Jan Stanislaus Kubary was born in Warsaw of Hungarian and German parents. After a brief career as a medical student and stucco worker, he was engaged by the Godeffroy Museum, Hamburg, to collect ethnological and natural history specimens in the Pacific Islands. He left for the Pacific in 1869 and visited Samoa, Ebon and Ponape on his way to the Palau islands. Most of his first collection of specimens was lost in 1874 when the ship Alfred was wrecked at Jaluit. After revisiting Europe, Kubary returned to Micronesia and remained in the employ
of the Godeffroy company until that firm crashed financially in 1879. Thereafter he led a precarious, vagabond existence until his death, but he never ceased collecting.

In the 1980s, Nic Maclellan was a trade union activist and member of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. He also travelled regularly to New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Marshall Islands, documenting struggles around US and French colonialism and nuclear testing. Between 1986-1995, Maclellan worked as a field officer for the Pacific program of the Overseas Service Bureau, in Papua New Guinea and Fiji, and then went on to establish the Australian Volunteers Abroad (AVA) program in Marshall Islands, Palau and Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). During his travels, Maclellan took hundreds of Kodachrome slides, which capture images of daily life in PNG and Micronesia during the 1980s, as well as unique moments in the rise of the Kanak independence movement during the 1984-1988 conflict known as 'Les evenements' or 'the events'. In the 2000s, Maclellan has worked as a correspondent for Islands Business magazine and contributor to Pacnews, Inside Story and other regional media.