Walkabout (magazine)

Walkabout was an Australian illustrated magazine published from 1934 to 1974 combining cultural, geographic, and scientific content with travel literature. Initially a travel magazine, in its forty-year run it featured a popular mix of articles by travellers, officials, residents, journalists, and visiting novelists, illustrated by Australian photojournalists. Its title derived from the supposed ‘racial characteristic of the Australian aboriginal who is always on the move"[1].

History

During the 1960s, the magazine and masthead were given a more contemporary design, with the slogan "Australia's Way of Life Magazine"

Ostensibly and initially a travel and geographic magazine published by the Australian National Travel Association (formed in 1929), Walkabout : Australia and the South Seas was named by ANTA director Charles Holmes. In its first issue of 1 Nov 1934, the editorial, signed by Charles (Chas) Lloyd Jones, chair of the board of David Jones and acting chairman of the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA), proclaimed its aim to educate its readers;

[I]n publishing ‘Walkabout’, we have embarked on an educational crusade which will enable Australians and the people of other lands to learn more of the romantic Australia that exists beyond the cities and the enchanted South Sea Islands and New Zealand

The income the Association derived from magazine sales provided for its other activities in promoting tourism, 'to place Australia on the world's travel map and keep it there.' It was assertively Australian in its ethos but took cues from other popular magazines of the period, such as the United States' National Geographic Magazine, and LIFE.

From August 1946, Walkabout also doubled as the official journal of the newly formed Australian Geographical Society (AGS), founded with a ₤5,000 grant from ANTA, its banner subscript reading 'Journal of the Australian Geographical Society'. This role is now filled by Australian Geographic magazine. Later it became ‘Australia's Way of Life Magazine’ when supported by the Australian National Publicity Association and later the Australian Tourist Commission.

Modern dynamic layouts and more lively captioning under the editorship (1960-1969) of Brian McArdle (1920-1968) saw a brief increase in circulation due to more liberal, human-interest and cultural content, emulating the American Life magazine (1936-1972) and the French Réalités (1946-1979).

In accounting for its demise, Max Quanchi writes '...it finally struggled against mass circulation weekly and lifestyle magazines in the early 1970s...'. In fact, Walkabout outlived Life by two years, which also succumbed to increasing publication costs, decreasing subscriptions, and to competition from other media and newspaper supplements.

In the 1960s the magazine spawned a number of book-length illustrated anthologies.

Contributors

Writers included some of Australia's most significant authors, novelists, journalists and commentators:

• Patsy Adam-Smith
• Robin Boyd
• Wilfred Burchett
• Frank Clune
• Eleanor Dark
• Frank Dalby Davison
• James Devaney
• Henrietta Drake-Brockman
• Keith Dunstan
• Elizabeth Durack
• Mary Durack
• Flora Eldershaw
• J. K. Ewers
• George Farwell
• Dorothy Green
• Bill Harney
• Enid Moodie Heddle
• Brett Hilder
• Ernestine Hill
• Ion Idriess
• Rex Ingamells
• Stan Marks
• Alan Marshall
• Hugh McCrae
• Walter Murdoch
• Vance Palmer
• James Pollard
• Leslie Rees
• Colin Roderick
• Kenneth Slessor
• Kylie Tennant
• Arthur Upfield
• Judith Wright

Western Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman originated the ‘Our Authors’ Page’, a full-page feature on a leading writer, which was given a leading position in each issue opposite the table of contents between 1950 and 1953.

A book review column ran almost continuously from 1953—1971 under the byline ‘Scrutarius’ (who was journalist H. C. (Peter) Fenton), totalling almost 200 columns and which reviewed usually four books per issue. The magazine thus provided a showcase of diverse Australian literature to a mostly 'middlebrow' audience that was otherwise ill-served by other periodicals and newspapers.

Photojournalism

Walkabout was an early outlet for, and promoter of, Australian photojournalism. Stories were liberally illustrated each with up to fifteen quarter-, half- and full-page photographs in black and white, and from the 1960s, sepia and colour photographs. (Walkabout also sponsored a national artistic and aesthetic photography competition in 1957 with a One Hundred Pound first prize). The original photography segment was later called "Our Cameraman's Walkabout", "Australia and the South Pacific in Pictures" (briefly including New Zealand in the title), "Australia in Pictures", "Camera Supplement" and after 1961, "Australian Scene". It began with as many as 23 photographs spread over 6-8 pages, but dropped to 6-10 photographs in the 1960s. The segment was often devoted to a single topic and in the 1960s to single-topic double-page spreads.

Significant Australian photographers included in its pages were;

• Frank Hurley,
• Max Dupain,
• Harold Cazneaux,
• Wolfgang Sievers,
• Laurence Le Guay,
• David Moore,
• Jeff Carter and Mare Carter,
• David Beal,
• Mark Strizic,
• Richard Woldendorp,
• Rennie Ellis, Robert McFarlane,
• Alan Chapple,
• Beverley Clifford,
• Leo Duykers,
• Lee Geoffrey,
• Heather George,
• Helmut Gritscher,
• Brian McArdle,
• Ern McQuillan,
• Harry Mercer,
• Lance Nelson,
• Russell Roberts,
• John Tanner,
• Jozef Vissel

Photographs from Walkabout are indexed online at the National Library of Australia

Representation of indigenous Australians

A photograph of Gwoya Jungarai, known as One Pound Jimmy, by Walkabout staff photographer Roy Dunstan, cropped from his original full-length portrait.

