Sugar Plant Hunting by Airplane in New Guinea

Drawing on Chris Pinney's suggestion that images 'narrate a different story, one told, in part, in their own terms', I examine the 1929 silent 35-mm film Sugar Cane Hunting in New Guinea. Emerging out of a particular moment in the colonial history of the Territories of Papua and New Guinea, the film and the United States Department of Agriculture Sugar Expedition from which it arose, provide important but largely overlooked glimpses into the workings of colonial science, racial imaginaries and exploration. Examining this film helps restore it to the larger discussion of such events of the 1920s, but more importantly enables a discussion of the narratives constructed and elided by this artefact. Doing so complicates the Expedition's account and repositions the film as an important vehicle for recovering silences in the histories of colonial science, practice and encounter in New Guinea.