Max Quanchi – författare

The South Seas, as this region used to be called, conjured up images of adventure, belles and savages, romance and fabulous fortunes, but the long voyages of discovery and exploration of the vast Pacific Ocean were really an exercise in amazing logistics, navigation, hard grit, shipwreck and pure luck. The motivations were scientific and geographic, but at the same time nationalistic and materialistic.A series on global exploration and discovery would not be complete without this book by Quanchi and Robson. It is ambitious and informative and includes the familiar names of Laperouse, Bougainville, Cook, and Dampier, as well as the intriguing stories of the Bounty Mutiny, scurvy, and the mysterious Northwest Passage, Terra Australis Ignotia, and Davis Land. There are entries on first contacts, ships, navigational instruments, mapping, and botany. The scene is carefully set in the introduction, the chronology spans several centuries, and the extensive bibliography offers a guide to further reading. There are more than just dry facts in this book. It has a whiff of salt air, the clash of empires, cross-cultural beach encounters, and personal adventure.

This book investigates the histories of photography, photographers and the camera in the Pacific, and the parallel histories of colonial expansion, colonies, territories and Empires, and decolonisation from the 1830s through to the 1960s. It looks at albums, postcards, portraits, colonial handbooks, illustrated newspapers and magazines, serialised pictorial encyclopaedia, and illustrated books, and how published black and white photography documented a place, people and their cultures. The material ranges across the early years of the camera in the Pacific, to the colonial era, and through to today's increasingly prolific mobile phone photography. Most of the argument, insight and data is from so-called old photographs, but reference to the present underpins the discussions on how photographs have been used in historiography over the two hundred years following the invention of the camera. Four essays focus on Papua New Guinea, two on Fiji, and one on American possessions in the Pacific, one each on pictorial encyclopaedia, colonial handbooks, illustrated magazines, and illustrated books, two on postcards, and three on photography generally in Oceania.