Antique & Vintage Postcards

Six vivid chrome-era panels capture Aboriginal Australians at work and at rest — mending a fishing net, arranging boomerangs and shields on red ochre earth, hurling a spear from a clifftop, fishing from a bark canoe, gathering pink water lilies in a billabong, and standing in ceremonial body paint — a snapshot of mid-twentieth-century Australian tourism's ethnographic gaze, packaged by Nucolorvue Productions for the souvenir market. The card is unused and in excellent condition with the characteristic deckle (wavy) edges of the Nucolorvue format. While today this type of card is viewed critically as an artifact of the colonial-era "native curiosity" genre, it remains historically significant as documentation of how Indigenous Australians were represented to tourists in the 1960s. The reverse describes the subjects as "a cross section of Australian Natives active in their environment." No message, no stamp, never mailed.