Perspective on Life as seen from a 100+ year old time capsule :: National Geographic - Volume XXX, Number VI - December 1916 (Part 2 - Geography, Geology, and Flora)
Greetings Steemit,
Via a warm response after posting 'Part 1' - I'm happily moving along this History lesson's curriculum per your request. All images can be viewed in full detail by right clicking on the pic, then selecting 'Open image in new tab'.
Part 2 - Geography, Geology, and Flora.
December 1916
Volume XXX, Number VI
Picking up where we left off in our last post, we've passed many pages of ads and finally come to featured content entitled:
"Lonely Austraila - The Unique Continent" - by Herbert E. Gergory
The 96 page article begins with describing the geographic location of the continent, using both miles & nautical miles, due to the fact that travel by sea was the most viable method at that time. The author states "The continent, lying thus far outside the ordinary routes of travel, is rarely visited by Americans."
It begins to describe for several pages the geography or Australia, including maps, and pictures from unique geological attractions, as well as Flora found there at the time.
Here are some of my favorite examples.
The Two Brothers on Bald Mountain.
Map showing the Isolation of Australia.
Maps showing the size of Australia in comparison to other North American lands.
The Highest Peak in Australia, Mount Kozciusko.
A nice 2 page spread of the continent.
There were several seascape pictures, this was my favorite. A sailing race in Sydney Harbor.
As an Aerial Photography Hobbyist myself, this pic caught my eye, as it looks like it could have been captured by a Quadcopter. I assume it was taken from a railway bridge, looking down on the barely 2 lane mountain road below.
As I progressed further into the 100+ year old magazine, the page creases became more stiff and didn't want to stay opened flat. Despite my attempts to weigh them down, this led to a couple of pics being shot at an angle as you'll notice the page warps towards the binding.. my apologies for that.
Balancing Rock - New South Wales.
Corals from the Australian Barrier Reef, North Queensland. This pic is cool for a few reasons to me. First its named "The Australian Barrier Reef", NOT "The Great Barrier Reef" as we know of it today. Second would be taking into account the camera technology (or lack thereof) at the time would lead me to believe this photo was probably not taken underwater, which would explain why the coral is all bleached white in the shot as its most likely dead and on land somewhere in a display. Despite that fact, most American readers at the time would probably have not ever seen anything like this before, and wouldn't even realize the Coral wasn't alive.
A Fern-Tree Gully in Victoria. The article really begins to sell how different the Flora ecosystem is from what's known in North America at the time. Notice the woman & her attire on the left side.
A Giant Tree Bridge over River Tarwan, Gipplsand. The caption reads "Australia's trees are largely forms that lived and became extinct in our own land more than one million years ago." ... again selling the Pre-Historic qualities of this far away land.
Forest Twins : An Ironbark and a Spotted Gum. I really liked this pic, though the page is creasing fairly badly at this point and it was hard to get a focused pic. Something about that man trotting along that outback road in his horse & buggy carriage gave pause for me to think about how far along our species has come technologically speaking, in the past 100 years.
And speaking of technology back then - how'd you like to transport all your lumber across rivers via ox drawn cart!
A Timber-Getter and his family in the "Big Scrub".
And finally rounding up our Geography, Geology, and plant life breakdown - here's a picture showing a Forrest of Eucalyptus. As prompted in the caption "Note the Three Men".
As noted in Part 1, the concept of "Travel" jumps off the pages to me, screaming the differences between what I do daily vs how these people lived. Its so much easier now, probably beyond my full conceptualization. The prevalent theme in the writing seems to be selling the the exotic differences between these readings and the targeted Ameican readership's daily mindsets.
So when I started this experiment in Part 1, I honestly didn't realize that the entire magazine consisted of only this one featured article, unlike today's National Geographics which issues host multiple different stories within.
In that model these Parts will be broken up by themes found in the story. Leaving us now completing:
* Part 1: Introduction & Ads
* Part 2: Geography & Flora
Which happily leaves us phasing along to:
* Part 3: Animal Life
Cheers Steemit!
~GiftedGaia
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Thanks for sharing love seeing those old books that I used to collect!