People Australia

Thomas John McMahon (1869-1933), photographer and journalist, was born on 15 May 1869, fourth son of Patrick McMahon and Bridget Doran. Theirs was a family of workers based at Mount Abundance pastoral property, Roma, Maranoa Region, Queensland. Little is known of Tom’s youth, early employment, private life, family, friendships, or other pursuits, except that he was reported to have been a tutor for children on outback pastoral properties in the Upper Burnett and a farmer at Malanda near Cairns.  

McMahon appears on the public record from 1915 when, at the age of fifty-one, a Port Moresby newspaper listed him as a passenger arriving from Townsville, identifying him as a freelance photographer and correspondent for the Cairns Post and the Northern Herald. This was to be the first of a series of self-funded reporting and photography trips he made, recognising there was a career and worldwide acclaim to be gained from espousing the commercial, trading, and political prospects of nearby Pacific Islands for Australia. Between 1915 and 1922, during lengthy visits to Papua, the former German New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Nauru, Ocean Island (now Banaba), the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), Marshall Islands, Fiji, Lord Howe Island, and Norfolk Island, he amassed thousands of negatives and prints, a significant commitment considering the weight and size of cameras, plates, chemicals, and developing equipment that needed to be carried on location. These photographs were then captioned and sent to editors, accompanied by a small column of topical reportage, nationalistic boosting, and criticisms of collected hearsay. Many of his photographs appeared in full-page collage arrangements, then a new publishing format. Some of McMahon’s images appeared in a dozen or more publications at the same time, which suggests he was not only ambitious but a hard-working letter writer and student of publishing practices who budgeted carefully for printing and postage.

On his first trip, McMahon stayed in Papua for two months and visited several plantations, Port Moresby, Samarai, Milne Bay, Rabaul, the eastern archipelago, Yule Island, and Mafula. His photographs subsequently appeared in the Northern Herald and Cairns Post (102 photographs), the Queenslander (47), Brisbane’s Daily Telegraph (12), the Sydney Mail (73) and the Australasian (36). He eventually published 763 photographs of Papua and German New Guinea in magazines, city newspapers and their weekend illustrated editions, and illustrated encyclopedia around the world.[1]

Between these journeys overseas McMahon worked across Queensland, the Torres Strait, and the Northern Territory as a freelance photographer to pay for his island adventures. For example, a series of fifteen articles in theQueenslander from August 1916 to October 1917 offered readers 105 photographs of the pearling and shipping industries; wharves, missions, and pastoral properties; and islanders dancing or serving as signalmen, divers, and policemen. His photography was so popular that in 1922 the Sydney Mail and the Weekly Times in Melbourne invited him to contribute a collage on Queensland to their annual Christmas editions.[2]

Known as ‘Thos’ on published by-line, McMahon’s worldwide output was prodigious. His photographs of Nauru, for example, were used on ninety occasions globally, appearing in publications across England, the United States, Canada, New Zealand. Like other aspiring colonial experts, in 1919 McMahon visited Britain briefly in an unsuccessful attempt to gain metropolitan acknowledgement and further his career as a photographer, journalist, and expert commentator on the Pacific Islands.

Realising he was unlikely to be awarded the prestigious rank of fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, McMahon gave up on a career as a Pacific expert and in 1922 took a trip to East Asia, writing a poorly received book on China.[3] He then took a full-time, paid job as a ‘back-country’ photographer for Brisbane’s Courier and the Queenslander. Over the following decade he created a significant archive on rural Australia by publishing hundreds of articles and a thousand photographs of outback Queensland. He held a salaried position and was now photographing prize pigs, country shows, school openings, new railways, soldier settlements, and World War I memorials for city-based audiences.

On 12 August 1933 McMahon passed away from a stroke at home during a lunch break from his work. He was buried at Brisbane cemetery, Toowong, the funeral attended by a large gathering from the Tattersalls Club, Kodak, and friends and representatives of the newspapers where he had worked.[4] Newspaper obituaries noted he had a kindly and genial personality and a wide circle of friends, and the Australasian remarked he was well known in southern capitals and that everywhere he went he made friends.[5] Both the Brisbane Courier and theQueenslander stated that he was a bachelor and had no known relatives.[6] His sexuality is unknown.

McMahon was possibly Australia’s first photojournalist. He was certainly a patriot and acknowledged widely for his reporting. The Sydney Mail noted in 1918 that ‘it cannot be doubted that Mr McMahon is doing a national service in keeping watch and ward over developments in the Pacific.’[7] In 1920 the magazine Trade Promoter of Australia and New Zealand described him as ‘a noted authority on South Pacific questions.’[8] His legacy is an archive of publications and journalism of the Pacific Islands.[9] He left a modest estate, asking for his papers to be burned and donating some photographs to a war veteran’s library in Melbourne, however no trace can be now found of that donation. Three hundred of his glass plate negatives eventually went to auction, purchased by a private collector, and the State Library of New South Wales has several hundred images from his central Pacific trip in 1919, but they are wrongly accessioned to Maslyn Williams, an author who purchased them in the 1950s.[10] The Royal Geographical Society in Brisbane inherited a hundred photographic prints and some of his journalistic drafts, letters, and press clippings, along with a few single lantern slides.[11] No sets of lantern slides, or the accompanying lecture notes, have survived. His memory continues through the occasional publishing of his photographs, but he has never attracted enough attention to be listed in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and his brief entries in Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia of the Pacific Islands are quite recent.[12]

[1]     Weekend illustrated newspapers for rural areas with a summary of the week’s news were published, for example, by the Melbourne Argus (The Australasian), by the Brisbane Courier (The Queenslander), The Telegraph in Brisbane (The Week), the Sydney Morning Herald (The Sydney Mail), and others.

[2]     Sydney Mail, 13 December 1922, 55; Weekly Times (Melbourne), 19 December 1925, 45.

[3]     T. J. McMahon, The Orient I Found (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1926).

[4]     ‘Funeral Notices,’ Brisbane Courier, 14 August 1933, 10.

[5]     Australasian (Melbourne), 26 August 1933, 9

[6]     Brisbane Courier, 14 August 1933, 7; Queenslander, 17 August 1933, 9.

[7]     Sydney Mail, 29 May 1918, 21.

[8]     Trade Promoter of Australia and New Zealand, 1920, 38.

[9]     T. Gervais, The Making of the News: A History of Photography in the Press (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2017); J. Hill and V. R. Schwartz (eds), Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015); M. Quanchi ‘Learning by Looking, for example, at Peoples of all Nations: European Education and Serial Encyclopedia,’ Pacific Geographies 45 (2016): 11-16.; M. Quanchi, ‘Power of Pictures; Learning by Looking at Papua in Illustrated Newspapers and Magazines,’ Australian Historical Studies 35, no. 123 (2004): 37-53.

[10]     McMahon’s photographs of the central Pacific are in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales, PXB293 vol 2, 3, 4, and 5.

[11]     McMahon Papers, 9038, 9053, Box 4, Royal Geographical Society, Brisbane.

[12]     Max Quanchi, ‘Thomas McMahon,’ in B. V. Lal and K. Fortune, eds, The Encyclopedia of the Pacific Islands (Honolulu: UH Press 2000). The Wikipedia entry was written by Peter Lloyd, who tracked down McMahon’s will, death certificate, and burial plot.