Pictures tell story of Pacific colony

By LINDA HERRICK

No one is sure who the young man is in this photograph taken at the beginning of last century, but he's likely to be a German colonist in German Samoa.

New Zealander Nick Netzler found the image under the "people" category in one of many boxes of pictures at the Linden Museum in Stuttgart while on a study tour for his bachelor of design degree at Unitec.

His theme, through five years of study, has been the colonial history of the Pacific, and his discoveries at the Linden Museum form Unsere Neuen Lansleute (Our New Countrymen) at Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi (see Teuane Tibbo story, with which Ketzler's show is linked, on opposite page).

"My surname is German - my great grandfather who lived in Samoa for 50 years had an extensive collection of family photos and he was quite established in the islands," says Ketzler.

"I've always seen these types of images in our family and I wanted to research more."

Western Samoa was a German colony for just 15 years, from 1899. Before then, Germans had traded in the region for many years, with German, British and American ships almost going to war in 1887 during a dispute over trade and naval rights. The row was settled in 1899 by giving Western Samoa to Germany and Eastern Samoa to the US.

When World War I broke out in 1914, New Zealand troops occupied the territory and Germany's brief tenure as a Pacific colonist was over.

While Ketzler also visited photo collections at anthropological museums in Cologne and Frankfurt, Linden Museum was the only one which allowed him to re-photograph the prints.

"The sheer volume of photographs blew me away but the collection was not necessarily categorised or stored very well. There was no information about the man in the photo at all, and the photos were just in boxes under very vague categories like 'people'.

"I looked at 2000 images and shot 200; what's showing at the gallery is 35 I've chosen.

"I've put them in the context of German Samoa without any kind of slant or statement on colonialism.

"You can't escape that - they are what they are. They are images of a time in history, a short time in a place close to us."

* Nick Netzler's Our New Countrymen runs at Lopdell House gallery until June 2.