Girl's costume in Tokelau Island

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19773

Title

p. 12, Girl's costume in Tokelau Island

Description

A woman in a white dress and broad brimmed hat stands with her hands on her hips on Tokelau Island, near Samoa. She is surrounded by children most of whom are wearing grass skirts. In the background a frame as a hut can be seen and palm trees.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1890

Size

9.6 x 11.8 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The Tokelau Islands are three atolls in the South Pacific Ocean; situated halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. They were previously called the Union Islands and since 1976 have been called Tokelau. The word Tokelau is Polynesian for north wind.

On 11th April 1890 Robert Louis Stevenson his wife Fanny and her son Lloyd Osbourne set off aboard the steamer Janet Nicoll from Sydney for a three-month trading voyage through the Pacific. The ship was under charter to Messrs Henderson and Macfarlane of Auckland, a well known trading firm The travelled through the Cook, Gilbert, Ellice and Marshall Islands, arriving at Noumea, New Caledonia on the 26th July.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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Related subjects

Clothing and dress > Garments > Dresses

Clothing and dress > Garments > Grass skirts

People > Adults > Women

People > Children > Boys

People > Children > Girls

Places > Oceania > Tokelau Islands

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