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The century-long relationship between Australasia and the region we call ‘the Middle East’ is little studied and poorly understood.
The constellation of ideas and images of the Middle East in early 20th-century Australia and New Zealand, their circulation through different communities, how they influenced and were influenced by mass travel to the region, and the ways they were inflected by everyday social relationships at home with immigrants from the area, all beg investigation. Pushing beyond stereotypes of larrikin-soldiers in the brothels of Cairo and current media portrayals of militant Islam and burqa-clad women, this project focuses on contact not conflict. It asks if the exchange of people, objects and ideas between 1890 and 1945 reveals more complex antipodean connections to Middle Eastern cultures and peoples than previously suggested. Was there a more cosmopolitan set of cultural influences on Australasian societies in the 20th century that are yet to be revealed? Studio portrait of Vic Grintell, Leslie Bell and Colin McPhail in Bedouin costume. The men served together in the Middle East in the 2/13th Battalion. 31 December 1942. Australian War Memorial, PO5297.003.
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When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, the Winton (Qld) cinema showed his most famous films 'The Sheik' and 'Son of the Sheik' as a double-feature. The locals helped out with publicity. John Oxley Library Image Collection, oai:bishop.slq.qld.gov.au:96376.
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Imagining Arabia explores the many ways Australians and New Zealanders understood the Middle East through travelling and staying home, reading and writing, dancing and decorating, seeing movies and museums, as well as through schooling, sermons and stories. Studying the decades from the 1890s until the end of the Second World War, this project necessarily explores wartime travel as a central cultural experience that changed the traveller and the places they visited. As well as focusing on soldier-travellers, the project examines combatants’ home societies, the ideas developed there and changed through greater contact with the region. We are investigating the material culture, from antiquities to souvenirs, that survives in Australia and New Zealand, and exploring the rich archive of photographs and writings by Australasians as a window onto the modernising, tumultuous, politically volatile worlds of the early 20th century Middle East.
One of our aims in using objects and photographs in this project is to assist museums and libraries around Australia and New Zealand to better describe their collections, making those collections easier to catalogue and discover. We hope our research will expand what is already known of the military history of Australasians in the Middle East, and will bring to light the strong influence that peoples and landscapes of the region exerted in our part of the world. |
