The Light of the World: transport and transmission in colonial modernity

Abstract

Taking a photograph from the 1906 Australian tour of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World as my starting point, I explore the special relationship colonial audiences had with magic lantern shows and related entertainments. I examine the sense of ‘transport’ that audiences felt at collectively witnessing images that had been ‘transmitted’ to them from Britain. I argue that their reactions were more complex than those felt in the metropole, and in many ways anticipate our own contemporary experience of globalized media.