IDNO

P.87313.VH

Description

Portrait of a seated man, wearing a grass skirt, necklace (?shark tooth) and handcuffs. This seems to have been taken in the Dufty Brothers’ Levuka studio. The painting in the background is particularly distinctive. [A. Nadin, 2/7/2003]

Studio portrait of a “Kai Colo” or Vitilevu highlander, handcuffed, and with close cropped head, he being a prisoner-of-war taken by the Cakobau government, probably during the Ba Campaign of 1873. His slit and distended right ear lobe appears still to retain a saunidaliga or ear lobe ornament and, he is being ridiculed by having a sisi necklace or collar of sperm whale teeth about his neck. Otherwise he is wearing a black likusausauwai kilt over a malo loincloth.
[Atrocious treatment of prisoners-of-war, including sentencing they and their families to plantation labour, and even leasing them to Barnum’s Circus, was a feature of the settler-dominated Cakobau government of the early 1870s.] See P.99958.
Levuka, circa 1873. [Fergus Clunie, 26/7/2003]

Place

Oceania Polynesia; Fiji; Ovalau Island; Levuka

Cultural Affliation

Kai Colo [historically Big Head Mountaineers]

Named Person

Photographer

Dufty Brothers, Levuka (Dufty, Francis Herbert)

Collector / Expedition

von Hügel, Anatole (Baron)

Date

circa 1873

Collection Name

Von Hugel Collection

Source

Format

Carte-de-visite; Print Black & White Mounted

Primary Documentation

Other Information

P.87297.VH to P.87320.VH were wrapped in the piece of paper now numbered C512/3/. This envelope came from the Museum’s paper archive envelope VH1/4/7, which has now been re-numbered C512/.

Photographer: This print was provisionally attributed to “?Dufty Brothers, Levuka”, but the related print with the same background, P.87301.VH, is published on the National Library of Australia website with the attribution to Francis Dufty. The Photographer and Place fields have been amended accordingly. [JD 9/3/2012]

Related Image: This commercial photograph appears more than once in the MAA Collections. There is no original negative. [JD 27/12/2011]

This print has been catalogued with the support of the Getty Grant Program One. [A. Nadin, 2/7/2003]