The cover of the first issue of Walkabout featured a silhouette of an Aboriginal man taken (on Palm Island) by German-born British photographer Emil Otto Hoppé (1878–1972) who in 1930 was commissioned to document Australia’s ‘true spirit’ and toured extensively throughout the country, including Tasmania. Otherwise, the first edition include no articles specifically on Aborigines but in accounting for the magazine’s name, it connected the magazine with an Aboriginal heritage:

The title has an ‘age-old’ background and signifies a racial characteristic of the Australian aboriginal who is always on the move. And so, month by month, through the medium of pen and picture, this journal will take you on a great ‘walkabout’ through a new and fascinating world below the Equator.

Walkabout's early to mid-century stance on depiction of Indigenous Australians was generally conservative, patronising, romantic, often racist and stereotyped, though mixed with some informed commentary and genuine concern (misguided and otherwise), in a reflection of the then prevailing national attitudes. Most issues were inclusive of Aborigines in photo spreads, more typically of Aborigines in so-called traditional poses or settings.

An instance (see: "The Language of Tourism") was Roy Dunstan's full-length portrait entitled "Jimmy" of 1935, standing heroically with a spear and gazing to the distance. 'Jimmy' was Gwoya Jungarai, a Walbiri man, but when his image, cropped to head and shoulders, appeared on the 1950 Australian stamp it was captioned just 'Aborigine'. Though belatedly named in an editorial essay, the deprecating moniker 'One Pound Jimmy' stuck.

However stereotyped or cursory such inclusions might have been, they did promote an understanding of an enduring and significant Aboriginal presence, and of a rich cultural heritage. Specialist essays, written for a general audience, covered topics including: Aboriginal art; black trackers; the Torres Strait Islands and Groote Eylandt; missions; Aboriginal bird and place names; Aboriginal weapons and tools; poetry and ritual; the skills and division of labour in fishing, hunting and gathering activities; foodstuffs; Aboriginal pastoral workers; and sea craft.

Ion Idress, Mary Durack and Ernestine Hill in their frequent writings for the magazine present complex and ambivalent attitudes to the indigenous. Despite their familiarity with Aborigines, they saw them as ‘vanishing’ due to unexplained causes and agencies of which even Aborigines themselves were ignorant, and an insufficient birth rate to sustain their population, explained as an instinctual ‘racial suicide’.

Conversely, regular contributor Bill Harney, cattleman, former patrol officer and protector of Aborigines and father of Wardaman elder Bill Yidumduma Harney, penned sixteen articles over 1947–57 presenting an experienced and sympathetic view of the the Aboriginal peoples of Australia’s Northern Territory alongside whom he worked and lived.

Anthropologists Donald Thomson, Ronald Berndt and Frederick McCarthy contributed learned articles, with Ursula McConnel's three articles, all in successive issues during 1936 and drawn from fieldwork she had undertaken in Cape York from 1927 to 1934, provided particular insights into the impact on Aborigines experiencing the transition from traditional practices to mission life.

Furthermore, the magazine reviewed more enlightened literature as early as 1952, including poet Roland Robinson’s studies of traditional Aboriginal knowledge Legend and Dreaming as related to Roland Robinson by Men of the Djauan, Rimberunga, Mungarai-Ngalarkan and Yungmun Tribes of Arnhem Land (1952, with a foreword by A. P. Elkin) and children’s literature dealing with indigenous subjects, such as Rex Ingamells’s Aranda Boy (1952), the latter being praised for its readability and its politics in showing "that the Australian aboriginal is not merely a 'native'.”. In the column 'Our Authors' Devaney’s popular historical novel The Vanished Tribes (1929), is described as ‘the first really successful treatment in creative prose of our Aboriginal theme, but it is as vitally human and beautifully written a book as we possess’.

By the sixties outrage in the Australian community at the injustice of apartheid in South Africa and consciousness of other social movements for civil rights changed attitudes to the indigenous population. Articles from this period more even-handedly acknowledged the colonial massacres alongside more sympathetic, though still somewhat patronising, stories on the remote desert tribes, and more in-depth and academic discussion of the complex issues of alcohol and indigenous employment appeared.

Bibliography

• Bolton, A. T. (ed.) WALKABOUT'S Australia : an anthology of articles and photographs from Walkabout magazine. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1964 ISBN T000019430
• McGuire, M. E. (1993), ‘Whiteman's walkabout’, Meanjin, [52:3]:517-525.
• Quanchi, Max (2004) Contrary images; photographing the new Pacific in Walkabout magazine. Journal of Australian Studies (79):73-88
• Rolls, Mitchell (2009): Picture imperfect: re-reading imagery of Aborigines in Walkabout, Journal of Australian Studies, (33:1): 19-35
• Rolls, M. (2010). Reading Walkabout in the 1930s. Australian Studies, 2.
• Rolls, Mitchell & Johnston, Anna, 1972-, (co-author.) (2016). Travelling home, Walkabout magazine and mid-twentieth-century Australia. London, UK New York, NY Anthem Press, an imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
• Russell, Lynette (1994), "Going Walkabout in the 1950's: images of 'traditional' Aboriginal Australia [in Walkabout magazine.]", Bulletin (Olive Pink Society), 6 (1): 4–8, ISSN 1037-0730