Percy Grainger and South Africa 1904: Australian National Identity, Colonial Tourism and Visual Culture

Content warning:
This paper includes a photograph that contains racist imagery and discusses racist archival material.

By Pelaya Arapakis (Master of Arts and Cultural Management)

He [Percy] talked about Australia and his hope to return and live there in the future. ‘And why do you set such store upon your country?’ I asked him. ‘Because Australians are the freshest, healthiest people in the world. The fight with nature has stamped them a unique race’.

‘An Australian Abroad’, The Adelaide Chronicle, 3 December 1904.

In the early months of 1904, a young Percy Grainger accompanied contralto vocalist, Ada Crossley, on her concert tour to South Africa. For Grainger—who was, at the time, a little-known musical figure—this tour marked a key turning point in his career trajectory, bolstering his international reputation as a distinguished performer. My research orbits around a photograph taken during this tour, depicting Percy Grainger, Ada Crossley, and unnamed rickshaw runners in Durban, South Africa.[i] Displayed as part of Grainger Amplified in 2023, the photograph is a haunting visual artefact of colonialism and provokes a variety of questions concerning the political landscape of the period and the relationship between colonial tourism and visual culture. I offer here an analysis of the social, cultural and political context of the tour in order to situate the 1904 photograph in space and time. In doing so, I weave discussions around how certain racialised discourses were perpetuated through the global circulation of imagery.

(Detail) Percy Grainger and Ada Crossley, Bower Studio, Durban, South Africa, 10 February 1904.
(Full image available at end of article)

Ada Crossley: A Colonial Artist[ii]

Ada Crossley was born in 1871 in Gippsland/Gunaikurnai Land.[iii] In the early days of her career, Crossley was sent to Melbourne/Naarm to receive vocal coaching from Madame Fanny Simonsen.[iv] Showing great promise as a vocalist, Crossley left for Europe in 1894 to further her vocal tuition, first studying under Sir Charles Santley and then Mathilde Marchesi—also Nellie Melba’s teacher. During these years, Crossley rapidly established a reputation for oratorio, garnering widespread acclaim throughout the British Empire and America. She was a favourite among British royalty and was commanded on five separate occasions to sing to Queen Victoria herself. For the remainder of her life, Crossley lived in England and became a first point of contact for Australian vocalists who sought to build their careers in London. At the time of her tour to South Africa in 1904, Crossley had already cemented an international status as a renowned vocalist.[v]

The Journey

The Crossley touring party commenced their tour to South Africa in early February 1904.[vi] The entourage comprised of Ada Crossley (contralto voice), Percy Grainger (pianoforte), W. A. Peterkin (bass vocalist) and Jacques Jacobs (violin). The photograph of Grainger, Crossley and the rickshaw runners was taken shortly after their arrival in South Africa. The quartet covered a large geographical area, performing in destinations such as Cape Town, Kimberley, Johannesburg and Gqeberha (referred to by Grainger as ‘Port Elizabeth’, its colonial place-name). The performers received substantial praise in the South African press. It was during this time that Grainger first encountered the frenetic nature of celebrity and in turn, reached new heights of visibility.[vii] Many newspaper excerpts published in the Cape Times—and subsequently preserved by Grainger—illustrate the intensity that surrounded Crossley’s celebrity status in particular. One Cape Times article wrote:

Miss Ada Crossley, on her arrival yesterday afternoon was met by the Mayor and members of the Australian Society in Maritzburg. She was presented with a bouquet in the name of the society.

‘On Martizburg, March 11’, Cape Times, 12 March 1904.

Another Cape Times article recounted how Crossley,

was presented with a handsome feather fan, a beaming gold plate and inscription, and a beautiful floral gift in the shape of a lyre from Australians in Durban. Great enthusiasm was shown by the large audience.

Cape Times, 16 March 1904.

The tour also reflects the vast networks and mobilities of the colonial world within the broader geographies of the British Empire. Furthermore, it ushered in a long-standing professional relationship between Grainger and Crossley. Grainger would again accompany Crossley on a series of concert tours throughout Australasia in 1908 and 1909.

