinction between representation and presentation. The historian
of late nineteenth-century urban entertainments, Peter Bailey, uses the term
‘knowingness’ to describe this kind of shared understanding between a
showman and his audience about the conventions of presentationalism that
govern his stage performance.108 This is supported by Hurley’s presence in the
cinema as both adventurer and showman, as both a participant in the event
and the medium of its (re)presentation. His humbug about the Antarctic air
being released from the film canisters in London – and implicitly in every
theatre where he subsequently appears – recalls the claims made by American
showmen about the presentational effects of phonograph exhibitions. As one
spruiker put it, ‘Think of it! A song or instrumental selection is rendered by an
artist in New York, is boxed up, carried to this place and then is reproduced
by the phonograph as though the…singer…were standing on the platform in
the presence of the audience which listens to its reproduction.’109 Bean and
Treloar would not have liked the comparison, but the bullet found in General
Birdwood’s swagger stick and other such personal relics perform the same
function in the Australian War Musuem’s Relics and Records Exhibition, bringing
146 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

people in Sydney and Melbourne close to the ‘real’ action of Gallipoli and the
Western Front.
The same presentational aesthetic is a fundamental strategy of Hurley’s
writing, which strives – impossibly of course, but that is the point of the joke –
to turn itself through overwrought verbal and visual puns – ‘Keep cool!’ – into
the stage humbug and visual imagery it is meant to advertise. Images like the
Antarctic air hissing from the film cans, his jokes about icebergs melting in the
hot Brisbane cinema, and the ‘unrehearsed special effects’ supplied by Luna
Park, all imply that a major effect of the film was its self-reflexive mimesis of
the original experience. This is supported by Hurley’s presence in the cinema as
an adventurer-cameraman-presenter and illusionist devices like his ‘signature’
in the newspapers. Hurley’s publicity turns upon the illusions of presence
and simultaneity which are fundamental to the cinema of attractions. The
cinematic performance promises the illusion of immediacy and presence in a
single, ‘unique’ performance that is in reality one commodified moment in a
series of exhibitions that endlessly repeat that ‘unique’ event across the multiple
places and times of colonial modernity. At this vanishing point of the cinematic
illusion, the film becomes its own subject, the film maker his own actor and
travel writing becomes spectacular.
 Chapter Four
Entr’acte: Sir Ross Smith’s
Flight, Aerial Vision and
Colonial Modernity

In War and Cinema (1988), the French critic Paul Virilio argues that the
relationship between the development of cinema and contemporary military
technologies, especially flight, is a definitive, indeed a constitutive feature
of modernity.1 In his role as official photographer with the Australian War
Records section in 1917–18, Frank Hurley became one of the first war
photographers to experiment with aerial photography, using both still and
cinema cameras. In particular, his experience flying with Captain Ross Smith
of No. 1 Squadron Australian Flying Corps in Palestine in 1918 is exemplary of
this early connection between aviation and photography. And in 1919, Hurley
would again connect aviation and cinematography by his almost accidental
involvement in the England-Australia air race or, as it became known, the
Ross Smith flight.
Before the war had ended, the possibility of an air route connecting
Australia to England was already being discussed in aviation journals. The
Australian prime minister, W. M. Hughes, had flown a good deal between
London and Paris during the peace discussions, and strongly favoured the
idea. At his initiative, the Australian Commonwealth announced on 19 March
1919 that it would offer a £10,000 prize for the first Australian crew to fly from
England to Australia within 720 hours and before 31 December 1919. By far
the best aircraft available was the Vickers’ Vimy bomber, and as no other
pilot had anywhere near Ross Smith’s experience with these large aircraft,
Vickers invited him to fly their machine in the race. With his brother Keith as
navigator, Smith left Hounslow on 12 November 1919, successfully overtook
their main rival, Etienne Poulet, in the skies over Burma, and touched down in
Darwin on 10 December, a flight of just under twenty-eight days.2
On that day, Hurley was presenting In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice at Brisbane’s
Olympia Theatre. He wrote in his diary, ‘The great news that my friend
Captain Ross Smith has reached Australia is the all-absorbing topic.’3 Shortly
after leaving Darwin, however, Smith experienced mechanical problems
148 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

that forced an 8-week delay in outback Queensland. The delay allowed him
to telegraph Hurley, who was by then at the end of his Melbourne season,
inviting him to meet them at the remote Queensland town of Charleville,
and to join them on the final leg of the flight to Sydney. Huddled in the nose
of the Vimy with his cameras, Hurley filmed their flight southwest to Bourke,
then east along the main railway line, racing a goods train before crossing the
Blue Mountains to Penrith, then on to Sydney, where, for the benefit of tens
of thousands of spectators, they made several passes over the harbour before
landing at Mascot. As Hurley biographer David P. Millar put it, ‘Aviation fever
gripped Sydney. Crowds poured out to the airport, using the special trams
and one-way motor route designated for the purpose. [There followed] a civic
reception, bands, a guard of honour and a hero’s progress’ – all to be repeated
later in Melbourne and Adelaide.4 Hurley’s response to his friend’s cable
was essentially opportunistic, but the flight allowed him to produce, quickly,
another successful travelogue, which he called Sir Ross Smith’s Flight. It stands in
his body of work like an entr’acte between the two major synchronized lecture
entertainments, In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice and Pearls and Savages.
In this short chapter, itself an ent’r acte, I will use Sir Ross Smith’s Flight to
argue that the new visuality and subjectivity associated with aerial photography
were modular and portable, and that after the war they migrated to other
domains of practice, such as entertainment, advertising, commercial aviation,
tourism and colonial administration. It is not simply that the new subjectivity
was mobile, but that in moving from one domain of practice to another, the
affective power of aerial visuality became available to motivate specific projects
in these other domains. This is not to argue that the postwar expansion of civil
aviation or colonial administration were forms of war, but that these practices
were able to mobilize powerful new modes of experience that originated
in war, and were circulating in new and often very popular technologies of
representation, such as photography and synchronized lecture entertainments.
My interest, then, is not simply in the application of military technology to
commerce, entertainment and colonialism, but in the way this application
was both mediated and motivated by certain new forms of representation
and their effects on audiences, effects that were then available to motivate
applications of technology in colonial modernity’s other domains of practice –
political, commercial, administrative.

War and Aerial Vision

‘At the turn of the century,’ writes Virilio, ‘cinema and aviation seemed
to form a single moment. By 1914, aviation…was becoming one way, or
perhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing.’5 In an important essay inspired by
 ENTR’ACTE 149

Virilio’s ideas, photographic historian Bernd Huppauf argues that to grasp

the full impact of modernity we must look to the new aerial photography
that emerged during the final years of the Great War. Aerial shots, he argues,
reflect the technical and dehumanized reality of industrial warfare. They
are ‘symptoms of new modes of mediated perception and organization
of battlefields…in a vast space that no individual would be capable of
surveying.’ Industrialized war ‘killed the natural landscape and replaced
it with highly artificial and, within its own parameters, functional spatial
arrangements.’ These photographs ‘resemble abstract landscape paintings,
which also reduce the profusion of details of a “natural” landscape to a
“rationally” structured order.’6 It is precisely this rationally structured order
that industrial warfare – and modern, Taylorized industry – require for their
efficient operation. Modernity is ‘functional’ within its own parameters
because it operates without regard to the individual. In this space, the
culturally conditioned self of the soldier is dissolved. Aerial photographs
were both ‘symptoms of’ and also ‘forces in’ the process of changing modes of
perception because they helped bring into being the dehumanized space,
‘emptied of moral content and experience’, in which war – and industry –
could operate ‘efficiently’ and ‘rationally’, free from the constraints of a
nostalgic, sentimental humanism.7 Aerial photographs of the battlefield,
in other words, do not answer to human imperatives. In such a landscape,
the individual human is invisible. What emerge instead are more abstract
forms of information: the speed and effects of weapons, transportation and
communications systems that transcend the perspective of an individual.
Finally, then, Huppauf ’s argument, following Virilio, is that there is no
longer a space of humanity or of nature outside war; or, to put this another
way, modern industrial society is continuous with the space of war.
To illustrate Huppauf ’s arguments about aerial photography, we can turn
to volume VIII of the Official History of Australia in the War, F. M. Cutlack’s
The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War 1914–1918.
Once official censorship ended, photographs from all kinds of sources,
including aerial photographs, began to circulate, rapidly becoming one of
the main forms in which the Great War was inscribed in public memory.
Photographs were displayed and collected by public institutions; they were
used as illustrations in history books; above all, millions of postcards, prints and
snapshots were pasted into private albums or proudly displayed in the sitting
rooms and hallways of homes throughout the empire. Profusely illustrated,
The Australian Flying Corps, together with its companion volume, the Photographic
Record of the War, was among the major official Australian efforts towards the
photographic inscription of public memory of the Great War. Published in
1923, it was extensively reviewed and acclaimed in Australia, New Zealand
150 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

and Great Britain. It was reprinted many times and ultimately sold some
18,500 copies.8
Although bound by Edwardian notions of chivalry, Cutlack frequently
acknowledges the increasingly scientific and technical nature of warfare. His
account of the development of aerial photography recognizes the emergence
of a new kind of vision, a new kind of strategic information that at first
appeared irrelevant because of the strangeness of its codes, but which was
soon recognized as essential for supremacy on the battlefield. Cutlack recalls
that officers could not at first ‘read’ the new photographic imagery or realize
its strategic importance. Their ability to do so corresponded with a shift from
seeing war as an interaction between individuals, to war as a technical exercise
carried out with new information systems encoded in aerial photographs and
the maps derived from them:

Earlier in the war, before the value of photography-reconnaissance was properly

appreciated, the pictures made were but scantily distributed to divisions in
the line… The value of a constant flow of intelligence…did not easily win
recognition. The photographs of German front-line defences were regarded
as things which would amuse the general of the division, or even perhaps the
brigade-commander, rather than as vitally important information for the fighting
men in the line… Staff officers would collect aeroplane-photographs as souvenirs
of ‘sections of the front where we have been engaged’… As soon as the army had
grown to accept the view that fighting the Germans was a problem as much of
science and intelligence as of rude force, these old notions underwent a change.
If the date of such a change must be named at all precisely, it would probably be
the spring of 1916. Towards the close of that year front-line intelligence of the
enemy had become almost a fetish with staffs of army corps, and a new officer
had appeared on the staff of the division – the Division Intelligence Officer.
Part of his special training was the interpretation of the evidence of aeroplane
photographs, and divisions thereupon came to demand these photographs at
more and more frequent intervals and in greater numbers for distribution. For
a time the map-making sections of corps and army staffs absorbed most of the
newly-taken photographs, and the information gleaned was then issued to the
line in the form of new editions of trench maps.9

Early in the war, then, aerial photographs were kept and read – or glanced
at and discarded – according to their human interest: if suitable they were
kept as personal souvenirs, and where they could not be used in this way
(presumably because they had no recognizable mimetic function within the
codes of pictorial realism) they were not valued. The recognition that their
value lay not as a record of human activity in particular places but of abstract
 ENTR’ACTE 151

patterns of intelligence corresponds with a shift in perception that war is not

just about fighting an enemy, but also a problem in applied science. From
this point, the rhetoric of the new aerial photographs can be read for the
information it contains: not about individual human combatants, but about
systems of intelligence, and flows of materials and processes.
The photographs Cutlack chose to illustrate the passage I have quoted
show the strange new language of the modern battlefield. ‘A Close View of
“Augustus Wood” near Passchendaele Ridge (Ypres), Showing the Shell-torn
Ground, 17th October, 1917’ (Fig. 4.1), could not be more different than
Hurley’s famous photographs of Passchendaele. As I argued in chapter two,
these are strongly pictorialist in their values, resisting what Virilio called ‘the
apocalypse of the deregulation of perception’ to focus on the element of
individual human suffering and heroism. Against that aesthetic, A Close View
is almost shocking in its abstraction and modernity. No recognizably human
element appears in it. What is evident is an abstract field of dots (shell holes)
on a field of cross-hatching (trenches) whose patterns disclose the location of
a gun emplacement. Reading this image required a new sensibility, a newly
trained eye that looks for systems rather than landscapes or human actors.
The resulting information resembles a map more than a souvenir of human
experience. A related illustration shows how the abstract patterns and systems
hidden in these new images could be read, not for reasons of personal memory
or emotion, but as information to be fed into other military systems. ‘Section
of a typical artillery map, showing method of ranging by reference to “clock
face”’ (Fig. 4.2) glosses the meaning of an aerial photograph as a set of codes
that can be used for range finding, a problem in the science of ballistics.
Although he sees aerial photography as quintessentially modern, Huppauf ’s
characterization of modernity differs from Virilio’s in one important respect:
he recognizes that it is not homogeneous and that the internalization of
its new technologies was not experienced evenly. In developing a theory
of war photography, he therefore identifies two distinct forms that might
be characterized, in Raymond Williams’s terms, as emergent and residual.
The emergent form, which we have just seen in aerial reconnaissance
photographs, reveals that industrial war is abstract and technical; that it
requires an absence of human considerations for its efficient operation. The
latter, more conservative mode attempts to mask the shock of modernity by
anesthetizing its destructive effects on nature and human experience. To do
so it drew on an increasingly anachronistic set of visual codes – the codes of
pictorialism – which preserved the idea that individual experience, morality
and heroism might be held apart from, and even survive, the abstract,
depersonalized space of modern war. The abandonment of pictorialism
was especially evident in the work of American photographer Edward
152 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Steichen after his experience of aerial reconnaissance. In The Vision Machine,

Virilio notes that ‘When the war was over, Steichen…burned all his previous
work, swearing…to forsake everything that smacked of pictorialism for the
redefinition of the image as directly inspired by instrumental photography
and its scientific processes.’10 For Virilio and Huppauf, those photographers
who sought to aestheticize war through pictorialism, or to humanize it
by focusing on individual heroism, were regressive, their practice nakedly
ideological. The regressive work of pictorialism and the cult of the war hero
were a nostalgic ‘reinterpretation of the empty space of aerial photography
in terms of individual experience.’11 It was precisely this anachronistic
imagery, they argue, that played a significant role in maintaining a moral
framework within which war propaganda might operate.
Not surprisingly, as an official publication of the Australian Commonwealth
and under Bean’s general editorship, one task of The Australian Flying Corps was
to commemorate the heroic dimension of Australia’s role in the Great War.
Drawing on nineteenth-century discourses of chivalry, Cutlack writes, ‘It will
be easily realised that this new field of war in the air offered considerable
scope to the daring and initiative of the individual.’ There follows a sketch of
the ideal heroic type:

Besides the pilot’s ordinary qualifications, there was required for the fighting
airman just that little more which may best be described as ‘devil’. It means
not so much recklessness as nice judgement of the moment’s risks while
simultaneously flying and fighting; sustained courage and determination,
without hot-headedness; unruffled confidence founded in perfect knowledge of
his machine’s capacity, estimation of the enemy’s ability, and assurance of his
own. There was probably no better example of what a fighting pilot should be
than the Australian, Ross Smith.12

A photograph shows Smith with his observer, Lieutenant E. A. Mustard, in

their Bristol Fighter in 1918. Here was the human face of the modern war in
the air.
The final years of the Great War were therefore a moment of crisis in visual
representation, when an emergent modernity was masked by the aesthetics
of pictorialism and humanism. Photographic representations of the war are
marked by a ‘structural dilemma’ because they seek to ‘maintain a dichotomy
between war and civilization.’ Yet, as Huppauf observes, this dichotomy is
‘based on a concept of humanity and nature that is being eroded by the very
condition of modern civilization…that is only more exposed, accelerated, and
condensed in warfare.’13 Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Hurley’s work
as a photographer for the AIF is that his individual photographs are riven by
 ENTR’ACTE 153

this crisis in representation. At the very moment when aerial photography

was disclosing the abstract nature of industrial modernity, his most distinctive
photographs strive to preserve a space for nature and humanity, and even
human spirituality, that is outside its amoral technical processes and which,
the photographs labour to imply, might survive into the postwar era. Among
his most famous, most moving images are intimate group portraits of soldiers,
expressing the ideals of mateship, imperial service, personal courage and
loyalty. These values are associated with the visual codes of pictorialism. At
some level, however, Hurley recognized that the modern battlefield presented
him with a spectacle that challenged this aesthetic. This is precisely why he
developed his technique of combination printing, as we have seen in chapter
two. According to Huppauf, the argument between Hurley and Bean over
combination printing merely reveals that Bean’s conception of realism was
hopelessly out of touch with the reality of industrialized war. The important
point for Huppauf is that Hurley was on the edge of realizing that modern
war was unrepresentable in the language of pictorialism, with its humanist
ideals of beauty, cohesion, and harmony. Instead of pushing beyond this
crisis, however, Hurley continued to aestheticize his pictures, investing them
with pictorial values and emphasizing the human presence, the heroism
of individual troops. Finally, despite their combination printing, which
anticipates modernist techniques of montage, his photographs seek to occlude
the unrepresentable field of modern war by interpolating a humane observer
who occupies a coherent, moral space outside of war. The result was that
his sublime or beautiful pictorial effects often look strangely at odds with the
violent and destructive consequences of warfare they record.
Hurley had ascended in observation balloons at Ypres, but it was in
Palestine that he began his life-long passion for aviation. He experimented
with aerial photography and cinematography when he made several flights
with Smith in the new Bristol F2B Fighter. After his first flight, Hurley wrote,
‘This day ranked as one of the most salient in my life.’ He planned to make
a film of a bombing raid and conducted ‘experiments to ascertain the points
of minimum vibration’ on the airframe, clamping his camera across the gun
cockpit and ‘insulating it by means of flat rubber sponges.’14 In the early part
of the century, flight was celebrated as a transformative experience for the
modern artist, 15 yet Hurley’s descriptions and aerial photographs continued to
mask the reality – and modernity – of warfare with romantic pictorial effects.
Here, for example, is the entry recording his first flight:

Oh the exhilaration of that upward climb! The earth assumed the appearance
of patchwork… I was utterly incapable of describing the wild, tremendous
grandeur of this view…we were over enemy territory – they were shooting at us,
154 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

wretched shooting to which we paid no attention…too absorbed, contemplating,

intoxicated by these mighty works of nature, living every moment of this
wonderful flight.16

His account of a bombing raid from the observation seat of Smith’s Bristol
Fighter uses similar rhetoric:

The wonderful scenery of the range viewed from this elevation beggars
description… Below us the fleet of bombing planes soared like great birds, making
the desolation re-echo with the hum of power. Yet it all looked so peaceful that
the mission of death and destruction on which we were bent, God knows, was
hellish enough: and it would be an unnatural being who could look down upon
the majesty of nature below, smiling and peaceful, and not feel regretful.17

The figurative language in these passages, together with the point of view of
the observer, creates the impression of a moral and aesthetic realm of human
experience that transcends the battlefield, and that will outlast it.
It was the more conservative mode of aerial photography, which aestheticized
flight and celebrated the individual hero – that provided the moral framework
for wartime and postwar imperial propaganda. As Huppauf argues, this can
be seen particularly in the cult of the air ace: ‘Through mass distribution of
photos, faces of young pilots came to be associated with the glory and splendour
of warfare… Planes and aerial combat more than any other system of arms…
were considered ideal for the creation of images of heroes who, in a war of mass
armies and increasing abstraction, represented the ideal of the pure knight.’18
It might also be argued that this humanizing process was extended into the
domain of commerce after the war. As Virilio suggests in War and Cinema, the
new ‘airborne vision’ quickly migrated from the battlefield to the fields of
commerce and mass entertainment. It offered ‘vistas whose precursors could
be found in the big wheels and other fairground attractions of the nineteenth
century, and which were later developed in the roller-coaster and scenic railways
of post-war funfairs.’ When commercial flights began again in 1919, often
using converted bombers, ‘aerial vision became a widespread phenomenon
with a large public.’19 In reality continuous with war in its obliteration of
human standards, modern, Taylorized industrial practice required an abstract,
technical field for its expansion, but relied upon the cult of the individual to
present a human face. It is therefore no accident that many of the air aces
who gave that human face to industrialized war in official photographs and
publications were the same figures who, immediately after the war, humanized
the era of postwar commercial and industrial expansion. Hurley’s friend Ross
Smith, the Australian ‘Knight of the sky’, was a case in point.
 ENTR’ACTE 155

The England–Australia Air Race and Prosthetic Modernity

The two major texts associated with the Ross Smith flight were Hurley’s
film, Sir Ross Smith’s Flight from England to Australia, first released in Sydney in
June 1920 and subsequently in London, and Ross Smith’s book 14,000 Miles
Through the Air, published by Macmillan in London in 1922. In the preface to
his book, Smith thanked Hurley ‘for his generous and energetic help in the
writing of this book,’20 and there is some evidence to suggest that Hurley’s
contribution to it was indeed substantial. Long, handwritten passages from
the book appear in one of Hurley’s own notebooks,21 and on his copy of the
‘Official’ British souvenir booklet for the film, Hurley noted, ‘I wrote this story
of the flight for Ross. It was sold in the theatres during the screenings of the
film I made for him.’22 Together, these texts demonstrate that the new aerial
vision produced by the conjunction of war, aeroplane flight and photography
was modular – that it could be used to motivate people involved in other
domains of practice, such as entertainment and commercial aviation. But it
was not the more modern, abstract form of aerial visuality that was to be used
in this way. Hurley’s film and Smith’s book had the power to move audiences
and readers because they associated flight and aerial vision with individual
heroism, colonial nationalism and imperial patriotism. To inspire this level of
public enthusiasm, the film and book had to present the experience of flight
as modern, but not threateningly so; a triumph of technology that audiences
could internalize in ways they already understood. To achieve this it was
necessary to use the older, more popular aesthetic of pictorialism, which drew
in turn on the nineteenth-century aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful.
Ross Smith’s public profile as a war hero was also central to the publicity,
the Sydney press dubbing him ‘Our Knight of the Air’. Colonial modernity
therefore advanced as a very uneven set of relations between different
domains of practice, and its new power of affect was selectively internalized
by audiences and readers. When the visual codes and affective power of aerial
photography migrated into the domain of imperial commerce, they had a
remarkable capacity to move ordinary people, to convey an impression of
their own participation in colonial modernity.
Smith’s account of the flight in his book 14,000 Miles Through the Air suggests
that the development of the new commercial air route was closely bound up
with the imperial imaginary and its symbolic occupation of global space.
Smith explains in the introduction that the flight began as a joke by General
Borton of the R.A.F. that they should fly to India to see the Viceroy’s Cup run
in Calcutta. ‘Then after that,’ Smith had replied, ‘let us fly on to Australia
and see the Melbourne Cup.’23 During their initial survey of the route, an
aeroplane lent them by the Indian government was commandeered and shot
156 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

down in a bombing raid against the Afghans on the Northwest Frontier.24 As

Smith left the English coast, the landscape inspired a wintry requiem for the
war dead of the empire:

There was a certain amount of sentiment, mingled with regrets, in leaving old
England, the land of our Fathers. Stormy seas were sweeping up channel, lashing
white foam against the gaunt, grey cliffs that peered through the mists in the
winter light, phantom-like and unreal.
The frigid breath of winter stung our faces and chilled us through; its garb
of white had fallen across the land, making the prospect inexpressibly drear.
The roadways, etched in dark relief, stood out like pencil-lines on the snow-clad
landscape, all converging on Folkestone.
I looked over the side as the town itself, which had played such an important
part in the war, came under us. Thither the legions of the Empire, in ceaseless
tides, had passed to and from the grim red fields of East and West, all acclaiming
thy might, great land of our fathers!25

The England to Australia flight is here seen as part of this imperial tide, and the
aeroplane itself is experienced simultaneously as a prosthesis for the personal
body of the pilot exhausted by the Great War, and of the body politic of the
empire, similarly wasted by war, but about to receive new life from modernity,
from industrial technology, from the east, and from the dominions:

The machine was flying stately and steady as a rock. All the bracing wires were
tuned to a nicety; the dope on the huge planes glinted and glistened in the
sunlight; I was filled with admiration. The engines, which were throttled down to
about three-quarters of their possible speed, had settled down to their task and
were purring away in perfect unison and harmony.
A small machine is ideal for short flights, joy-riding the heavens, or sight-
seeing among the clouds; but there is something more majestic and stable
about the big bombers which a pilot begins to love. An exquisite community
grows up between machine and pilot; each, as it were, merges into the other.
The machine is rudimentary and the pilot the intellectual force. The levers and
controls are the nervous system of the machine, through which the will of the
pilot may be expressed – and expressed to an infinitely fine degree. A flying
machine is something entirely apart from and above all other contrivances of
man’s ingenuity.
The aeroplane is the nearest thing to animate life that man has created. In
the air a machine ceases indeed to be a mere piece of mechanism; it becomes
animate and is capable not only of primary guidance and control, but actually
of expressing a pilot’s temperament.
 ENTR’ACTE 157

The lungs of the machine, its engines, are again the crux of man’s wisdom.
Their marvellous reliability and great intricacy are almost as awesome as the
human anatomy. When both engines are going well and synchronized to the
same speed, the roar of the exhausts develops into one long-sustained rhythmical
boom – boom – boom. It is a song of pleasant harmony to the pilot, a duet of
contentment that sings of perfect firing in both engines and says that all is well.
This melody of power boomed pleasantly in my ears, and my mind sought to
probe the inscrutable future, as we swept over the coast of England at 90 miles
per hour.
And then the sun came out brightly and the Channel, all flecked with white
tops, spread beneath us.26

One important way in which the individual subject imagined his embodiment
in colonial modernity was through the trope of prosthesis. As Freud implies
in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), new technologies such as the aeroplane,
the steamship and the camera were essentially prosthetic, seeming to extend
the sensory reach of the individual, providing a way to imagine a new,
embodied relation to modernity, to nation, to empire: modern man had
become a ‘prosthetic god’.27 Historians of the Great War, however, disagree
over the extent to which it caused the formation of a recognizably ‘modern
consciousness’, particularly a ‘machine consciousness’, some arguing that
returned servicemen were nostalgic for older, more organic ways of conceiving
the body and human society. Joanna Bourke observes that ‘between 1914 and
1918, more and more bodies of young, healthy men were at risk of frighteningly
new ordeals of mutilation.’28 There was no official collection of medical
statistics within the AIF, but in the 1920s, over three thousand Australians
were being paid pensions for the wartime amputation of one or more limbs.29
Although a ‘machine consciousness’ may not enter widely into the working-
class infantry men’s diaries Bourke examines in her book, Dismembering the
Male (1996), the memoirs of pilots like Smith strongly suggest that aircraft
technology was a potent source of imagery with which the soldier, exhausted
and even mutilated by war, could imagine his own revitalized embodiment
and, in turn, a revitalized imperial order.
In his study of the relations between the body and its technologies in
modernity, Tim Armstrong argues that the ‘prosthetic imagination’ has two
modes – one utopian, the other dystopian. On the one hand, through the
application of new technologies, ‘the body is re-energized, re-formed, subject
to new modes of production, representation, and commodification.’30 On the
other hand, as the site of the contradictions of modernity, ‘the body harboured
a crisis’. Conceived of as being grounded in nature, and therefore outside of
modernity, the body might be out of step with the modern, technologically
158 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

advanced world: diagnoses like hysteria, neurasthenia, even constipation and

eye-strain registered the stress placed on the body by modern civilization
and suggested that compensatory action was necessary. Modernity, then,
‘brings both a fragmentation and augmentation of the body in relation to
technology; it offers the body as lack, at the same time as it offers technological
compensation. Increasingly, that compensation is offered as part of capitalism’s
fantasy of the complete body: in the mechanisms of advertising, cosmetics,
cosmetic surgery, and cinema: all prosthetic in the sense that they promise the
perfection of the body.’31 Coincidentally, Armstrong’s two modes of prosthetic
modernity – the dystopian sense of the body as lack, as pre-modern; and the
utopian sense in which technology extends the body’s sensory and intellectual
capacities – resemble Huppauf ’s modes of aerial vision, the residual and the
emergent. My argument here is that in the domains of postwar commerce and
entertainment, it is almost uniformly the utopian version of prosthetics and
the aestheticized form of aerial vision that best perform the ideological work
required of them.
In Smith’s description of his departure from England, the machinery of
the aeroplane feeds the prosthetic imagination in its utopian mode, its ‘melody
of power’ granting the pilot a bodily resurrection after the wintry devastation
of the Great War. The aesthetic equivalent of this utopian prosthetics is a
pictorialized version of aerial vision. It might be termed the aerial sublime:

The mighty cloud ocean over which we were scudding resembled a polar
landscape covered with snow…
Ahead loomed up a beautiful dome-shaped cloud, lined with silver edges.
It was symbolical; and when all seemed dark, this rekindled in me the spark of
hope. By the side of the ‘cloud with the silver lining’ there extended a gulf about
two miles across. As we burst out over it I looked down into its abysmal depths.
At the bottom lay the world. As far as the eye could reach, in every direction
stretched the illimitable cloud sea, and the only break now lay beneath us. It
resembled a tremendous crater, with sides clean-cut as a shaft. Down this
wonderful cloud avenue I headed the Vimy, slowly descending in a wide spiral.
The escape through this marvellous gateway, seven thousand feet deep, that
seemed to link the realms of the infinite with the lower world of mortals, was the
most soul-stirring episode of the whole voyage.
Snow was falling heavily from the clouds that encircled us, yet down, down
we went in an almost snow-free atmosphere. The omen was good; fair Fortune
rode with us.32

In such passages, the imperial subject exhausted by war is rejuvenated

by the prosthesis of the aeroplane, uplifted by the aerial sublime, and
 ENTR’ACTE 159

resurrected bodily into an optimistic postwar future. If the pictorialism of

Hurley’s war photography implied the survival of a realm of human values
and nature outside the space of battle, then the prosthetic imagination
of Ross Smith’s flight affirms that survival into the postwar era. This is
modern consciousness of a kind, but a highly selective – we might say a
heavenly – version of it, in which the empty space of industrial war – and
the equally empty space of postwar imperial commerce – are sublimated
and re-occupied by human experience.

