“OLFALA PIJA BLONG NIUHEBRIDIS BLONG BIFO”: OLD PICTURES OF THE EARLY NEW HEBRIDES (VANUATU)

Authors

Frédéric Angleviel, Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie

Abstract

The postcard offers visual and documentary access to the past. As products of the transient and permanent European presence in the Pacific, postcards contain insights on the colonial mentality, missions, early ethnography, tourism, and the progress of colonial administration. They also reveal personal doubts, joys and loneliness, and mundane details of travel, weather, accommodation, friendships, and jobs. The photographic images on the front are less explicit but leave tantalizingly obscure and confused messages on a similar range of understandings of the colonial past. Postcards have been ignored by historians but eagerly sought by collectors. The Max Shekleton Collection is therefore a remarkable archive and our purpose here is to publicize the diversity and value of the 657 postcards listed in the catalog for the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), so that historians might be alerted to a wonderful new mass of evidence upon which to construct or revise their interpretations of the history of colonial Melanesia.

Recommended Citation

Angleviel, Frédéric (1997) "“OLFALA PIJA BLONG NIUHEBRIDIS BLONG BIFO”: OLD PICTURES OF THE EARLY NEW HEBRIDES (VANUATU)," Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 20: No. 4, Article 12.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol20/iss4/12