Walkabout was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n 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. Frank Clune

Frank Clune

Francis Patrick Clune, OBE, was a best-selling Australian author, travel writer and popular historian.-Early life and career:Frank Clune was born in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney in 1893, and grew up in Redfern...

, Brett Hilder, Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Graham Burchett was an Australian journalist known for his reporting of conflicts in Asia and his Communist sympathies...

, Ion Idriess

Ion Idriess

Ion Llewellyn Idriess, OBE was a prolific and influential Australian author. He wrote more than 50 books over 43 years between 1927 to 1969 - an average of one book every 10 months, and twice published three books in one year...

, Ernestine Hill

Ernestine Hill

Ernestine Hill was an Australian journalist, travel writer and novelist.-Life:Born in Rockhampton, Queensland, Hill attended All Hallows' School in Brisbane, and then Stott & Hoare's Business College, Brisbane...

, Charmian Clift

Charmian Clift

Charmian Clift was an Australian writer and essayist during the mid 20th century. She was the second wife and literary collaborator of George Johnston.-Biography:...

, George Farwell

George Farwell

George Farwell was an Australian novelist, freelance journalist, broadcaster and travel writer.-Early career:George Michell Farwell was born in Bath, Somerset, England. and educated at a number of different schools, ending with Forest School, Walthamstow, which he left at age 17...

, Robin Boyd

Robin Boyd

Robin Gerard Penleigh Boyd CBE was an influential Australian architect, writer, teacher and social commentator...

 and Keith Dunstan

Keith Dunstan

Keith Dunstan OAM is an Australian journalist and author born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of William Dunstan VC and Marjorie Dunstan. He attended Geelong Grammar School and was a Flight Lieutenant in 1943-46 with the Royal Australian Air Force, stationed at Labuan in the Pacific...

 were but a few of its name writers.

History

Ostensibly and initially a travel magazine, Walkabout was published by the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA, formed in 1929). The income they derived from its sale provided for the Association's other activities in promoting tourism, 'to place Australia on the world's travel map and keep it there.' It was assertively Australian, aiming to help 'Australians and the people of other lands [...] learn more of the vast Australian continent and its nearby islands,' and came to resemble the popular magazines that were to appear after World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, and like the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

' National Geographic Magazine

National Geographic Magazine

National Geographic, formerly the National Geographic Magazine, is the official journal of the National Geographic Society. It published its first issue in 1888, just nine months after the Society itself was founded...

.

From August 1946, Walkabout also doubled as the official journal of the newly formed Australian Geographical Society (AGS), founded with a five thousand pound grant from ANTA. This role is now filled by Australian Geographic

Australian Geographic

The Australian Geographic is a quarterly geographical magazine-style journal created by Dick Smith in 1985. It focuses mainly on stories about Australia, or about Australian people in other countries...

 magazine.

Modern dynamic layouts and more lively captioning under the editorship (1960-1968) of Brian McArdle saw a brief increase in circulation due to more liberal, human-interest and cultural content, emulating the American Life

Life (magazine)

Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

magazine (1936-1972) and the French Réalités

Réalités

Réalités is a weekly French-language Tunisian magazine. An independent magazine, it is published by Maghreb Media each Thursday. It was founded in 1979 by Taïeb Zahar and quickly became an important element of Tunisian national media. In 2005, an Arabic version began to be published...

(founded 1946). 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.

Photojournalism

Walkabout was an early outlet for 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

Frank Hurley

James Francis "Frank" Hurley, OBE was an Australian photographer and adventurer. He participated in a number of expeditions to Antarctica and served as an official photographer with Australian forces during both world wars.His artistic style produced many memorable images but he also used staged...

, Max Dupain

Max Dupain

Maxwell Spencer Dupain AC was a renowned Australian modernist photographer.-Early life:Dupain received his first camera as a gift in 1924, spurring his interest in photography He later joined the Photographic Society of NSW, and when he left school, he worked for Cecil Bostock in Sydney.-Early...

, Harold Cazneaux

Harold Cazneaux

Harold Cazneaux was and Australian pictorialist photographer; a pioneer whose style had an indelible impact on the development of Australian photographic history. In 1916 he was a founder of the Pictorialist Sydney Camera Circle...

, Wolfgang Sievers

Wolfgang Sievers

Wolfgang Georg Sievers, AO was an Australian photographer who specialised in architectural and industrial photography.Seivers was born in Berlin, Germany...

, Laurence Le Guay, David Moore

David Moore (photographer)

David Moore was an Australian photojournalist.Moore was educated at Geelong Grammar School. He began his career in the studio of Russell Roberts in Sydney, moving on to work with Max Dupain soon after...

, Jeff Carter

Jeff Carter (photographer)

Jeff Carter was an Australian photographer and author.-Early life:Carter was born to Percy and Doris Carter in Melbourne in August 1928 in Victoria and attended Melbourne Boys High School. By the time he matriculated in 1946, his three major passions were clear – photography, writing and travel....

 and Mare Carter, David Beal

David Beal

David Beal played first-class and List A cricket for Somerset in the 1991 season. He was born at Butleigh, Somerset.Beal was a lower-order right-handed batsman and a right-arm medium-pace bowler who took a lot of wickets in club cricket for the Morlands Cricket Club at Glastonbury...

, Richard Woldendorp

Richard Woldendorp

Richard Leo Woldendorp is an Australian photographer.Born in Utrecht, Netherlands, he migrated to Australia in 1950. He began photographing in 1956, initially on various projects in Indonesia. He became a professional photographer in 1961 after winning two prizes in the Craven-A national...

, Rennie Ellis

Rennie Ellis

Reynolds Mark "Rennie" Ellis was an Australian social and social documentary photographer who also worked, at various stages of his life, as an advertising copywriter, seaman, lecturer, and television presenter...

 and Robert McFarlane

Robert McFarlane (photographer)

Robert McFarlane is an Australian photographer and photographic critic.-Early life:Born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1942, he was given a Kodak Box Brownie at the age of 9 by his parents, Bill and Poppy McFarlane...

.

Stereotypes of indigenous Australians

Walkabout’s early to mid-century stance on depiction of Indigenous Australians was generally conservative, romantic and stereotyped, a reflection of the then prevailing national attitudes. An instance 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

Gwoya Jungarai

Gwoya Jungarai , known as One Pound Jimmy, was an Australian Aboriginal man of the Wailbri people of central Australia....

, a Walbiri man, but when his image, cropped to head and shoulders, appeared on the 1950 Australian stamp it was captioned 'Aborigine'. Though belatedly named in an editorial essay, the deprecating moniker 'One Pound Jimmy' stuck.