Frank Hurley’s Sir Ross Smith’s Flight

Hurley’s Sir Ross Smith’s Flight from England to Australia premiered at the Sydney
Town Hall on 8 June 1920, where it ran for a week before going on to
Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth over subsequent months. Hurley’s collection
of press clippings indicates how, through its reception, the synchronized lecture
entertainment was able to mobilize the utopian effects of aerial visuality across
a number of public domains. In his ‘exclusive’ reports to the Australian press,
Hurley publicized his own involvement in the final leg of the flight, often
implying that he had made the entire journey from London.33 In ‘Photographer
on the Wing’, he informed readers of the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 February
1920, ‘There is an indefinable exultation in looking down upon the world from
a great height. The shackles that cramp one to earth are severed, and you feel as
if liberated into realms of uncurbed freedom… One feels poised in the heavens
with a plan of the earth slowly unrolling below.’ The same ‘exclusive’ report
appeared in the Sydney Sun on 15 February with the dramatic headings, ‘Australia
From Above – Captain Hurley’s Story/ In the Cockpit with Ross Smith/ Bird’s
Eye View of Two States’. Announcing ‘Remarkable Aerial Photography: New
Views of Sydney’, the Sydney Mail published a wrap-around souvenir featuring
Hurley’s still photographs in broadsheet format.
The Sydney premier of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight was supported by a press
campaign featuring the novelty of aerial photography. A tie-in article in the
Sun asked, is ‘a photograph of the harbour, taken by Captain Hurley in the
Vickers’ Vimy…“news”?’ The answer was yes: ‘Because these photographs are
taken from a new view-point…which hitherto it has been impossible for us to
reach.’ Many Sydney newspapers featured full-page souvenir photographs of
the city from the air. Familiar sights, including Sydney Harbour, the botanical
gardens, the Heads and the central business district were rendered exotic and
more ‘modern’ by this new point of view, while Harrington’s Photographic Journal
devoted an entire issue to the techniques of aerial photography.34
Hurley’s travel writing for the press mimicked the effects of this ‘new view-
point’. An advertisement for Sir Ross Smith’s Flight prepared for Union Theatres
160 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

uses the practised voice of the showman, the spruiker and the platform
personality to invoke the new aerial vision:

You’ll see one-half of the globe spinning beneath your feet – cities, towns, rivers,
mountain peaks – all strange to you, yet brought so close you feel like reaching out
and touching them. You’ll almost feel the insufferable heat as the Vimy ploughs
her way through the skies above the steaming deserts – you’ll shiver, even as the
‘men who did it’ might have, as you are entrapped in the drenching, torrential
rains of the Near East – you’ll clench your teeth and hang tight to the seat as
the giant ‘plane swoops, dives and swirls through the vast open spaces of the air
route – and you’ll taste, too, the thrill of pride that must have been theirs when
they landed victorious in the Australia that gave them birth.35

Hurley was pleased that so many of his aeroviews were reproduced by the
Sydney press and he wrote a number of descriptive essays on the theme,
including another ‘exclusive’ for the Sun, ‘Sydney from the Skies. Seen from
the Vimy’:

Below us lay the city and Port Jackson. Starboarding our rudders, in the most
graceful of curves we swept out over Coogee-Bronte-Bondi, to the sea beyond.
With the sun flashing our propellers and glinting our varnished wings, Vimy
swung like a gigantic flying fish out over the sea…
Almost in a flash Botany Bay comes into view – the aerodrome below, a carpet
of green – a ring of waving specks. Sir Ross puts her nose down – the engines are
throttled. Like a tornado we rush at the ground – a wild thrill of exhilaration –
65 miles per hour. The wheels touch; you can just feel the ground. The rush past
of the earth – an indescribable feeling of exaltation, of terrific speed, of objects
in the front growing larger, at an amazing pace – a crowd waving and cheering
wildly – a slackening in pace. The world moves by more slowly, and the Vimy
has come to rest!36

Hurley’s prose here recalls the early cinema’s close relation to the fairground
in exhibitions such as Hale’s Tours, in which films taken from moving
vehicles were screened in theatres designed to resemble the interior of buses
and trains.37 Wolfgang Shivelbusch termed this ‘panoramic perception’: ‘the
traveler sees the objects, landscape, etc., through the apparatus that moves
him through the world.’38
In addition to saturation newspaper coverage, Hurley’s company produced
striking posters and programmes promoting the film, and a souvenir booklet
so that people could take home with them a selection of the new ‘aeroviews’.
Published by Angus & Robertson, the booklet includes a short introduction by
 ENTR’ACTE 161

Sir Ross Smith, ‘With 27 full-page Aeroviews [by Capt. Frank Hurley].’39 In
a marketing strategy similar to that adopted by the Australian War Museum
at its Records and Relics exhibition, photographic enlargements of the views
(15 × 12 inches), autographed by Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith, could be
bought at the Kodak Salons in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane at
42 shillings each. Widely reproduced, the photograph which most directly
recalls the wartime origins of aerial vision is ‘The Vimy Approaching
Sydney’, in which Hurley has caught the two aviators and the aeroplane in the
foreground as it passes over Sydney Heads.
Posters promoting the film depict a new and slightly awkward interpretation
of aerial vision. They combine a view of the aeroplane seen from the air, whose
high vantage point the spectator adopts, with an aerial view of the landscape
seen from the plane. It is as if an aerial perspective is so new that the poster
must show both the view and the location from which it is achieved – an aerial
view, with the aeroplane in the foreground. In posters for the film’s London
premier, under the auspices of the Lowell Thomas Travelogues, the aerial
perspective has become even more triumphalist, impossibly foreshadowing
the global vision of extraterrestrial orbit, as the path of the Vimy through the
spaces of empire traces a movement of light across darkness (Fig. 4.3).
The programme for the Sydney Town Hall premier of The Ross Smith Flight
gives a good indication of how Hurley’s multimedia performance represented
the new experience of aeriality to local audiences, and how much it drew
on the older theatrical traditions, including the stage practices of sensation
melodrama. The public’s craving for the visual sensation of aerial views had
recently been exploited in melodramas such as Randolph Bedford’s White
Australia: The White Man’s Land, first performed in Melbourne on 27 February
1909. An entire scene takes place on an airship in flight, aboard which
Australian patriots struggle against Japanese spies in a bid to reach Sydney
Harbour in time to bomb a Japanese invasion fleet.40 Hurley’s entertainment
belongs to the same theatrical tradition. It began with an ‘Overture’, performed
by an orchestra conducted by Mr Howarde, followed by an ‘Introduction’ by
‘Our Knights of the Air’, in which Ross Smith addressed the audience in front
of a backdrop of the Swiss Alps. The first part of the film, ‘From Darwin to
Adelaide Through the Air’, combined the film shot by Hurley from the nose
of the Vimy with some of his old war footage of the Palestine desert shot from
Smith’s Bristol Fighter, now passing as the Australian outback. These sequences
alternated with lantern slides, inserted like the tableaux in a melodrama:

The Far North. A bewildered aboriginal looks up to the heavens, and mistakes
the ‘Vimy’ for a new kind of bird. The wild tribes of the Northern Territory
corroboree over the ‘sky debil-debil’. Approaching civilization. Australian life
162 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

from above and below. Wonderful panoramas of the glorious outback. Charleville.
Wide expanse of the ‘Never-Never’. Bourke is reached. A delightful voyage over
the outback settlements – the blast furnaces of bustling Lithgow – up – up over
the beautiful Blue Mountains. Then the most wonderful and most welcome sight
of the entire journey – Sydney Harbour from the air. The whirl of excitement
below – the thrill of the first landing in the great city… The marvellous scenes…
are the perfection of aerial photography, and were taken at a great risk of life by
Captain Frank Hurley, who was strapped to the upper wing of the machine.

During the interval there was a ‘Special Scenic Prologue introducing a tableau
of the Vickers’ Vimy in flight over the Mediterranean.’ Part two showed the
flight from England to Darwin, using footage shot by Ross and Keith Smith,
but incorporating trick effects by Hurley. Audiences saw city after city coming
into shaky view over the pilot’s cockpit, not suspecting that in the absence
of suitable shots, Hurley had filmed picture postcards of several cities with
a cinema camera to gain the desired effect. Smith’s opening speech was
delivered in front of the scenic backdrop, across which a model Vickers Vimy
struggled to cross the Swiss Alps. The Sydney magazine, People, later reported
that on the night of the governor’s attendance, the model Vimy crashed into
the mountains and in struggling to get it free, Hurley brought down the whole
backdrop, exposing himself holding the model Vimy on a long pole:

Across the Alps a model of the Vimy struggled through turbulent upper regions.
On the Vice-Regal night it struck on the mountains. No ordinary aircraft, it
struggled vainly to get free, finally lifting the backdrop off the hooks to disclose
to an intrigued audience Hurley, his model aircraft on the end of a long pole, and
brought to its destruction by a sky-larking Keith Smith.41

But the audience was delighted, and the evening’s entertainment closed with
a performance of ‘God Save the King’.42
The programme for Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainment about
the Ross Smith flight indicates how complex and uneven a moment it was
in Australia’s accession to colonial modernity. It reminds us, as Lynda Nead
argues, that the sites of modernity are heteronomous. The conjunction of
air flight and cinema had made available the powerful new form of aerial
visuality that nonetheless relied on the older imagery of personal heroism to
connect it deeply in the public mind with empire loyalty. In broadcasting this
new experience at large through the medium of mass entertainment, Hurley
continued to deploy long-standing stage conventions of sensation melodrama,
whose residual aesthetic might be compared to pictorialism and heroism in
photography and cinema. All these familiar aesthetic forms helped to mediate
 ENTR’ACTE 163

the potentially traumatic visuality of the battlefield in ways that were consoling,
utopian and inspiring to audiences, for many of whom the pain of the war was
still fresh. The effect was to imply that Australia was leading the empire in its
accession to colonial modernity – measured by the anachronistic figure of the
‘bewildered aboriginal’.
In April 1922, the Vickers Vimy was put on display in a gigantic marquee as
‘Sydney’s Main Easter Attraction’ at the Royal Agricultural Show. This was in
conjunction with the Australian War Museum’s travelling exhibition of official
war photographs, whose season at the Sydney Town Hall basement ran from
4 March to 29 April 1922.43 The Vimy had been partially restored to its former
identity as a bomber through being placed on display in an annex to the main
exhibition, like the other large relics and machines-in-motion discussed in
chapter two. It was a strong reminder of the continuing association between
war, commercial aviation and popular entertainment.
 Chapter Five
COLONIAL MODERNITY AND
ITS OTHERS: PEARLS AND SAVAGES
AS A MULTIMEDIA PROJECT

The success of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight can be attributed to Hurley’s

entrepreneurial brilliance in linking the powerful new technologies of flight,
cinema and aerial photography with popular patriotic sentiments about
nation and empire. In his synchronized lecture entertainment, Sydney
audiences had seen with their own eyes how new technologies vanquished
distance and difference, connecting them instantly to the wider spaces of
colonial modernity. In the 1920s, Hurley would turn these new technologies
northward upon Australia’s own colonial territory in Papua in what would
be his single greatest stunt, resulting in his most successful and most original
synchronized lecture entertainment, Pearls and Savages.
Hurley’s plans for the new travelogue began as a collaboration between his
own company and the Lowell Thomas Travelogues, and the two adventurers
arranged to meet on location in Papua. Thomas was in Australia at the time
of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight with his own show, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence
in Arabia. Exactly when or how they met is not known, but it seems that they
discussed a scheme in which Hurley would produce a new Pacific travelogue
and tour it in Australia, while Thomas would handle the international
distribution. Some such collaborative venture is foreshadowed on the handbill
for the London screening of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight, which implies that Hurley
was working for Thomas’ company:

Captain Hurley…is now traveling with Mr. Lowell Thomas, and in the future will
devote all of his time to the securing of films for the Lowell Thomas Travelogue
productions.
Mr. Lowell Thomas…is now gathering material for an entirely new production
on the mysterious and romantic islands of the South Seas.1

This looks like another version of the regional rights arrangement Hurley
had brokered with Perris and Jury in London in 1918 over the three polar
166 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

films, and like his business agreement with Gent and Martin, it would quickly
be dissolved. Hurley left Sydney in December 1920 to tour the Torres Strait
Islands and then visited the Anglican mission stations along the east coast
of Papua. His diaries suggest, however, that he quickly came to reconsider
the arrangement with Thomas, deciding instead to produce the new show
independently and to take full personal control of its North American and
British seasons. Arriving in Port Moresby on 1 April 1921, he ‘Cabled
Thomas not to come to Papua & also Kodak for extra materials as there is a
vast fund of work to do here… I am out to make a hit & win success & realise
that I can only secure it by my own efforts’.2 Hurley returned to Sydney
in August and immediately began to exploit the new material, preparing
the first version of his new travelogue, Pearls and Savages: A Film Drama of
Primitive Humanity.3 Premiering at the Globe Theatre in George Street on
3 December 1921, it screened three times daily for a five-week season before
going on a national tour.
The financial success of this first version of Pearls and Savages led Hurley
to undertake a second expedition in the relatively remote regions of Western
Papua, leaving Sydney in August 1922 and returning in January 1923. By
the time he returned to Port Moresby at the start of his second expedition
on 29 August 1922, Hurley’s aspiration, now within reach, was to become
not only an independent film maker, but also an international distributor and
performer of his own synchronized lecture entertainments. ‘My object,’ he
wrote, ‘[is] to exploit the films throughout the world & by thus doing, secure
sufficient capital as will enable me to equip & set out on expeditions to various
places, without either government or private subsidy.’4 This chapter describes
Hurley’s success in achieving those aspirations and deals with the four major
seasons of Pearls and Savages in its various iterations: in Australia in 1921–22
and again in 1923, in North America in 1923–24, and in Great Britain in
1924–25. In terms of its subject matter, the Melanesian travelogue was
Hurley’s most nationally and even regionally based show to date, but in terms
of its subsequent marketing throughout the Anglosphere, it would mark the
high point of his international fame. This paradox reminds us of Veronica
Kelly’s injunction that the cosmopolitan and the local constitute each other
interactively;5 it also illustrates Tony Ballantyne’s concern with what he calls
‘the complex interplays between different layers of analysis: the local, the
regional, the inter-regional, the national, the continental, and the global.’6

Popular Cinema and Ethnographic Representation

In preparing In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice for its national tour in the summer
of 1919–20, Hurley had mastered the technical and logistical aspects of
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 167

synchronized lecture entertainments, and in developing his travelogue about

polar exploration he had learned much from Ponting’s With Captain Scott in
the Antarctic. But with Pearls and Savages he was venturing into a new field: the
ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic travelogue. This was a distinct genre
that had its own history, its own visual language and promotional rhetoric.
To succeed with this latest entertainment, Hurley would need to master a
new vocabulary.
As Alison Griffiths demonstrates in Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, &
Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (2002), there is a long and tangled association
between popular ethnographic representation in early cinema and the emergence
of anthropology as a professional discipline in museums and universities.7 In the
1910s and 1920s, the boundaries between ethnographic and popular film were
quite fluid and the provenance of films often uncertain, as museums frequently
screened commercially produced films, while popular travelogues combined
sensational forms of entertainment with scientific and educational pretensions.
Professional ethnographers were wary of the cinema for its association with
popular culture and its privileging of spectacle over rational comprehension,
but they envied its capacity to attract commercial sponsorship and its appeal
to urban mass audiences. At the same time, professional showmen sought to
associate visual representations of exotic peoples with scientific discourses,
especially in their efforts to engage with respectable middle-class audiences.
Griffiths therefore uses the term ‘ethnographic film’ to refer to ‘actuality
films featuring native peoples’ regardless of whether they were produced by
anthropologists, or by commercial or amateur filmmakers.8 This is because
prior to 1915, ethnographic film-making was part of the mainstream
of visual popular culture, and such films circulated widely in a range of
venues and institutional contexts: they were part of the ‘global trafficking
of nineteenth-century visual culture’.9 The new mass audiences for modern
urban entertainments were fascinated by representations of native peoples,
which had become conventionalized through a range of tropes that were
common across different media of visual representation, from museum life
groups and dioramas to photography and film. These tropes, which would
feature repeatedly in Hurley’s work, include performance, especially dance,
as a marker of primitive cultures, the exotic mise-en-scène, portrait studies of
native ‘types’, illustrations of native industries, and the ubiquitous spectacle
of nudity.10 Whatever their origin and purpose, films of exotic cultures and
subject peoples made their way not only into the auditoriums of museums,
town halls, lecture halls, churches and Lyceums, but also into turn-of-the-
century store-front theatres, dime museums, circus tents, fairgrounds and side
shows.11 Because they were so mobile across this range of venues, early films
offering ethnographic content carried a range of potential pleasures, meanings
168 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

and registers of knowledge: they can be seen ‘as aesthetic objects; as fleeting,
scopophilic gazes upon objectified men, women, and children; as historical
artifacts; as colonialist propaganda; as the raw material of anthropological
research; and as justifications for social policy.’12
This variety of uses and meanings has profound implications for the
methodology required to read ethnographic films. Given their uncertain
provenance and social mobility, it was often the ‘context of exhibition’ in its
broadest sense that determined their meanings, which were otherwise fluid
and contingent. While this is similar in principle to the variety of uses to
which the war photographs discussed in chapter two might be put, in the case
of ethnographic film the potential for variation was perhaps more extreme.
As Griffiths observes, ‘whether a specific film was shot by an anthropologist
may have been less significant in constituting its ethnographic status’ than
the context and practices of its exhibition: ‘the same ethnographic footage
may have meant quite different things to different audiences, depending on
whether they viewed it in the socially sanctioned spaces of the American
Museum of Natural History or the New York Explorers’ Club as opposed
to a crowded nickelodeon in a working-class neighborhood.’13 Much also
depended on the framing effects of a range of extra-textual phenomena,
such as the biographical legend and patter of the lecturer, and the language
and imagery of associated texts such as advertising tie-ins and handbills.
These institutional and exhibitionary contexts were themselves ambiguous,
for while museums exploited cinema’s popular appeal, showmen like Hurley
exploited the authority of ethnographic language in their promotion of
commercial films. As Griffiths argues, early ethnographic films ‘were…
promoted simultaneously as visual illustrations of anthropology’s intellectual
concerns and as popular entertainment.’14
In the United States, travelogues were first shown at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York around 1908. As Griffiths demonstrates, the
museum authorities had long held ambivalent views about visual ethnography,
initially with the life groups and dioramas, and then the lantern slides, which
had been used in lectures since the 1880s. The museum’s mission was focused
on education and social uplift, and so the new visual technologies were
seen as useful in its efforts to attract metropolitan working-class audiences.
But while authorities recognized the cinema’s popular appeal, they were
concerned to retain the priority of rational knowledge over visual spectacle.
They were conscious, as Griffiths notes, that patrons of the museum ‘would
have been exposed to a wide array of popular ethnographic imagery…some
of it represented in vulgarized form in freak shows, circuses, and vaudeville
programs.’15 Authorities were also cautious about the reputations of the
many itinerant lecturers and showmen who sought to exhibit their latest
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 169

travelogues at the museum. By the early 1910s, however, the museum was
regularly engaging adventurer-cameramen to perform in its auditorium, while
also keeping a certain professional distance from them. This was a two-way
exchange, for ‘just as science and anthropology looked to popular culture as
a way of publicly presenting their findings, so too did popular culture turn to
the rhetoric of science and anthropology to market its products to a middle-
class audience.’16
One precedent for Hurley’s production of Pearls and Savages was the
adventurer-cameraman Paul J. Rainey’s association with the American
Museum of Natural History. Rainey was a millionaire adventurer who
had privately financed his own expedition to Mombassa, during which he
shot a series of adventure films and collected scientific specimens for the
Smithsonian Institution and the New York Zoological Society. In 1912 and
1914 he released two versions of his ‘African Safari’ films, which were used in
a series of lectures on both the commercial theatre circuit and to professional
scientific groups. Griffiths points to Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt as an example
of an ethnographic film exhibited simultaneously in both high-cultural
and popular-cultural venues: it was shown at both the American Museum
of Natural History and the Lyceum Theatre, and so ‘the textual meanings
attributed to the film were subject to constant negotiation by audiences (and
exhibitors).’17 First screened at the museum in February 1912, it attracted one
of the largest audiences the museum had yet seen, and subsequently enjoyed
worldwide distribution in an edited form with inter-titles. Despite its success,
however, when the museum president wrote an article about it for the New
York Times in 1914, his equivocal language suggested ‘a calculated effort…to
assuage any doubts about the pedagogical and scientific value of films shot by
a wealthy amateur-adventurer.’18 Hurley recorded in his diary that he had seen
an African hunt film in London in 1917, The Macklin Expedition, one of many
made in the wake of Rainey’s success.19
While museums courted the cinema’s popular appeal, commercial
filmmakers ‘were keen to draw upon notions of authenticity and ethnographic
verisimilitude which circulated in the legitimating worlds of professional
anthropology and museology.’20 The mainstream travelogue, popularized in
the United States and Britain by touring lecturers such as Lyman H. Howe
and E. Burton Homes, included a strongly ethnographic component that was
also associated with the nascent travel industry. Advertising for such films
commonly evoked ideas of virtual travel, offering images of exotic places and
peoples as commodities for domestic consumption. Metropolitan audiences
were not necessarily ‘globe-trotters’ but they could enjoy the experience of
armchair travel. As one promotion put it, ‘for the “stay-at-home” who lacked
either the “time or money to see the great wonders of the world,” travel
170 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

pictures offered “the advantages and pleasures of travel without any of its
defects, discomforts or inconveniences.”’21 While travelogues offered audiences
glimpses of faraway places, ideologically they perpetuated, according to
Lauren Rabinowitz, ‘ethnocentric notions…by making faraway cultures into
commodities that could be enjoyed for the price of admission.’22
Yet Griffiths returns again and again to the difficulty of interpreting
early travelogues; so much depends on the institutional and exhibitionary
context, and on the now vanished performance itself. While travelogue
lecturers like Howe and Burton Holmes may have peppered their talks with
racist quips about primitive types, precisely how audiences reacted to such
material is now impossible to determine. Griffiths suggests that the films
were probably read on multiple levels: ‘while some spectators may have
enjoyed or taken pride in seeing the iconography of Western mastery and
imperial might, others may have lamented the loss of an “ethnographically
pristine” way of life.’23 At the same time, the spectacle of the primitive
may have invoked ambivalent responses arising from the audience’s own
complex relationship with ‘the forces of modernity that were transforming
work and everyday life in Western metropoles.’24 From the promotional
materials associated with the films, we can perhaps infer that their reception
was variously shaped by discourses of tourism, ‘national identity’, ‘civic
participation’, ‘cultural uplift’, ideas concerning ‘the governability of
colonial peoples’, and the suitability of colonies and dependent territories
as sites for economic exploitation and emigration.25

What was Pearls and Savages? The Travelogue

as Multimedia Project
Pearls and Savages exists today in a 57-minute ‘restored’ version made in 1979 by
the National Film and Sound Archive (Australia) as part of its Reel Australia
project. This is a text comparable to the British Film Institute’s 1994 restoration
of South. In both cases, what has been produced is a new thing in the world,
an object whose ontology reflects late twentieth-century assumptions about
authorship and textuality. To be sure, the National Film and Sound Archive
describes its ‘restoration’ as a ‘version’ of Pearls and Savages whereas the BFI’s
South was described as a ‘definitive version’. The research, mainly done by
Australian cinema historian Andrew Pike, ‘involved rearranging disorganized
footage from both expedition films into a logical sequence, and adding inter-
titles based on a 1925 program.’26 But the failure to grasp fully the film’s
original ontology is suggested by the negative connotations of ‘disorganized’ –
the BFI’s ‘definitive version’ had been restored from ‘a wide range of available
(and sometimes contradictory) materials’ – and the slippage of dates, from the
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 171

1925 handbill to the attribution of the ‘original’ version to 1921. This is not
what Pearls and Savages was in the 1920s.
As we have seen in earlier chapters dealing with The Home of the Blizzard,
‘Shackleton’s Marvellous Moving Pictures’ and In the Grip of the Polar Pack-
Ice, in their thinking about the ontology of early cinema, theorists including
Tom Gunning, Rick Altman and Alison Griffiths prioritize performance
over texts. Altman argues that to understand the travelogue, ‘we must…put
aside our firmly entrenched film-oriented approach to cinema in favor of
a performer-oriented position.’27 Building on my discussion of In the Grip of
the Polar Pack-Ice in chapter three, I want now to take this theorization one
stage further by identifying a slightly larger horizon of interpretation than the
performance or exhibitionary event that I will call the multimedia project.
Pearls and Savages was certainly not a single text, but it was also more than just
a single performance or even series of performances – more, that is, than just
a single theatrical season. It was in fact a highly complex multimedia project
in both the financial and aesthetic senses that evolved over a number of years
and theatrical seasons, expressing itself in different forms or iterations for
different regional, national and international markets until its commercial
potential and capacity for novelty and reiteration had been exhausted. The
most obvious sign of this ontology was the project’s constant changes of title,
from Pearls and Savages for the first Sydney season, to With the Headhunters of
Unknown Papua for parts of the second Sydney season, to The Lost Tribe for the
North American tour, and finally back to Pearls and Savages for the British tour.
We might define the multimedia project as a developing ensemble of texts that
could be added to over a number of seasons in response to the opportunities
presented by a series of markets – regional, national and international. But
as Hurley developed this model, one of its other key features was that the
distinction between the originary event – in this case the expedition – and its
subsequent media representations collapsed: the expedition itself was part of
the project and always already mediated.
Hurley had been coming closer to this scale of thinking with each
succeeding project, but his earlier lectures had been tied to originary events
he did not fully control – Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
and his opportunistic response to the London to Sydney air race – and to
biographical legends other than his own: the very different kinds of celebrity
attached to the names Mawson, Shackleton and Ross Smith. With Pearls
and Savages, it was precisely the scope of the project, its capacity for what
Hurley would have called ‘exploitation’, that most excited him in the early
phases of its development. In terms of its scale and iterability, we might say
that In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice had been perfectly developed to the point
of being a series of performances consistent with a single theatrical season.
172 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

The quality of Pearls and Savages that gave Hurley the confidence to cable Lowell
Thomas instructing him not to come to Papua was precisely its scalability as
a multimedia project: its capacity for portability, adaptability, reiteration and
exportability to overseas markets.
The project was loosely articulated, largely for financial reasons, to a range
of companies and institutions, each with its own ideology and discursive
effects. They include the Anglican Church’s Australian Board of Missions, the
Sydney Sun and other Australian newspapers, Kodak, Amalgamated Wireless
(Australasia) (AWA), the Australian Museum, the Territorial Administration
of Papua, the Burns Philp shipping line, and Union Theatres. Overseas, it was
articulated to other comparable institutions, including the American Museum
of Natural History, National Geographic and other prestigious American
magazines. What this project consisted of was a series of textual materials in
a range of media, but at its core were Hurley’s photographic negatives, cine
film and diaries. These were modular, and reappeared in slightly modified
forms across a range of media platforms: photographic exhibitions, postcards,
lectures, newspaper articles and so on, all centred on the persona of Frank
Hurley. And crucially, the so-called expeditions these texts claimed to represent
did not precede them. Despite Hurley’s claims to be undertaking scientific
research or geographical discovery, the expeditions’ sole purpose was to be the
vehicle for this ensemble of media events. They were not events that preceded
their later representation, but ‘stunts’ that were part of the very process of that
media representation: they were, we might say, hyper-mediated.

