The National Gallery of Australia's research library &
The Far East Magazine
Gael Newton AM
The Librarians at the National Gallery Research Library work with curators to acquire titles to support the research needed for exhibitions and ongoing or new areas of collection research. While I was working towards exhibition on Asia-Pacific photography, a major project for the reseearch library was to build the Gallery Research Library catalogue of books relating to the history of photography in the Asia-Pacific region. This was a new area of collecting in line with the Director’s 2005 Vision Statement and for a planned major exhibitionl.
One of the major Library acquisitions was a pair of volumes from The Far East, A Monthly Illustrated Journal published in Japan from 1876-78 by John Reddie Black. The monthly was preceded by The Far East, an Illustrated Fortnightly Newspaper published between 1870 -1873. The Journal was in English and covered stories from Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan.
The Far East is the first newspaper illustrated with original photographs. It is not clear how many were printed of each issue, with some 1000 prints used over its eight year run.
The publisher of The Far East was Scot John Reddie Black (1827-1880) who had first immigrated to South Australia in 1854 but moved to Japan in 1863 where he worked as an editor. The two volumes in the Gallery Research Library are the only known copies held in Australia and complement other important photographically illustrated books from Europe and America in both the Research Library and the permanent art collection.
