Images of the Pacific Rim: Australia and California, 1850-1935

Abstract

Nineteenth-century networks of travel, trade and technology excite keen interest in current art history.1 Compared with present day electronic image transmission, nineteenth-century information networks were humble predecessors. But as more scholars demonstrate, these networks were crucial conduits of imagery and ideas in an age of less convenience. Erika Esau has contributed an important new study to this field; that of the aesthetic connections established through trade, travel and technology-enabled mass communication between California and the emerging colonies of Australia. Beginning in the 1850s with the gold-induced population booms along the Pacific coasts, and the arrival of itinerant artists–photographers in ‘gold country’, Esau identifies key moments of shared history and aesthetic exchange between California and Australia in a series of case-studies spanning eighty-five years. She focuses on the ‘lower’ arts of photography, illustration and graphic design, which are characterized by reproducibility, made possible by technological advances in printing, and portability. Esau argues that these factors of reproducibility and portability, together with the itinerancy of artists and artisans, established conditions for a rich flow of imagery and aesthetic ideas between California and Australia. She stops her account at 1935 when, as she points out in a Coda, ‘historic transformations in art and mass media changed the nature of the concepts of itinerancy, reproducibility and portability’, and ‘tracing the specific origins of a particular aesthetic or visual strand became increasingly difficult’ (pp. 330–1). Her range of comparative case-studies, which encompass landscape photography, narrative painting, formations of the picturesque and domestic architecture, tease out the problem of what aesthetics are shared, what remains distinct to each place and, as in the intriguing case of early-twentieth-century California commercial graphics, how the flow of imagery through modern networks across the Pacific created a specific aesthetic, one which eventually produced a modern ‘Pacific Rim’ style.