Pearls and Savages: The First Australian Season of 1921–22

Hurley had been planning a Pacific travelogue since at least his return
to Australia after the war: he wrote to Mawson in April 1919, ‘at present
there is a great opportunity to investigate New Guinea [and] the Pacific.’28
Although he discussed the idea with Thomas and some kind of commercial
partnership had been mooted, the immediate arrangement that allowed
Hurley to begin preparations was a commission from the Anglican Church’s
Australian Board of Missions to make a promotional film about their
activities in the Torres Strait Islands and Papua. The minutes of the ABM
record the original agreement:

He [Hurley] would supply the Board with 5000ft of film…together with 100
lantern slides for about £250, in return for his passage to Thursday Island…
together with transport & facilities in each mission area. Capt. Hurley made the
following conditions: - (1) Of the 5000ft of film 50% shd be missionary & 50%
general views...29
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 173

In addition, Hurley negotiated an agreement with the popular illustrated tabloid,

the Sydney Sun, that he would send back a series of travel articles from the field.
As was always the case with Hurley, however, such relationships were primarily
a vehicle for his own projects: he noted in his diary, the ‘primary purpose is to
take cinematographic films & plates for a travelogue entertainment.’30

The Serialization of Travel Writing

Hurley’s illustrated travel articles for the Sun were a major innovation, commencing
the mediatization of the project even before his editing and assembling of the
travelogue. As well as providing a profitable new outlet for his writing and still
photography, the articles created a climate of anticipation for the travelogue in
the major Australian cities, and would eventually enhance the intelligibility of
the photographs, lantern slides and silent films for their first audiences.
Hurley’s first major serialization comprised about twenty illustrated articles
written during his first tour of Torres Strait and Papua, which appeared in the
Sun from the 16 January 1921, and led up to the premier of Pearls and Savages
at the Globe Theatre on 3 December.31 Over the course of the series, Hurley
established the distinctive features of his travel journalism, which we can
assume echoed to some extent his stage patter. He crafted a style of writing
that is overwrought, ‘knowing’, and laden with puns, quips and colloquialisms,
which mimicked the sensational and sometimes melodramatic voice of the
showman. He also began instinctively to explore affinities between page
layouts in newspapers and magazines, and the modalities of still and cine film,
exploring the possibilities of montage and juxtaposing series of short, dramatic
episodes. In its puns and colloquialisms, his writing mimicked the attractions of
the cinema and music hall, often exploiting its sexist and racist patter; and like
the cinema of attractions, his articles refer self-consciously to the technologies
of travel and representation – the aeroplane, radio, newsprint, photography
and cinema. The proliferating subtitles that organize the essays resemble the
inter-titles of the silent screen: ‘Sublime Spectacle in Tropics’, ‘Adventures on
a Coral Reef ’, ‘Murray Island Dance’, ‘Hunting the Dugong’.
The editorial introductions to the Sun serialization announce that Captain
Hurley is in the islands on ‘a scientific and picture-taking expedition to the
tropical possessions of Australia.’32 But from the outset they emphasize
his celebrity presence, his role as an adventurer-cameraman in mediating
Australia’s tropical territories for the entertainment of metropolitan readers:

To the marvels of the coral built tropics and the mysteries of unknown Papua
Captain Frank Hurley, the famous Antarctic photographer, has gone for new
copy and studies. On the sea, beneath the sun, on the earth, and above the
174 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

earth, he will be busy for some months. His pen and camera will be employed
on behalf of ‘The Sun’ and from Thursday Island we have received the first
of his articles.33

The Sun was a popular illustrated tabloid, comparable to London’s Daily

Chronicle, where Hurley had first learned about the modern newspaper business
under Perris’s tutorship: it is perhaps for this reason that he was drawn to
write for it. The Sun’s actual readership was low- to middlebrow, and Hurley’s
imagined reader is familiar with the attractions of international popular culture,
including magazines and light reading, the music hall, the cinema and the
fairground. His relationship with his readers is defined by what Peter Bailey, in
his history of the late nineteenth-century popular stage, calls ‘knowingness’ –
the implicit understanding of a shared language and set of values between a
music hall comedian or master of ceremonies and his audience.34 For such an
audience, colonialism is not so much represented as it is performed through
the active presence of the popular entertainer on the colonial frontier. The
colonial territories are a field of popular entertainment, an abundant source
of verbal and visual clichés, a glamorous urban commodity. As in the patter
and imagery of travelogues, the governing principle is not narrative or serious
reportage and analysis, but a miscellany of novelties and wonders. As the
publicity materials for a Pathé travelogue about India put it in 1905, ‘The
whole scene is one of splendid color, just what one would expect to see.’35 This
coincidence of the novel and the stereotypical, the new and the already known,
is the principle that Griffiths calls popular ‘ethnographic verisimilitude’.36
Initially Hurley sailed from Thursday Island through the Torres Strait
aboard the Anglican mission’s schooner, the Herald, visiting Darnley, Mer,
and Mabuiag, and then on to Saibai and Boigui, ‘the northern most limits
of Australia’s territorial waters.’ The strategy of his writing is to present
Melanesia as a popular entertainment, so that it is always already absorbed
into his readers’ familiar world of the musical hall, light literature and the
cinema. His racist patter is that of the fairground spruiker, welcoming readers
to ‘the isles of coral, coons, coconuts, churches, and cockroaches!’37 Like a
music hall comedian taking a pratfall, Hurley spares no one in his quest for
amusement, least of all himself:

An uproar of yells, a babel of belles, and a reek of smells welcomed me as I neared

the shore in the dingy, and two stalwart warriors, their scaly skins anointed with
rancid coconut oil, waded out and proferred [sic] to lift me through the muddy
shallows to the shore… I had doubts as to whether my immaculate whites would
last out the allotted week if I accepted the lift. So I…took off my boots and
waded ashore.38
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 175

The point of view Hurley adopts is sometimes ethnographic and pseudo-

scientific, but this is the visual ethnography of the popular stage and screen,
openly treating the tropical setting as a stage or film set. On Darnley Island,
he observes:

No Covent Garden or Drury Lane staging could compare with this weird
fantastic setting of nature. The star spangled sky – the ceiling – the orchestra – a
score of drums – and the footlights a hundred palm-leaf torches. In the uncanny
setting and flickering flares, the dance is eerie enough, but viewing it through the
goggles of a cinema producer, I would be holloaing out cut, cut, cut, every ten
seconds.39

The subheadings and captions, and even some of the camera shots in the
illustrated Sun articles, play on the idea of the tropics as popular spectacle,
tourist destination and realm of entertainments: ‘Sublime Spectacle in
Tropics’, ‘Murray Island Dance’, ‘Fandangoes in the Forest’, ‘Cupid of the
Isles’, ‘Murray Island seen through the porthole’, ‘Swiss Family Robinson’,
‘Land of Topsy-Turveydom’, ‘Merry Widow’s Second Choice’. Hurley
purports to be on a ‘scientific and picture-taking expedition’ but ‘the tropical
possessions of Australia and the mandated territories’ are annexed for this
particular readership by making them part of the familiar world of modern
urban entertainment:

Dusky Chaplins
In the picture world of shadow shapes I have discovered the prototypes of
Pickfords, Chaplins and Arbuckles. Pearl White appeared to me in a dusky
vision of coconut fibre and red Poinciana blooms, and Mr Arbuckle a youthful
eighteen-stoner – a dugong humanized.40

Here, at the moment of its presentation, the primitive comes into focus
for the reader as a modern commodity; Hollywood and Torres Strait are
brought instantaneously together through the reign of cinematic clichés.
Colonial territory is literally a ‘cinema of thrills’. Writing, photography and
cinematography transport the natives as spectacular commodities into the
urban realm of the reader, who is implicitly empowered as a consumer of
mass entertainment.
In May 1921 Hurley left Thursday Island for Papua aboard the SS Tambar
in search of further copy and pictures, and his fellow passengers – planters
returning from a trip south – are subjected to the same quips and patter as the
natives: ‘The passengers…are a most interesting crowd, who have done things
by planting coconuts, and seen things by watching them grow. They think in,
176 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

talk in, even their heads have grown like – coconuts!’41 As the subheading,
‘Country of Undeveloped Wealth’ suggests, the perspective is at once touristic
and imperialistic, interpreting Papua through the rhetoric of the travelogue
as a potential destination for tourism or colonial investment. In his first view
of Port Moresby from Paga Hill, the intrepid cameraman, as ever in the
foreground, captures the ‘real Papua’ with ‘ethnographic verissimiltude’ – that
is, by the deployment of clichés:

…by sweat of brow [I] bore my cinema…up to the stony slopes of the summit of
Paga Hill… There continues an excellent cinema-eye sweep of the town and its
setting… So I gained my first glimpse and impressions of the real Papua, marvelling
at the existence, on the very threshold of our continent of this strange land,
convulsed with mighty ranges, torn by rivers, littered with swamps, and inhabited
by a people as wild, primitive, and fantastic as their fierce environment. A few days
beyond our civilized actuality opens the portals of this world of unreality.42

Pearls and Savages Premiers at the Globe

Hurley’s illustrated travel articles in the Sun were an extended tie-in advertisement
for his forthcoming synchronized lecture entertainment. When he returned to
Sydney on 27 August 1921, he did not so much begin exploiting the expedition as
move its already ongoing mediatization into its next phase. On 3 December, the
new travelogue premiered at Union Theatre’s Globe in George Street, opposite
the Queen Victoria Markets. The promotion and reception of the event were
spectacular, continuing to draw on the language of musical hall and fairground
promotion, speaking directly ‘To the adventure loving public of Australia’, but
also appealing broadly across social classes as revealing ‘the life and beauty
contained right in the very heart of our latest empire possession.’43
While the promotional materials for Pearls and Savages drew most strongly
on the transpacific language of the cinema and the picture palace, there was
one important local precedent for the popular exploitation of ethnographic
films. That was the synchronized lecture entertainment developed in the
wake of Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s expedition to Central
Australia in 1901. It is a significant precursor to both the form and content of
Pearls and Savages, especially in its articulation to other institutions, including
museums and the popular press, and its use of multimedia including lantern
slides and recorded music. Spencer had also written a series of travel articles
in the field, publishing them as he went along in the Melbourne Age. And on
the advice of British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, he had taken with
him a heavy tripod-mounted camera, a cinematograph-taking camera, and an
Edison gramophone. In preparation for the subsequent lectures, he engaged
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 177

the fashionable Melbourne photographer J. W. Lindt to make glass lantern

slides, while the Edison wax cylinders used to record Arunta ceremonies
were enhanced for performance by a phonograph enthusiast from Adelaide.
Spencer’s illustrated lectures on ‘Aboriginal Life in Central Australia’ premiered
at the Melbourne Town Hall on 7 July 1902 to an audience of 2,000 people,
including the governor and his suite, and would later move on to other less
formal venues, including the Athenaeum and the Savage Club.44 The handbill
for the premier performance advertises not a film in the modern sense, but a
lecture illustrated by a combination of the new visual and aural technologies:

The Lecture is designed to give an idea of the nature of the life led by a Central
Australian Aborigine, and for this purpose a brief account will be given of
scenes and ceremonies which have been selected as typical of savage life. The
various ceremonies will be illustrated by lantern slides, cinematograph views, and
phonograph records.45

Lindt witnessed the opening night’s performance ‘enraptured’ from a balcony

seat, and conveyed his impressions in a letter to Spencer a few days later.
He found the phonograph recordings ‘simply grand’, and advised Spencer
that at the next performance the film and phonograph recordings might be
played simultaneously, ‘repeating the same tune if necessary’, given the limited
number of successful recordings.46
Spencer’s use of the gramophone to provide a sound track to his performance
may well have influenced the planning of Hurley’s project. His performance
at the Globe was also accompanied by music said to have been ‘discovered by
Frank Hurley’ in the field and ‘arranged and composed by Mr Emanuel Aarons’,
the organist and conductor of the Globe’s house orchestra. It was subsequently
published in a piano transcription by W. H. Paling & Co., Sydney’s leading
distributor of sheet music, under the title, Pearls & Savages: A Cycle of Papuan
Melodies. The preface describes Hurley’s recording of the original performances
on an Edison phonograph and the multitude of difficulties he experienced
‘inducing the timid and wild people to face the machine.’ The five tunes in the
cycle were illustrated by Hurley’s photographs of Papuan ‘types’ and silhouette
drawings in a popular art deco style.47 One reviewer used the music to make a
connection between the primitive and the modern – or at least identified the
metropolitan interest in the primitive as a sign of its modernity:

While the civilized world of music has been indulging in the wild and weird
music of its most advanced composers, and thinking no end of itself for the
possession of such geniuses as Stravinsky, Ornstein, Scriabin, and Co., the whole
affair has been the creation and possession of the Papuan for ages.48
178 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

These references to contemporary music and European modernism, which

occur in a number of reviews, suggest another possible influence on the
reception of Pearls and Savages than popular ethnography, and that is the
Orientalist costume musicals then in vogue in London’s West End. A key figure
here is the Australian-born actor and producer Oscar Asche, who brought his
hit musicals Kismet and Cleopatra to Australia in 1912–13, and then Chu Chin
Chow and Cairo for J. C. Williamson in 1922–23. The immensely popular Chu
Chin Chow had also been brought to Australia in 1920 by Hugh D. McIntosh,
the sporting entrepreneur who had sponsored the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight in
1909.49 Kelly argues that Ache’s musicals were the conduit for a popular form
of modernist Orientalism that had begun with the Ballets Russes’ seasons of
1909 and 1912, and then rapidly entered the world of the popular musical
stage. They encouraged a taste for extremes of colour and movement, lighting
and costume, the ‘barbaric’, the ‘sumptuous’ and the ‘savage’, even licensing
the public expression of sensuality and a ‘perverse eroticism’.50 According to
one report, the Sydney Cairo audience was ‘doped’ with colour and perfume
alike, while the Sun found Percy Fletcher’s ‘primitive’ atonal music ‘sheer
musical Bolshevism’.51 Kelly argues that Asche’s ‘sexualised Orientalist utopias’
catered to a ‘post-war desire for a vitalist and recuperative paganism.’52
A second association was with the emerging tourism industry. The Sydney
Morning Herald remarked that watching Kismet was like travelling magically in
the ‘East’, with ‘passing glimpses of Algiers, Cairo, Ceylon, Batavia or Bombay.’
Joseph Harker, one of the designers for Kismet, was subsequently invited to
design advertising for the Peninsular and Orient Line.53 Asche’s career is
also significant as a further illustration of the de-centred nature of colonial
modernity. Kelly argues that his particular version of modernist Orientalism
was ultimately influenced by his youth in Australia, the Pacific Islands and
Southeast Asia. As he wrote in his biography, ‘I think I got my love of colour
[in Fiji]. Bronze skins clad in orange, saffron, green, blue, sliding along coral
pathways under giant verdant palms against azure seas and skies…surely it
was this feast which gave me the cue for Abdulla’s opening song in Chu Chin
Chow: “Here be oysters stewed in honey – etc.”’54 Asche, then, was not so much
bringing modernity to Australia as ‘bringing it back home, to those lands of
the South Pacific that were his original inspiration.’55 Against this background,
Hurley’s Melanesian travelogue might be seen as the ultimate expression of a
‘Pacific Orientalism’ – Algiers, Cairo, Ceylon, Batavia, Papua.
This ‘Pacific Orientalism’ and the ambience of the contemporary musical
stage are evident in several reviews from the opening season of Pearls and Savages.
Lalie Setton Cray’s review for the Triad, ‘The Shadow Show’, places the film in
the generic context of adventure and romance, and suggests that the central
values of commercial cinema, like those of the contemporary musical and
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 179

dramatic stage, are sensory and visual pleasure, colour and movement, and a
utopian escapism:

This month I have been fascinated by the Robinson Crusoe adventures of

photographer Frank Hurley. He is to be congratulated warmly upon his film,
‘Pearls and Savages’… Captain Hurley lectured in a delightful way on his
adventures and experience in those beautiful islands. It made me personally
long to let down my hair, grab a few beads, and stain myself chocolate. Truly
the primitive conditions are the more honest, besides being the more healthy
and natural. The hand-colouring was remarkable to a degree, and some of the
specimens of Bird of Paradise Plumes, native head-dresses, and wara dancers’
insignia were magnificent… Another great attraction in connection with this
wonder-film was the music. Captain Hurley took gramophone records in the
Islands, and the various chants, wailing dirges, and war dances played by the
orchestra, were exact reproductions. Mr. Emmanuel Aarons, of the Lyceum
Theatre, adapted and orchestrated the quaint score, and with the assistance
of native ornamented drums, the effects were magnificent, and sent the blood
coursing through one’s veins with sheer delight at the uncontrolled madness of
the moment. The Globe orchestra, under the baton of Mr. Higginbotham, is to
be congratulated upon a fine performance… It is like a breath of fresh air to
wander for a while away from the stiff collar and correct conventional phrasings
of life to a land where the days slip away slowly, and the nights are full of magic
and the rhythm of blue, lapping waters. Our thanks to this Robinson Crusoe
man, whose ingenuity has made it possible to do so for this brief period.56

Hurley’s clippings folder in the National Library of Australia indicates the

astonishing range of promotional strategies he employed for the premier
performance, all exploiting the spectacular, exotic and occasionally salacious
quality of the material. The focus as usual was on Hurley’s presence as a
platform personality using a range of stage and screen techniques, including
cine film, monochrome and coloured lantern slides, foyer posters, photographic
enlargements and even displays of native artefacts. An advertisement appearing
in the days leading up to opening night, in Union Theatre’s in-house trade
magazine The Union Photoplayer, uses the language and rhetorical attack of the
fairground spruiker:

You –
Who have heard faint rumours of the wild, unexplored back-country of
Papua!
Who have listened with awe to travellers’ tales of cannibals and poison
darts!
180 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Who have read wonderingly of rare orchids, for which men have died – of
dark forests and fearsome snakes!
Take notice! Captain Frank Hurley has returned from the wildest parts of
Papua, bringing a concise, all-absorbing pictorial record of his trip. This is ‘Pearls
and Savages’, to be screened in Union Theatres.57

Many advertisements played on the contrast between civilization and the

primitive, and appealed to the magic of the screen as a medium of translation
between the two domains:

Come right away from the same old Sydney – into the wonder lands beyond
Cape York! Papua will entrance you…
READER! YOU’RE TOO CIVILISED, THAT’S THE TROUBLE.
MORE THAN A REQUEST – IT’S A COMMAND
SEE ‘PEARLS AND SAVAGES’.58

Outside the Globe in George Street, Union Theatres had placed an

‘indicator’ showing attendances. It was announced that ‘the indicator
ascended to…32,000 by the third sensational week’ and readers were asked,
‘Have you been yet?’ The public were warned that, ‘owing to the tide of
patrons that never stop flowing into the Globe, patrons are particularly
advised to secure and book their seats.’ At the end of the five-week season,
Hurley thanked those ‘thousands of patrons’ who attended the screening of
his ‘Papuan Pictures’, announcing that he was ‘more than delighted with the
reception accorded both photo tour and lecture by newspapers and citizens
alike.’ ‘Both day and night,’ he declared, ‘the Globe Theatre was crowded
with the highest class of patrons.’59
Significantly, Hurley refers to Pearls and Savages here as a ‘lecture’ suggesting
that he did not think of his project solely as a film. One reviewer applauded ‘the
entire absence of subtitles, rendered unnecessary by the excellent explanatory
lecture which Captain Hurley delivers during the screening of his picture.’60
The ‘photo tour’ referred to in the same promotion was a tie-in exhibition
of still photographs that had opened in conjunction with the premier at
the nearby Kodak Salon at 379 George Street. The exhibition of some two
hundred prints and enlargements was opened by the governor of New South
Wales, Sir Walter Davidson, and attended by the Reverend J. Jones, chairman
of the Anglican Board of Missions. The ‘entire costs’ of the exhibition were
defrayed by Kodak, and the proceeds donated to the Australian Board of
Missions and the Catholic Sacred Heart Mission ‘in the areas of which
Captain Hurley spent most of his time.’61 Newspaper reports of the exhibition
focused on the photographs’ scenic beauty and ethnographic value, especially
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 181

those dealing with the stock tropes of popular visual ethnography: native
‘types’, native ceremonies, native industries, exotic locales, and the uncanny
relationship between primitive and modern:

One of the many striking features in the exhibition of photographs of Torres

Strait and Papua…is a collection of native types from the whole of Papua, all
the tribes being represented. The keenest faces are those of the West Papuans,
who are the great builders, and although cannibals are the most advanced in
art. Captain Hurley gives a number of photographs of the carvings of these
cannibals, who as artists, are more restrained than the art extremists of Paris.62

Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainment was episodic in structure,

presenting a series of ‘views’ rather than a coherent narrative, and several
reviewers used the word ‘kaleidoscopic’ to describe the overall effect of his
presentation.63 In imitation of this effect, tie-in articles were organized by a
principle of montage. This underlying principle, which was central to both
the stage performance and print layout, locates Hurley’s visual vocabulary
within the language that Jill Julius Matthews, in her study of Sydney’s embrace
of industrial entertainment in the 1920s, calls ‘vernacular modernism’.64 The
masterly hand-coloured lantern slide he used to introduce Pearls and Savages on
stage (Fig. 5.1) is a composite made from dozens of photographs of individual
native ‘types’, and similar principles were used in the layout of associated
newspaper advertisements and illustrated articles. The large half-toned
illustration captioned ‘Aristocracy of Papua’, appearing in the Sunday Sun
of 9 October 1921, is a black and white combination print of native ‘types’
accompanied by one of Hurley’s tie-in articles whose punning title, ‘Papuan
Snapshots: Almost Every National Type’, announces the formal connections
between text and image. Hurley uses the terms ‘assembly’ and ‘composite’ to
describe this principle, which, again through wordplay, crosses over from his
photographic and screen practice into his writing:

To endeavour to convey anything beyond a most superficial impression of

Papuan types and customs in a single article is impossible… With that fidelity
which photography alone can compass, I recorded types and customs from
almost every quarter of Papua. Now the scattered elements are gathered in a
concentrated composite, they produce a brilliant and amazing assembly.65

The written text plays on the collage principle that pervades the entire media
event in its use of subheadings to juxtapose native ‘types’, each of whom
is presented in a brief descriptive vignette corresponding to a ‘view’: ‘Belle of
Mekeo’, ‘Water Carrier’, ‘Eroro Warrior’, ‘Orokavan Widow’, ‘Japanese Diver’.
182 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Another stage and screen technique that Hurley imitated in his writing
is the slide dissolve. One review described the lanternist’s technique: ‘At the
Globe yesterday, “Pearls and Savages” was accompanied by the Captain’s
own interesting lecture, which was well timed with the screening of each
scene. The film was made even more attractive by the occasional use
of coloured slides, which folded into each other with artistic effect.’66 The
coloured slides were made by an additive colour method known as the
Finlay process, which involved placing a coloured screening plate over
the standard black and white plate during both exposure and printing
on to paper or glass.67 Here, now, is Hurley’s description of one of the
native types, the ‘Widows Pipeclayed and Mournful’, from the article
‘Papuan Snapshots’:

In far Membare I visited a small village called Embeo. The moon was just peeping
above the palm crests, and the fireflies were playing in scintillating swarms over
the mirror of the river…when a party of ghosts came from out a dingy hut and
squatted around a fire. This coterie of white spectres – like animated marble –
were divine studies in the nude.
I left the fireflies and told my interpreter to command the ghosts to remain.
Distance, like moonlight, lends enchantment to many a scene. The living Venuses,
on closer investigation, resolved into evil-looking old ladies heavily pipe-clayed
from crown to toe.68

As the technical term ‘resolve’ indicates, Hurley is drawing here on screen

practices familiar to his readers from the theatre and music hall: the tableau
vivant, often associated with sexual titillation, the pantomime’s transformation
scene, and the lanternist’s dissolving of one slide projection into another, the
basis of the popular lantern shows about ghosts called phantasmagoria. And
in the finest music hall tradition, the humour in turning Venuses into witches is
ultimately at the expense of the audience and their host, who literally cannot
believe their eyes.
After opening at the Globe, Hurley took this version of Pearls and Savages
on a national tour, utilizing the same rail and shipping routes that he had
used during the 1920 tour of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice. The often undated
press clippings in his files indicate that stand-in lecturers were used at some
performances, as had been the case during the earlier season. Between
January and April 1922 he performed at the Strand Theatres in Newcastle
and Wagga Wagga, the Princess Theatre in Launceston, the Geelong Theatre,
West’s Olympia in Adelaide (where Sir Douglas and Lady Mawson were in
attendance), the Paramount Theatre in Mordialloc, and several theatres in
Melbourne and its suburbs, including the New Strand Theatre in Bourke
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 183

Street, the Renown Theatre in Elsternwick, the St Kilda Theatre, and the
Rivoli Theatre in Camberwell.
In March 1922, after returning from the interstate tour, Hurley eventually
fulfilled his obligations to the Anglican Board of Missions, delivering two
films, one on Papua and another on Torres Strait, together with 174 negatives.
The ABM’s Cinema Committee assembled from them an illustrated lecture
of its own titled The Heart of New Guinea, which toured regional towns in 1923
and 1924. Disappointed by the preponderance of travelogue material and
Hurley’s failure adequately to record the Mission’s ‘really spiritual work’, the
Anglican Archbishop eventually pronounced the material ‘absolutely useless
as a means of propaganda’.69 When the exhibition prints deteriorated, Hurley
was not invited to replace them.

With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua:

The Second Australian Season of 1922–23
Hurley’s planning of the second Papuan expedition was a tour-de-force. Its centre-
piece was the use of aeroplanes, both as a platform for aerial photography
and as props in his pictures, but he was also successful in articulating his
project to a number of important new sponsors and institutions. His aim was
to return to Papua, ‘to further augment “Pearls & Savages” by eliminating
scenic sections & replacing them with sensational & unique matter.’70 To this
end he planned to film in the relatively remote regions of the Kikori Delta,
and the Fly and Strickland rivers, flowing from Lake Murray into the Gulf
of Papua. Following the business model used by Shackleton and Perris for the
Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, a new company was created especially
for the project: called World’s Picture Exploration but also known as the Pearls
and Savages Syndicate, it secured some four thousand pounds in investments.
The principal shareholders were Stuart Doyle, director of the Union Theatres
chain, John Rouse of Kodak, and Sir Hugh Denison of the Sun.71 Hurley
also persuaded the wealthy Sydney businessman and aeroplane enthusiast
Lebbeus Hordern, whose family owned Sydney’s largest department store, the
Hordern Emporium, to loan him two biplane seaplanes: an American Curtiss
Seagull biplane flying-boat and an English Short Shrimp biplane seaplane.
His pilot was Captain Andrew Lang, a former commander in the Australian
Flying Corps. Hurley boasted that this was the best-equipped expedition ever
to leave for Papua and he featured the new technologies in his publicity. He
again negotiated with the Sun for a second series of illustrated travel articles –
the dozen or so articles appeared between 21 October 1922 and February
1923, and some were delivered by a wireless provided by another sponsor,
Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) (AWA).
184 Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity

In promoting the first version of Pearls and Savages, Hurley had exploited
the language of popular ethnography but had as yet developed no formal
connection with a scientific institution such as a natural history museum.
This type of association had proven valuable in the past both to professional
scientists venturing into ethnographic film making, like Baldwin Spencer in
Australia, and to commercial filmmakers like Paul J. Rainey in the United
States. On 1 July 1922, Hurley wrote to the director of the Australian Museum
in Sydney, Charles Anderson, informing him of his plans and regretting that
on his previous expedition he had been ‘debarred from securing relics that
would have been of great value and interest to the museum.’72 This time he
wrote, ‘I am quite prepared to collect and gather data…gratuitously, if you…
will supply me with…official authority.’ Hurley boasted of his innovative use
of aircraft and hinted at further benefits for the museum:

Practically every mile of country flown over will be new and wherever possible a
landing will be made to study the natives… We will have unique opportunities of
securing collections of relics and obtaining data about a people that are known
to exist in this region, but of whom very little has been seen.

Anderson not only gave Hurley the museum’s imprimatur, but approved
leave for one of his scientific staff, ichthyologist and taxonomist Allan
McCulloch, to accompany the expedition as its ‘official’ collector and
advisor on natural history.
Another of Hurley’s important commercial associations was with the
well-established Sydney-based shipping line, Burns Philp & Co. Hurley had
travelled to and from Torres Strait in 1921 with Burns Philp, and for the
second expedition one of the aircraft was sent on their freighter, the Marsina,
supervised by Lang, while Hurley and McCulloch went aboard the steamer
Morinda with the smaller of the two aircraft as deck cargo. Although they do
not appear to have been a formal sponsor of the expedition, Burns Philp
linked Hurley’s travelogue project to the nascent tourist industry, in which the
shipping company was set to become a key player.

