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Burton Brothers photographic album

Photographer Burton Brothers Studio

Date1879-1884

Object number00056243

NameAlbum

MediumPaper

DimensionsOverall: 275 × 373 × 20 mm, 791 g

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineAustralian National Maritime Museum

Terms

DescriptionPhotographic album of original images by the Burton Brothers Studio from the Solomon Islands and Fiji circa 1879-1884 from a blackbirding voyage by the vessel the schooner SYBIL.HistoryBlackbirding was the practice of essentially kidnapping workers from across the large island groups of the Pacific (the Solomon, Gilbert, Cook Islands, the Bismark Archipelago and others) to work on sugar, coffee, and cotton fields in Queensland, Fiji, Tahiti, Hawaii and even Central America. As the British naval officer and contemporary to the late 19th century practice Albert Hastings Markham described it, 'This so called labour traffic was only slavery under another name ...' In this album, the first of the four images is captioned “Yacht SYBIL”. The next has on the verso “The SYBIL’s Company (only myself left out), taken in the Solomons”; another “My canoe Capt. Gibb (the Pilot), Solomon Is.” The last is uncaptioned but so similar a craft with a similar crew it, too, is almost certainly engaged in the trade. These sit appropriately within a group twenty photographs of Fiji, some captioned in the negative. They were taken in the New Zealand studio of the Burton Brothers and depict the Rewa River and village, Levuka, Nausori, villages, waterfalls, canoes, a wooden bridge, a banana plantation, and several individual and group portraits of local residents. Alfred Burton is considered one of New Zealand’s most significant nineteenth century photographers. He published a series of images of Māori in the Whanganui and King Country regions in his book 'Through the King Country with a camera: a photographers diary' SignificanceA rare photographic record of blackbirding in the Solomon Islands. While printed material (often Government blue books) and the odd manuscript occasionally appears on the market, photographs of blackbirding are rare.