White Nations

While the 1904 tour undoubtedly propelled Grainger’s reputation forward, it can also be read in the context of reinforcing a narrative of colonial dominance, consolidating the image of a newly federated ‘White Australia’.[viii] The South Africa tour begins only a few years after Australian Federation in 1901, a period defined by white nationalism and pervasive racial anxiety, which co-existed with a renewed imperial fervour in both Australia and the British metropole.[ix] In Australia, this zeal was demonstrated by the nascent nation’s eagerness to fight alongside Britain in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). With the British victory in the war, Australia’s allegiance to the British Empire reached a highpoint, while the war also invigorated an emergent white Australian settler nationalism as a distinct expression of territorial identity.[x] Indeed, the Second Boer War was the first international war fought by Australia as a discrete national entity and in a sense, inaugurated the Australian nation as a bourgeoning player on the international political arena. As asserted by Belinda Nemec, Australians in the early twentieth century largely did not perceive an ontological conflict in ‘identifying as both Australian and British, nor as both nationalist and imperialist’.[xi] This is echoed in the attitudes displayed by Grainger, who remained resolutely loyal to his British roots, while also championing the ‘unique’ character of white Australian culture. In the post-Federation climate, the Crossley tour had the combined symbolic effect of contributing to Australia’s nation building efforts while also promoting a transnational white colonial identity. These discourses of race—baked into the fabric white Australian nationalism—are reflected pictorially through this photograph.[xii]

Ethno-photography, Postcards and the Imperial Gaze

The invention of photography had significant implications on colonial tourism between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[xiii] Photography enabled individuals to not only capture, but to possess images of distant lands and the exoticised ‘other’. The majority of ethno-photography in this period was firmly entrenched within colonial ideology, where ‘othered’ cultures were observed through the racialised and essentialising prisms of primitivism, ‘the noble savage’, barbarism and inferiority.[xiv] The convergence of colonialism, tourism and photography is typified in the Crossley tour of South Africa, where Grainger encountered ‘exotic’ cultures through his participation in the customary colonial tourism activities of his day.[xv] One such encounter was staged in the photograph of Grainger, Crossley and the rickshaw runners. In the image, Crossley and Grainger sit in a cart that is pulled by one rickshaw puller. A number of other rickshaw runners pose around the cart and are adorned in the typical rickshaw uniform, commonly referred to as the ‘kitchen suit’, which consisted of white shorts and a white shirt with coloured trimmings. Other uniform accessories include beadwork, a feathered headdress and headdresses with double sets of horns.[xvi] In a letter to his mother, Rose, Grainger recounted his time in Durban, describing the rickshaw men. This extract encapsulates the ways in which these workers were often reduced to objects of the imperial gaze, perceived by Grainger as objects of fascination and fetishisation:

Yesterday Durban, which’s landscapes quite pretty, blacks (‘spec Zulus) godlike, whites largely outland & thro’out weedy. No good homegrown colonial-type to be spotted at Durb. But the Zulu ricksha-runners are wholly overmanish; fulsomely headgeared with ribbons & cattle-horns & tuniced & breeches… shining from sweat & polished oil, thus devilishly rigged-up are fine untamed savagery indeed—& the perfect taste of savagery.[xvii]

Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 25 February 1910.

Rickshaws were introduced to Durban as a profit-making endeavour in the 1890s by European colonists. The business venture operated in the context of the Durban beachfront tourism industry which still continues to this day. The purchase of a souvenir in the form of a postcard or photograph was, and remains, a vital part of this tourism experience. The visual motifs depicted in this photograph also strikingly resemble the standard commercial postcards that circulated throughout the colonial world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.[xviii]

Postcards were rapidly adopted as a method of disseminating discourses of identity and power and thus formed a central part of the visual culture of tourism.[xix] Being both cheap and widely available, they played a prominent role in perpetuating racial stereotypes.[xx] This ‘circuit of culture’ is epitomised in Grainger’s correspondence with his friend Roger Quilter, who then resided in England.[xxi] For example, one postcard sent to Quilter depicts Zebras peppered across Rhodes’ Farm, a vast, undulating and picturesque landscape. Another portrays a group of South African people sitting and eating around a large cooking pot. Both of these images evoke a specific kind of colonialist nostalgia, steeped in the romanticisation of primitivism. As Sitah Al-Qahtani succinctly puts it, ‘the gaze, as a visual act, generates modes of power, domination and control’.[xxii] The practice of sending mementos of tourism back home to friends and to loved ones was a common one, and this ritual of sociality ultimately aided in the reproduction and reification of contemporary colonial discourses.

Visual objects such as photographs and postcards were a ubiquitous and inextricable part of the colonial tourism industry.[xxiii] Interpreted against the backdrop of broader social, cultural and political dynamics, these archival objects provide substantial evidence of colonial identity construction and racialised power, both forming and solidifying a visual lexicon of colonial domination.[xxiv] In this vein, the image of Crossley, Grainger and the rickshaw runners, and the 1904 South Africa tour more generally, can be read within the wider frame of colonial politics. While the tour played a significant role in internationalising Grainger, it also emboldened a unique sense of white ‘Australianness’ that was distinct yet intimately tied to British imperial identity.