With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua: The Film

Hurley returned to Sydney in February 1923, and began combining lantern
slides and footage from both expeditions to produce a second edition of Pearls
and Savages, now renamed With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua. It opened
at Sydney’s Lyceum and Lyric Theatres on 6 October 1923, then went on a
national tour that included Adelaide and Melbourne, opening at Melbourne’s
New Gaiety Theatre on 14 June 1924. The new travelogue was promoted in
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 185

some venues as The Paradise of Papua and Into the Paradise of Unknown Papua, and
agency lecturers were used, as Hurley was by now in the United States.
As we have seen, the film component of the stage production survives today
in a version edited in 1979 by Andrew Pike for the National Film Archive.
Although it appears to take With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua as its copy-
text, the 1979 version is titled Pearls and Savages, misleadingly presenting the
evolving project and its changing textual forms as a single, stable text. In the
absence of Hurley’s lecture, which has not survived, Pike has added inter-
titles, some informative, others melodramatic, drawn from the contemporary
handbills and from the text of Hurley’s book, Pearls and Savages, published
during the North American tour in 1924.73 The sequences of cine film are
appropriately broken up with still photographs to take the place of lantern
slides.74 Although it cannot be taken as definitive, this modern edition, Pearls
and Savages (1979), is valuable in so far as it gives us some insight into what With
the Headhunters of Unknown Papua may have looked like in performance.
While it belongs to the genres of the travelogue and popular ethnography,
the film’s imagery and rhetoric strongly evoke the adventure stories and
sensation melodramas that were popular on the stage in Hurley’s youth, and
the Orientalist musicals popular during and after the Great War, with their
emphasis on colour, movement, dance and exotic sexuality. The inter-title
to the prologue announces that the audience will be taken ‘Through jungle
waterways that thread the swamp in an endless maze.’ The camera acts as the
eye of the photographer-explorer, who sits in the stern of a canoe as natives
paddle upstream on a winding river through dense overhanging jungle – a
common establishing shot in contemporary travelogues. The audience shares
the explorer’s line of sight in a visual experience similar to a fairground ride.
This is followed by a sequence of stills from Hurley’s photographs showing
native ‘types’: native belles, the warrior, the native dandy, the native grotesque,
and more native belles. An inter-title now introduces Captain Frank Hurley,
dressed in a tweed suit and holding a globe of the world on which he points to
‘The region of our forthcoming adventures.’
The first half of Pearls and Savages (1979) presents Hurley’s voyage among
the islands of Torres Strait, beginning with Thursday Island, ‘The Isle of
Pearls’. These early sequences have no narrative beyond that of a travelogue’s
characteristic sequence of ‘views’, and illustrate such stock themes as pearl
diving, the traditional arts, crafts and dances of the Torres Strait Islands, and
the ‘sublime wonders of the coral gardens’. The Papuan section has a much
stronger narrative of adventure and exploration. It begins with an arrival scene
in which the seaplanes feature in a tale of first contact between the stone age
and the air age, and climaxes in the party’s encounter with the ‘headhunters’
of Lake Murray. The arrival sequence, filmed in Hanuabada and Elevala
186 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

villages on the outskirts of Port Moresby, makes no reference to the town, and
misleadingly presents Hurley’s party as pioneering explorers. Native society
appears to exist in what anthropologists term ‘traditional time’, as if it were
unaffected by contact with the West. Hurley’s expedition vessel, the Eureka
rides at anchor, the seaplanes are unloaded from a Burns Philp steamer and
the white men appear as god-like custodians of the new technology.
The Seagull and the Short Shrimp arrived in Port Moresby aboard the
Marsina on 17 August 1922. Captain Lang and his mechanic spent the next
few days assembling and testing the aircraft, then, at 10 a.m. on 5 September
1922, Lang took off from Port Moresby Harbour – the first flight of
an aircraft in Papua or New Guinea. Hurley’s photograph of the two sea
planes on the harbour with the village of Elevala in the background looks
remarkably like the stage set for a tableau in a sensation melodrama or a silent
adventure film, complete with a cast of native extras. His diary entry not only
confirms the theatrical origin of his vision, but also the contrivance evident
in his photographs: ‘The Seagull & Fleetwings were both towed across to the
village & anchored in a small crescent shaped harbourage… No better stage
setting could I have desired than this remarkable site… The machines were
brought close under the houses whilst their occupants swarmed out onto the
veranda stages to look on. On one of these stages I found a splendid site for
photographing the subsequent manoeuvres.’75
Beginning the next section of the film, Hurley’s ship, the Eureka, penetrates
the Fly and Strickland rivers to Lake Murray. With no sign of contemporary
towns or plantations, the landscape of Papua is represented by dense,
overhanging jungle. Hurley wrote in his diary on 9 November 1922, ‘Today’s
run has been particularly beautiful, the river banks now are like wondrous
drop scenes & stage settings. Mammoth trees overwhelmed by vines &
carrying great burdens of staghorns, orchids & countless innumerable parasite
growths…a gorgeous fanciful stage setting.’ In a carefully managed tale of
‘exploration’, armed white explorers and their ‘boys’ penetrate the jungle and
head-high grass, alert for attack. An inter-title announces, ‘To the homes of
the wild denizens of Lake Murray, into the citadels of headhunters.’ A skull
is posted as a warning to the explorers. Hurley is shown holding the skull,
laughing at it, and replacing it with trade beads. The armed party penetrates
more jungle, arrives at a ravi,* carries camera equipment inside and films its
secrets. Outside, McCulloch displays ‘skull trophies’ and other curios. The
episode concludes with two armed white men retreating from a shower of
spears, though no natives are shown throwing them.

* A Papuan house or dwelling.

 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 187

In the film’s final sequence, the seaplanes return to Urama and Kaimare
villages on the mouth of the Kikori River in the Gulf of Papua. This was a
substantial recasting of the narrative, since the seaplanes had been sent back
to Thursday Island prior to the Eureka sailing up the Fly River, and they took
no part in the narrative climax of the story Hurley was crafting about the
discovery and encounter with the cannibal tribes at Lake Murray. As we will
see, this recasting is apparent in the magazine serializations and published
book, written in the United States, but it is not certain that the rearrangement
had been made as early as the second Sydney season. In this final sequence,
Hurley uses the planes to great effect, and his diaries confirm that in a number
of scenes he handled them as props in his ‘adventure’ story long after they had
ceased to have any real use. In one of the last, most brilliantly staged action
sequences of the film, large war canoes converge on the planes and swirl
around them in mock hostility. Hurley’s diaries reveal that this was far from
spontaneous. Ever the perfectionist, he carefully choreographed the sequence,
filming it several times, much to the bewilderment of the local people, and
used the threat of force to secure their cooperation, allowing them to believe
that he represented the territorial administration:

Since my landing it has been my desire to have a canoe regatta. Yesterday I called
all the native village constables together & asked them to inform the people.
As nothing resulted, the Coxswain Veiaki & myself went round the villages
with the constables offering payment of…tobacco & threats of force from the
government if the canoes did not come out at once. This latter had the desired
effect & gradually the canoes began to row in… ‘The Seagull’ was taxied to
a distant point, & as she came up to ‘The Eureka’ the canoes followed in her
wake, shouting and paddling wildly. It was a magnificent display, especially when
the canoes formed up in a line & made figure eights around the Seagull & the
Eureka. As a present each man was given a stick of tobacco.76

A final inter-title announces, ‘We depart for civilization with many regrets:
convinced that the simple happy life of these carefree children of nature holds
much that the superficiality of modern civilization has lost to us.’ Although
they were by now damaged by exposure of their fragile wood and cloth bodies
to the tropical climate and sent home, ignominiously, on a Burns Philp steamer,
the planes are shown taking off into a final sunset.

Urban Entertainment and Colonial Governance

From the perspective of postcolonial theory, With the Headhunters of Unknown
Papua would appear to be an exemplary instance of colonial discourse.
188 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

As Hurley deploys them, aerial and cinematic vision are the master tropes
of a modern, colonial way of seeing. The viewer has extended to him the
privileges of social modernity: mobility, vision, the ability to see into the lives
of primitive things without himself being seen. The native, by contrast, is
embodied, visible, and trapped in traditional time, the object rather than the
subject of modern cognition. What is perhaps most striking about With the
Headhunters of Unknown Papua, however, is that its content eschews all reference
to contemporary settler Papua, maintaining an impression, more often than
not misleading, of first contact between Hurley’s expedition and the ‘Stone
Age’ inhabitants of ‘unexplored New Guinea’. There is nothing in it of the
active modernization of Papua that features so prominently in government
reports of the period, nor does the film engage directly with the issues, widely
debated at the time, relating to colonial governance, even though Hurley does
engage with these issues at length in some of his articles for the Sun.
Hurley’s filming in Papua coincided with a period of active promotion
by the Australian Territorial administration of a white settler society based
on a plantation economy. A Royal Commission had been appointed in
August 1906, and its findings recommended sweeping changes in Australian
colonial policy, seeking deliberately to foster the development of a white
settler society based on plantation agriculture. In The Plantation Dream (1996),
Pacific historian D. C. Lewis explains that the Report of the Royal Commission,
published in 1907, was ‘a clarion call to investors’, and as an encouragement
to settlement its influence was ‘immediate and considerable’. 77 The Report
recommended that Papua be advertised to attract white settlers and
investors, and to overcome the current prejudices about its climate and living
conditions. The reports and other publications that followed were intended to
affirm that the territory was potentially rich, and also beautiful, safe, healthy
and liveable for people of British stock. Sir Hubert Murray, who was then
acting administrator, engaged Irish-born novelist and travel writer Beatrice
Grimshaw to write promotional material advocating the development of a
plantation society. The direct, instrumental relation between her texts and
colonial governance is therefore of a different order to Hurley’s travelogue.
In 1909 the Commonwealth published Grimshaw’s promotional booklet
Papua the Marvellous, the Country of Chances, which addressed potential British
investors. In 1911 she published another work of travel and propaganda,
The New New Guinea, written with editorial assistance by Murray, who was
now lieutenant governor.78
This promotional literature coincided with and helped, locally, to promote
an immense boom in demand worldwide for tropical agricultural products,
especially copra and rubber, which caused a dramatic increase in plantation
settlement throughout the world, but especially in Southeast Asia. The Papua
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 189

shown in government literature published during the years of the plantation

boom is very different to the Papua of Hurley’s travelogue. Hurley shows nothing
of either Port Moresby or settler society, focusing instead on the picturesque
villages of Hanuabada and Elevala, with their seemingly traditional customs
and architecture. As a result, the film appears to take place in ‘traditional’ time,
a convention resembling the narrative time commonly used in contemporary
ethnographies. Away from the unseen Port Moresby, Hurley shows his hired
vessel, the Eureka, or native canoes penetrating overhanging walls of dense
jungle. By contrast, Murray’s Papua or British New Guinea (1912) includes
photographs of the clear felling and burning off of rainforest, a powerful
image of settler ‘progress’. Where Hurley photographed natives in traditional
time, government publications often show them engaged in the routines of
modern labour. The Territory of Papua Annual Report 1914–1917, for example,
includes photographs of native workers operating machinery intended to
impress potential investors of their capacity to learn modern tasks and to work
tractably under modern conditions.
Although rigorously excluded from his film and still photographs, the
plantation economy does intrude into Hurley’s diaries. On the Fly River,
for example – which he depicts in the film as the site of his most intrepid
exploration – he visited the Mediri coconut and rubber plantation, owned by
Papuan Industries:

…we dropped anchor a [sic] plantation known as MEDIRI… The single figure
of a white man looked inexpressibly lonely & outcast in this dreary place… He is
married to a native woman… The plantation impressed me as a failure. The soil
is much too clayey & heavy to produce coconuts & the rain excessive. The rubber
trees were lean & sapling like, though they have been planted for 7 years. The
area of the plantation is 400 acres & it is a mystery however it produces sufficient
revenue to warrant keeping it going… beyond this, the ceaseless routine of the
plantation – the interminable rain – mud & isolation.79

The contrast between his film and diary suggests that as a film maker
Hurley made deliberate artistic and commercial decisions about what was
entertaining. While the adventurer himself might be depicted heroically, the
native subject was confined to traditional time and the plantation economy was
deemed unromantic, and therefore unsuitable as the subject of a commercial
entertainment. It could, however, be treated in Hurley’s often polemical articles
for the Sun and Brisbane Courier Mail, which confirm that he was well aware of
current debates about colonial policy.80 Hurley offended the advocates of the
plantation economy by siding with Murray’s attempt to shield native labour
from exploitation. On his second expedition, he stayed at Government House
190 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

at Murray’s invitation but was in a state of constant hostility with both the
planter establishment and lower ranking colonial officials. He wrote in his diary
on 6 September 1922: ‘I noticed a certain amount of cold hospitality existing
towards me amongst a certain class in town – the planters. This doubtless
because of my attitude in the press towards them. I being a whole hearted
supporter of the Government and defending them against the accusations and
slander of these exploiters.’
Despite his being ‘a wholehearted supporter of the Government’,
however, neither Hurley nor his texts can simply be aligned with the colonial
administration. In January 1923, at the conclusion of his second expedition, he
became embroiled in an official inquiry into his conduct following accusations
of ‘irregularities’ in his method of collecting ethnographic material in the
Lake Murray region. The correspondence relating to the inquiry confirms
that Hurley was largely innocent of the charges and the victim, as he always
insisted, of petty officialdom, but it also reveals the predominantly commercial
nature of his ‘expedition’ and the way he used the apparatus of colonial
administration for his own purposes.81 The original complaint against Hurley
was made by a missionary at Daru, who accused him of using armed force to
secure ethnographic specimens against the wishes of the natives. Suspicions
were apparently confirmed by photographs published in the Sun and Brisbane
Courier Mail showing Hurley’s party carrying arms. Murray had in fact
instructed them to do so, but the photographs equally suggest that Hurley
played up the dramatic potential of showing his party bearing arms into the
‘citadels of the headhunters’.
How, then, can the travelogue’s ambiguous relation to colonial
governance best be described? Writing of similar travelogues made in the
German territories in Africa and New Guinea in the 1910s and 1920s,
Assenka Oksiloff argues that their reception demonstrates the real though
sometimes variable link between ‘the political sphere, mass entertainment,
and pro-colonialist propaganda.’82 She describes a spectrum of films, from
those commissioned by colonial societies or companies actively trading
in the colonies and screened before audiences of potential emigrants and
investors, to more commercial films made by adventurers like Hurley
who were often at odds with colonial administrators, and whose generic
conventions were more oriented to entertainment than propaganda. An
example of the former type is State Minister Solf Visits the German Colony of
Togo (1913). It is documentary in style, recording natural assets such as
tropical forests, natives working in coffee plantations, and various kinds of
spectacle, including ceremonial visits by the minister and staged enactments
of native dances. The films of Hans Schomburgk, by contrast, were
made for popular audiences. Schomburgk was an adventurer-cameraman
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 191

whose relationship with colonial authorities was often uneasy. His films
adopt a variety of generic conventions, including popular ethnographic
presentations of native ‘types’ and ceremonies, and even slapstick
comedy, often with racist motivations. These travelogues were centred on
Schomburgk himself as ‘traveler, researcher, hunter, and cultural expert’.
The Goddess of Wangora, or A White Woman Among Cannibals, for example, was
shown at the Philharmonic Hall in London in 1914.83 While these German
travel films represent a spectrum of relations to colonial governance,
Oksiloff nonetheless argues they must still be thought of as constructing a
more or less ‘standardized and… pro-colonialist viewer.’84 Hurley’s relations
with the Australian administration of Papua and the style of his travelogue
are closer to Schomburgk’s, combining entertainment and information,
and representing Papua as a field for adventure and entertainment rather
than as a scene of active colonization and modernization. Nonetheless,
they can fairly be described as being broadly complicit with colonialism
and address what Oksiloff usefully calls the ‘pro-colonialist viewer’.

Touring the United States with The Lost Tribe: 1923–24

Even before its second Australian season had finished, Hurley arranged for
stand-in lecturers to complete the final performances, and personally took
With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua to the United States, where it was
renamed The Lost Tribe (Fig. 5.2). He was now at the very peak of his career,
aspiring not only to plan his own stunts and tour his shows nationally, but
also to take them personally into the world’s largest markets, as Mawson had
tried to do with mixed success some years earlier. As McGregor points out,
Hurley was taking quite a risk. Armed with a portfolio of prints, steel trunks
packed with lantern slides, sound recordings, several copies of the film With
the Headhunters of Unknown Papua, and a selection of spears, drums and other
artefacts to be used as props, Hurley headed first for Hollywood, the centre
of the world’s feature film industry, and then on to Boston and New York.85
His aim was to secure the North American tour he had originally planned in
collaboration with Lowell Thomas. Six weeks before leaving for the United
States, he had boasted to Mawson, ‘I will be in negotiation with the largest
buyers and distributors in the world.’86
In Hollywood, Hurley carried introductions from Stuart Doyle of Union
Theatres to the heads of Paramount, Universal Films and United Artists.
From the start, the film was well enough received but contracts proved
elusive. Only United Artists offered a percentage deal, which Hurley deemed
unacceptable. The problems were partly logistical. Hurley later described the
difficulties of breaking into the vast American market in his evidence to the
192 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

1927 Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry: a North American

tour ‘would have required something like 100 lecturers to travel with the
film…or I would have had to stay there and travel with it. To do that I should
have been required to spend the rest of my lifetime there.’87 Perhaps more
importantly, though, as McGregor observes, Headhunters was not quite what
Hollywood producers were looking for. To begin with it was a travelogue,
a format whose ‘educational’ purpose was now difficult to sell. Even so,
Hurley’s own brand of sensationalism belonged to a slightly earlier era, and
his work could not compete for pure entertainment value with the modern
genres that now dominated Hollywood cinema, especially romance. A year
earlier, the American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty had a similar
disappointment in the reception of Nanook of the North (1922), his film about
Canada’s Inuit people. Paramount’s Jesse Lasky, who met Hurley and praised
his film, had encouraged Flaherty to make a film for Paramount about Pacific
islanders. Set in Samoa, Moana (1926) has been compared to Hurley’s Papuan
films, yet McGregor rightly points out that Flaherty achieved a more modern,
romanticized ethnography, whereas Hurley was unable to move beyond the
older forms of the travelogue.88
From Hollywood, Hurley went on to New York, where his photographs
and showmanship caught the eye of the press. He later recalled, ‘I arrived
there with a glorious collection of press pictures, the like of which New York
papermen had never seen.’ He also found the perfect ‘hook’. Brandishing
passages from his diaries about the people of Lake Murray, he appealed to
popular racial stereotypes of the 1920s: ‘It seemed as if we had discovered
one of the lost tribes of Israel. That was news. Big news. It kindled the
imagination of the young Jewish reporters and soon flamed up in front page
headlines.’89
Hurley’s success in the eastern United States market was substantially
built upon his personal performance as an interviewee, his consummate
marketing of his own ‘biographical legend’, and his providing perfect
copy and images for the periodical press. The American reception of The
Lost Tribe illustrates how cultural production in Australia in the 1920s was
embedded within a complex network of globalizing commercial relationships
in which Australia functioned as a second-order colonial power, marketing
exotic subjects at second hand to Britain and the United States. Discussing
a range of films made about the south and western Pacific between 1920
and 1950, Stuart Cunningham suggests that Australia has long functioned
as ‘a kind of linkman in a chain of representational command from first
world metropolises to the alterity of the third world, relaying images of the
other through delegated authority.’90 One illustration of this ‘delegation’ is
the article, ‘Captain Hurley’s Adventures’, which appeared in the New York
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 193

Literary Digest International Book Review. Introducing Hurley as an Australian

version of the American backwoodsman, the reviewer considers that ‘his
pictures and his stories have been a tremendous contribution to the “literature
of escape”’:

Not many months ago there appeared unheralded in New York a strongly built
man of thirty-four, bronzed and lean, with the look of a pioneer in his eye and the
cock of an adventurer in his broad shoulders. He came from the other side of the
world and brought under his brawny arm a portfolio…filled with photographs
the like of which none had ever seen before…
Born in a frontier country, and having led a life of adventure from the time he
was twelve, he finds it difficult to understand the need for ‘escape,’ which bears
heavily upon the men and women whose lives are bounded by apartment houses,
telephones, steaming baths and motors…
‘I can’t bear your cities’, he says frankly… ‘I’d be more comfortable in a
cannibal’s grass-house.’91

Reproduction rights to his photographs alone netted Hurley £2,000, and the
Hearst press ran picture stories nationwide in 30 of its papers. Hurley’s celebrity
in the mass media was based on his exotic appeal as a professional Australian,
mediating the colonial frontier to a metropolitan market. Like America’s own
adventurer-cameraman, Paul J. Rainey, he was lauded at an Explorers’ Club
lunch, and invited to show his film to the National Geographic Society in
Washington, while the country’s most prestigious paper, the New York Times,
ran a feature in its magazine section.92
As a result of this widespread publicity, Hurley was approached by the
New York publisher George Putnam to prepare the illustrated travel book,
Pearls and Savages: Adventures in the Air, on Land and Sea – in New Guinea. Putnam
had been so impressed by the photographs he had seen in the New York Times
that he asked Hurley to provide a text quickly before he left New York. The
book begins with a foreword written by Putnam in which he introduces Hurley
to an international rather than Australian readership:

Now and then there appears out of the confusion of our complex and noisy
civilization a being seemingly strayed from some more romantic day…the figure
of a man who desires solitude and the experience of penetrating unexplored
country, stands forth unique and somewhat incongruous.
Such a one is Captain Frank Hurley, of Australia…
In ‘Pearls and Savages’ Captain Hurley has set down the vivid record of these
alluring New Guinea explorations. Its text is calculated to appeal to every one of
us for whom the story of modern adventure holds any measure of interest.93
194 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Locked in a hotel room for ten days with a staff of stenographers, Hurley used
his diaries to dictate around seven thousand words a day. The book Pearls and
Savages was written and published in America. It appeared in New York and
London in 1924, where it received substantial and highly positive reviews both
for the technical excellence of its illustrations and the quality of its letterpress.94
There was no Australian edition, although it was subsequently translated into
German, Dutch and Swedish.

Elaborating the Narrative of The Lost Tribe

What made Hurley’s Pearls and Savages so successful as a multimedia project was
therefore its capacity to evolve in different forms and iterations in response to
changing regional, national and international markets. In the United States,
where the stage version of his travelogue seemed less innovative and was less
successful than it had been in Australia, Hurley astutely exploited other media
platforms, especially the illustrated travel book and the illustrated magazine
essay. He also returned to a form that he had been developing through his
relationship with the Sydney Sun, the serialized travel article. Here, in fact, was
the distinctive success of the American tour.
Although not a great reader, Hurley was drawn to the adventure fiction
of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers like Jules Verne, H.
Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad: while returning
to South Georgia in 1917 to re-shoot location footage lost in the wreck of
Endurance, he spent much of the voyage reading Rider Haggard’s She.95 The
language and narrative conventions of these ripping yarns, which themselves
reflect conventions of both the popular stage and the periodical press, are
especially evident in the serializations of his travel writing in the North
American press. The Los Angeles Metropolitan introduced them as ‘a tale
of adventure rivaling the most fanciful Conrad narrative of lost cannibal
tribes and unknown lands.’96 The new title chosen for the travelogue’s North
American tour, The Lost Tribe, may have been meant to resonate with Doyle’s
‘Professor Challenger’ novel, The Lost World, which appeared in 1912. An
editorial introducing the series, ‘My Adventures Among Cannibals’, in the
Boston Sunday Post seems deliberately to allude to it: ‘Penetrating into a
jungle of the Lost World, Captain Hurley accomplished one of the most
daring adventures in modern times.’
Although some of these articles show signs of editing by American
journalists, it is remarkable how little Hurley’s prose changes from his
diaries through their various newspaper incarnations to their eventual
publication in book form. The following passage, for example, cited
here from a major North American serialization in McClure’s Magazine in
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 195

1924, remains virtually unchanged in its many printings in these different

genres:

We made a beautiful landing right alongside the Eureka, which, this evening,
floats with her electric lights ablaze, only a few hundred yards away from as
weird and ancient a village as can be found on earth. Seeing the great gaping
dubus† and ravis silhouetted against the moon, and the Seagull reposing in the
moon’s track on the water, I seem to be living in some uncanny drama created
by the imagination of Jules Verne. Here the most ancient and primitive forms
of human life have welcomed to the shores of a time-old lake the motor ship
and the airplane of civilized whites. There is something eerie about the whole
experience – it is as if we had entered another planet.97

There were, though, some significant changes made to Hurley’s narrative of

the expedition in both print and stage formats that were to have important
consequences. While Hurley’s many newspaper and magazine articles drew
more or less verbatim on his field diaries, either he or his US editors were
clearly beginning to shape the narrative of the expedition away from the
episodic structure of a travelogue toward the more coherent narrative of a
ripping yarn that would end up as the published book, Pearls and Savages. But
there was a major structural problem with his material: his two most gripping
episodes were the use of the seaplanes early in the expedition, between Port
Morseby and Kaimare, and the search for and encounter with the people of
the Lake Murray region – the so-called lost tribe. The problem was that these
moments in the story did not connect: by the time Hurley arrived at Lake
Murray, the aeroplanes had been sent back to Thursday Island.
In the article, ‘My Adventures Among Cannibals’, published in the Boston
Sunday Post, Hurley – or his editor – substantially enhanced the literary quality
of the diaries, making them read more like a science fiction tale by H. G. Wells.
When Hurley takes up the narrative in his own voice, the aeroplanes are made
to seem central not just to the early part of the expedition, but to its major
project, the discovery and encounter with the lost tribe at Lake Murray:

New Guinea is a land stranger than the exaggerated romancing of fiction. There
are still vast unexplored regions within the heart of the island, where prehistoric
creatures dwell, unchanged and far removed from what we call civilization…
Finding it impossible to proceed on foot, I equipped a second expedition with
seaplanes and set out on what surely was the strangest of the many adventures
of my life.

† Papuan long house.

196 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

After many harassing experiences in the air, owing to the turbulent conditions
above the swamps, we at last reached the realm of this lost world. We might have
been flying above the desolate plains and swamps of the planet Mars.98

The seaplanes – not just the one that had actually been used at Kaimare
but also the second one that remained unused at Port Morseby – are now
instrumental in the explorers’ penetration of the lost world, and are deployed
militarily in their armed encounter with the cannibals:

For a fortnight we sought out the head hunters, penetrating solitudes where no
white man ever before had reached. But the quarry disappeared like the vanishing
mist over the great lake… I decided the planes might offer us additional protection
and at the same time aid in frightening the cannibals into submission.
Ten days later we flew into the heart of the jungle. Swooping down on a
village, we landed on the lake near the scene of our first near-disaster. Vast hordes
of cannibals rushed out to greet us. Some waded into the lake; others swam and
others paddled out in the great war canoes.

Hurley had long-since dispatched the seaplanes to Thursday Island. They

did not reach Lake Murray, but now, an episode derived from the landing at
Kaimare is transposed to Lake Murray:

Planes Regarded as Demons

With difficulty we forced them to remain away from the planes by keeping the
propeller blades running. To our surprise the head hunters evinced no hostility,
and greeted us with ovation of ‘Keahmoo!’ ‘Keahmoo!’ That we later learned
meant that they would not harm us as they believed we were gods come down
from the clouds!
Evidently the machines were regarded as flying demons, for each evening,
amid great ceremonies, processions came out to the planes and placed burnt
offerings of pigs on the cockpits as sacrifices.

Hurley’s seaplane had indeed been regarded as a god and propitiated with a
sacrificial pig – but that was at the entirely peaceful village of Kaimare early
in the expedition. There was only one plane and one pig, and the plane was
not used in a military capacity. In London in 1914, Douglas Mawson had been
shocked to learn from his agent that images of his ship leaving the pack-ice
might be used to represent its entering the pack for the sake of ‘amusement’.
Hurley, ever the showman, needed no such lessons.
Whether the text of the Boston Sunday Post article was Hurley’s work or
that of an editor, the enhancement to the narrative was clear, and it was also
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 197

adopted in the narrative arrangement of both the illustrated travel book, Pearls
and Savages, and in The Lost Tribe in its North American stage performances. This
is striking proof that the ontology of the travelogue bears little resemblance to
later concepts of authorship and textuality. These alterations to the narrative
were adopted wholesale when The Lost Tribe appeared at Carnegie Hall in
New York on 17, 22 and 26 February 1924.
Hurley was represented in New York by the agent James B. Pond of West
43rd St. The handbills describe his performance as a lecture, ‘Illustrated with
Motion Pictures and Color Views’, and note that it was introduced by Carl
E. Arkeley (Fig. 5.3). The programme began with a musical ‘Overture’ with
‘Ward-Stephens at the Organ’, performing ‘Melodies from the heart of New
Guinea…accurately transcribed by Mr Ward-Stephens from phonographic
recordings made by Captain Hurley’. The first part of the programme was
a lecture on the Torres Strait Islands and parts of New Guinea – essentially
the original Sydney version of Pearls and Savages. After intermission, the
second lecture described Hurley’s second expedition, ‘Through the Jungle
waterways to the Home of the Sambio Headhunters.’ The subheadings of
the programme clearly indicate that the alterations to the narrative that
would appear a few months later in the Boston Sunday Post article had been
made here for the stage presentation, apparently both to Hurley’s lecture
and to the running order of the films and lantern slides, with the seaplane
playing an active role in the climactic episode, the discovery and encounter
with the Lost Tribe at Lake Murray:

Through the Jungle waterways to the Home of the Sambio Headhunters

The Lecture – Part II
Discharging the seaplanes at Port Moresby – Transports of the Stone Age
and of the Twentieth Century meet for the first time – Science and Savagedom –
The first New Guinea flight – into the tropic storm – Lost above the clouds –
A Martian landscape… The ambush – A narrow escape – The seaplane locates
the village of the Sambio Headhunters – We establish friendly relations –
Babylonian types – Sacrifices to the Seaplanes – The temple of mysteries – The
Holy of Holies and the sacred Kopivari…

The New York handbill indicates that at some point in the post-production
life of With the Headhunters of Unknown Papua, the running order of the films
and lantern slides was altered away from the originary order of events so as
to bring the role of the seaplane(s) forward from their actual use at Kaimare
early in the expedition to play a key role in the climactic narrative of events at
Lake Murray. It is not clear when, if ever, an absolutely stable version of the
performance ‘text’ was achieved, although it is likely that by the time he set off
198 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

with slides and cine film in hand for the United States, these two visual media
at least were settled into a reasonably final running order. This is certainly the
order Pike adopted for his 1979 restoration. That order may even have been
settled as early as the end of the second Sydney season, when the performance
was left to stand-in lecturers after Hurley departed for the United States. He
must have reasoned that there would be little or no chance to re-edit his
films while on tour. But as the American tour suggests, the physical form and
running order of the ‘pictures’ was left sufficiently ambiguous for Hurley still to
make substantial alterations to the narrative that surrounded them, both in his
lectures and in the various tie-in texts. For this reason, while the physical form
of the travelogue probably did eventually settle into something like a fixed
running order, the interpretations that could be built around it during a live
performance or for interviews with the press remained fluid and dynamic.

