COLOUR, MOVEMENT AND MUSIC

CHRIS SZEKELY

DESCRIPTION Men from Bellona, Solomon Islands, perform at the Tenth Festival of Pacific Arts, Pago Pago, American Sāmoa, 31 July 2008

MAKER / ARTIST Julia Brooke-White (b. 1942)

REFERENCE PA-Group-00421: PA12-8331-15

Colour, movement and music: a taste of the sights and sounds of the four-yearly Festival of Pacific Arts can be savoured in the photographs of Julia Brooke-White (b.1942). Now living in Wellington, Brooke-White spent a decade immersed in Pacific cultures while living in Fiji in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1992 to 2008, she photographed four festivals hosted in turn by the Cook Islands, Sāmoa, Nouméa and American Sāmoa, depositing a selection of these images with the Turnbull Library in 2009. The collection now comprises more than 2200 colour transparencies, stored in environmentally controlled conditions and findable through the library’s catalogue.

The first festival took place in Fiji in 1972, with support from the South Pacific Commission. BrookeWhite heard people still talking about the event when she arrived in the islands five years later, having sailed across the Pacific with her partner and young daughter, and pregnant with her second daughter. While working as a photographer for the Fiji Museum, she wondered about photographing the festival. The opportunity came in 1992 when the event was held on Rarotonga. There, she recalls riding a scooter with a pack full of camera gear and a heavy tripod strapped to her body.

She couldn’t be at several venues at once, but BrookeWhite tried to ensure there was a record of each participating nation. In the earlier festivals it was unusual

The Festival of Pacific Arts is held in a Pacific Islands nation once every four years and attracts performers from over 25 Pacific countries.

for performers to have their own cameras, and BrookeWhite later provided prints to performers on request. She also photographed the festival in the Solomon Islands in 2012 using a digital camera. By then, however, smartphones were more commonly available and people could take their own pictures. It was the last festival the photographer attended.

The Festival of Pacific Arts has grown to become one of the longest-running and largest events of its kind, attracting hundreds of participants from more than 25 Pacific nations. The festival serves to support and celebrate indigenous arts in the Pacific, especially dance. Conveying the full sensory experience of dance performance for retrospective appreciation is impossible; the experience of each moment is unique to those who were there. However, the photographs housed at the Turnbull offer partial glimpses of four of these events through the lens of a New Zealander in attendance.