The Pearson photographic albums of New Britain

Steven Gagau is an archivist and researcher with PARADISEC (the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) - a digital archive of languages from the Pacific. Steven is also a co-curator of the Chau Chak Wing Museum's exhibition Pacific Views. In this episode of Object Matters he joins host Dr Craig Barker on a personal journey to his homeland of New Britain as recorded in photographs in two albums taken in the late 1920s by an Australian banker in Rabaul. It was around the time Steven's father was born. In this wide ranging discussion Steven and Craig discuss language, poetry, music, culture, colonisation and the power of photography to capture a changing world.

Image: Photographs from album of views of Rabaul (HP2021.11.1-4)