Hurley Strikes Criticism at Carnegie Hall, New York

While these elaborations of the narrative played to the interests of magazine
readers, Hurley’s cavalier attitude to ‘ethnographic verisimilitude’ did not
escape notice. New York had long been the centre of ethnographic film
making, with its powerful institutions, such as the American Museum of
Natural History, its major performance venues, such as the Explorers’ Club
and Carnegie Hall, and its influential agencies, such as the Lee Keedick
Agency. Since its cautious adoption at the Museum of Natural History a
decade earlier, ethnographic film making had enjoyed an uneasy relationship
with the scientific establishment because of its alleged sensationalism and
fakery. Hurley had already experienced the fault lines between science and
entertainment, notably in his sometimes difficult professional relationships
with Mawson and Bean. In New York, however, he was working in a media
environment of unprecedented sophistication. While there was pressure on
one side – from Hollywood and the popular print media – to present his
Papuan films and photographs as an entertainment – there was equal scrutiny
from a sceptical scientific and documentary film-making establishment.
Carl E. Arkeley, who chaired Hurley’s performances at Carnegie Hall, was
himself a successful independent film maker, and by 1924 had risen to the
post of curator at the American Museum of Natural History. In that capacity
he had recently published a number of articles in the New York press on
the issue of scientific accuracy in travelogues. 99 Hurley’s articles would
now appear in a number of these periodicals, including McClure’s Magazine
(Fig. 5.4). As we have seen, the museum had led the way in encouraging the
use of cinematography for scientific and educational purposes, but retained
an intense scepticism about entertainment values and professional showmen.
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 199

A review of Hurley’s premier performance in the Moving Picture World

(New York) indicates that Arkeley had used his role as master of ceremonies to
raise doubts about the accuracy of Hurley’s lecture and screen presentation.
It was headed ‘Film Shows Headhunters, Hurley’s Pictures at Carnegie
Hall – Arkeley Slams Producers’:

Before enjoying the picture the audience had to listen to an attack on film
distributors by Carl E. Arkeley, curator of the Museum of Natural History.
Mr Arkeley dwelt for some time on a charge that distributors impair the scientific
merits of travel pictures by editing them solely with an eye to thrills. Then he
enlarged his attack to include directors.100

Were Arkeley’s comments from the chair about film producers and directors
aimed at Hurley and his performance? If so, they sparked a more detailed and
more direct attack on the ‘ethnographic verisimilitude’ of Hurley’s presentation
by Burton Rascoe, a critic for the New York Tribune. After complaining that his
‘ethical sense was slightly ruffled’ by Hurley’s raid on the men’s house – ‘These
heads are sacred objects to these natives’ – Rascoe launched into a detailed
critique of Hurley’s motives and his cinematography, directly claiming that
he was a showman rather than a scientist, and that his presentation contained
clear instances of fakery, manipulation and exaggerated claims:

There were at least two occasions during the evening when Captain Hurley
sought to impose notions upon me which my credulity rejected. Both of these
occasions had to do with the ‘perils, hardships and sufferings’ he endured for the
‘unselfish purpose’ of adding some stuffed human heads to our already overloaded
museums. On one occasion he sought to make me believe that I was witnessing a
motion picture of the actual attack upon the exploring party by a band of savages,
but since my eyes show me that the camera operator, in order to take the picture,
had to be stationed within a few feet of where the shower of poisoned javelins was
coming from, I permitted myself to doubt the reality of the scene. Again Captain
Hurley related that his airplane was caught in a terrific storm in the clouds, and
he threw upon the screen what purported to be motion pictures taken on this
perilous occasion. There were pictures of flashing lightning, tumultuous clouds,
and a fragile machine careering through space at the mercy of the elements; but
I had read too many articles in the motion picture magazines about how these
pictures are obtained to be properly terrified, even when Captain Hurley added
melodramatic and poetic eloquence as accompaniment to the film… If Captain
Hurley will let me take him through the tenement districts of New York I shall let
him see what real hardship is. If he will follow me into the subway at 5:30 on a
weekday I shall acquaint him with peril and discomfort.101
200 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

At Carnegie Hall, then, Hurley was dealing with a very different audience to
the one at the Sydney Town Hall that had laughed with innocent delight when
his model Vimy had crashed into the Swiss Alps and brought down the screen.
Elsewhere in the sophisticated New York press, Hurley was taken to task for
another aspect of his editing of both still photographs and cinema film, his
featuring of bare-breasted Melanesian women:

I never could quite get the laws governing exposure, as applied to the fair young
persons who pivot and flutter behind the footlights of a girlie-girlie show, or who
pose, and otherwise make attractive our literature. The censors snip-snip when
a too scantily clad ballet runs in as part of a scene for a motion picture and Mrs
Oliphant Smythe Reed, from Pawtucket, hurries daughter Maude past the nudes
when they visit the art gallery. But it seems to be all right to illustrate articles and
show reel after reel of dusky-hued south sea natives, femme gender, running
around all dressed up in elaborately carved nose rings and a couple of bracelets.
Which is more or less apropos ‘The Lost Tribe’.102

Following the premier at Carnegie Hall, where Shackleton’s brief American

lecture tour had culminated in April 1917, there were two repeat performances,
and occasional screenings at less prestigious venues. Hurley then took the show
to Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, where he played five nights at
Boston’s Symphony Hall, and finally Milwaukee and Wisconsin. In Canada
he played at Hamilton, Ontario, and then Toronto. The reviews were mixed,
as they had been in New York. Variety cited the novelty of aeroplanes, yet was
otherwise lukewarm, noting that ‘This sort of camera work…should make
the picture playable with judicious placing.’ In reality, as Hurley later testified
to the 1927 Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry, the tour lost
some eight thousand pounds.103 Although Hurley’s North American venture
was in many respects a success, the financial failure of Pearls and Savages as a
touring stage production was evidence of Australian producers’ continuing
vulnerability not only to the power of Hollywood, but also the weight of
opinion among middle-class audiences of educational films back east.

Touring Great Britain with Pearls and Savages: 1924–25

From Toronto, at the end of his North American tour, Hurley took his
travelogue on to the United Kingdom, where it seems to have enjoyed more
sustained success at the box office. Once more under its original title, Pearls and
Savages, it premiered on 31 October 1924 at the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden and the following evening moved to the Stoll Picture Production
Company’s Polytechnic Cinema Theatre in Regent Street. It was there shown
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 201

three times daily during a remarkable run of three months, notching up more
than two hundred performances. Hurley lectured personally on both opening
nights and was given star billing. The trade journal the Bioscope eventually
announced that solely on account of ‘prior arrangements’, this popular show
must be ‘positively withdrawn’ on 28 January 1925.104 The one-night-only
Covent Garden performance was a trade event designed to introduce Pearls
and Savages to ‘the gentlemen of the press’, and to regional distributors and
independent showmen who could hire the film and its associated slides to
present in their own venues around the country. It was available in two formats:
either for use with a lecturer or with inter-titles. For the British tour, Hurley had
signed up with the Stoll Film Company as his agent and distributor, and with
D. Gosden & Co., Advertising Agents of Covent Garden, to promote a national
tour in the regional press. He contracted under the company name of Natural
Films, Ltd.105 This followed his now well-established pattern of entering into
series of local and regional commercial agreements to achieve national and
international circulation.
The handbills produced by the Stoll Film Co., with substantial text and
photographic illustrations, indicate that the British screenings continued to
place the aeroplanes at the end of the narrative, though the text makes no
explicit claim that they were used at Lake Murray: ‘The picture leads us to the
homes of the wild denizens of Lake Murray... The flying and river parties then
unite at Kaimare.’106 The claim that the aeroplanes were used at Lake Murray
appears to have been confined, then, in its most explicit form at least, to the
handbills, newspaper articles and some of the lectures associated with the
North American tour, and it is possible that Hurley drew back from the more
extreme version of this claim after the allegations of fakery and exaggeration
levelled against him in New York.
As in the United States, Hurley’s celebrity presence was essential to the
promotion of his films in Britain, as was his Australianness:

There is a spell which comes into the eyes of men who have looked long on
wide spaces, and whose minds harp on roving and the penetration of unknown
territories.
Mr Frank Hurley, the Australian who was one of Shackleton’s companions,
has just this spell in his eyes…when in talking to me about New Guinea he
turned and looked across Russell Square his eyes were travelling over miles of
dense jungle, the ridges of mountains, broad rivers, and desert sands. He seemed
strangely out of place in a London hotel, in spite of conventional clothes.107

The emphasis on the showman above the film throughout the British winter
season of 1924–25 suggests that Altman’s argument about the heyday of
202 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

performer-centred screen practice in North America requires some adjustment

in the light of colonial modernity’s global reach. Drawing primarily on
American evidence, Altman argues that it was during early cinema’s formative
years – that is, during the 1890s and early 1910s – that films were subservient to
existing forms of entertainment and the performers who provided them: they
were, in this sense, ‘theatrical props’ that gained meaning only to the extent that
performers were able to integrate them into their acts. By the early 1910s, he
argues, developments such as the use of inter-titles and expanded distribution
arrangements meant that films began to separate from the lecturer: ‘Once
tied ineluctably to a lecturer’s performance, films might now be understood
as separable and even separate commodities, a potential source of income for
any exhibitor, even in the absence of the film’s author-lecturer.’108 Although
Altman concedes that travel and expedition films tended to perpetuate the
link between films and the platform lecturer, he dates their separation to the
years of the Great War. Yet Stoll’s promotion of ‘Captain Frank Hurley’s Pearls
and Savages’ suggests that the role of the showman continued well into the
1920s. The advertisements in the trade journals that followed the opening
night were designed to promote the film in either of its two formats: that is,
with Hurley’s lecture or with inter-titles. The Film Renter, for example, advised
that while ‘Captain Hurley’s services will be available to lecture…exhibitors
who are unable to avail themselves of these will…be supplied with fully titled
copies.’ Yet industry observers agreed that the live lecture was preferable. The
Kinematograph confirmed, Pearls and Savages is ‘a fine business proposition’ but
‘the astute showman will endeavour to obtain the services of the lecturer.’109
The choice of Covent Garden for the gala opening night of the British
season was probably an attempt by Stoll to associate Pearls and Savages with
Lowell Thomas’s recent success, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia,
which had made Thomas the world’s most famous platform personality of the
1920s. Some press notices even confused Hurley’s career and body of work
with Thomas’s, claiming that Hurley was ‘also responsible for the well-known
series of pictures “Allenby in Palestine”.’110 This may have been a deliberate
promotional stunt or merely a consequence of their tentative commercial
liaison around the time of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight and the associated advertising
campaign for the then forthcoming ‘South Pacific’ travelogue. Moreover, the
Stoll Film Production Company was planning to use Hurley’s new travelogue
as part of a promotional campaign to reclaim the market prestige of ‘British’
films in the face of rising imports from the United States. On 30 October 1924,
Stoll’s managing director, Jeffrey Bernerd, used the trade journals Cinema and
Kinematograph Weekly to announce ‘one of the greatest drives ever attempted
in the film world by a British organization or, indeed, by any transatlantic
company.’ This ‘great campaign’ was designed as ‘an overwhelming blow
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 203

to the suggestion that British enterprise in the kinema Industry is dead.’ It

would take the form of a ‘four-fold super film programme’, commencing with
Hurley’s travelogue at Covent Garden. It was to be followed on 3 November
by Moon of Israel, a feature film based on a story by H. Rider Haggard.111 That
Stoll, himself an Australian, could market Pearls and Savages as a ‘British’ film is
a mark of the transnational nature of colonial modernity.
Hurley’s clipping books relating to the promotion of Pearls and Savages in Great
Britain provide insights into the increasingly complex promotional techniques
that characterized tie-in marketing at this time. In newspapers around the
nation, reviewers of Hurley’s 75-minute Covent Garden performance gave
detailed and glowing accounts of his stage and screen technique, including the
now consummate integration of his patter, films and lantern slides:

Intimate screen-peeps into the heart of savage New Guinea are afforded by
this heterogeneous collection of beautiful and interesting films and slides,
photographed by Captain Frank Hurley, who lectured to the pictures at the
Covent Garden Trade Show.
Very effective introductory dissolving views in colour are followed by a film
section showing native canoes gliding down a mirror-like jungle river, whose
towering banks are festooned with tropical foliage. Then come preparations for
the voyage with a pearl-diving interlude; pictures of native ceremonial dancers
in grotesque costumes; seashore studies of coral; supplemented by lantern slides
in glowing colours; films and slides of multi-coloured fish; close ups of natives…
native houses, type portraits, landscapes and so on.
Save for the connecting links of the lecturer’s remarks, there is no attempt at
a continuous ‘story’ in these diverse pictures.112

As Jeffrey Ruoff observes, the travelogue was essentially episodic: ‘an open
form; essayistic, it often brings together scenes without regard for plot or
narrative progression.’113
The episodic nature of the performance was in turn reflected in the music.
At the Polytechnic, 46 elaborately contrived musical pieces accompanied
the presentation, from Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Hymn to the Sun’ (described as
an Oriental melody) to ‘The Head Hunter’s Dance’ and ‘Wangala Funeral
March’.114 McGregor speculates that the latter were probably Hurley’s own
recordings.115 Large gramophones were certainly used in the 1890s and
early 1900s in concert-hall broadcasts. They were introduced by Lyman
H. Howe in the United States, for example, both in conjunction with lantern-
slide projection and as purely sound concerts, and Baldwin Spencer had used
his own wax-cylinder recordings to accompany screenings of ‘Aboriginal Life
in Central Australia’ at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1902. It is more likely,
204 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

however, that these were musical arrangements based on Hurley’s recordings,

or perhaps derived from Emmanuel Aaron’s sheet music, and performed on
the house organ or by the house orchestra as at Carnegie Hall. The Bioscope
review also confirms Altman’s argument that while film sequences featured
movement and action, they were not received all that differently to the still
images, since both were appreciated for their aesthetic qualities as ‘views’
rather than as narratives. Indeed, by using the technique of the slide dissolve,
Hurley further narrowed the distinction between slides and films, endowing
the slides with a form of proto- or co-cinematic series.
In conjunction with the London premier, Hurley gave press interviews and
arranged for the publication and serialization of tie-in travel articles as he had
done in Australia, the United States and Canada. Although he – or perhaps
Stoll – had engaged the Gosden Advertising Agency, Hurley’s guiding hand
is everywhere in evidence. As in Australia, the text of his advertisements and
travel writing was larded with references to the popular stage, to the aesthetics
of escapist entertainment, and to the presentational techniques of theatrical
and cinematic ‘attraction’, as his writing constantly strove to anticipate the
visual effects of his stage and screen practice. If the New York publicity strove
to satisfy the contrary interests of adventure and science, the London material
was perhaps coloured more strongly by the traditions of the music hall, the
popular stage and the travelogue as escapist entertainment, suggesting that
British and Australian tastes may have had more in common than either
had with United States audiences, especially in New York. The punning,
overwrought quality of his prose is distinctly different to the American material,
and again suggests the ‘knowingness’ of the British music hall comedian. One
reviewer asserted that his ‘verbal and racy commentary…excelled anything
we have seen from America in the way of screen humour.’116
As the performance continued into December and the Christmas season,
Hurley was able to exploit the contrast between the tropical theme of his
travelogue and the cold of the London winter. This was a mirror image of the
promotional strategy for In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice during the sweltering
Australian summer of 1919–20. In marketing the two contrasting films there
was a conscious appeal to inverted climatic fantasies: the conceit dates back to
his original claim to have conceived Pearls and Savages as a relief to the Antarctic
rigors of Elephant Island. This climatic conceit is developed in the article, ‘My
Christmas in New Guinea’, which appeals directly to the cinema’s escapist
illusionism and also to the popular stage entertainments with which it had to
compete during the Christmas season:

It was very different from a London Christmas. Imagine a sandy beach fringing
a green jungle and facing the sapphire waters of Torres Straits, with a blue
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 205

and cloudless sky, and a sun whose scorching rays are gently tempered by a
breeze to the lonely humans encamped on the seashore. Then you will have
set the stage for that particular Christmas Eve. Remembering what day it was
I thought of pantomimes, and laughed at my own resemblance to Robinson
Crusoe as I watched my native cook, appropriately named Friday, busy with
his cooking pots.117

Hurley, of course, did not have a cook called Friday. This is not a realistic
travel article, but a ‘knowing’ piece of tie-in promotion, inviting his readers
to slip between geographical spaces as easily as they would between different
forms of entertainment: from the cold of the London winter to the warmth of
a tropical night; from the act of reading to the willing suspension of disbelief
required by the popular stage and the ‘silent’ screen.
Other promotional material appearing in the press reinforced these themes.
The punch-lines of advertisements, for example, played upon the cinema’s
capacity for magical transformation to another world. The Evening News
declared, ‘A hundred yards from the roar of Oxford Circus we can step into
the Stone Age on the screen which an Australian traveller in Papua is lighting
with moving pictures...of that wild land.’ Another advertisement proclaimed,
‘You can step off the escalator at Oxford-Circus to day into a land where
dusky giants still live with men of the Stone Age.’118 The Bioscope noted that
‘the magic carpet of the cinema offers a wonderful means of escape from
London’s murky atmosphere. Captain Frank Hurley’s “Pearls and Savages”…
transports the spectator to sunny beaches by southern seas, to coral reefs and
lagoons of romance’. For the Daily Express, ‘the glimpses of surf-beaten atolls,
palm-fringed shores, crystal clear lagoons and sun-bathed seas’ must ‘fill
November’s victims with restless longing’. A stock photograph accompanying
many of these advertisements shows a London audience heavily dressed
against the winter cold and queuing around the block to enter the show-space
of the Polytechnic Cinema Theatre, as if they were indeed about to step off
the footpath into another, warmer world.119
These promotional appeals to a touristic appropriation of exotic locations
again raise questions about the relation between travelogues and colonialism.
Tom Gunning asks whether such images of escape and magical transformation
can be read as a more or less ideologically innocent utopian impulse. On the
one hand, he suggests, we can see clearly that ‘this consumption of the world
through images occurs in the context of industrial and colonial expansion.’120
Travelogues in which the audience are ‘carried along’ by both film images
and modes of transport seem to act out ‘the aggressive appropriation of
space’. On the other hand, the popular screen’s fascination with escape and
transformation also expresses the ‘utopian power of cinema’. An article
206 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

appearing in the Woman’s Pictorial explicitly links that year’s spate of travelogues
with the celebration of empire and its expansion:

It is surely characteristic of the Britisher’s love of travel and the world-wide limits
of the British Empire that of all the nations engaged in film-making there is none
to be compared with ours. That is something of which we may be very proud,
since the travel film represents more in daring, in achievement, and in influence
than any other form of picture we have. Such films make a sure appeal to people
of all ages, and they are visual proof of the ideals for which the British Empire
stands. It is a remarkable fact that such films seem to be poured into Britain from
every corner of the earth.121

Acknowledging the cinema’s ambivalence, Gunning concludes that ‘to find in

early cinema and especially in early travel films a form that escapes the claims
of ideology and entrapments of power and aggression would be the worst sort
of deception.’122
At the end of its three-month London season, Pearls and Savages continued
to tour Great Britain with independent showmen and regional distribution
agencies. An article appearing in the trade journal Cinema during that period
indicates not only Hurley’s international celebrity in 1925, but also the extent
to which his own synchronized lecture entertainments had come to set a
benchmark for the form internationally:

EXPLOITATION NOTES
VALUABLE, INEXPENSIVE SUGGESTIONS FOR SHOWMEN
The suggestions at the head of these columns are put forward for the benefit
of showmen who desire to present their bookings with the maximum of appeal
and the minimum of expense… The Cinema Exploitation ‘Challenge Cup’
Competition will cover the weeks from May 4 to August 1. Exploiters should
plan to do at least one comprehensive exploitation during that time. The film
doesn’t matter – it may be a well-known film or a programme picture – it is
the exploitation which will count. Look over your bookings and prepare your
scheme.
‘Pearls and Savages’
Long run at Polytechnic Hall a huge advertising asset. Reproduce some of
the glowing Press tributes on show cards in lobby, alternating with a selection
of the beautiful colour stills available depicting submarine flora of Northern
Australia. Atmosphere could be simply suggested by show of native trophies or
by large wall map of expedition’s itinerary.
Press advertising should emphasise one of the most engrossing travel pictures
yet shown. Tie-ups with educational authorities.123
 COLONIAL MODERNITY AND ITS OTHERS 207

The international success of Pearls and Savages suggests that cultural production
in Australia in the 1920s was becoming embedded in a network of globalizing
commercial relationships, both imperial and transnational. Surprisingly,
perhaps, the effects of this were positive as well as negative. Hurley had
successfully penetrated the lucrative British and North American markets
while remaining an independent Australian producer. He had learned how to
craft his product and his own biographical legend to suit different audiences.
His books, films and photographs about ‘our’ territory in Papua were made
partly for domestic consumption in Australia but also for marketing in North
America and Great Britain as part of a globalizing entertainment industry.
A ‘professional Australian’, Hurley functioned as a linkman, mediating local
experience for at least three distinct metropolitan audiences in Sydney,
New York and London.
Hurley’s success in the London season of 1924–25, and the use of his
film by Stoll to project the marketing power of the ‘British’ industry, not
only provides compelling evidence for the role of Australian personnel in
colonial modernity, but suggests that American film historians have tended to
underestimate the continuing importance of the performer well into the 1920s.
Nonetheless, both the North American and British tours were not financially
successful for Hurley. The Sydney Sun of 10 August 1925 reported Hurley’s
return home after two years in America and the United Kingdom. ‘Travel
pictures are not successful’, he told the reporter: ‘They appeal to the educated
audience but not to the masses. “Pearls and Savages,” spoken of as the finest
travel production on the screen, has just paid production costs after two years.’
In 1927, Hurley would report to the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture
Industry that the American tour lost £8,000. The worldwide Anglosphere was
not, after all, an even playing field for all entertainment personnel.
 CONCLUSION

Finally, from these five case studies I want to draw some conclusions about
exhibitionary entertainments in the early decades of the twentieth century.
I will return now to those research questions I asked in the introduction to
this book, which have informed my archival research, and attempt to draw
out some of the more general concepts and principles that define what I have
called colonial modernity.
A central strategy in my re-imagining of the fluid media landscape of the
early twentieth century has been to revive Frank Hurley’s quaint and now
largely forgotten term, ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’. Recovering
this term has helped us to see that in the early decades of twentieth century,
media such as photography and cinema, which we now tend to think of as
distinct, were in fact bound together in the kinds of mixed or multimedia
‘platform’ performances described by Charles Musser and Carol Nelson in
their pioneering book, High-Class Moving Pictures (1991): these include lectures,
travelogues, magic lantern shows and gramophone concerts. Some of the
media used in these synchronized lecture entertainments belonged to the new
century, while others had deeper roots in the long nineteenth century and
beyond. They include lantern-slide projection, early cinema (now incorrectly
called ‘silent’ cinema, as Rick Altman has shown in Silent Film Sound), musical
accompaniment and sound effects (both live and pre-recorded), ethnographic
displays, photographic exhibition, newspaper and book publication, and –
centrally – the presence of the celebrity lecturer and his narrative, anecdotes,
stage patter and humbug. It is because of the central role of the platform
personality that theorists of early cinema including Altman, Jeff Ruoff and
Alison Griffiths, advocate a ‘performance-oriented’ methodology.
In the case of the travelogue, with which we have mainly been concerned
here, the life-span of this singular conjuncture of media extends from roughly
1896, when E. Burton Homes began to integrate sequences of cinematograph
film into his lantern-slide lectures (first called ‘travelogues’ in 1903), to around
1927, when the first talking motion picture was released. As we have seen,
Hurley began to learn the art of synchronizing by attending the performances
of Herbert Ponting and Lowell Thomas in London during the Great War,
210 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

and first launched his own full-scale synchronized lecture entertainment, In

the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, in the summer of 1919–20. Throughout this short
30-year period, the synchronized lecture entertainment was one of the major
forms of middle-class, middlebrow international urban entertainment. It
was centred on the celebrity and glamour of the lecturer, though as Altman
argues, we already begin to see the separation of the lecturer from the film
as a standalone commodity at various moments throughout this period. The
genre of the ‘expedition’ film sustained the association longer than others, but
we can see the beginning of their final separation around the time of Hurley’s
British tour in 1924–25, when Pearls and Savages was marketed for distribution
both with and without a lecturer.
Following historians such as Tani E. Barlow and Antoinette Burton, I have
defined colonial modernity as both a conceptual approach to describing the
cultural phenomena associated with the period of social modernity – a ‘frame
of analysis’, ‘a way of posing questions’ – and as the de-centred or multi-centred
economy that constitutes the dynamics of that cultural space. Emphatically, the
space of colonial modernity is not organized by the principles that shape early
postcolonial theory, with its centre-periphery models and unidirectional flows
of culture and modernization. Following some of the alternative conceptual
geographies associated with the new imperial history and the innovative
work of nineteenth-century theatre and screen historians such as Tracy C.
Davis, Jill Julius Matthews and Veronica Kelly, I have argued that Australia’s
engagement with social modernity was constituted much more as a network
or web, a series of multi-centred innovations and exchanges.
In its largest sense, the space of colonial modernity described by Hurley’s
career corresponds with what Linda Young calls the Anglosphere, the
exchange and circulation of middlebrow entertainment through middle-
class markets in Great Britain, Australasia, the United States and Canada.
As a cultural and economic space, this can be imagined as a vast mosaic or
checkerboard divided in part by large-scale continental or territorial rights
agreements. As Kelly observes, ‘the term “territory” has its important legal as
well as organizational aspect’.1 As we have seen, these rights agreements were
often instigated by corporate entities that were themselves temporary and
ill-defined, such as Shackleteon’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Syndicate or the
abortive Hurley Australian Film Production Company Limited. Some of these
agreements were more or less honoured, such as the loose continental-scale
rights agreement brokered by Hurley, Ernest Perris and Sir William Jury for
the three polar travelogues, though others were ephemeral and opportunistic,
like Hurley’s agreement with Lowell Thomas for the distribution of their
planned Pacific travelogue. As Roland Huntford points out, Shackleton’s
ITAE was at best a ‘paper company’, while Hurley’s postwar venture with
 CONCLUSION 211

Fred Gent and W. Tod Martin ended in conflict and threats of litigation. But
these large spaces of colonial modernity were also defined and regulated by
more stable commercial entities, especially the various management agencies
specializing in theatrical and cinema product, and the older style of platform
personalities, including the Lee Keedick Agency in New York, Lloyds’ and
Gerald Christy’s in London, and J. C. Williamsons and Stuart Doyle’s Union
Theatres in Australia.
The spaces of colonial modernity were also transected by the remarkable
mobility of the celebrity performers themselves – Mawson, Shackleton,
Ponting, Hurley, Thomas and others – who travelled constantly along
regional, national and international routes: Mawson and Shackleton between
Australia, Antarctica, Great Britain and North America; Hurley in Antarctica,
Australasia, Melanesia, Great Britain and the United States. What made
this possible were the new and increasingly efficient lines of transport and
communication: telephony and telegraphy; shipping lines like Burns Philp in
Australasia, and the international routes of the Cunard and P&O Lines that
took Mawson and Shackleton back and forth across the Atlantic; the Australian
and North American railway systems, still in development as national networks,
that took Mawson and Hurley on ‘national’ tours of Australia and the United
States; and of course the emerging commercial air routes foreshadowed by
the Ross Smith flight. Julian Thomas is surely right to say that Hurley’s career
was shaped and carried along by currents of war and colonialism, for these
were also important vectors of colonial modernity, though war, colonialism,
commercial transport and tourism were by no means distinct, as the Ross
Smith flight again suggests.
Clustered throughout these spaces of colonial modernity were what
Peter Bailey calls the ‘sites of modernity’: music halls, town halls, picture
palaces, lyceums, theatres, mechanics’ institutes, museums, art galleries and
so on. They include a range of high and middlebrow venues and institutions,
such the Kodak Salon and the Globe Theatre in Sydney; the Sydney and
Melbourne Town Halls; the Alhambra Theatre, the Royal Academy, the
Royal Geographical Society, and Covent Garden in London; Carnegie
Hall, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Explorers’ Club in
New York; the Exhibition Buildings and the Australian War Museum (then
in Melbourne). These sites, as Lynda Nead points out, were heteronomous.
The temporality of modernity is folded in both time and space, as old and
new media, old and new stage and screen practices, and old and new forms
of affect and audience competency mixed together. At London’s Alhambra,
with its strong music hall tradition, for example, we have seen the influence
of older traditions of comedy and ‘amusement’ imposed on the form and
content of Mawson’s version of The Home of the Blizzard. In Melbourne’s
212 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

