This tiny image of doctor and politician William Bland was taken by George Barron Goodman sometime between December 1844 and January 1845. It is the oldest photo taken in Australia to have survived to the present day. Goodman arrived in Sydney in 1842, after purchasing a licence from English entrepreneur and photographer Richard Beard, which gave him sole rights to use the daguerreotype process in the British colonies. The daguerreotype was the first commercially viable photographic process. Images were created by first sensitising a silver plate with iodine fumes, and after exposure in a camera the image was developed over heated mercury vapour, at great risk to the health of the photographer. Finally, it was stabilised (or fixed) with salt water or ‘hypo’ (sodium thiosulphate). This photo, although small in size, retains a high level of detail.

Australia’s oldest photo

1840

William Hetzer and his wife Thekla came to Sydney from Germany in 1850. They both worked from a photo studio in Hunter Street where, like most commercial photographers at the time, they relied on portraits as their main source of income. The salt print was made by exposing paper sensitised in a solution of salt and silver nitrate under a negative. In the early years paper negatives were used but by the middle of the 1850s, when this print was made, they had been largely replaced by glass negatives. The salt print had a matt finish which was easier for photographers to paint over. This family portrait was commissioned by Reverend Thomas Druitt after he had resigned as a Sydney schoolmaster and moved to the southern New South Wales town of Cooma.

The Druitt family

Painting and photography were not always mutually exclusive practices. This photo of Hobart Hospital’s house surgeon Edward Swarbreck Hall appears to be a painting but is actually a photographic salt paper print over-painted with watercolours and oils. Known as a chromatype (or chromotype), the process was patented by photographers Frederick Frith and John Sharp after they moved to Hobart in 1855. Like many photographers, Frith had trained as an artist and took up a new career in photography as it usurped traditional portrait painting.

Edward Swarbreck Hall

Walter Woodbury is best known as the inventor of the Woodburytype, one of photography’s most beautiful and detailed photo-mechanical processes. Born in England, he joined the goldrush to Australia in the early 1850s.  He set up a photography studio in the goldmining town of Beechworth, Victoria, in 1855. In this photo of the town, a sign on the upper floor of the Commercial Hotel advertises ‘Photography Portrait Rooms’. It is possible that Woodbury used the hotel rooms to take portraits. He left Australia and travelled through Indonesia between 1858 and 1863, taking some of the earliest photographs of that country. In 1864 he returned to England where he patented the Woodburytype.

Beechworth, Victoria

On 8 December 1858 Edwin Dalton exhibited some unusual portraits at the Philosophical Society’s rooms in Sydney using his photo-crayotype process. Essentially salt paper prints over-painted with pastels, they would have been very similar to this portrait of Mrs Frances Jones that Dalton made a year later. There were several Australian photographic artists experimenting with painting over salt prints, but of the few whose images survived none matched the work produced by Dalton’s studio.

Mrs Frances Jones

This daguerreotype is a portrait of George Coppin, who was known as ‘the father of the Australian stage’. It was taken during the boom years of the Australian goldrush around the time Coppin managed the Cremorne Gardens outdoor theatre in Richmond, Victoria. This theatre opened in 1856, before moving to the Haymarket in 1862. At the height of the theatre’s popularity, Coppin’s performers were pelted by the audience with gold nuggets and coins wrapped in banknotes as a sign of their appreciation.

George Coppin

In the late 1850s, Thomas Glaister’s fashionable Sydney studio advertised ambrotype portraits twice the size of those his competitors offered. His portrait of Mrs Jane Day reveals every detail down to the minute lines on her face. Mitigating this is Glaister’s subtle colouring work. Her skin is brushed with pink, and red and green highlights have been added to the lacework flowers. Her brooch and wedding ring are beautifully outlined in gold paint.

Jane Day

Daguerreotypes and ambrotypes were among the earliest commercially available photographs. Often small in size, they were usually cased and framed for travel. Although they eventually usurped hand-painted miniature portraits, for a time the two mediums coexisted. In some cases photography gave new life to old painted miniatures, which were photographed and presented in the same way. This ambrotype is a copy of an earlier miniature painting of Mary King, the third daughter of New South Wales Governor Philip Gidley King. It was originally painted around 1826, some 13 years before photography was invented, and this ambrotype copy has been hand-coloured to mimic the original.

