Photography and the emergence of the pacific cruise

In 1884 almost simultaneously Australia and New Zealand launched the first voyages of what are now commonly referred to as South Pacific cruises. The Aotearoa/New Zealand shipping firm, Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSC), and Burns Philp (BP) Australia instigated the totally new and untried project that joined a variety of leisure practices (sightseeing, walking, observation) to a nautical schedule of port visits, deckboard games, and dinner with the Captain. In examining these cruises I want to elaborate on the connection between colonialism and tourism by suggesting that tours to the Pacific are one aspect of Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand colonialism in the Pacific. ¹ More specifically, I wish to concentrate on the utilization of technologies of representation, in particular photography, which operated in the formation of a South Pacific cruise. Having colonial terrain represented, collected, pictured, and observed through photography is perhaps one of the most insidious forms of colonialism, where indigenous terrain becomes an object of a representational knowledge to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the site for reproducing colonial relationships of power. Importantly, tourism allows colonialism to be practiced in that the tourist is involved in a number of disciplines dealing with observation, recording, and consuming which produce relationships of power in a specific colonial context.