Jackson St Casterton Aug 18. 23 Dear Girls, I was very pleased to receive your nice letters with news of your doings in Eltham. You put Casterton S.A., so your letters were a long time reaching me. As I hope to see you all very soon I shall just send a p.c. of me taken in Mrs Cox’s garden Easter Sunday 12 months ago. The river here has been in flood twice and people who lived along its banks had to move. I believe the Eltham PS is greatly improved. Betty says I shall get lost there now. Casterton is on the Glenelg R. in Vic so you will remember that next time. Best wishes to you all. From E. Hooley Ellen Sweeney was a former student of Eltham State School in the 1880s, She became a teacher at the school from 1891-1898. She returned in 1915 until her marriage to William Hooley of Casterton at St Marys, Eltham, Tuesday, April 24, 1923. Wedding at Eltham. (1923, April 27). Advertiser (Hurstbridge, Vic. : 1922 - 1939), p. 2 (AFTERNOON). Retrieved February 14, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article56655781 Wedding at Eltham PRESENTATIONS TO MISS SWEENEY. On Tuesday last. Miss Sweeney (a member of an old and respected Eltham family), who recently resigned her position as assistant teacher at the Eltham State School to marry Mr. W. Hooley, of Casterton, was presented with a handsome gold wristlet watch. The headmaster, Mr. Dudtield, in making the presentation on behalf of the school committee, parents, and children paid a high tribute to the excellent work done by Miss Sweeney during her connection with the school, and in asking her acceptance of the present, expressed on behalf of all the fullest measure of happiness to Miss Sweeney in her married life. On Thursday evening, a social evening was tendered to Miss Sweeney, at Mrs. T. Jewell's residence Main street, by the choir and parishioners of St. Mary's Church, Eltham, where Miss Sweeney has for some years acted as choir mistress. Mr. Harold Cox, in handing her a handsome gold and oak silver salad bowl and service, expressed the heartiest good wishes to one who had not only labored so strenuously in organising the choir, but had been always foremost in promoting church and public movements in the community. Congratulatory addresses were also contributed by the Rev. F. Norris and Mr. W. P. McMahon. Miss Sweeney sincerely thanked the donors for their beautiful present, and the speakers for the many kind things said in her regard. She felt very much severing her connection with Eltham. She would carry away many happy-. recollections of her old home, and the kindly people of the town. She hoped after some years to return to Eltham. permanently. (Applause.) On Saturday morning. the marriage ceremony was performed at St. Mary's in the presence of a large number of friends. During the nuptial Mass, celebrated by the Rev. F. Parker. (North Fitzroy), assisted-by the Rev. F. Morris .(Eltham). The choral part of the service including the Wedding March, was very efficiently rendered by the choir. MRS HOOLEY (1940, May 10).Eltham and Whittlesea Shires Advertiser (Vic. : 1940 - 1942), p. 4. Retrieved February 14, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article57491650 MRS HOOLEY Sincere regret was felt, in Eltham and district at the death of Mrs. W. Hooley (nee Miss Ellen Sweeney) a very dear and capable teacher at State Schools in Eltham and other districts, including the Western District. The deceased was one of Nature's ladies, and was a native of Eltham having been born in the historic home, Culla Hill, one of the first settlements on the Yarra. She passed peacefully away on Anzac Day, April 26. The. funeral was the largest and most impressive ever seen in Eltham, and left St. Mary's Church after a requiem mass conducted by Rev. Father Morrison and Father Hollis. The pall bearers were mostly girlhood friends. Deceased leaves a husband, two brothers, Mr. Tom Sweeney of Kew, and Mr. Frank Sweeney of Western Australia and sisters (Mrs. Lane, of W.A., and Mrs. M. Carringham, of Dalton St, Eltham.) POSTCARD 1905-1940s Like the carte-de-visite, postcards enjoyed a collecting craze by large numbers of people, and were often kept in albums through which the interested visitor could browse. Postcards were posted or exchanged in huge numbers. Postal authorities in Australia only allowed the private printing of postcards from 1898. At this time the back of the card was reserved for the address and postage stamp, and the front was used for the message and a picture. In 1902 British authorities allowed a "divided back", so that the left side could be used for the message, the right side for the address and stamp, and the whole of the front was devoted to the picture. France followed suit in 1904, Germany and Australia in 1905, and the United States in 1907. - Frost, Lenore; Dating Family Photos 1850-1920; Valiant Press Pty. Ltd., Berwick, Victoria 1991marg ball collection, postcard, 1922, 1923, ellen hooley (nee sweeney), ellen sweeney, eltham, mrs cox