Mary King

To create an ambrotype, the photographer first spread a light-sensitive collodion emulsion onto a glass plate. Then they slid the plate into the back of a portrait camera. To take the photograph, they removed the lens cap for just the right amount of time and allowed light to expose the whole plate. Once the photo was developed and fixed, an artist carefully hand-painted the image.

Seated lady

Before arriving in Australia in the early 1850s, Edwin Dalton and his wife, Magdalena, were miniature portrait painters who enjoyed the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In January 1855, Dalton arrived in Sydney from Melbourne and set up a temporary studio above Piddingtons Bookshop in George Street. From here he produced photographs in a number of formats, including stereoscopic transparencies like this one. These photos were positive images made from original negatives, often using albumen emulsions. A milk glass backing was added to diffuse the light and produce a high-quality image when viewed through a stereoscope.

Circular Quay, Sydney

This early stereo-photograph of well-dressed women, posed studiously around a globe, is likely to have been taken in England. A three-dimensional effect was created when the twin images mounted on card were inserted into a special viewer that magnified and transformed the photos. They were a cultural phenomenon that radically changed the industry. Until their arrival in the 1850s, photographers relied on portraiture as their main source of income. The new format opened up a market for landscape views and genre studies like this one. By the 1860s large-scale publishing houses were producing millions of stereo prints each year.

Women examining a globe: genre view

In 1855 the Iron Church was erected on the site where the State Library now stands. An early example of large-scale prefabricated ironwork in Australia, it was completed by Robertson and Lister of Glasgow and shipped to Sydney. This view, taken from the corner of Hunter and Macquarie streets, is one of a series of early images of Sydney taken by German-born photographer William Hetzer. The two images on the card may look the same but are in fact slightly different as they were taken by a single lens camera that was moved horizontally between each shot to create the stereo effect when looked at through a stereo viewer.

Iron Church, Sydney

1850

Panoramas were a popular way to convey the scale of Sydney’s growth to people around the world. Made up from a number of separate prints stitched together, their cumulative size added new levels of detail for the viewer. On display are two of a set of four panoramic negatives printed and mounted to form a 360-degree view of Sydney. The two views, taken from Observatory Hill, start by looking out to Balmain from Barangaroo, with cattle grazing on the shoreline. Part one of panorama.

Panorama, Sydney (part one)

Panoramas were a popular way to convey the scale of Sydney’s growth to people around the world. Made up from a number of separate prints stitched together, their cumulative size added new levels of detail for the viewer. On display are two of a set of four panoramic negatives printed and mounted to form a 360-degree view of Sydney. The views, taken from Observatory Hill, start by looking out to Balmain from Barangaroo, with cattle grazing on the shoreline. Part two of panorama.

Panorama, Sydney (part two)

This photo was taken during an inspection of New South Wales goldfields by the Deputy Master of the Sydney Mint, Edward Wolstenholme Ward, and Sydney University Professor, John Smith. Helped by their knowledge of chemistry, both became keen amateur photographers and produced early outdoor views of Australia. This image was probably taken at Adelong, in the Riverina district, where they inspected the quartz-crushing machinery to report on its viability. Smith can be seen at the front, and the man in a top hat is probably William ‘Charcoal’ Williams, who discovered gold in the region at Mt Charcoal in 1857.

Goldfield

In this photo of Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini (also known as Lallah Rookh), pain and hardship emanate from her eyes. Taken by Australian-born photographer Charles Woolley, it is one of the most published nineteenth-century images of an Aboriginal person. Truganini was photographed in 1866 during her forced residency at Oyster Cove station in the island’s south-east. By this time she had experienced the worst of Europeans, who had killed many of her relatives, occupied her lands and physically and mentally abused her. After her death in 1876, her body was exhumed and displayed in the Tasmanian Museum. In 1976 she was returned to the Aboriginal community.

