Haddon’s 1898 team made both visual and sound recordings in the Torres Strait, having taken with them wax cylinder phonographs for recording speech and song, and a variety of photographic equipment that included kit for stills, experimental colour photographs, and film. The surviving film from the expedition, probably taken by Haddon, was shot on a Newman and Guardia 35mm camera, purchased by Haddon in London (Long and Laughren, 1993, 34).

At the end of the nineteenth century there was no dispute about the use that the still photograph could serve for producing excellent ethnological evidence: Haddon himself wrote the entry on photography in the 1899 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology (Garson and Read eds., 1899, 235-40). Whether or not film was worthy of the same respect was a matter for debate, and it has been argued that the public appetite for film of exotic subjects and subsequent commercial exploitation of such films ‘helped convince many anthropologists that the medium had few serious applications’ (Griffiths 1996, 19). In the Reports, Haddon himself hardly mentions the films he took in the Torres Strait, though the films were shown in London in 1905 at the Royal Anthropological Institute, with sound from the relevant phonograph recordings (Philp, 2004, 106).

The reels that were successfully developed are the earliest known ethnographic films. All were shot in the first few days of September 1898. Many of the people shown are known by name, and appear in other photographs taken by Haddon during the expedition. The final sequence is considered to be the earliest known film of aboriginal Australians, and shows the aboriginal crew of a trepang lugger which had stopped at the island: they perform a dance on a beach, accompanied by a man beating a stick for rhythm (Long and Laughren identify this dance as ‘Shake-A-Leg,’ a generic description, op.cit., 36).

At no point in any of the sequences does the camera move, and occasionally in the first dance sequences the subjects move out of frame, leaving the viewer contemplating a well-composed landscape shot of overhanging palm trees on a sandy beach with a view to a boat moored a little distance out to sea. The immobility of the camera, although characteristic of filmmaking of the period, seems also both to reflect and to replicate the early anthropological attempt to align the nascent discipline with the exact sciences. It also seems to take upon itself some of the existing prestige of still photography, and it is perhaps telling that the only use to which the films were put was to produce touched-up stills for volume 6 of the Reports and for Haddon’s 1901 popular memoir of the expedition, Headhunters: Black, White and Brown (Haddon, 1908; Haddon, 1978, 49).

The five sequences show, in order: a Malu-Bomai ceremonial dance, in the forest; two consecutive sequences of dancers on the beach, wearing dhari head-dresses, shot from slightly different positions; three men (Pasi, Mana and Sergeant) fire-making; Australian visitors dancing on the beach (the shot location is identical to the earlier beach dance sequences). All the scenes are staged for the camera; it is worth noting that in almost all Haddon’s published photographs of Mer Islanders they are clothed in simple Western dress, and the minimal clothing in the fire-making sequence thus appears to have been intentional, presumably to reconstruct the look of past times. Of the four scenes, the occasion of the first is by far the best documented, as Haddon discusses it at length in Headhunters.

The filmed Malu-Bomai dance is a staged reconstruction of a defunct ceremony. Like other local beliefs, the Malu-Bomai cult had been suppressed by the missionaries and at the time of the expedition the rituals connected with it had not been performed for around 25 years. The cult focused on two mythic personages, Malu and Bomai, and was central to male initiation into adulthood. It was kept highly secret from women. The turtle-shell masks used in the ceremonies had long been destroyed by the missionaries; those which can been seen in the film were created at Haddon’s request by two of his friends on Mer named Wano and Enocha. They are made of cardboard which he supplied, and he paid 10 shillings of gold for them: his collaborators requested that he put the money ‘in the plate at the annual missionary meeting’ (Haddon, 1978, 46). The dance on the film took place at Kiam, an abandoned sacred ground in northern Mer which had been one of the locations of the Malu-Bomai initiation rituals.

The creation of the masks for the dance caused a stir. Haddon found himself in trouble for showing them to a woman, and received a stream of old men who seem to have been deeply moved by these shabby, makeshift reminders of their spiritual life before the Coming of the Light. ‘[I]t was quite pathetic,’ he writes in Headhunters, ‘to see the expressions of pleasure tempered with sadness manifested by the old men. They shook their heads and clicked, and even the tears started to their eyes’ (ibid., 47). Staged and commissioned or no, whatever truth about the Malu-Bomai ritual Haddon had hoped to capture in his film seems to be supplanted and surpassed by this poignant image of the tears shed by old men for a world gone by, an image which gives the recreated dance of the film a higher order of authenticity than Haddon had imagined for it.

Francis Gooding (September 2009)