Visualising the Subject of Development

Abstract

This paper examines a significant body of government documentaries made in Papua and New Guinea, focusing on those works produced in the late 1950s and 1960s that visually report on those policies and practices of development that were part of Australia's trust responsibilities. It traces the political, institutional and administrative negotiations that determined the semantics and rhetoric of the visual and aural modes deployed to represent the Australian work of development of the Territories and its peoples. While these films were instrumental public relations projects, those involved in their production carefully negotiated the field of their representations and the interrelations between ‘actuality’ and policy, a caution bred, at least in part, in view of their envisaged status as part of PNG's history. These flawed and compromised projects provide visible evidence of the interrelated stylistic and political challenges of attempting to visualise development positively during a time when the Trust discourse on racial relations was entangled in broader Cold War contestation about freedom, directed self-determination and the path towards capitalist modernity in the decolonising Asia/Pacific region.