Truganini

Mary Denning was born in Sydney in 1795. The daughter of Benjamin and Catherine Johns, she worked as a servant to pastoralist Elizabeth Macarthur. At the age of 21, she married Thomas Denning at St John’s Cathedral in Parramatta. The ceremony was performed by prominent clergyman and landowner Samuel Marsden. This photo was taken in the Parramatta studio of Henry William Burgin — a jeweller and clockmaker who took up photography in about 1860 — when Denning was about 70.

Mary Denning, Parramatta

Frederic Bonney’s photo gives us an amazing insight into the lives of the Paakantyi People in far western New South Wales in the 1870s. Surrounding the family group of Jacob, Mary and their daughter Doughboy are items used by the family. In the ashes of the fireplace is an emu leg, and circling the area are traditional implements: spears, digging sticks, fishing net, boomerangs and a kangaroo-skin water bag. Objects of European origin have been integrated into the family’s daily life: a billycan, tobacco pipes and damper.

Jacob and Mary, Momba station, New South Wales

This photograph shows the Aboriginal cricket team that played a Boxing Day match against Melbourne Cricket Club in front of 10,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1866. They were coached by the Australian sportsman, and founder of Australian rules football, Tom Wills. Some members went on the tour of England in 1868.

Aboriginal cricketers

In 1867 English cricketer George Smith was contracted to coach an Aboriginal cricket team for a visit England. They would be the first Australian cricket team to tour internationally. The team of 13 Jardwadjali, Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk men from western Victoria played their first game against the Surrey Club on 25 May 1868 in front of a crowd of 7000. The portrait of each cricketer was taken by surveyor and photographer Patrick Dawson in his studio in Warrnambool before he assembled and mounted them into this composite portrait.

1860

The proposal to erect a statue of British explorer and navigator James Cook, in Hyde Park, was initiated by Captain Watson, one of Sydney’s Harbour Masters, in 1869. This photograph was taken soon after it was unveiled 10 years later. The sandy soil around the statue is devoid of trees, and a newly planted garden encircles it. The bronze sculpture of Cook was designed by Thomas Woolner and cast in England. It was shipped to Australia and when it was unveiled about 40,000 people gathered in the park for the occasion. The 13,600-kilogram base, made from granite excavated in Moruya on the New South Wales south coast, was the only part of the structure from Australia.

James Cook memorial

The New South Wales goldfields attracted many different businesses looking to make money from the miners’ hard work. One of the stranger enterprises in the gold town of Hill End was Thomas Girvan Weir and George Emberton’s cordial and soda factory. The machine in the photo can be seen injecting dissolved carbon dioxide gas into an elliptical-shaped bottle of flavoured water. Just a year after this photo was taken, the company appeared in the insolvency court. This may have been a blessing in disguise for the locals, as the cordial’s ingredients included a mix of carbonate of lime and sulphuric acid.

Cordial factory, Hill End

On 10 August 1870, two Italian immigrants discovered gold at McGraths Creek in the mountains northwest of Grafton, New South Wales. Soon afterwards, many more prospectors were lured by the gold-bearing quartz found in reefs named the ‘Lunatic’ and ‘Perseverance’. The town of Solferino, which sprang up on the site, was named after the hometown of the two brothers. On a visit there in 1872, photographer JW Lindt took this wonderfully detailed panorama. The two most prominent buildings seen in the image are hotels —  the Solferino and the European.

Solferino, New South Wales

This portrait of businessman and philanthropist Walter Russell Hall is the work of at least three different artists. The first is the unknown photographer who took Hall’s portrait in 1874, around the time of his marriage in Melbourne to Eliza Rowdon Kirk. The photo was then mounted onto a translucent glass surface to create what is known as an opalotype, and the background was decorated with Australian flora and fauna by Sydney natural history illustrator and artist Helena Forde (nee Scott). Finally, the portrait was encased in an ornate gilt frame made in Sydney by Henry W Callan & Son. At the time, Walter Russell Hall was a partner in the Australian coaching business Cobb & Co.

