Walkabout has become well-known as a quintessential source of mid-twentiethcentury Australian images and narratives. Yet from its inception, the magazine imagined Australia as part of the Pacific region. For almost every iconic image of Aborigines and outback locations, Walkabout matched these in quantity and quality with Pacific images and stories from the 1930s to the 1960s. Even the very first issue in November 1934 included articles on the Solomon Islands, Tahiti, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Walkabout 's coverage of the South Pacific and Papua New Guinea remained very much in the style of a geographic magazine. Many of the articles describe island peoples through a popular anthropological lens, whilst others discuss the available exploitable resources, and others still the history of the islands. The tourism potential of the Pacific Islands and Papua New Guinea was also promoted. Indeed, Charles Chauvel contributed an article on Tahiti for Walkabout 's inaugural issue in 1934. This article is essentially a tourist guide: it resounds with descriptions of various sights, sounds and smells, of the population and its admixture; mention is made of the street where parties are held and champagne is cheap, the venue for local dancers, the theatre where ‘talking pictures’ are screened, the hotel that features Tahitian girls dancing, Chinese tailors’ shops and the markets that start at dawn each morning and are at their busiest from 4:30 a.m. Chauvel's film-maker's eye is evident, for he paints compelling and romantic images of a beautiful island of contrasting scenery, climate and people. He situates his travel within the long European history of Pacific exploration, yet refigures this for the modern traveller: ‘Go! Search Tahiti with an open mind, but be not tempted by its madness. Go forth in search of beauty and happy days, of rest and contentment; then the dream which takes you to Tahiti can become an actuality.’ Evoking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century traditions of South Seas literature even in an article which stresses its focus is ‘Tahiti To-day’, Chauvel epitomizes the complex network of time and space which the Pacific occupied for mid-century Australians, and for the wider settler-colonial Pacific rim (Australia, New Zealand and North America) which encircled the region.