Arthur William Glass known as Peter was born August 28, 1917. During the 1930s, Peter Glass and a young Graeme Bell were studying painting under Max Meldrum. Graeme Bell at that time was undecided whether to devote his life to music or painting. In 1938, inspired by what they had seen at 'Montsalvat', Peter Glass along with Graeme and Roger Bell (whose names were to become internationally known as the leaders of Australia's most famous jazz band) agreed to purchase land at Eltham to build themselves a mud brick house. For some time, Eltham had been their chosen place for painting and sketching, but it was not until they visited the 'Jorgensen Colony', as it was then known, and saw the possibilities of building in earth, that they decided to establish a permanent base in Eltham. In July, the three of them bought a few acres of land at the top of John Street and started making mud bricks for a proposed sixty square sized house. Following the Second World War, Peter Glass returned in 1946 to live permanently in Eltham. He resumed work on building of the adobe house which he had commenced before the war. During some years spent in England and France he married a French girl and on returning to Eltham he built another adobe house in which he lived with his wife, Cecile Madeleine, and two children, Julian and Marie-Luce on land adjoining the original house. Peter Glass died in December 1997 aged 80, his wife Cecile in 2006, aged 79. They are memorialised in Eltham Cemetery. Much of the inspiration for his landscape painting comes from the Eltham bush and the Yarra flowing through it.oil on chipboard 33 x 40.5 x 1.0 cm Signed 'Peter Glass in red paint lower right of centre Evidence of some paint rub-off at edges from previous frame mounting (frame removed).Reverse side painted in pale yellow cream and inscribed: 'Summer Landscape - 1968 Kangaroo Ground' in black paint1968, arthur william glass, artwork, kangaroo ground, paintings, peter glass

The outer envelope is addressed Mr E. Fielding which is believed to be Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding. It is understood from Tom Fielding, that this item was collected by his Uncle Bill Teagle when visiting Japan in the 1920s whilst serving in the Navy. It is further understood that Bill always made efforts to collect souvenirs from his travels to give to family members. William George Teagle, more commonly known as Bill, was born 2 August 1899 at Sandringham, Victoria. Bill, a milk carter first attempted to enslist in the AIF in October 1917 but was rejected on the grounds of being too small. On a second attempt he was successful and his application was accepted 1 June 1918. He embarked in November 1918 for overseas with the 17th Reinforcements. He was discharged a year later in December 1918. On 6 May 1919 he enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy for a period of 7 years service with the rank of Stoker however he remained with the navy throughout till the end of the Second World War, and was finally discharged 14 November 1945 with the rank of Petty Officer. This item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection

The text on reverse translates Kikaha toilet department. There is also the printed image of a swallow on the back, which suggests that it was taken by the S. N. Banshiudo Studio in Shiba Park, Tokyo. Geisha Sakae was an extremely popular postcard model shortly after the Russo-Japanese war 1904-05, people used to line up early in the morning whenever a new postcard was released at the postcard shop in Ginza. The beauty of her gait was so widely admired that her walk inspired many of the leading Onnagata (male Kabuki actors in female roles) of the day. She went on to marry Ichikawa Sadanji II, one of the most popular Kabuki actors in Japan, who worked hard to promote new plays and revive long-forgotten classical dramas. [Ref: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blue_ruin_1/8448420741] During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the Japanese government sent postcards of beautiful Japanese women, bijin ehagaki (美人絵葉書), to soldiers to motivate them. Publishers continued to print them well into the 1920s. [Ref: Duits, Kjeld (February 21, 2022). 1910s: Geisha Postcards, OLD PHOTOS of JAPAN. Retrieved on March 31, 2024 (GMT) from https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/photos/883/vintage-geisha-postcards-early-20th-century] See also: Sakae さかえ - Meiji / Taishō Era Geisha https://www.flickr.com/groups/1988804@N22/pool/ The photochrom process Photochroms are not photographs but actual prints, produced using 6 to 15 colors and the lithography printing process. The technique was invented by the Swiss Hans Jakob Schmid during the 1880s. The fascinating aspect of these prints is that they are created from black and white photographs. It required quite some work and talent to create these images. The photographer would usually make notes about the colors in the image he shot. These enabled a painter to create a painting that served as a color guide for the litho stone maker. This artisan would then create multiple exposures of the original black-and-white negative, changing the exposure time, development settings, and using dodge and burn techniques to create the required set of 6 to 15 stones that would each be used to print one specific color. By combining all these colors you get the prints [Ref: https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/photochrome-prints]This item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, geisha sakae, japanese postcard, postcard