Walter Russell Hall

Landscape views of Sydney Harbour were a favourite subject for early photographers for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. This photo of a portable darkroom tent is from a time when photo negatives needed to be processed immediately after they were taken. Before 1880 most outdoor photographers were forced to transport chemicals, delicate glass plates and other equipment to the location they were photographing. These constraints, plus the need for a good supply of fresh water, saw many early photographers making use of the boat access and streams around the harbour.

Outdoor darkroom, Middle Harbour, Sydney

This carte-de-visite photo of a travelling photographer’s bush studio was probably taken in northern New South Wales. The photographer’s tent and banner advertise his business, and examples of his work are pasted onto the hut. The people gathered around the tent appear to have dressed up especially to be photographed. Patented by André Disdéri in 1854, the cheap carte-de-visite print was the size of a small visiting card. They were incredibly popular until about 1870, mostly for portraits. Outdoor views like this are rare.

Bush studio

This group photograph appears to have been set up by the photographer Charles Bayliss, who can be seen lying hatless behind the tripod of rifles. Bayliss either had someone click the shutter or activated it himself using a cord attached to the camera’s trigger. The surface of the negative is pitted with dust that stuck to the wet collodion, a result of having to sensitise the plate in the bush. Standing behind Bayliss, his face blurred due to the long exposure time, is the man who probably paid for the trip, goldminer and entrepreneur Bernhardt Otto Holtermann.

Shooting party

Before the uptake of half-tone printing in the 1890s, it was difficult to print text and photos together. Processes like photogravure, collotypes and Woodburytypes were often too expensive. So, for small print and photography work, it was easier to simply paste an albumen photo directly onto the page. This photograph was taken by prison authorities at the end of bushranger Ned Kelly’s second jail sentence in 1874. It is likely the photo was taken by Charles Nettleton, who was a police photographer in Victoria at the time.

Ned Kelly

1870

This photo of the State Library of New South Wales was taken before it moved to its current location on Macquarie Street. The first stage of the current Library, the Mitchell building, opened in 1910. Before then readers made their way to the corner of Bent and Macquarie streets to the elegant but rather ramshackle Free Public Library. This had been built in 1848 for the Australian Subscription Library, which the State bought in 1869 along with its premises and collections. By the 1880s, the Library was receiving 150,000 visitors a year.

Free Public Library

This photograph belongs to a collection taken by seaman Claus Franzen on board the German Imperial Navy’s SMS Bismarck during its first cruise though the Pacific in 1879–80. The photographs record stopovers at Society Islands, Rarotonga, Samoa and Sydney, where the ship’s arrival in Sydney was timed for the opening of the Garden Palace and the Sydney International Exhibition in September 1879. Upon his return, in 1880, Franzen printed his photos and bound them into a sumptuous photograph album which was presented to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

SMS Bismarck album

SMS Bismarck album

By 1880 the use of photography in police investigations was becoming commonplace internationally. In Paris every murder scene was being photographed, while here in Sydney photographs were used to identify criminals. This photo of 19-year-old John Fox, accused of assault and robbery, does not include fingerprints as Francis Galton’s detailed fingerprint system was not widely in use before the 1890s. Instead, the portrait was supplemented with written details not provided by the photo: in this case Fox’s hair and eye colour.

Police portrait

On the morning of 22 September 1882, a huge fire engulfed and destroyed the ornate 244-metre-long Garden Palace exhibition building. Built in the Domain for the Sydney International Exhibition just three years earlier, it had seen one million people pass through its doors before this photo of the wreckage was taken.

Ruins of the Garden Palace

The Garden Palace building only graced the Sydney skyline for three years before it burnt to the ground. Designed by Colonial Architect James Barnet it was built in the Botanical Gardens for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition and housed examples of the arts and sciences shipped from around the world. Constructed by John Young, at a cost of £191,800, it was built in only eight months largely helped by the importation of electric lighting from England, which enabled work to be carried out around the clock.

Garden Palace, Sydney

This tiny photo is a tintype of the radical poet Francis WL Adams, whose revolutionary verse collection Songs of the Army of the Night was published in Australia in 1887. Dame Mary Gilmore wrote of him in 1953: ‘No one today knows the way Francis Adams swept the feeling, young and just-awakening minds of Australia when he wrote.’ Tintypes were often favoured by travelling photographers as tin was easier to transport and print on than glass, and positive prints could be developed on the spot.