Exhibition Buildings, exhibition practices and national rivalries dating back

to the Crystal Palace in 1851 continued to influence the representation
of modern, industrial warfare by the new Australia War Museum. And in
established art galleries like the Fine Art Society and the Grafton Galleries
in London, intentionally scientific and documentary photographs could
be reframed as high art, camera operators like Ponting and Hurley could
be presented to the public as camera artists, and photographs of the Great
War – which, as Berndt Huppauf argues, was the first truly modern, industrial
war – could convey humane values and even those eighteenth-century qualities
of sublimity and beauty. In these heteronomous sites of colonial modernity,
temporality was not linear or serial, as Marshall Berman and others had
theorized, but pleated, folded, and crumpled, as Michel Serres and Lynda
Nead argue. And as we have seen in the case of Hurley’s war photographs
and his pseudo-ethnographic travelogue, Pearls and Savages, the shifting forms
and meanings of these texts were substantially determined by and negotiated
within their changing contexts of exhibition, performance and publication, as
Elizabeth Edwards and Alison Griffiths have argued.
Although colonial modernity has been defined as a de-centred or multi-
centred space, the distribution of cultural capital and modern expertise was
not even. In London during the Great War, for example, Hurley and his
colleagues Ivor Castle and Hubert Wilkins found themselves at the world’s
epicentre of technical innovation in both photography and cinematography.
Firms like Raines & Co., the Autotype Company, and Barker’s Studios, all at
Ealing, the Padget Prize Plate Company at Watford, and the Gaumont film
studios at Shepherd’s Bush, offered equipment, editing and film processing
skills far in excess of what a transnational company like Kodak could supply in
Sydney or even New York. As Martyn Jolly has shown, this climate of technical
innovation made possible the assemblage and exhibition of ‘the largest
photographs in the world’. But the increasingly transnational distribution of
personnel, intellectual property and cultural products stimulated consumer
demand, closing the supposed time-lag in expertise and fashion. As Jack Poggi
has said of theatrical tastes in the United States and Veronica Kelly has argued
of Australia, even ‘provincial’ or ‘colonial’ markets demanded ‘the best’ and
they wanted it now.
Another feature of its temporality, then, is that colonial modernity was
experienced simultaneously in its widely dispersed sites. This effect was vividly
illustrated in Hurley’s presentation of In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice to audiences
in the regional New South Wales town of Wagga Wagga only one day after
the premier of Shackleton’s ‘Marvellous Moving Pictures’ at the Royal Albert
Hall. This was put most clearly by the reporter for the Wagga Wagga Daily
Express, who noted the regional audience’s pride in participating in a media
 CONCLUSION 213

event that linked them in a moment in time to others in the nation and at the
heart of the empire in London:

Those who went to the Strand Theatre last night had cause to thank their lucky
stars… Wagga, alone of all country towns, has had this honour conferred upon
it. Captain Hurley and his companions showed in Brisbane and Sydney – two
days in each place – and then in Wagga. By the time this is read, they will be
well on their way to Adelaide. Thence they proceed to Melbourne and then to
Hobart and Perth. Our thanks to Union Theatres for the opportunity of seeing
and hearing this wonderful story from the lips of a man who helped to make it.2

This experience of simultaneity had been a hallmark of Hurley’s work since

he photographed the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight in the summer of 1909.
My research on synchronized lecture entertainments has also raised
questions about the ontology and authorship of the texts. The Home of the
Blizzard, ‘Shackleton’s Marvellous Moving Pictures’, In the Grip of the Polar
Pack-Ice and Pearls and Savages were not single, stable texts, but loose ensembles
of texts in various formats that were modular, reproducible, exportable,
and capable of constant reconfiguration in response to changing market
opportunities. Pearls and Savages, in particular, was more than a repertoire of
texts: it was an entire multimedia business project, evolving and developing
over several years. And while they often featured the celebrity and glamour
of individuals – Mawson, Hurley, Shackleton – these texts did not have single
authors, and could even be presented simultaneously in different sectors of
the Anglosphere by different personnel at much the same time, as the multiple
extant versions of some lectures indicate. As Alison Griffiths argues, referring
to both their multiple authorship and their fluid form, travelogues usually have
an ‘uncertain provenance’. This casts doubt over projects to ‘restore’ films
attributed to individual showmen like Hurley, including South by the British
Film Institute in 1994 and Pearls and Savages by ScreenSound Australia in 1979.
It is precisely to ‘restore’ some of this uncertainty that I have described Hurley’s
The Home of the Blizzard in chapter one as ‘Douglas Mawson’s synchronized
lecture entertainment’.
One important question about the transnational space of colonial
modernity is whether it should be conceived as an even playing field, as some
theorists of imperial ‘networks’ and ‘webs’, including Tony Ballantyne and
Alan Lester, seem to imply. Is a de-centred or multi-centred cultural economy
capable of producing the kind of ‘mobile and de-centred freemasonry’ that
Veronica Kelly attributes to the ‘complementary economy’ of the nineteenth-
century stage, with its touring companies and artistes? As I argue in chapter five,
Hurley was remarkably successful in projecting his shows into the North American
214 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

and British markets, but as he later reported to the 1927 Royal Commission
on the Motion Picture Industry, he failed to gain sponsorship for Pearls and
Savages in Hollywood, lost £8,000, and found that the logistics of a truly
nationwide tour in the vast United States market were in fact beyond his
capacities. This tends to suggest that there is a danger with some alternative
conceptual geographies of moving too far toward a de-centred model, as
if cultural authority and opportunity were evenly disseminated throughout
the Anglosphere. Simon Potter, for example, has questioned the accuracy
of network and web models associated with the work on transnationalism
by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Tony Ballantyne, Alan Lester and
Antoinette Burton. He notes that ‘Historians of the British Empire have
recently…begun to write about webs and networks, and to discuss the role
of the mass media in creating imperial communities.’ These networks are
implicitly ‘informal, open, multiple, competing, and dynamic.’ Potter argues,
however, that empirical evidence about the mass media in the early twentieth
century suggests a ‘systems’ model may be more appropriate because they are
inherently more uneven than networks in their distribution of cultural capital
and agency: ‘systems differ from networks in that they are dominated by a
restricted number of powerful organizations, whose interests together dictate
more formal, entrenched, and limited patterns of interconnection.’3
What of the others of colonial modernity? In Making the Modern, Terry
Smith suggests that cultures of modernity necessarily produce their others: the
provinces, women, the urban poor, other races.4 Yet one of the characteristics
of the international entertainment industry in which Hurley practiced is
that it was required to offer a sense of simultaneity to its regional markets,
which demand ‘the best’. This recalls Kelly’s argument that the local and
the cosmopolitan define each other interactively, and reinforces Ballantyne’s
argument that ‘bundles of relationships’ exist between apparently distinct
layers of analysis – the regional, the inter-regional, the national and the global.
But Hurley’s work, especially Peals and Savages, does confirm Alison Griffiths’
view that the new mass audiences were fascinated by visual representations
of native peoples, and that the production of racial others lies at the heart
of international urban entertainments. As we have seen in chapter five, the
relation between Hurley’s travelogues and the more instrumental aspects of
colonial policy and administration is by no means straightforward, and like
many producers of travelogues his work was often both facilitated by colonial
authority and at cross purposes with it. Pearls and Savages was often appreciated
as much for its utopian escapism, its vernacular modernist vitalism and its
visual spectacle as for its explicit promotion of British colonialism, though it
always addresses what Assenka Oksiloff calls the ‘pro-colonialist viewer’. Just
as the temporality of modernity is folded rather than linear, so the relation
 CONCLUSION 215

between metropole, region and colony is folded. Modern technologies of

visual representation offered a commodified relation to the other: the magic
carpet ride of cinema transported ‘stay at home’ Londoners or Sydneysiders
to more exotic locales. But Hurley’s screening of his Shackleton pictures on
the Torres Strait Islands suggests that while the frontier and the metropolis
were not placed on equal footing in these kinds of exchanges, nor were they
mutually exclusive.
Hurley’s performances, of course, were ephemeral and have long since
vanished, and are therefore no longer available to us as evidence for that
holy grail of reception studies, the role of the audience. But his synchronized
lecture entertainments were both promoted and received as a highly unstable
combination of education and entertainment, narrative and spectacle,
representation and presentation. This was entirely typical of the cinema of
attractions in the transitional era Tom Gunning dates, in the United States,
to the period 1907 to 1913. The evidence suggests that in the genre of the
travelogue, at least, this transitional period extended into the late 1920s, when
exhibition practices associated with pre-classical cinema, including the role of
the platform personality, survived alongside classical Hollywood feature films
and were even screened on the same programmes with them. This suggests,
in turn, that audiences’ competencies in the consumption of these popular
cultural forms were complex and historically layered, some residual, some
emergent, which allowed them actively to make sense of, and above all to
derive various kinds of pleasure from, the mixed fare available in the theatres
and cinemas of the Anglosphere. As Hurley’s London agent, Harry Hughes,
understood, audiences accepted and were entertained by the seeming paradoxes
and instabilities of these changing entertainment media. In his account of the
nineteenth-century musical hall, Peter Bailey calls this link between performers
and their audience ‘knowingness’. Hurley’s advertising clearly assumes this
knowingness and speaks directly to it. His tabloid advertisements appeal to
diverse tastes and competencies. They foreshadow such narrative qualities as
the shows possess and invoke their important themes of empire loyalty, manly
courage, devotion to duty and self-sacrifice, but they also promote the films’
salacious qualities, and enumerate their episodic attractions, the thrills and
spills that allowed them to compete with the ever-present alternatives of the
amusement park, the feature film and the music hall. The very design of the
advertisements, with their cluttered juxtaposition of texts and images, and
their noisy commands to ‘See!’ and ‘Hear!’, is performative of this aesthetics
of excess, hybridization and intertextuality.
Like most forms of popular culture at this time, Hurley’s synchronized
lecture entertainments offered local audiences a sense of participating in
what was felt to be an authoritatively modern, international experience.
216 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

The commodity Hurley offered, in other words, was the experience of colonial
modernity. Although Charles Musser and Carol Nelson speak of American
exhibitors like Lyman H. Howe ‘transcending’ class divisions and contributing
to ‘nation building’ through their ‘culture of reassurance,’ we cannot assume
that Mawson’s, Shackleton’s or Hurley’s performances produced a single or
coherent ‘public sphere’.5 As Miriam Hansen argues, ‘publicness’ is a shifting,
heterogeneous phenomenon brought into being momentarily around the
performance event.6 The various forms of publicness that swirled around the
performances of Hurley’s films remind us of the groups of Sydneysiders arguing
over his photographs of the Lang–Fitzsimmons fight back in the summer of
1909. Hurley’s crowds of Australian citizens were, above all, ‘capricious’ and
‘disputatious’. Hurley was a successful showman precisely because he was
alert to the shifting identifications and investments of his audiences, who did
not necessarily experience anything as coherent as a unified identity: their
response to polar or tropical exploration, like their response to the Great War
or a world title fight, was shot through with conflicting local, national, imperial
and even international loyalties and aspirations. Hurley’s own study of ‘the
psychology of audiences’ confirmed that the exhibitionary moment is volatile
and unstable, and this was reflected in the variety of responses in the different
houses at which he played.
It is also clear that a major part of Hurley’s audiences’ fascination was
with the still relatively new cinema technology that allowed this to happen,
and which made his performances so highly self-reflexive. At times, it seems
that the mere survival of the films and their presentation in Australian cities
was more entertaining than their content – a guarantee of colonial modernity.
Finally, it is apparent that Hurley’s career as an adventurer-cameraman
and platform personality was an artefact of modernity and its international
cultures. That career both formed and was formed by these technologies
and social formations. Hurley was not only a master of the older modes of
showmanship but also of the new media, actively calibrating his biographical
legend to local requirements and shaping each performance in response to the
protean forms of publicness they momentarily conjured into being.
The braiding of these different aspects of Hurley’s exhibition of In the Grip
of the Polar Pack-Ice, particularly its ‘educational’ qualities and its ‘attractions’,
remains a feature of the film’s most recent incarnations across quite different
institutions of contemporary popular entertainment, each with its own niche
market and aesthetic values. In January 2002, Shackleton, the two-part television
drama, premiered in the United Kingdom on the BBC. It was screened in
Australia in June 2002 in the ABC’s ‘quality’ Sunday night drama time-
slot. This is the contemporary equivalent of Hurley’s performance before
the ‘splendid’ audience at the ‘aristocratic’ Melbourne Town Hall in 1920.
 CONCLUSION 217

Billed as ‘the most expensive British television drama ever made’, Shackleton was
written and directed by Charles Sturridge and produced by Selwyn Roberts,
the team who made the award-winning, up-market television documentary-
drama Longitude. As journalist Jasper Rees rightly observes, the production,
which stars Kenneth Branagh as Ernest Shackleton, ‘has the whiff of pedigree
about it.’7
Meanwhile in New York in February 2002, Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure
premiered in IMAX format before touring IMAX cinemas around the world,
including a Sydney season in April to June 2002. This is the contemporary
equivalent of the 1919 Palais-de-Danse performance. Narrated by American
actor Kevin Spacey, its associations are with Hollywood and the contemporary
cinema of attractions rather than quality British television drama. The
experience of attending an IMAX cinema strongly recalls the early twentieth
century’s cinema of attractions in its emphasis on the novelty of spectacular
new technology, in the overwhelming scale of its architecture, and in its
marketing and programming. IMAX revives the somatic quality of the early
cinema, as audiences are warned to close their eyes if they become nauseated
or disoriented by the experience. In programming, too, IMAX recalls early
cinema’s close relation to other forms of popular spectacle. For the Sydney
season in 2002, Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure was programmed alongside the
travelogue, Journey into Amazing Caves, and Cirque Du Soleil: Journey of Man. The
promotional literature acknowledges, this is ‘a story of bravery so powerful that
it changes forever your understanding of human courage’, but it also promises
‘a rip-roaring story which should knock the socks off every viewer.’8 It is
therefore highly significant that the 2002 Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure digitally
incorporates sections of Hurley’s original film into the IMAX format. This
at once illustrates the historical continuity between these two moments in the
technological development of popular entertainment and testifies to Hurley’s
prescient sense of modern visuality. His original images of towering icebergs
and the Endurance steaming out of the screen toward the cameraman are
perfectly at home one hundred years later on ‘The World’s Biggest Screen’.9
 NOTES

Introduction. Australia’s Embrace of Colonial Modernity

1 D’Arcy Niland, ‘A Nice Boxing Day All Round’, Walkabout, December 1965, 20.
2 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991), 1.
3 Frank van Straten, Huge Deal: The Fortunes and Follies of Hugh D. McIntosh (South
Melbourne: Lothian, 2004), 23–9, 184.
4 Niland, ‘A Nice Boxing Day’, 20–3.
5 Quoted in Niland, ‘A Nice Boxing Day’, 21.
6 Frank Hurley, ‘The Prizefighter’s Face’, Lone Hand, 1 April 1910, 591.
7 Quoted in Niland, ‘A Nice Boxing Day, 20.
8 Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney:
Currency Press, 2005), 1.
9 Michael Gray and Gael Newton, ‘Pioneer of Polar Photography’, in Joanna Wright
(ed.), South With Endurance: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition 1914–1917 (Ringwood, Vic.:
Penguin Viking, 2001), 236.
10 Quoted in Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe
and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 6.
11 Veronica Kelly, The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama 1890s–1920s
(Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2010), 5.
12 Erika Esau, Images of the Pacific Rim: Australia and California, 1850–1935 (Sydney: Power
Publications, 2010), 18.
13 Jack Poggi, Theatre in America: The Impact of Economic Forces 1870–1967 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1968), 87–8.
14 Kelly, The Empire Actors, 5.
15 Ibid., 2.
16 Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace, 20.
17 See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge,
1995) and Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums
(Oxford: Berg, 2001).
18 See National Library of Australia wesbite: http://www.nla.gov.au (accessed 28 June
2011).
19 Frank Legg and Toni Hurley, Once More on My Adventure (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1966);
Lennard Bickel, In Search of Frank Hurley (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1980); David P. Millar,
From Snowdrift to Shellfire (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1984); and Alasdair McGregor, Frank
Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (Camberwell, Vic.: Viking Penguin, 2004).
220 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

20 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 3.

21 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 1.
22 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous
Spectator’, Art & Text 34 (1989): 37.
23 Jeffrey Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle’, in
Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2006), 9.
24 For an overview see Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly (eds), Impact of the Modern:
Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008),
xiii–xxiv.
25 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 1.
26 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982;
London: Verso, 1999), 16.
27 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 21.
28 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 8.
29 Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
30 Esau, Images of the Pacific Rim, 18.
31 Antoinette Burton, Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London and New York:
Routledge, 1999), 3–4.
32 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Political Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
33 Burton, Colonial Modernities, 1.
34 Tani E. Barlow (ed.), Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997), 6.
35 Burton, Colonial Modernities, 4.
36 Robert Dixon, ‘Boundary Work: Australian Literary Studies in the Field of Knowledge
Production’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 3 (2004): 27–43;
‘Australian Literature-International Contexts’, Southerly 67.1–2 (2007): 15–27.
37 David Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States
History’, The Journal of American History 86.3 (1999): 965.
38 Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997); Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking
and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Allen
Lane, 2006).
39 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Putting the Nation In Its Place?: World History and C. A. Bayly’s
The Birth of the Modern World’, in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected
Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 2001), 32.
40 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain
(London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 3; see also Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and
Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4.1 (2006): 124–41.
41 Ibid., 7–8.
 NOTES 221

42 Ibid., 63.
43 Ibid., 6.
44 Ballantyne, ‘Rereading the Archive and Opening Up the Nation-State: Colonial
Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond)’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial
Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 2003), 112–13.
45 Ibid., 113.
46 Ibid., 114.
47 Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 353.
48 Burton, ‘Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation’, in
After the Imperial Turn, 11.
49 Veronica Kelly, ‘A Complementary Economy? National Markets and International
Product in Early Australian Theatre Managements’, New Theatre Quarterly 21.1 (February
2005): 77.
50 Ibid., 78.

Chapter One. The Home of the Blizzard: Douglas Mawson’s

Synchronized Lecture Entertainment
1 Hurley to Mawson, 10 December 1921, MAC 6DM.
2 Hurley to Mawson, 22 March 1922, MAC 6DM.
3 Hurley to Mawson, 22 July 1922, MAC 6DM.
4 Frank Hurley, Argonauts of the South: Being a Narrative of Voyagings in Polar Seas and
Adventures in the Antarctic with Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton (New York:
Putnam, 1925).
5 Martyn Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs During the First World War’,
History of Photography 27.2 (2003): 155.
6 Julian Thomas, Showman: The Photography of Frank Hurley (Canberra: National Library
of Australia, 1990).
7 Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
8 Veronica Kelly, ‘A Complementary Economy? National Markets and International
Product in Early Australian Theatre Managements’, New Theatre Quarterly 21.2 (2005): 78.
9 See Daniel Dayan, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992); John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in US Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Nick Couldry, Media Rituals:
A Critical Approach (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
10 Thomas, Showman, 7.
11 Jeffrey Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle’, in
Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2006), 2.
12 Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, 3.
13 X. Theodore Barber, ‘The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton
Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture’, Film History 5
(1993): 68–84; Charles Musser, ‘The Travel Genre in 1903–1904: Moving Towards
Fictional Narrative’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, and Narrative
222 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

(London: BFI, 1990); Musser, The Emergence of Early Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Charles Musser and Carol Nelson,
High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition,
1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
14 Keedick to Mawson, various letters, MAC 171AAE.
15 Rick Altman, ‘From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of
Travel Films’, in Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages, 62; see also Altman, Silent Film Sound
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
16 Kevin Brownlow, The War, The West and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1979), 420.
17 Quoted in Brownlow, The War, The West and the Wilderness, 419.
18 Altman, ‘From Lecturer’s Prop’, 61.
19 Ibid., 64.
20 Ibid., 68–9.
21 Quoted in Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness, 420.
22 Hurley, ‘Adventure Films and the Psychology of the Audience’, NLA MS883, Series 1,
Item 14.
23 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford
University Press 1980), 80.
24 Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 181–2.
25 Quoted in Alison Griffiths, ‘Animated Geography: Early Cinema and the American
Museum of Natural History’, in John Fullerton (ed.), Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of
Cinema (Sydney: John Libbey, 1998), 194–5.
26 Griffiths, ‘Animated Geography’, 195.
27 Altman, ‘From Lecturer’s Prop’, 76.
28 Ibid., 74.
29 Ibid., 73.
30 Quoted in Norman R. Bowen (ed.), Lowell Thomas: The Stranger Everyone Knows (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 31.
31 Handbill for the London season of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 31.
32 See H. J. P. Arnold, Photographer of the World: The Biography of Herbert Ponting (London:
Hutchinson, 1969) and Beau Riffenburgh, Elizabeth Cruwys and H. J. P. Arnold, With
Scott to the Pole: The Terra Nova Expedition 1910–1913: The Photographs of Herbert Ponting
(Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004).
33 Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South, or With Scott in Antarctic: Being an Account of
Experiences with Captain Scott’s South Pole Expedition and of the Nature Life of the Antarctic
(London: Duckworth, 1923), x.
34 Ibid., 41.
35 Ibid., 165–6.
36 Ibid., 297.
37 Handbill, MAC, 7DM.
38 Daily Express (London), 24 January 1914.
39 Daily Express (London), 13 May 1914.
40 Daily Express (London), 29 April 1914.
41 ‘Interview with Mr Herbert G. Ponting, FRGS, the World-Wide Traveller, Writer and
Camera-Artist’, MAC 7DM.
42 With Captain Scott in the Antarctic… The Complete Cinematograph Diary of Captain Scott’s
Memorable Journey, and Personal Narrative of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times, directed
by Herbert G. Ponting (London: The Fine Art Society, n.d.[c. 1914]), MAC 7DM.
 NOTES 223

43 See James McNeil Whistler: The Etchings. A Catalogue Raisonne. Online at: http://etchings.
arts.gla.ac.uk/whistler.html (accessed 21 July 2011).
44 Robert Dixon, ‘What Was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts
of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing’, Studies in Travel Writing 11.1
(2007): 59–81.
45 Anita Calloway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Sydney:
University of New South Wales Press, 2000).
46 Daily Express (London), 24 January 1914.
47 Handbill, MAC 7DM.
48 Helen Ennis, Frank Hurley’s Antarctica (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2010), 8.
49 Hurley, diary, 18 November 1916 and 11 December 1916.
50 David P. Millar, From Snowdrift to Shellfire: Capt. James Francis (Frank) Hurley 1885–1962
(Sydney: David Ell Press, 1984) and Alasdair McGregor, Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s
Life (Camberwell, Vic.: Viking, 2004).
51 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’, Art Journal
42.4 (1982): 311–19.
52 AAE personnel legal agreements, MAC 180AAE.
53 Margaret Innes, Mawson’s Papers: A Guide (Adelaide: The Mawson Institute for Antarctic
Research, 1990), xi.
54 Unsigned and undated copy of agreement with Gaumont, MAC 169AAE.
55 Gent to Mawson, 16 October 1911, ML MSS171/14.
56 MAC, 169AAE. The notice in the Sydney Morning Herald on 11 May 1912 indicates that
Professor Edgeworth David lectured on the night of the governor’s attendance, while
Conrad Eitel, who was in Hobart for a single performance at His Majesty’s Theatre
on 25 June 1912, may have lectured there. It is also possible that Gaumont staff were
involved.
57 Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney:
Currency Press, 2005), 111, 148.
58 MAC 169AAE.
59 Gent to Eitel, 1 May 1912, MAC 169AAE.
60 Gent to Eitel, 29 August 1912, MAC 169AAE.
61 Signed agreement with Gaumont, dated 15 May 1912, MAC 169AAE.
62 Mawson to Broomhead, 12 June 1914, MAC 169AAE.
63 Australian Kinematograph Journal, 7 August 1913, 12–14, cuttings album, MAC M462.
64 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 76–7.
65 Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace, 1–2.
66 Philip Ayers, Mawson: A Life (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1999),
101–2.
67 Ayers, Mawson, 98ff.
68 Hurley to Mawson, 10 April 1914, MAC 6DM.
69 Mawson to Hurley, 18 June 1914, MAC 6DM.
70 Mawson to Hurley, 2 July 1914, MAC 6DM.
71 Hurley to Mawson, 10 and 11 September 1914, MAC 6DM.
72 Mawson to Heinemann, 1 January 1915; Heinemann to Mawson, 15 January 1915;
Heinemann to Mawson, 22 January 1915, MAC 151AAE.
73 Heinemann to Mawson, 27 September 1918, MAC 151AAE.
74 Mawson to Heinemann, 1 January 1915, MAC 151AAE.
75 ‘Alone in the Antarctic’, Star (London), 10 June 1914, cuttings album, MAC M462.
224 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

76 Cuttings album, MAC M462.

77 Typed lecture delivered to Lloyds and Keedick, 1915, MAC 181AAE.
78 Heinemann to Mawson, 15 January 1915, MAC 151AAE.
79 The Fine Art Society, Exhibition of Unique Pictures Taken During the Australasian Antarctic
Expedition (London, 1914), MAC 7DM.
80 Mawson to Hurley, n.d., MAC 6DM.
81 Catalogue, MAC 7DM.
82 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 75.
83 Mawson to Hutchinson, 20 June 1914, MAC 169AAE.
84 Mawson to Hutchinson, 19 June 1914, MAC 169AAE.
85 Hutchinson to Mawson, 19 June 1914, MAC 169AAE.
86 Mawson to McLean, 20 July 1914, MAC 169AAE.
87 Mawson to Keekick, 19 July 1914, MAC 171AAE.
88 Mawson to Geddes, n.d. [1914?], MAC 170AAE.
89 Hughes to Mawson, 27 May 1915, MAC 170AAE.
90 Mawson to ITA Film Syndicate, 6 July 1914, MAC 170AAE.
91 ITA Film Syndicate to Mawson, 15 July 1914, MAC 170AAE.
92 ITA Film Syndicate to Mawson, 15 July 1914, MAC 170AAE.
93 ITA Film Syndicate to Mawson, 11 August 1914, MAC 170AAE.
94 Roland Huntford, Shackleton (London: Abacus, 2000), 393.
95 Gent to Mawson, 14 April 1915, MAC 170AAE.
96 Heinemann to Mawson, 11 September 1914, MAC 151AAE.
97 Cuttings album, MAC 257.1.3. Unless otherwise stated, the following citations from
North American reviews are from this file.
98 I am grateful to Clive Wilson-Roberts of the Mawson Collection for this
information.
99 Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 233–4.
100 Keedick to Mawson, 1 May 1915, MAC 171AAE.
101 Keedick to Mawson, 18 October 1915, MAC 171AAE.
102 Keedick to Mawson, 17 March 1916, MAC 171AAE.
103 MAC 172AAE.
104 Ponting to Mawson, 23 April 1915, MAC 170AAE.
105 Hughes to Mawson 16 April 1915, MAC 170AAE.
106 The following quotations are from Hughes’ letters to Mawson, dated 17 February, 22
March and 16 April 1915, MAC 170AAE.
107 Contract between Lloyds Film Agency and the Alhambra Theatre, MAC, 170AAE.
108 Heinemann to Mawson, 14 July 1914, MAC 151AAE.
109 ‘A New Note in Kinema Posters’, Advertising World, May 1915, cuttings album, MAC
257.1.6. Unless otherwise stated, the following citations from British reviews are from
this file.
110 Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette, 15 May 1915, cuttings album, MAC 257.1.6.
111 Evening News, 3 May 1915, cuttings album, MAC M462.
112 Daily Sketch, 23 April 1915, cuttings album, MAC M462.
113 Gent to Mawson, 6 June 1915, MAC 170AAE.
114 Hughes to Mawson, 7 May 1915, MAC 170AAE.
115 Hughes to Mawson, 27 May 1915, MAC 170AAE.
116 Cuttings album, MAC 257.1.6.
117 Hughes to Mawson, 27 May 1915, MAC 170AAE.
 NOTES 225

118 Heinemann to Mawson, 11 September 1914, MAC 151AAE.

119 Mawson to Hurley, 1 February 1920, MAC 6DM.
120 Australasian Photo-Review, 22 August 1914.

Chapter Two. Guided Spectatorship: Exhibiting the Great War

1 Scott of the Antarctic, directed by Charles Frend, starring John Mills, music by Ralph
Vaughan Williams (London: Ealing Studios, 1948).
2 John F. Williams, ANZACS, The Media and the Great War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999).
3 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford and
New York: Berg, 2001), 14.
4 Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from
the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 204.
5 Graeme Davison, ‘Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions’, in
S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (eds), Australian Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
6 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 33, 57.
7 Ibid., xxi–xxii.
8 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Putting the Nation In its Place?: World History and C. A. Bayly’s
The Birth of the Modern World’, in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected
Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 2001), 32.
9 Erika Esau, Images of the Pacific Rim: Australia & California 1850–1935 (Sydney: Power
Publications, 2010), 231.
10 Esau, Images of the Pacific Rim, 233.
11 Michael McKernan, Here is Their Spirit: A History of the Australian War Memorial 1917–
1990 (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1991).
12 Martyn Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs during the First World War’,
History of Photography 27.2 (Summer 2003): 155.
13 1 March 1918, quoted in Dudley McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme: The Story of CEW
Bean (Sydney: John Ferguson, 1983), 321.
14 McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, 321.
15 Argus (Melbourne), 24 May 1924, 10. See also Deborah Edwards, Bertram Mackennal
(Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000).
16 Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs’; and Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda
and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
17 Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs’, 155.
18 Quoted in Matthew Kibble, ‘The Betrayers of Language: Modernism and the Daily
Mail’, Literature & History 11.1 (2002): 70.
19 The ‘Hell Cantos’ XIV and XV, quoted in Kibble, ‘The Betrayers of Language’, 67.
20 Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs’, 156.
21 Online at: http://two.archiseek.com/2009/1982-grafton-galleries-bond-street-london
(accessed 16 September 2010).
22 Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs’, 162.
23 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 71–2.
24 Lord Beaverbrook, draft of ‘The Ministry of Information, its Organisation and Work’,
for publication in the Windsor Magazine, 18 June 1918, quoted in Jolly, ‘Composite
Propaganda Photographs’, 155.
226 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

