“The Child of the World’s Old Age”: Australian Perceptions of Japan-as-Child

Abstract

interests and values. 3 Visual culture has figured prominently in these histories as a site in which ideologies of childhood are defined and reproduced. 4 However, the special role of photographs of children in representing and redefining Australian relationships with Japan has yet to be examined. One of the compelling qualities of photographs is that they rely upon a referent in the world-a child who stood in front of the lensbut they also have important symbolic meanings that underscore the historically and culturally specific qualities of both the representation and the child itself. These meanings inform the desire to produce the photograph, its composition, tone, commercial value, changing patterns of interpretation over time, travellers' perceptions of the Japanese children whom they encounter and the performances of children as they pose for the camera. Photographs of actual children accordingly cannot be divorced from larger symbolic values and systems.Personal and public modes of cross-cultural photographic encounters are similarly intertwined in these photographs. The scale and low weight of photographs made them highly portable objects of material culture and facilitated their movement across the seas with travellers, through the mail, or among family and friends at home.