Radical activist

On 27 August 1885 the exploring party of the Geographical Society of Australasia ran their small schooner, the SS Bonito, aground while approaching the head of the Strickland River, a subsidiary of the Fly River, in New Guinea. Four days later, in the middle of the night, stones on the riverbed washed away and the boat capsized, forcing the crew to move all their stores to shore. After much exertion, they propped the grounded boat upright. The small party remained stranded at the head of the river for almost two months before they could refloat the Bonito.

SS Bonito

SS Bonito

After setting up a studio in Sydney in the early 1870s, photographer August Tronier travelled to the south coast of New South Wales in search of more business. He and his partner Felton arrived in the Shoalhaven area in 1875, where they took photos of the locals and the surrounding landscape. Over the next seven years, Tronier built up a portfolio of landscape views like this one of a sawyers’ camp in the Cambewarra, near Nowra. When he returned to his studio in Balmain, Sydney, he compiled an album of Shoalhaven views.

Cambewarra Mountain

1880

Bathurst photographer WH Maguire took this photo at Burrawang Sheep station near Ootha, west of Parkes. Huge ploughs like this were driven by steam traction engines. Appearing in the 1890s, they decimated the landscape as they opened up the land for cultivation. The steam engine’s impact was even greater when using the chains seen in this picture for pulling up tree stumps.

Plough, Ootha

The platinotype process was widely used for high-end commercial portraiture from about 1888 to the beginning of the First World War. Platinum being the most chemically stable metal found in nature, the process was a reliable alternative to silver-based photographic processes. Having opened his first studio in Sydney in 1863, JH Newman established his reputation five years later with a portrait of James O’Farrell after his attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh. By 1894 Newman had a new store at 314 George Street, Sydney, where he took this photo of the Bulletin cartoonist, Livingston Hopkins. He remained at this studio until the firm was taken over by Mark Blow in 1900.

Livingston (Hop) Hopkins

In the 1890s the half-tone print revolutionised the commercial use of photography. Using a special screen, the process reduced a continuous-tone photograph to thousands of tiny black dots. The darker parts of the photograph had more dots while the lighter parts had fewer. This allowed publishers to print text and images together cheaply for the first time. Over the following 100 years, almost all the images reproduced in newspapers, magazines and books were made using this process. This 1890 cover of the Illustrated Sydney News is an early example of the process.

Picturesque peeps in New South Wales

The British Antarctic (Southern Cross) Expedition under the command of Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink was the first to spend the winter on the Antarctic mainland. The group reached further south than any human had previously. This rare album of photographs was compiled by one of the expedition’s members, William Colbeck. In this photo we see Borchgrevink under the stern of the Southern Cross.

The Southern Cross

When he died in 1910, Octave Chanute was hailed as the father of aviation. He had helped the Wright brothers design their ground-breaking aeroplane but before his death some of his highest praise was given to Sydneysider, Lawrence Hargrave. In 1893 Chanute is quoted as saying, ‘If there be one man, more than another who deserves to succeed in flying through the air that man is Lawrence Hargrave.’ This photo shows Hargrave and fellow aviator James Swaine conducting their famous kite-lift experiment at Stanwell Park, south of Sydney, on 12 November 1894.

Kite-lift experiment

Walter Burke was editor of the Australasian Photo-Review for more than 40 years and the first fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in Australasia. Born in New Zealand in 1866, by the 1890s he was a photographer for the Christchurch Weekly. This photo was probably taken around this time on one of his excursions with his half-plate camera. In 1904 he moved to Sydney to establish an Australasian agency of the American photography firm Underwood and Underwood.

Dog ride, New Zealand

Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Fanny Cochrane Smith is being recorded by amateur anthropologist Horace Watson. Fanny was born at the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in Bass Strait, northeast of Tasmania. She made the earliest recordings of Tasmanian Aboriginal song and speech in 1899 and 1903. Watson lived most of his life in Hobart, where he manufactured Keen’s Curry Powder.