25 Catalogue of the Canadian Official War Photographs Exhibition (London: 1916), quoted in
Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs’, 160–1.
26 Jolly, ‘Composite Propaganda Photographs’, 161.
27 McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, 306.
28 Hurley, diary, 21 August 1917. On Wilkins, see Simon Nasht, The Last Explorer: Hubert
Wilkins, Australia’s Unknown Hero (Sydney: Hodder, 2005).
29 Hurley, diary, 2 October 1917.
30 Frank Hurley, ‘War Photography’, Australasian Photo-Review, 15 February 1919.
31 Catalogue of the Canadian Official War Photographs Exhibition, quoted in Jolly, ‘Composite
Propaganda Photographs’, 160–1.
32 Captain Geo. H Wilkins (ed.), Australian War Photographs: A Pictorial Record from November
1917 to the End of the War (London: AIF Publications Section, 1919).
33 Hurley, diary, 6–8 June 1918.
34 See AWM D00258.
35 Hurley, diary, 25–8 May 1918.
36 Catalogue of Australian Official War Pictures & Photographs, Grafton Galleries, Grafton Street,
London, W… Under the direction of the Australian Commonwealth Office, London [1918], 5.
See AWM 758.9940 A932c.
37 Catalogue of Australian Official War Pictures & Photographs, Grafton Galleries, 3.
38 See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration
of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993); and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983).
39 Paul Virilio, La Machine de la Vision, quoted in Jay, Downcast Eyes, 211.
40 Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, quoted in Jay, Downcast
Eyes, 213.
41 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 211–12.
42 Hurley, diary, 23 August 1917. For related photograph see AWM E00928.
43 Hurley, diary, 20 September 1917. For related photograph see AWM E00700.
44 Hurley, diary, 26 September 1917.
45 Jolly, ‘Australian First-World-War Photography: Frank Hurley and Charles Bean’,
History of Photography 23.2 (Summer 1999), 141–8; and Robert Dixon, ‘Spotting the
Fake: CEW Bean, Frank Hurley and the Making of the Photographic Record of the
War’, History of Photography 31.2 (Summer 2007): 165–79.
46 Bean, diary, 27–8 September 1913.
47 Hurley, diary, 4 September 1917.
48 Robert Dixon, ‘Where are the Dead? Spiritualism, Photography and the Great War’,
History of Photography 28.3 (Autumn 2004): 247–60.
49 Hurley, diary, 26–8 May 1918.
50 Hurley, Catalogue of an Exhibition of War Photographs…held at the Kodak Salon, Sydney
(March 1919), n.p.
51 Kathleen S. Howe, Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine
(Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1997), 28.
52 H. S. Gullett, The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine 1914–1918 (Sydney:
Angus & Robertson, 1923); and Christopher Lee, ‘War is not a Christian Mission:
Racial Invasion and Religious Crusade in H. S. Gullett’s Official History of the Australian
Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian
Literature 7 (2007): 85–96.
 NOTES 227

53 Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
54 Hurley, diary, 18 December 1917.
55 C. E. W. Bean and H. S. Gullett (eds), Photographic Record of the War (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1923), viii.
56 Hurley, ‘Captain Hurley’s War Photographs’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 1919,
press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 31. Unless otherwise stated, all reference
to material relating to the Sydney exhibition are from this file.
57 Hurley, Catalogue of An Exhibition of War Photographs by Captain F. Hurley, n.p.
58 Hurley, press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 31.
59 ‘War Pictures. Realistic Collection. Capt. Hurley’s Work’, Sydney Morning Herald,
13 March 1919, 6. Hurley, press clippings, NLA MSS883, Series 2, Item 31.
60 J. L. Treloar to the Secretary, Department of Home and Territories, 15 December
1923, NAA: A1/15, 1923/30557, quoted in McGregor, Frank Hurley, 271.
61 Descriptive Catalogue of Exhibition of Enlargements, Official War Photographs, exhibited at the
Exhibition Building (Aquarium), Melbourne, opening on 20 August 1921. Arranged
by the Australian War Museum.
62 Descriptive Catalogue of Exhibition of Enlargements, Official War Photographs, exhibited at the
Exhibition Building, South Australia, 30 November – 21 December 1921. Arranged
by the Australian War Museum.
63 Descriptive Catalogue of Exhibition of Enlargements, Official War Photographs, exhibited at the
Sydney Town Hall Basement, 4 March – 29 April 1922. Arranged by the Australian
War Museum.
64 Australian War Museum: The Relics and Records of Australia’s Effort in the Defence of the Empire,
1914–1916, exhibited at the Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne, 22 April 1922 – 26
January 1925.
65 Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 216.
66 Descriptive Catalogue of Exhibition of Enlargements, Official War Photographs, exhibited at the
Exhibition Building (Aquarium), Melbourne, opening on 20 August 1921. Arranged
by the Australian War Museum.
67 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 167, 169.
68 Ibid., 178–9.
69 Quoted in Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 199.
70 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 200–1.
71 Quoted in Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 201.
72 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 200.
73 Relics and Records, 9.
74 Ibid., 10.
75 Ibid., 40.
76 Ibid., 77.
77 See, for example, AWM E01918KRIGHT and AWM EO1919KLEFT.
78 See Dixon, ‘Where are the Dead?’
79 Relics and Records, 7, 26.
80 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a
Stain)’, October 29 (Summer 1984): 63–81; see also Rex Butler and Keith Broadfoot,
‘A Fold in Time: Anne MacDonald and the Origin of Photography’, in Stuart Koop
(ed.), Value Added Goods: Essays on Contemporary Photography, Art and Ideas (Melbourne:
ACP, 2002), 40–1.
228 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

81 Margaret Maynard, ‘“La Mode” – as Sacral’, Form/Work 4 (March 2000): 23.

82 McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme, 34.
83 Jill Roe, Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879–1939 (Sydney: University of New
South Wales Press, 1986), 231–2.
84 See Dixon, ‘Where are the Dead?’
85 Argus (Melbourne), 10 September 1892, quoted in Mimi Colligan, ‘Full Circle: The
Cyclorama of Early Melbourne 1892–1920’, La Trobe Library Journal 13.50 (Spring
1992): 1–11.
86 Relics and Records, 42.
87 Ibid., 43.
88 Ibid., 44.
89 Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs’,
Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 1–32.
90 Bean, C. E. W. and H. S. Gullett (eds), Photographic Record of the War: Reproductions of
Pictures Taken by the Australian Official Photographers (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1923).
91 AWM 38 3DRL 7953/19 Part 1 (Correspondence 1920–23).
92 Photographic Record of the War, vii.
93 Bazley to Treloar, 21 November 1921, AWM38 3DRL 7953/19 Part 1 (Correspondence
1920–23).
94 The cable and letters that follow are at AWM38 3DRL 7953/20 Part 2 (Correspondence
1921–23).
95 Bean to Newman, Defence Department, 1 August 1922.
96 Bazley to F. S. Shenstone, Angus & Robertson, 30 September 1922.
97 AWM E01202.
98 Jolly, ‘Australian First-World-War Photography’, 147.
99 Hurley to Mawson, undated letter [c. 1919], MAC 6DM.
100 Treloar to Bazley, 15 November 1921, AWM38 3DRL 7953/20 Part 1 (Correspondence
1920–23).
101 Hurley to Mawson, 11 August 1917, MAC 6DM.
102 nla.pic-an23480813-v.
103 For this image and the tale associated with it, thanks to Andrew Jack, curator, AWM
photographic archive.
104 AWM E01237.
105 AWM E01237A.
106 nla.pic-an23478305.
107 It was no. 13 in the 1921 catalogue, and was there given an AWM number for the first
time: E1237x.
108 ‘Because the AWM also holds composite prints, it is not possible to say definitely
whether the exhibition print was of the original, without the shell burst, or a composite
print. Senior curatorial staff who are familiar with the long history of accession and
cataloguing suggest that it was most likely the original, unadorned image that was
used in the Melbourne exhibition, and that the composite reference print may only
have come to replace it, inadvertently, during the recent digitization of the catalogue.’
Interview with Andrew Jack and Ian Affleck, AWM, 9 February 2006.
109 AWM E00737.
110 Thanks to Andrew Jack for this observation.
111 AWM E00927.
112 AWM E01230
 NOTES 229

113 Interview with Andrew Jack and Ian Affleck, AWM, 9 February 2006.
114 No. 128, ‘Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres, from a Cloister Window’.
115 nla.pic-an23816566. Thanks to Sylvia Carr for her help in examining this negative.
116 See Helen Ennis (ed.), Man With A Camera: Frank Hurley Overseas (Canberra: National
Library of Australia, 2002), 16–17.
117 AWM E01202.
118 AWM E01202A.
119 AWM E05430C.
120 nla.pic-an23478227.
121 See, for example, Newsy Notes: The Official Organ of the Millions Club of N.S.W. 1.3 (August
1919), Hurley, press clippings, NLA MSS883, Series 2, Item 31.

Chapter Three. Touring the Nation: Shackleton’s ‘Marvellous

Moving Pictures’ and the Australian Season of
In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice
1 Frank Hurley, diary, 17 July 1918.
2 Beau Riffenburgh, The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–2.
3 Michael Gray and Gael Newton, ‘Pioneer of Polar Photography’, in Joanna Wright
(ed.), South With Endurance: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition 1914–1917 (Ringwood, Vic.:
Penguin Viking, 2001), 235.
4 Roland Huntford, Shackleton (London: Abacus, 2000), 393.
5 Hurley, diary, 11 November 1916.
6 Hurley, diary, 22 January 1917.
7 Hurley, diary, 25 November 1916.
8 Martyn Jolly, ‘Fake Photographs: Making Truths in Photography’, PhD thesis at the
University of Sydney (2003), 47.
9 Hurley, diary, 15 December 1916.
10 Hurley, diary, 12–14 November 1916.
11 Hurley, diary, 24 January 1917.
12 David Hempleman-Adams, Sophie Gordon and Emma Stuart (eds), ‘Polar Images and
Royal Collecting’, The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography
(London: Royal Collection Publications, 2009), 32–7.
13 Hurley, diary, 21 December 1916.
14 Alasdair McGregor, Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (Sydney: Penguin Viking, 2004),
151.
15 Hurley, diary, 21 June –10 July 1918.
16 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 250.
17 ‘Sir William Jury’, in Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge
and Taylor & Francis, 2004), eBook.
18 Hurley, diary, 28 July 1918.
19 Hurley, diary, 20 July 1918.
20 Huntford, Shackleton, 673.
21 Sir Shane Leslie, quoted in Huntford, Shackleton, 645–6.
22 ‘Shackleton on the Screen: Antarctic Expedition Pictures’, Times, 12 December
1919.
230 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

23 ‘Shackleton on the Screen: Vivid Pictures of Antarctic Perils’, Times, 17 December

1919.
24 ‘Shackleton on the Screen: Antarctic Exhibition Pictures’, Times, 12 December 1919.
25 ‘The Antarctic Failure: Sir E. Shackleton on His Expedition’, Times, 20 December
1919.
26 Captain Edward R. G. R. Evans, ‘Sir E. Shackleton’s Story’, Times, 10 January 1920.
27 Daily Mirror, 17 December 1919, 2.
28 Ibid., 3.
29 Daily Mirror, 18 December 1919, 4.
30 Shackleton to Jury, 23 December 1919, BFI Jury Collection, Item 36.
31 Handbill, BFI Jury Collection, Item 36.
32 Huntford, Shackleton, 318, 643–4 and 673–4.
33 Sir Ernest Shackleton, South (London: Heinemann, 1919), xi.
34 Hurley, Argonauts of the South (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925).
35 ‘Antarctic Reunion: Sir E. Shackleton’s 100th Lecture’, Times, 24 February 1920.
36 Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the
Forgotten Era of Travelling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 34–5.
37 Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, & Turn-of-the-Century Visual
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 206–7.
38 BFI Jury Collection, Item 35.
39 The lecture is wrongly attributed to Shackleton in McGregor, Frank Hurley, 215.
40 BFI Jury Collection, Items 33–40.
41 South: Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition, explanatory notes accompanying
the film restored by Milestone Film & Video, www.milestonefilms.com (accessed
16 August 2010).
42 Ibid.
43 For example, Daily Mirror, 3 January 1920, 9, and 7 April 1920, 8.
44 Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 223.
45 Ibid., xxxi.
46 Hurley to Mawson, 14 November 1918, MAC 6DM. Hurley was probably referring
here to the AAE lecture, since he was writing to Mawson, but the same rewriting
would have been applied to ITAE materials.
47 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 209–11.
48 Martin to Mawson, 10 September 1919, MAC 6DM.
49 Mawson to Martin, 16 October 1919, MAC 6DM.
50 Hurley to Mawson, 15 July 1919, MAC 6DM.
51 Mawson to Hurley, 1 February 1920, MAC 6DM.
52 Hurley to Mawson, 16 April 1920, MAC 6DM.
53 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 210.
54 Hurley to Mawson, 3 July 1919 and Hurley to Mawson, 10 October 1919, MAC 6DM.
55 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 210.
56 Martin to Mawson, 18 November 1919, MAC 6DM.
57 Mawson to Hurley, 1 February 1920, MAC 6DM.
58 Hurley, ‘Diary When On Tour with the Shackleton Picture from 21 November 1919
to 20 January 1920’, NLA MS883, Series 1, Item 6; and press clippings, NLA MS883,
Series 2 Items 30–3. Unless otherwise indicated, all newspaper articles cited are from
this source.
59 Hurley, diary, 6 December 1919.
 NOTES 231

60 Hurley, diary, 5 December 1919.

61 Hurley, diary, 6 December 1919.
62 Hurley, diary, 7 December 1919.
63 Ibid.
64 Hurley, diary, 11 and 13 December 1919.
65 Hurley, diary, 18 December 1919.
66 Hurley, diary, 20 and 23 December 1919.
67 Hurley, diary, 23 December 1919.
68 Hurley, diary, 24 December 1919.
69 Hurley, diary, 30–31 December 1919.
70 Hurley, diary, 23 December 1919.
71 Ibid.
72 Hurley, diary, 30 December 1919.
73 Hurley, diary, 3 January 1919.
74 Hurley, diary, 10 January 1920.
75 Hurley, diary, 12 January 1920.
76 Hurley, diary, 14 January 1920.
77 Hurley, diary, 19 January 1920.
78 Hurley, diary, 18 January 1920.
79 Hurley, ‘Adventure Films and the Psychology of the Audience’, NLA MS883,
Item 14.
80 Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 36, 42.
81 ‘Two Words to the Foot. Films and Lectures. Art of Synchronising’, unidentified and
undated press clipping, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
82 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
83 Altman, ‘From Lecturer’s Prop’, 68–9.
84 Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 281.
85 Ibid., 33.
86 Ibid., 4.
87 Helen Ennis, Frank Hurley’s Antarctica (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2010), 70.
88 Hurley, ‘View of interior of hut on Elephant Island’, glass lantern slide, nla.pic-
an24039583.
89 Ennis, Frank Hurley’s Antarctica, 102.
90 Gray and Newton, ‘Pioneer of Polar Photography’, 235.
91 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-
Guarde’ in Thomas Elsaessar (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI,
1990), 57–9.
92 See McGregor, Frank Hurley, 20.
93 Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, 60–1.
94 Hurley, diary, 7 December 1919.
95 Quoted in Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 6.
96 Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 6–7.
97 Hurley, diary, 13 December 1919.
98 Quoted in Martyn Jolly, ‘Australian First-World-War Photography: Frank Hurley and
Charles Bean’, History of Photography 23.2 (Summer 1999): 144.
99 W. A. Somerset, ‘A Slave of the Ruby Lamp: How Frank Hurley Became a World-
Famous Photographer’, Life, 1 September 1919, 166, press clippings, NLA MS883,
Series 2, Item 31.
100 Somerset, ‘A Slave of the Ruby Lamp’, 164.
232 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

101 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.

102 Hughes to Mawson, 22 March 1915, MAC 170AAE.
103 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
104 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
105 ‘In Polar Seas. Captain Hurley’s Story’, Daily Mail (Brisbane), 6 December 1919, press
clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
106 Hurley, ‘In the Grip of the Polar Ice’, (Adelaide) Register, 23 December 1919, press
clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
107 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
108 Peter Bailey, Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
1986).
109 Quoted in Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 25.

Chapter Four. Entr’acte: Sir Ross Smith’s Flight,

Aerial Vision and Colonial Modernity
1 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London and New York: Verso,
1988).
2 Stanley Brogden, The History of Australian Aviation (Melbourne: Hawthorn, 1960),
66–7.
3 Frank Hurley, diary, 11 December 1919.
4 David P. Millar, From Snowdrift to Shellfire: Capt. James Francis (Frank) Hurley 1885–1962
(Sydney: David Ell Press, 1984), 71.
5 Virilio, War and Cinema, 17.
6 Bernd Huppauf, ‘Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War and
Destruction’, in Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (eds), Fields of Vision: Essays in
Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography (Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1995), 106.
7 Huppauf, ‘Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War’, 107–8.
8 F. M. Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War 1914–
1918, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume VIII [Canberra:
Australian War Memorial, 1923] (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press in
association with the Australian War Memorial, 1984), xxxii.
9 Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, 205–7.
10 Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and British Film
Institute 1994), 49.
11 Huppauf, ‘Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War’, 109.
12 Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, xxxix.
13 Huppauf, ‘Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War’, 96.
14 Hurley, diary, 14 February 1918.
15 Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 157–202.
16 Hurley, diary, 16 February 1918.
17 Hurley, diary, 25 February 1918.
18 Huppauf, ‘Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War’, 109.
19 Virilio, War and Cinema, 18–19.
20 Sir Ross Smith, 14,000 Miles Through the Air (London: Macmillan, 1922), v.
 NOTES 233

21 NLA MS883, Series 1, Item 14.

22 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 31.
23 Smith, 14,000 Miles, 2.
24 Ibid., 4.
25 Ibid., 17–18.
26 Ibid., 18–20.
27 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), 27–9.
28 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 31.
29 Bourke, ‘The Battle of the Limbs: Amputation, Artificial Limbs and the Great War in
Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 110 (April 1998): 49–67.
30 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2.
31 Armstrong, Modernism, 3.
32 Smith, 14,000 Miles, 22–6.
33 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33. Unless otherwise indicated, citations
from media reports are from this file.
34 Harringtons’ Photographic Journal, Special Aerial Photography Number 29.334 (1 March
1920).
35 Press clippings, NLA, MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
36 Hurley, ‘Sydney from the Skies’, Sun, 18 February 1920, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 33.
37 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde’, in Thomas Elsaessar (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI,
1990), 58.
38 Wolfgang Shivelbusch, The Railway Journey, quoted in Edward Dimendberg, ‘The Will
to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity’, October 73 (Summer 1995): 108.
39 Smith, The First Aeroplane Voyage from England to Australia With Aeroviews by Capt. Frank
Hurley, New South Wales Edition (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1920).
40 Robert Dixon, ‘Literature and Melodrama 1851–1914’, in Bruce Bennett and Jennifer
Strauss (eds), The New Oxford History of Australian Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University
Press 1998), 73–4.
41 ‘Captain Frank Hurley. The Famous Photographer… Is Still on the Job’, People, 13
September 1950, quoted in Alasdair McGregor, Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life
(Camberwell, Vic.: Viking Penguin, 2004), 218.
42 Millar, From Snowdrift to Shellfire, 71.
43 Descriptive Catalogue of Exhibition of Enlargements, Official War Photographs, exhibited at the
Sydney Town Hall Basement, 4 March–29 April 1922. Arranged by the Australian War
Museum.

Chapter Five. Colonial Modernity and Its Others: Pearls and

Savages as a Multimedia Project
1 Handbill for the London season of Sir Ross Smith’s Flight, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 31.
2 Hurley, diary, 4 April 1921.
3 The full title appears on a composite, re-shot half-plate glass negative used to prepare
an introductory lantern slide, nla.pic-an23382084.
4 Hurley, diary, 29 August 1922.
234 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

5 Veronica Kelly, The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama 1890s–1920s
(Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2010), 2.
6 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Putting the Nation In its Place?: World History and C. A. Bayly’s
The Birth of the Modern World’, in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected
Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 2001), 32.
7 Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, & Turn-of-the-Century Visual
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
8 Ibid., xxix.
9 Ibid., xxx.
10 Ibid., xx.
11 Ibid., xxx.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., xxxi.
14 Ibid., xxxiii.
15 Ibid., 266.
16 Ibid., 251.
17 Ibid., xxxi.
18 Quoted in Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 271.
19 Hurley, diary, 22 January 1917.
20 Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 203.
21 Ibid., 205.
22 Quoted in Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 205.
23 Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 226.
24 Ibid., 227.
25 Ibid.
26 National Film and Sound Archive (Australia), Focus on Reel Australia: A Collection of Early
Australian Feature Films (Hendon, South Australia: Australian Council of Government
Film Libraries, 1990), 49.
27 Rick Altman, ‘From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of
Travel Films’, in Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 2006), 62.
28 Hurley to Mawson, 28 April 1919, MAC 6DM.
29 Minutes of the Australian Board of Missions, ML MSS4503, add on 1822, quoted
in Alasdair McGregor, Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin
Viking, 2004), 220.
30 Hurley, diary, 2 December 1920.
31 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 34. Unless otherwise stated, all clippings
quoted are from this file.
32 Sun, 3 February 1921.
33 Sun, 16 January 1921.
34 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
35 Quoted in Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 219.
36 Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 219.
37 Sun, 3 April 1921.
38 Sun, 9 July 1921.
39 Sun, 3 February 1921.
 NOTES 235

40 Sun, 1 March 1921.

41 Sun, 4 May 1921.
42 Sun, 25 June 1921.
43 ‘Papua To-Day. Hurley’s Pictorial Explorations’, unidentified press clipping.
44 D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, ‘So Much That is New’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929: A
Biography (Carlton, Vic.: University of Melbourne Press, 1985), 217–8.
45 Mulvaney and Calaby, ‘So Much That is New’, 212.
46 Lindt to Spencer, 11 July 1902, quoted in Mulvaney and Calaby, ‘So Much That is New’,
218.
47 Frank Hurley and Emanuel Aarons, Pearls & Savages: A Cycle of Papuan Melodies (Sydney:
Paling, 1921).
48 Daily Telegraph, 14 January 1922.
49 Kelly, The Empire Actors, 99–102.
50 Ibid., 107.
51 Quoted in Kelly, The Empire Actors, 119.
52 Kelly, The Empire Actors, 104.
53 Ibid., 116.
54 Quoted in Kelly, The Empire Actors, 117.
55 Kelly, The Empire Actors, 93.
56 Lalie Setton Cray, ‘The Shadow Show’, Triad, 10 January 1922.
57 Undated press clipping, The Union Photoplayer.
58 Globe Theatre advertisement.
59 Globe Theatre advertisement.
60 Bulletin (Sydney), n.d., press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 39.
61 Unidentified newspaper clipping, dated January 1922.
62 Unidentified newspaper clipping.
63 ‘Told by the Screen!’, unidentified press clipping.
64 Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney:
Currency Press, 2005).
65 Hurley, ‘Papuan Snapshots’, Sun, 9 October 1921.
66 Unidentified press clipping.
67 Jim Specht and John Fields, Frank Hurley in Papua: Photographs of the 1920–1923
Expeditions (Bathurst, NSW: Robert Brown, 1984), 8.
68 Hurley, ‘Papuan Snapshots’, Sun, 9 October 1921.
69 ABM Minutes, April 1923 and November 1924, quoted in McGregor, Frank Hurley,
239.
70 Hurley, diary, 29 August 1922.
71 Commonwealth of Australia, Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry. Minutes of
Evidence, 2 June 1927 – 16 February 1928, 167–79.
72 Hurley to Anderson, 1 July 1922, AMA series 9, H42/1922, quoted in McGregor,
Frank Hurley, 241.
73 Hurley, Peals and Savages: Adventures in the Air, on Land and Sea – in New Guinea (New York
and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924).
74 The Australian Museum in Sydney holds a complete set of lantern slides prepared for
the lecture whose catalogued order probably reflects no more than a typical running
order.
75 Hurley, diary, 11 September 1922.
76 Hurley, diary, 9 October 1922.
236 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

77 D. C. Lewis, The Plantation Dream: Developing British New Guinea and Papua 1884–1942
(Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1996), 67.
78 See Eugenie and Hugh Laracy, ‘Beatrice Grimshaw: Pride and Prejudice in Papua’,
Journal of Pacific History 12.3 (1977): 154–75.
79 Hurley, diary, 7 November, 1922.
80 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 34.
81 FL Mic. 6543.
82 Assenka Oksiloff, Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German
Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 72.
83 Ibid., 83.
84 Ibid., 72.
85 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 272.
86 Hurley to Mawson, 11 July 1923, MAC 6DM.
87 Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry. Minutes of Evidence. 2 June 1927 – 16
February 1928, 175.
88 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 272–3.
89 ‘An Inkwell Launched Me into Adventure’, NLA MS883, Series 3, Item 41, quoted in
McGregor, Frank Hurley, 273.
90 Stuart Cunningham, ‘Apollonius and Dionysus in the Antipodes’, Photofile 6.3 (Spring
1988): 42.
91 Press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35.
92 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 273–4.
93 George Putnam, ‘Preface’ to Hurley, Pearls and Savages, iii–vi.
94 See, for example, ‘Travel in the Photographic Age’, New Statesman, 11 October 1924,
press clippings, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35.
95 Hurley, diary, 6 March 1917.
96 NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 35.
97 Hurley, ‘Hunting the Head-Hunters: A Famous Explorer’s Diary of Adventures in
New Guinea. With Amazing Photos of Newly Found Cannibals’, McClure’s Magazine
56.2 (February 1924), 8–34, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 71a.
98 Hurley, ‘My Adventures Among Cannibals’, Sunday Post (Boston), 6 April 1924, NLA
MS883, Series 2, Item 35.
99 Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 280–1
100 ‘Film Shows Headhunters’, Moving Picture World (New York), 1 March 1924, NLA
MS883, Series 2, Item 71a.
101 Burton Rascoe, New York Tribune, February 1924, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 71a.
102 ‘Braving Cannibals in Unknown Lands’, Telegraph (New York), 18 February 1924,
NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 71a.
103 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 376.
104 Bioscope, 22 January 1925, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 32.
105 NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 30.
106 Captain Frank Hurley and “Pearls and Savages” (London: Stoll Film Company, [1924]), 7.
107 Evening News (London), 18 October 1924, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 30.
108 Altman, ‘From Lecturer’s Prop’, 61, 73.
109 NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 30.
110 ‘Into the Wilds’, Marylebone Mercury, 1 November 1924, which attributes ‘Allenby in
Palestine’ to Hurley, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 30.
111 NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 30.
 NOTES 237

112 ‘Pearls and Savages’, Bioscope, 6 November 1924, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 32.
113 Ruoff, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, 11.
114 Pearls and Savages film press book (London: Stoll Film Production Company, BFI,
n.d.).
115 McGregor, Frank Hurley, 277.
116 ‘Wonderful Film. Striking Coloured Record of Exploration’, Dispatch (Manchester),
1 November 1924, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 32.
117 Hurley, ‘My Christmas in New Guinea’, Star, 23 December 1924, NLA MS 883,
Series 2, Item 30.
118 Evening News (London), 3 November 1924, NLA MS883, Series 3, Item 30.
119 Bioscope, 11 December 1924, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 32.
120 Tom Gunning, ‘“The Whole World Within Reach”: Images without Borders’, in
Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2006), 32.
121 Woman’s Pictorial, 7 December 1924, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 32.
122 Gunning, ‘“The Whole World Within Reach”’, 39.
123 ‘Exploitation Notes’, Cinema, 19 March 1925, NLA MS883, Series 2, Item 32.

Conclusion
1 Veronica Kelly, The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama 1890s-1920s
(Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2010), 3
2 Daily Express (Wagga Wagga), 20 December 1919.
3 Simon J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media
in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies 46
(July 2007): 621–2.
4 Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993); see also Terry Smith, ‘Modernism, Modernity and Otherness’,
Australian Journal of Art 13 (1996): 145–66.
5 Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the
Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 281.
6 Miriam Hansen, ‘Introduction’ in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
7 Jasper Rees, ‘The White Stuff: Sub-Zero Hero’, Australian 30–31 (March 2002): review,
4–6.
8 IMAX Theatre handbill, Sydney, April – June 2002.
9 Programme for Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, IMAX Theatre, Sydney, April – June 2002.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Unpublished Material
Bean, C. E. W.
1. Diaries, AWM38, 3DRL606, Series 1.
2. Documents relating to the Photographic Record of the War (1923): AWM38 3DRL 7953/19
Part 1 (Correspondence 1920–1923); AWM38 3DRL 7953/20 Part 2 (Correspondence
1921–1923).

Hurley, Frank
1. Diaries. AAE Diary, ML MSS389/1; ITAE Diary, ML MSS89/3–4; Great War Diary,
ML MSS389/5; ‘Diary when on tour with the Shackleton Picture’, NLA MS883, Series
1, Item 6; Diaries of first expedition to Torres Strait and Papua, NLA MS883, Series
1, Items 7–9; Series 4 Item 74; Diaries of second expedition to New Guinea, NLA
MS883, Series 1, Items 10–12; ‘Adventure films and the psychology of the audience’,
NLA MS883, Series 1, Item 14.
2. Press clippings. NLA MS883, Series 2, Items 2, 14, 30–5, 71a.
3. Correspondence relating to inquiry into ‘irregularities’ by the Territorial Administration,
Port Moresby, January 1923, FL, Mic. 6543.

