Australian travel writing of the interwar period expanded with the growth of
tourism in the Pacific Islands and the development of publishing and literacy
at home. This article focuses on how the Australian middlebrow imagination
was shaped by the diverse travel accounts of Australian tourists, adventurers,
executives, scientists, officials, and missionaries writing at this time. Many of
their texts borrowed and blended multiple discourses, simultaneously promoting
the islands as educational and exotic, and appealing to an Australian
middlebrow readership. In this article I argue that not only was travel writing
middlebrow in its content and style, but the islands themselves were a particularly
middlebrow setting. This is evident in representations of the islander “savage”
in the region of Melanesia, a prevalent theme in Australian travelogues.
I argue that this middlebrow literature was characterized by ambivalent and
often contradictory ideas about the civilized “self” and the savage “other.”
Compte rendu de At Home and in the Field: Ethnographic Encounters in Asia and the Pacific Islands, de Suzanne Finney et al. (eds)