Fanny Smith, Hobart

Sometime around 1890 two tourists from Sydney, Ellen Ferguson and Augusta Quigley, signed into the Fujiya Hotel in the Hakone mountains of Japan to escape the summer heat. While in nearby Yokohama they had their portraits taken in traditional dress by Japanese photographer Kozaburo Tamamura.

Yokohama, Japan

After Ellen and Augusta posed in traditional costumes provided by Tamamura’s studio, the photographer sent the finished prints to the Fujiya Hotel. This is the envelope they arrived in, with the Japanese photographer’s studio address and graphics.

Envelope, Japan

Between 1891 and 1894 police were confounded in their attempts to capture two Aboriginal trackers accused of murder and theft. This cyanotype of Dunimbery (Willie) and constable Nathaniel King appears to have been taken soon after Dunimbery’s arrest in December 1893. His fellow tracker, Bulyal (Jacky), was arrested soon after. Both were Badjala men, Dunimbery from Sandy Cape and Bulyal from White Cliffs on K’gari (Fraser Island). Cyanotypes were made using an insoluble iron compound known as Prussian blue, which was also used in dye-making. The process was simple, cheap and permanent, making cyanotypes easy to produce in the field or by amateurs with a limited budget.

Dunimbery (Willie)

Soldiers embarking for the Boer War press their way through crowds of well-wishers surrounding them in every direction. Clearly Sydney, and the rest of Australia, saw itself as part of the British Empire as between 1899 and 1902 more than 10,000 Australians volunteered to sail to South Africa to fight with British troops.

Troops, Pitt Street, Sydney

Australian artist Arthur Streeton is seen here painting on the beach at Curlew artist’s camp in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. Painting in the open air rather than a studio became popular in the late 1700s, as it enabled the artist to better capture the changing details of weather and light. While portable canvases and easels were available from at least the early 1830s, Streeton has propped up a wooden board with a tree branch instead. His brushes and paints rest on a nearby stone.

Arthur Streeton

In June 1890 the famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson visited Butaritari Island in Kiribati while on his third tour of the Pacific. While there, his stepson Lloyd Osbourne took this photo of Stevenson and his wife Fanny with another couple, Nan Tok and Natakanti, who lived on the island.

Robert L Stevenson

In 1885 Grafton-based photographer JW Lindt visited Australia’s newly acquired Protectorate of New Guinea and took this photo at Kalo Creek in the Kapa Kapa district. Reproduced as an autotype in his 1887 book Picturesque New Guinea, it was also part of a series of large exhibition prints Lindt made in the 1890s. This photo is a contender for the largest vintage print in the Library’s collection. Lindt’s signature is in the lower right-hand corner.

Kalo Creek

1890

This wonderful panorama captures the scale of wheat harvesting in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tractors were yet to replace horses, and in this picture we can see more than a dozen harvesters taking hay to the threshing machines. The photo was taken at Narromine by American adventurer and photographer Melvin Vaniman, who travelled through Australia in 1903 and 1904.

Wheat harvest, Narramine Station

Solicitor and amateur photographer Cyrus Saul Moss took this photo at a local fishing competition at Greenwell Point, New South Wales. Born in 1872, Moss was the youngest son of Nowra mayor Henry Moss and he spent his whole life in the Shoalhaven. He was a passionate about photography and had photos published in major newspapers including the Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser and the Evening News.

Shark fishing

On 22 January 1901, just weeks after Australia became a Commonwealth, Queen Victoria died. Sydney’s Anthony Hordern & Sons department store celebrated the occasion of her son Albert Edward becoming King by erecting these magnificent decorations. Six months later, on 10 July, the Haymarket building was destroyed by fire.

Hordern’s department store, Sydney

This double portrait of actor (and convicted bigamist) James Athelwood is an early example of work by professional photographer May Moore. Before she migrated to Australia, Moore ran the Rembrandt Studio in Wellington, New Zealand. There she composed this photo of Athelwood as himself, and in stage make-up as the sculptor Nelson Illingworth. Moore has collaged the two portraits into a single image.