The text on reverse translates to Kikaha toilet department. There is also the printed image of a swallow on the back, which suggests that it was taken by the S. N. Banshiudo Studio in Shiba Park, Tokyo. Geisha Sakae was an extremely popular postcard model shortly after the Russo-Japanese war 1904-05, people used to line up early in the morning whenever a new postcard was released at the postcard shop in Ginza. The beauty of her gait was so widely admired that her walk inspired many of the leading Onnagata (male Kabuki actors in female roles) of the day. She went on to marry Ichikawa Sadanji II, one of the most popular Kabuki actors in Japan, who worked hard to promote new plays and revive long-forgotten classical dramas. [Ref: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blue_ruin_1/8448420741] During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the Japanese government sent postcards of beautiful Japanese women, bijin ehagaki (美人絵葉書), to soldiers to motivate them. Publishers continued to print them well into the 1920s. [Ref: Duits, Kjeld (February 21, 2022). 1910s: Geisha Postcards, OLD PHOTOS of JAPAN. Retrieved on March 31, 2024 (GMT) from https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/photos/883/vintage-geisha-postcards-early-20th-century] See also: Sakae さかえ - Meiji / Taishō Era Geisha https://www.flickr.com/groups/1988804@N22/pool/ The photochrom process Photochroms are not photographs but actual prints, produced using 6 to 15 colors and the lithography printing process. The technique was invented by the Swiss Hans Jakob Schmid during the 1880s. The fascinating aspect of these prints is that they are created from black and white photographs. It required quite some work and talent to create these images. The photographer would usually make notes about the colors in the image he shot. These enabled a painter to create a painting that served as a color guide for the litho stone maker. This artisan would then create multiple exposures of the original black-and-white negative, changing the exposure time, development settings, and using dodge and burn techniques to create the required set of 6 to 15 stones that would each be used to print one specific color. By combining all these colors you get the prints [Ref: https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/photochrome-prints]This item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, geisha sakae, japanese postcard, postcard

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama

The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923 devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures and was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Nearly 90% of the newspaper printers were destroyed in the earthquake. These postcards were not produced for aesthetics but as a major tool for the spread of information. Seeing how newspaper companies were left with their offices in shambles, postcard publishers tried to fill the gap hence some were in three languages. A very small number of publishing companies were fortunate enough to survive, one of them being Mitsumura Printing, which took advantage of its remaining resources to churn out postcards. When the Ōsaka Mainichi Shinbunsha published its bilingual three-volume photographic pictorial of the Great Kantō Earthquake just two weeks after the event, the calamity had already been captured in thousands of images that circulated on a national and international media highway. Commercial photographers and photojournalists produced the most abundant and immediate images of the quake, which were transmitted in newspapers, special-issue newspaper pictorials, commemorative photography collections, illustrated survivors’ accounts, and sets of commemorative postcards. These photographic images functioned as both news and souvenirs, rendering their consumers/viewers, inside and outside the devastated locale, into both witnesses and voyeurs. Images in the news media and those issued by respected publishing houses carried the visual authority of supposed facticity. As such they both produced and became the historical record of the event. Since the vast majority of 1923 disaster postcards that survive have no writing on them, they were likely treated more as collectibles than as a form of postal communication. Many were put into albums, creating new ways to combine images and create visual cultures of disaster for home viewing. Accordion-style albums allowed for personalized, serial organization of images that produced unique, imagistic narratives of the event. The album pages were also two-sided and could be stretched out to view a series of images on recto and verso. References: Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 震災をイメージ化する　東京と1923年関東大震災のヴィジュアルカルチャー - The Asia. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/gennifer-weisenfeld/4270 The Great Kanto Earthquake: Postcards of Tragedy. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/the-great-kanto-earthquake-postcards/ See also: Postcards from Hell – Glimpses of the Great Kantō Earthquake; M. William STEELE (International Christian University, Japan) 14th Conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies: Visual Culture and Postcard Research Papers – East Asia Image Collection Blog. (2024, March 31). Retrieved from https://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/2014/09/01/14th-conference-of-the-european-association-of-japanese-studies-visual-culture-and-postcard-research-papers/] And https://icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/4503/files/ACS44_01Steele.pdfThis item, a souvenir from Japan from between the wars (circa 1923) was brought home to Research, Victoria by Bill Teagle who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy (1919-1945). Bill Teagle's sister Violet Amelda Teagle had married Theodore (Curly) Feldbauer in 1933. Bill's brother-in-law Curly was taken as a Prisoner of War by the Japanese and died at Sandakan in March 1945. The family did not learn of Curly’s death till months later and Bill's sister, Violet, herself could never forgive the Japanese for what happened to Curly. Curly is remembered on the Eltham Roll of Honour Board and his son, Albert Feldbauer (Bill’s nephew and youngest child of the children of the soldier fathers attending a school in the district), was given the honour of turning the first sod for the Eltham War Memorial Infant Welfare Centre Building. Despite this, the family maintained this cherished souvenir from a time of previous foreign friendship with Japan. The item was possibly given by Bill Teagle to his sister Margaret Rose (formerly Ingram) who later married Richard Edward (Eddie) Fielding in early 1948. (Eddie had been engaged to someone else before he went to war, but his fiancée broke it off before his return to Australia.) It was cared for by the Teagle/Fielding family for approximately one hundred years. It is of particular significance given the family's connection to the Eltham War Memorial and the significance of that memorial to the local community and represents that despite the horrors of war, former friends then foes can become friends again.tom fielding collection, japanese postcard, postcard, 1923, great kanto earthquake, japan, tokyo, yokohama