Jury, Sir William

BFI Sir William Jury Collection, Items 33–40.

Mawson, Douglas
Papers, MAC: 6DM (Hurley–Mawson correspondence, 1914–40); 5DM (Antarctic
photographs, 1909–1930s); 7DM (Printed catalogues and programmes of Antarctic
expedition film shows and exhibitions, 1915–35); 132AAE (Inventories of equipment,
1911); 180AAE (AAE personnel legal agreements, 1911–12); 150AAE (The Home of
the Blizzard distribution lists and reviews, 1914–15); 151AAE (Correspondence with
Heinemann and other publishers, 1914–27); 169AAE (Mawson–Gaumont Company
correspondence and papers, 1911–17); 170AAE (Film and lecture rights, correspondence
with London film agencies, 1914–19); 171AAE (Mawson–Keedick correspondence relating
to American tours 1914–27); 174AAE (Index to AAE film contents, 1914, 1916, 1919);
240 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

172AAE (Correspondence with photographic companies, 1914–19); 173AAE (AAE film

and photograph collection general correspondence, 1916–29); 181AAE (AAE film and
lantern-slide lecture typescript copy, 1915); Mawson, press cuttings albums, 257.1.3 (North
American Tour, 1915); 257.1.6 (British Season, 1915); M462 (First Australian Screenings).

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244 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

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 INDEX
A Asche, Oscar 178
Aarons, Emmanuel 177, 179
Adelaide 20, 29, 37, 58, 125, 128–30,
134, 148, 159, 161, 177, 182,
184, 213
adventurer-cameraman 8, 10–11,
26, 141–42, 146, 169, 173, 190,
193, 216
aerial photography 147–55, 159,
162, 165, 183,
Aitken, Max, Lord Beaverbrook 42
Alhambra Theatre (London)
35–36, 211
Altman, Rick 6–9, 15, 134, 171,
201–2, 204, 209–10
Silent Film Sound 209
Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia)
(AWA) 172, 183
American Museum of Natural
History (New York) 5, 8, 29–30,
168–69, 172, 198, 211
Amiens 66
Anglosphere xxiv, xxvi, xxix, 166,
207, 210, 213–15
Angus & Robertson (Sydney) 23, 69,
74, 160
Antarctica xx, 14, 26, 38, 112,
145, 211,
ANZAC 43, 62
Argus (Melbourne) 44, 119
Arkeley, Carl E. 197–99
Armstrong, Tim 157–58
Note: Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations.
Cairo 54, 127, 178
Chu Chin Chow 178
Cleopatra 178
Kismet 178
Aurora (ship) 18–20, 24, 74
Australasian Antarctic Expedition
(AAE) 1, 15, 17–19, 21–23,
26–27, 29, 70, 74, 109, 113,
124–25
Australasian Films 125
Australia 3, 8, 10, 18–19, 21–23,
26–29, 31–33, 38–45, 47,
49–50, 54–61, 63–67, 69–73,
75, 85–86, 100–101, 109–10,
113–15, 118, 120, 122–26,
132–34, 136, 138, 142–45, 147,
149, 152, 155–56, 159–63,
165–66, 170, 172–79, 184,
192–94, 203–7, 210–13, 216
Australia House (London) 43, 49,
56, 75
Australian Board of Missions
172, 180
Australian Flying Corps 100–101,
147, 149, 152, 183
Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 42,
47, 49, 52, 55, 70, 109, 113–14,
152, 157
Australian Museum (Sydney) xix,
42–43, 172, 184
Australian studies xxv
248 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
Australian War Memorial (Canberra)
40, 42, 49, 55, 58, 64, 67, 69,
100–101
Australian War Museum (Melbourne)
40, 42–43, 49, 57–58, 60, 65,
67, 76, 86, 161, 163
The Relics and Records of Australia’s
Effort in the Defence of the Empire 58
Australian War Records Section
39–40, 42–43, 47, 55, 147
Autotype Company (London) 33, 212
Ayers, Philip 21
B Burns Philp (Sydney) 172, 184, 186–87
Bailey, Peter 145, 174
Ballantyne, Tony 41, 166
Ballets Russes 178
Barber, X. Theodore 5
Barlow, Tani E. 210
Formations of Colonial Modernity
in East Asia xxiv
Barnum, P. T. 120
Bazley, John 58–59, 67–70, 74–75
Bean, C. E. W. 8, 39, 42–44, 47–48,
50, 52–59, 61–64, 67–70,
72–76, 109–10, 114, 141, 145,
152–53, 198
The Official History of Australia in
the War of 1914–1918 39, 67,
100–101, 149
Photographic Record of the War 39, 55,
67, 71, 149
Bean, Jack 64
Bedford, Randolph 161
White Australia: The White Man’s
Land 161
Bennett, Tony xix
Berman, Marshall xxiii, 212
All That is Solid Melts into Air xxiii
Bernerd, Jeffrey 202
Bioscope (London) 8, 201, 204–5
Birdwood, Sir William Douglas 52,
62, 145
Birtles, Francis 22
Boigui Island 174
Bordwell, David 141
Bourke, Joanna 148, 157, 162, 182
Dismembering the Male 157
Brisbane 125–28, 134, 141, 143–44,
146–47, 161, 189, 190, 213
Britannia Theatre (Melbourne) 130
British Antarctic Expedition 10,
109, 116
British Film Institute 17, 120–22, 170
British War Office Cinematographic
Committee 43
Bullecourt 63
Burton, Antoinette 210, 214
Burton, Percy 9, 117
C
California 10, 12
Canada 3, 29, 40, 42, 48–49, 192
Canadian War Photographs
Exhibition 46, 48
Canadian War Records Office 43–45
Carnegie Hall (New York) 105,
115, 197
Castle, Ivor 44–45, 48–49, 52–53,
84, 109
‘Dreadnaughts of the
Battlefield’ 45, 53, 84
‘The Taking of Vimy Ridge’ 46
Certeau, Michel de xxiii
Chakrabarty, Dipesh xxiv
Provincializing Europe xxiv
Charleville 148, 162
Charlot, Andre 35–36
Chicago 6, 29, 31, 115
Chicago Daily Tribune 31
cinema of attractions 14, 139–42,
146, 173,
Colligan, Mimi 64
colonial modernity xxi–xxxi, 3–5, 18,
41, 54, 57, 65, 134, 146, 148,
155, 157, 162–63, 165, 178,
202–3, 207, 209–14, 216
 INDEX
composite photographs 71
Conrad, Joseph 194
Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, The xv, xix
Courier Mail (Brisbane) 189–90
Crean, Tom 121
Cunningham, Stuart 192
Cutlack, F. M. 100–101, 149–52
The Australian Flying Corps in the
Western and Eastern Theatres of
War 1914–1918 100–101, 149
‘A Close View of “Augustus Wood”
near Passchendaele Ridge
(Ypres)’ 100, 151
‘Section of a typical artillery map’
101, 151
Crystal Palace (London) 20, 40–41,
59–60, 212
cycloramas 64
D 58–59, 63, 211–12
Daily Chronicle (London) 4, 15, 28, 35,
110–12, 174
Daily Express (London) 117, 205
Daily Express (Wagga Wagga) 133–34,
138, 142, 212
Daily Mirror (London) 24, 44–45,
111, 117
Daily News (London) 35, 44
Daily Sketch (London) 13, 36
Darnley Island 175
Daru 190
David, Edgeworth 20
Davis, Captain John King 21, 129
Davis, Tracy C. xxviii–xxix, 3, 210
The Economics of the British
Stage xxviii
Deakin, Alfred 41
Depue, Oscar B. 6–7
Devonshire Park Winter Garden
(Eastborne) 37
Didi-Huberman, Georges 64
dioramas 53, 58, 167–68
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 64, 194
The Lost World 194
249
Doyle, Stuart 125, 183, 191, 211
During, Simon 58
E
Edwards, Elizabeth 40, 212
Eitel, Conrad 18–20
Electric Pavilion (London) 35
Elephant Island xxi, 97, 111, 116,
118–19, 121, 137–39, 204
Elevala 185–86, 189
Endurance (ship) 38, 114, 116–18,
121–22, 127, 130–31, 133,
135–38, 141, 143–44, 194, 217
Ennis, Helen 15, 138
Esau, Erika xviii, xxiv, 41
ethnographic films 168, 176
Eureka (ship) 186–87, 189, 195
Evening News (London) 36, 205
Exhibition Buildings (Melbourne)
exhibitions xv, xvii, xx, 15, 35,
39–42, 44–47, 56–58, 61, 67,
71–72, 75–76, 111–12, 145–46,
160, 172
expedition films 8, 15, 110, 170, 202
Explorers’ Club (New York) 168,
193, 198, 211
F
Fine Art Society (London) 13, 16,
25–27, 32–33, 35, 45, 212
Flaherty, Robert 192
Moana 192
Nanook of the North 192
Flanders 49, 57, 71
Fly River 187, 189
Foucault, Michel xxiii
France 47–48, 51, 62–63, 68, 70, 113
Fraser Film Company (London) 114
Freud, Sigmund 157
Civilization and Its Discontents 157
Fry, Roger 45
Manet and the Post-Impressionists 45
Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition 45
250 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
Fussell, Paul 7
Abroad: British Literary Travelling
Between the Wars 7
G
Gallipoli 41–42, 62, 146
Gardiner, A. G. 44
Gaumont Company (London and
Sydney) 33
Gent, Fred 17–19, 28–29, 32, 36,
114, 124–25, 166, 211
Gerald Christy Lecture Agency
(London) 5, 23
Gillen, Frank 176
Globe Theatre (Sydney) 1, 166, 173,
180, 211
Gosden Advertising Agency
(London) 204
Grafton Galleries (London) 44–45,
47–50, 53–56, 63, 66, 70–75,
109, 112–13, 141, 212
Gray, Michael xvii, 110, 139
Great Britain xvi, xviii, xxviii–xxix,
3–4, 150, 166, 200, 203, 206–7,
210–11
Great Exhibition (London)
40, 60
Great War xx, xxii, xxx, 3, 8–10,
12, 21, 39–40, 46, 50–51,
53–55, 58, 64, 66–67, 73,
109, 114, 119, 135, 149,
152, 156–58, 185, 202, 209,
212, 216
Greenblatt, Stephen xxi
Griffiths, Alison 120, 123, 167–71,
174, 209, 212–14
Wondrous Difference: Cinema,
Anthropology & Turn-of-the-Century
Visual Culture 167
Grimshaw, Beatrice 188
Grosvenor Hotel (London) 21–22
‘guided spectatorship’ 39, 46–47, 49,
58–59, 66–67
Gullett, H. S. 54
Gunning, Tom xxii, 14, 139–40, 171,
205–6, 215
‘The Cinema of Attractions’ xxii,
14, 139, 215
H
Haddon, Alfred Cort 176
Haggard, H. Rider 194, 203
Moon of Israel 203
She 194
Hanuabada 185, 189
Harmsworth, Alfred, Lord
Northcliffe 44
Harrington’s Photographic Journal
(Sydney) 159
Heinemann, William 22–26, 29,
33, 35, 37, 39, 115, 118
Herald (ship) 174
Hill 60 51
His Majesty’s Theatre
(Hobart) 18
Hoffenberg, Peter 40–41,
46, 59–60
An Empire on Display 40
Hollywood 140, 175, 191–92, 198,
200, 214–15, 217
Holmes, Elias Burton 4–7, 170
Through Europe with a Camera 6
Hordern, Lebbeus 183
Howe, Kathleen Stewart 54
Howe, Lyman H. 5, 32, 124, 134,
169–70, 203, 216
Hughes, Harry 27–29, 33–34, 36–37,
120, 132, 136, 143, 215
Hughes, W. M. 43, 147
Huntford, Roland 28, 110,
115, 210
Huppauf, Bernd 149, 151–54,
158, 212
Hurley, James Francis (Frank)
xvi–xxii, xxvi, xxviii–xxxi,
1–4, 6–10, 15–20, 22–29, 31,
33, 36, 38–40, 47–58, 62–64,
66–76, 88–94, 96, 98–99,
 INDEX
102–6, 109–15, 118–48,
151–55, 159–62, 165–69,
171–207, 209–17
‘Adventure Films and the
Psychology of the Audience’
(article) 129, 131
Argonauts of the South (book) 119
‘Aristocracy of Papua’ (article) 181
‘The Dawn of Passchendaele’
(photograph) 57
‘Death the Reaper’ (photograph)
53–54, 73, 91
‘Death’s Highway’ (photograph)
52–53, 56, 71–73, 89, 90
‘An Episode after the Battle of
Zonnebeke’ (photograph) 75, 94
‘The First Battle of Passchendaele’
(photograph) 69
‘The Gateway to the Ypres
Battlefield’ (photograph) 72
‘A Hit on the Road’ (photograph)
53, 56, 72
The Home of the Blizzard (film) 2,
15–18, 21–23, 26, 29, 33–40,
49, 110, 115, 118, 120, 124–25,
132, 136, 171, 211, 213
‘A Hop Over’ (photograph) 66, 75
In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice (film)
2, 57, 96, 98, 99, 109, 125,
132–34, 138–39, 141–42,
147–48, 166, 171, 182, 204,
210, 212–13, 216
The Lost Tribe (film) 104, 105, 171,
191–92, 194, 197
‘The Morning of Passchendaele’
(photograph) 56, 74
‘My Adventures Among Cannibals’
(article) 194–95
‘Over the Top’ (photograph) 56,
75–76
Pearls and Savages: Adventures in the Air,
on Land and Sea – in New Guinea
(book) 171–73, 183, 193–95,
197, 213
251
Pearls & Savages: A Cycle of Papuan
Melodies (sheet music) 177
Pearls and Savages: A Film Drama of
Primitive Humanity (film) 166,
176, 178, 180–85, 200–207,
210, 214
‘Photographer on the Wing’
(article) 159
‘The Raid’ (photograph) 49, 75
‘Ruins of the Cloth Hall, Ypres’
(photograph) 56, 73–74, 92
‘A scene on the Menin Road
beyond Ypres’ (photograph)
51–52
Sir Ross Smith’s Flight from England to
Australia (film) 58, 155, 159
‘View of the gateway to
the battlefield of Ypres’
(photograph) 71, 88
‘The Vimy Approaching Sydney’
(photograph) 161
‘War Photography’ (article)
48, 72
With the Australians in Palestine
(film) 56
With the Headhunters of Unknown
Papua (film) 171, 183–85,
187–88, 191, 197
Hurley, Antoinette xix
Hussey, Leonard 118–19, 123
I
IMAX films xx, 4, 137, 140, 217
Imperial Hotel (London) 109–10
Imperial Pictures (London) 114
Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
(ITAE) xvi, xx, xxx, 15, 22,
38–39, 48, 58, 109–10, 118,
122, 171, 183
Imperial War Exhibition
45, 49, 85
Imperial War Museum (London) xix,
42, 50, 55, 67
Indonesia xxi, 70
252 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
In Amazon Jungles with the Captain
Belsey Expedition (film) 8
ITA Film Syndicate (London)
27–28, 110
J Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in
James Caird (ship) 116, 118, 121,
127, 137
Jay, Martin 51
Jerusalem 9, 56
Jolly, Martyn 44–45, 47, 69, 212
Jury, Sir William 95, 114–15, 117–18,
120–22, 165, 210
K Lippincott, J. B. 23, 30–31
Kaimare 187, 195–97, 201
Kelly, Veronica xvii–xix, xxix, 3, 166,
178, 210, 212–14
Kern, Stephen xxii
The Culture of Time and Space xxii
Kodak xvii, 10, 22, 55, 57, 72, 76,
112, 128, 137–38, 166, 172,
183, 212
Kodak Salon (Sydney) 15, 55, 72, 90,
161, 180, 211
‘knowingness’ 145, 174, 204, 215
Krauss, Rosalind 16, 26
L 209, 211–13, 215
Lake Murray 183, 185–87, 190, 192,
195–97, 201
Lambert, G. W. 49
Lang–Fitzsimmons fight xv, xvi, xvii,
xviii, 178, 213, 216
lantern slides xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 2,
5–8, 11–13, 18, 20–25, 27,
30–31, 33, 35, 38–39, 48–49,
56, 112–13, 115–16, 120–21,
123, 128, 134–36, 138, 161,
168, 172–73, 176, 177, 179,
184–85, 191, 197, 203
Lawrence, T. E. 9
Lee Keedick Agency (New York) 5,
24, 27, 29, 31, 115, 198, 211
Leed, Eric J. 51
Lefebvre, Henri xxiii
Lennox, Cosmo Gordon 35
5064 Gerard! 35
Lester, Alan xxvi–xxvii, 213–14
Nineteenth-Century South Africa and
Britain xxvi
Lewis, D. C. 188
The Plantation Dream 188
Life (Melbourne) 142
Light Horse 54, 56, 68
Lindt, J. W. 177
Lingelbach, W. E. 30
Literary Digest International Book Review
(New York) 193
Lloyds Film Agency (London) 23,
27, 35
London xvi, xix, xxvii, 4–6, 9–13,
15, 19, 21–24, 26–29, 32–37,
39, 42–45, 47–50, 55–57,
60–62, 70, 75, 79, 80, 85, 94,
95, 102, 109–15, 118–19,
122–25, 128–29, 132, 134, 136,
140, 142–43, 145, 147, 155,
159, 161, 165, 169, 171, 174,
178, 191, 194, 196, 201, 204–7,
Lone Hand (Sydney) xvi, xvii
Luna Park (Melbourne) 130–31,
140, 146
Lyceum Theatre (New York) 169
Lyceum Theatre (Sydney) 18, 125,
143, 179
M
Mabuiag Island 174
Mackennal, Sir Bertram 43–44
Phoebus Driving the Horses of the
Sun 43
Macklin Expedition, The (travelogue)
111, 169
Majestic Theatre (Melbourne) 129
 INDEX
Marble Arch Picture Hall
(London) 111
Marsina (ship) 184, 186
Martin, W. Tod 114, 124–25,
166, 211
Matthews, Jill Julius xvii, xix, 21,
181, 210
Mawson Antarctic Collection (South
Australia) xix
Mawson, Douglas xvi, xix–xx, xxx,
1–5, 8, 15, 17–39, 44, 70, 74,
109–10, 112, 114–15, 118, 120,
124–25, 128–29, 132, 134, 136,
142–43, 171–72, 182, 191, 196,
198, 211, 213, 216
The Home of the Blizzard (book)
1, 15–18, 21–23, 26, 29, 31,
33–35, 37–40, 49, 110, 115,
118, 120, 124, 125, 132, 136,
171, 211, 213
Maynard, Margaret 64
Mazengarb, William 125–28,
130, 133
McCarthy, Dudley 43, 47, 64
McClure’s Magazine (New York) 106,
194, 198
McCulloch, Allan 184, 186
McDowell, Edward Burton 7
Samoa: The Tropical Paradise of the
South Pacific 7
McGregor, Alasdair 113, 124–25,
191–92, 203
McIntosh, Hugh D. xv, xvi,
xviii–xix, 178
McLean, Archie Dr 21–22, 27
Mediri 189
Melbourne xvi, xix, 1, 20–21, 41, 44,
57–59, 61, 63–64, 66–68, 72,
75, 87, 119, 125–26, 128–30,
133–34, 142, 146, 148, 155,
159, 161, 176–77, 182, 184,
203, 211, 213, 216
Melbourne Centennial
Exhibition 58
253
Melbourne Town Hall 129, 177, 203,
211, 216
Menin Road 71–72
Mer 174
Messines 63
Middle East xx–xxi, 6, 9, 47, 54,
113–14
Milestone Film & Video 121
Millar, David P. 148
modernity xvi–xix, xxi–xxxi, 3–5,
18, 21, 41, 51, 54, 57, 63, 65,
134, 146–49, 151–53, 155–58,
162–63, 165, 170, 177–78, 188,
202–3, 207, 209–14, 216
Mont St Quentin 65–66
Morinda (ship) 184
Morlancourt 61
multimedia project 165, 170–72, 194
Murray, Sir Hubert 188–90
Musser, Charles 5, 7, 131, 134–35,
209, 216
High-Class Moving Pictures 209
Mustard, Lieutenant E. A. 152
N
National Film and Sound Archive,
Australia (ScreenSound
Australia) (Canberra) 170
National Geographic Society
(Washington DC) 29, 193
National Library of Australia
(Canberra) xix, xx, xxviii, 55,
71–72, 138, 179
Nead, Lynda xxiii, 54, 162, 211–12
Nelson, Carol 5, 7, 131, 134–35,
209, 216
new imperial history xxiv, xxviii, 210
‘new journalism’ 44
New Olympia Theatre (Sydney) 126
New York xv–xvi, xviii–xix, 5, 8–9,
21, 27, 29–30, 32–33, 70, 105,
110, 115, 124, 145, 168–69,
191–94, 197–201, 204, 207,
211–12, 217
254 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
New York Times 169, 193
New York Tribune 199
New Zealand xviii, xxix, 3, 40,
109–10, 115, 118, 149
Newton, Gael xvii, 110, 112–13, 139
Ninnis, Belgrave Edward 20, 24
O 129, 136, 138, 141, 142, 167,
Oksiloff, Assenka 190–91, 214
Olympia Theatre (Adelaide) 128
Olympia Theatre (Brisbane) 126, 147
Orduna (ship) 30
Orientalism 54, 178
Orrisa (ship) 110
O’Shea, Terry 126, 128–29, 133
P Pound, Ezra 45, 55
Pacific Rim xviii, xxiv
Padget Prize Plate Company
(London) 27, 212
Palais-de-Danse (St Kilda) 130, 217
Palestine 10, 49, 54, 147, 153, 161
Panama–Pacific International
Exposition (San Francisco) 40–41
panoramas 64, 162
Papua xix–xxi, xxx, 1, 58, 70,
165–66, 172–73, 175–89,
191–92, 195, 198, 205, 207
Passchendaele 56–57, 69, 74, 93,
100, 151
patter 6, 15, 119–20, 123, 133, 135,
139, 145, 168, 173–75, 203, 209
Pavilion (Adelaide) 129–30
Pentaur (ship) 113
People (Sydney) 162
Perris, Ernest 15, 28, 48, 110–15,
136, 165, 174, 183, 210
Philadelphia Ledger 30
Philadelphia Press 30
Philharmonic Hall (London) 12–14,
26, 29, 35, 95, 111, 117–20,
134, 191
pictorialism 51, 151–53, 155,
159, 162
platform performers 116, 209
Poggi, Jack xviii, 212
Polytechnic Hall (London) 112–13,
136, 206
Ponting, Herbert G. 10–16, 25–26,
28–29, 33–35, 38–39, 45,
79–81, 109, 111, 114, 116, 118,
209, 211–12
The Great White South 11, 13, 79,
80, 138
‘Kinematographing in the Pack’
11, 79, 136
With Captain Scott in the Antarctic 12,
14, 21, 39, 81, 111, 167
Port Moresby 166, 176, 186, 189, 197
Power, H. S. 49
Pozières 61, 63, 65
Primmer, Richard 9
Putnam, George 193
Q
Queen’s Hall (London) 21, 23–24,
26, 117
R
Rabinowitz, Lauren 170
Raines & Co. (London) 45, 48–49,
75, 84, 113, 212
Rainey, Paul J. 169, 184, 193
Paul J. Rainey’s African Hunt 9, 169
Rallston Art Gallery (New York) 29, 32
Rascoe, Burton 199
Reid, Sir George 23
Riffenburgh, Beau 110
Roe, Jill 64
Royal Academy (London) 44–45, 49,
85, 211
Royal Albert Hall (London) 115, 117,
127, 134, 212
Royal Commission on the Moving
Picture Industry (1927) 192,
200, 207
 INDEX
Royal Dutch Steam Packet
Company 20
Royal Geographical Society (London)
xix, 21, 23–24, 26, 109, 211
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
(London) 9, 200
Royal Theatre (Adelaide) 128
Ruoff, Jeffrey xxiii, 4–5, 203, 209
S spiritualism 53–54, 62–64, 73
Saibai Island 174
San Francisco 10, 40–42, 115
Saunders, Edward 118, 123
Schomburgk, Hans 190–91
The Goddess of Wangora 191
A White Woman Among Cannibals 191
Scott Polar Research Institute xix
Scott, Robert Falcon 10–15, 21, 27,
29, 35, 36, 44, 79–81, 109, 111,
114–16, 118, 129, 167
Scott’s Last Expedition 11, 13
Serres, Michel xxiii, 212
Shackleton, Ernest xvi, xx, xxx, 1,
4, 12, 15, 21–23, 28, 39, 48,
57, 70, 95, 109–111, 113–126,
131–36, 138–39, 142–44, 171,
183, 200–201, 210–13, 215–17
‘Shackleton’s Marvellous Moving
Pictures’ 134, 171, 213
South 118–19, 121–23, 142,
170, 213
Shivelbusch, Wolfgang 160
Singer, Ben xxiii
Melodrama and Modernity xxiii
Smith, Sir Keith 161–62
Smith, Sir Ross xx, 2, 10, 58, 102,
147–48, 152–59, 161–2, 165,
171, 202, 211, 214
14,000 Miles Through the Air 155
Smith, Terry 214
Making the Modern 214
Smithsonian Institution 5, 9, 169
Somme, Battle of the 65, 111
South Africa xxvi, xxix, 42
255
South Georgia xxi, 48, 51, 111,
113–14, 116, 118, 135–36,
139, 194
Spencer, Walter Baldwin 176–77,
184, 203
‘Aboriginal Life in Central
Australia’ 177, 203
Spencer’s Pictures 18
Sphere (London) 11, 111
State Minister Solf Visits the German
Colony of Togo (film) 190
Steichen, Edward 152
Stoddard, John L. 5–6
Stoll Picture Production Company
(London) 200
Strand Theatre (Brisbane) 127,
141, 143
Strand Theatre (Wagga Wagga)
126–27, 133, 182, 213
Strickland River 183, 186
Sun (Sydney) 56, 99, 143, 145,
159–60, 172–74, 176, 178, 181,
183, 188–90, 194, 207
Sunday Post (Boston) 194–97
Sydney xv–xix, 1, 4, 15, 17–22,
28–29, 54–58, 62, 64, 71–76,
86, 91, 96, 98–89, 112, 114–15,
124–27, 131–32, 140, 142–43,
145–46, 148, 155, 159–63, 165–
66, 171–73, 176–78, 180–81,
183–84, 187, 194, 197–98, 200,
207, 211–13, 215–17
Sydney Morning Herald 57, 159, 178
Sydney Town Hall 58, 159, 161,
163, 200
synchronized lecture entertainments
xxi–xxii, xxviii–xxxi, 2, 4, 16,
112, 118, 123, 148, 166–67,
206, 209, 213, 215
T
Tambar (ship) 175
Tatler (London) 36
256 PHOTOGRAPHY, EARLY CINEMA AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
Telegraph (Sydney) 56
Terra Nova (ship) 11–12
Thelen, David xxv
Theosophical Society 64
Thomas, Julian 2–3, 211
Thomas, Lowell 9–10, 56, 117, 161,
165–66, 172, 191, 202, 209–11
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence
in Arabia 165
Thomashevsky, Boris xvii, 141
tie-ins 11, 23, 35, 168
Times (London) 35, 116–17,
119–20, 123
Torres Strait xix, xxx, 166, 172–75,
181, 183–85, 197, 204, 215
Trachtenberg, Alan 66
travelogue 1, 4–11, 14–15, 23, 26,
29, 32, 38, 54, 58, 70, 111, 117,
120, 125, 128, 135, 144 ,148,
161, 165–74, 176, 178, 183–84,
188–92, 194–95, 197–98, 200,
202–6, 209–10, 212–15, 217
Treloar, Captain John 42, 57–59, 61,
65–68, 70, 145
Triad (Sydney) 178
Tuggranong 67, 69
U
Union Theatres 1, 125–26,
129–30, 159, 172, 180,
183, 191, 211, 213
United States xv–xvi, xviii, xxiii–xxiv,
xxvi, 3, 5, 8, 18, 23–24, 27,
29, 30, 33, 36, 40, 115, 120,
168–69, 184–85, 187, 191–92,
194, 187, 201–4, 210, 211–12,
214, 215
V
Veriscope Company xv
Verne, Jules 194–95
Victorian Art Society 42
Villers-Bretonneux 66
Virilio, Paul 50–51, 147–49,
151–52, 154
The Vision Machine 152
War and Cinema 147, 154
W
Wagga Wagga 125, 127, 133–35,
138, 142, 182, 212
war photography 48, 67, 72,
151, 159
Weddell Sea 121, 135–36
Wells, H. G. 195
West’s Olympia (Adelaide) 20, 182
West’s Theatres 126
Whistler, William 13
Wild, Frank 113, 116, 121, 135
Wilkins, Hubert 47–49, 68, 70–73,
111, 141, 212
Australian War Photographs 73
Williams, Raymond 151
Williamson, J. C. xviii, 178, 211
Worsley, Captain Frank 135
Y
Young, Linda xxiv, 210
Ypres 47–48, 51–53, 56,
69, 71, 72–74, 88, 92,
100, 151, 153
Z
Ziter, Edward 54
Zonnebeke 49, 69, 75, 94