The Woodford Folk Festival is an annual music festival held near the semi-rural town of Woodford, 72 km north of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It is one of the biggest annual cultural events of its type in Australia.

The festival takes place over six days and nights from 27 December to 1 January each year. It features a wide range of performance styles, musical genres and nationalities, in many simultaneous venues across the site. About 130,000 patrons attend annually, camping on-site—some just overnight—many for the full festival experience. The final evening of the Woodford festival culminates in a spectacular New Year's Day closing ceremony, Fire Event.

Photographer Adolphe Sylvain's black and white images are both a tribute to Tahitian women's spell binding sensuality and a testimony of their actual beauty and allure. http://puretahiti.net/post/32130902067/tahitian-beauties-by-adolphe-sylvain

Adolphe Sylvain stopped in Tahiti in 1946. Until 1991, he photographed Polynesia. We still photographs of rare beauty, including vahines he contributed to mystify the world. Flipping through this book the other day, I was surprised at how many skins vahines were shiny. Sylvain surely loved skins copper vahines Monoi de Tahiti. Watch water drops beading on the lagoon hides these young flower girls ...
http://blog.monoi-tahiti.info/post/2008/07/17/Monoi-de-Tahiti-%3A-le-mythe-de-la-Vahine-peau-cuivree

By Serge Kakou.http://budsartbooks.com/prod.cfm/pc/TAHBH/cid/31

A collection of portraits of early twentieth-century Tahitian beauties. French born Gauthier (1875-1971) traveled to Tahiti in 1904 and opened a portrait studio, which allowed him to meet the local beauties, who posed for him both clothed and, very often, nude. Public nudity was full accepted in Tahitian society. His body of work was widely diffused in the form of postcards, establishing his fame and today highly collectible.
Tahiti became a French protectorate in 1842 and the French government had a small garrison there. The first photographers in Tahiti were, therefore, French naval personnel.  A number of French officers took photographs which were sent to Paris for reproduction in magazines such as Tout du Monde andL'Illustration to pander to the thirst for views of these exotic islands.

In 1901, however, the Oceanic Steamship Company of San Francisco launched a regular (once every 36 days) service to Papeete.  Leaving San Francisco at 11.00 am  on the steamship Mariposa under the command of Captain Rennie, the voyage would now take only 12 or 13 days, remaining at Papeete for four days before returning to San Francisco.  Although the ship could accomodate 75 passengers it rarely took more than 25 making it a relaxing voyage, according to travellers at the time.

It was on the Mariposa that French photographer Lucien Gauthier arrived in Tahiti in 1904.  Gauthier was born in 1875 but left France at the age of 27 to work in the French American Bank in San Francisco.  A friend told him that the only photographic studio had just closed on the island and he set off for Papeete forthwith.

Gauthier only spent two years in Tahiti as he was required to return home to France to complete his military service.   He returned to San Franciso on the Mariposa arriving shortly after the 1906 earthquake which meant that he had to sleep outside on the ground on his arrival.
Gauthier had little difficulty encouraging the local girls to pose for him for his tasteful art nudes for, despite the activities of Catholic missionaries who had made the girls cover up, memories of a culture that did not see nudity as shameful remained strong enough.  Gauthier himself recording that, on one of his expeditions to some of the wilder and more distant country, he ran into a completely naked vahine, much to his delight.
Gauthier's girls show less of the impact of Chinese and Indian blood coming to the island and so their apperance more closely mirrors the look of the girls who enticed the crews of Bougainville and Bligh over a hundered years earlier.
http://goo.gl/R0xf7P

By Robert Herrick
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-04/old-masters-exhibition-unveiled-at-nma-in-canberra/5134152

The largest collection of fine Indigenous bark-art in the world has been brought together for an exhibition at the National Museum in Canberra.
Old Masters: Australia's Great Bark Artists features 122 of the most exquisite Arnhem Land works by 40 artists.
The chair of the Indigenous Advisory Committee to the Australian National Museum, Peter Yu, says many of the artists lived off the land before the arrival of white explorers in some of the most remote parts of the Northern Territory.
"We needed to be able to explain to the broader non-aboriginal community, to the white community, who we are, what we are, and what is our story," he said.
"These aren't just magnificent works of fine art, this tells a story of the fabric of Aboriginal society."
The paintings were created between 1948 and 1988, and have been held in the National Museum's vault.