James Athelwood

Gifted with intelligence and charm, Margaret Pattison Thom gained international renown as a New Zealand tourist guide and promoter of Māori culture. Popularly known as Mākereti (or Maggie) Papakura, she was born in 1873 at Matatā in the North Island’s Bay of Plenty. In 1926 she enrolled at the University of Oxford to study for a Bachelor of Science in anthropology, but on 16 April 1930, just two weeks before her thesis was due, she died suddenly from a ruptured aortic artery. Mākereti’s thesis, published eight years later, is the first extensive ethnographic work by a Māori scholar. This autographed photo was taken in 1908 on one of her many trips to Australia.

Maggie Papakura

This photograph of Oxford and Flinders streets was taken around December 1900, soon after the arrival of the first Governor-General of the Commonwealth, Lord Hopetoun, to appoint the head of the new Commonwealth ministry. Its creator Josephine Ethel Foster was keenly interested in the history of Sydney and was one of the first members of the Royal Australian Historical Society. In the early 1900s  ‘Ethel’ (as she preferred to be called) used photography to document the changing nature of Sydney and capture buildings and streetscapes before they disappeared, and her photographs are an important early record of change in Sydney. In this image we see an early steam tram in front of a streetscape that would be virtually unrecognisable in 20 years due to changes to the buildings and the roadway.

Tram, Darlinghurst, Sydney

Sydney Council started a massive cleansing operation in 1900 to stop further outbreaks of the bubonic plague ravaging the city. Its focus was the run-down, rat-infested houses and businesses in the poorest parts of town. One of these was the infamous Wexford Street — full of gambling houses and brothels — where, it was said, anyone who dared walk this street in the 1890s needed to be armed. The street, south of Hyde Park, was demolished to become part of Wentworth Avenue.

Wexford Street, Sydney

Mary Ann Sullivan, or Munro, was known to her community in Tingha, New England, as meengha, the mother of all mothers, having raised nine of her own children and at least 13 orphans. This 1909 photo was taken when she was probably in her 70s, at a pseudo-coronation arranged by white settlers. Most of the other people in the photograph are her grandchildren, as well as two of her sons and a daughter.

Mary Ann Sullivan

In 1899 the New South Wales Government accepted David Scott Mitchell’s offer to donate his collection of more than 61,000 books to the Public Library on the condition they fund a building to house it. Work began on the building in 1906, and a year later the reclusive Mitchell died. He had spent most of his fortune on his antiquarian collection, which he kept in his house in Darlinghurst, Sydney. This photo of Mitchell’s sitting room shows how his vast collection had taken over almost every space in the house.

A grand obsession

Few crazes had such a successful run as the picture postcard. In the early 1900s, cards with photographs were hugely popular. They were mass produced in their millions, mainly in Germany, and sold cheaply as an ideal way to communicate without writing a letter. Postcards were sold in a range of formats including half-tone prints, gelatin-silver photographic prints and, most popular of all, mechanically printed collotypes like this one of the Japanese battleship Shikishima.

Shikishima

HMS Aboukir

HMS Aboukir

HMS Terrible

HMS Terrible

Murenjo

Photogravures were made with a photomechanical printing process using light-sensitised carbon tissue. They were conceived by English photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1850s and perfected by Czech artist Karel Klíč in 1879. This beautiful example, titled ‘Souvenir of the visit of Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of York to the Australian Colonies and New Zealand’, was made in 1901 by England’s Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company, which produced quality photogravures. The high level of tonal detail in these prints means they were used in photographers’ portfolios throughout the 1900s.

Duke and Duchess of York

When Australia became a Commonwealth in January 1901, celebrations went on throughout the month. At a navy and military sports event at the Royal Agricultural Grounds on the 8 January spectators witnessed Lieutenant Speight of the Royal Engineer Corps elevated more than 180 metres in the air in a balloon rechristened Australia. Other events included sword and lance exercises, and a re-enactment of Indian frontier warfare.

Balloon, Sydney

Designed by architect John Reid, the new Anthony Hordern & Sons department store on Brickfield Hill, Sydney, replaced the Haymarket premises destroyed by fire in 1901. With more than 1650 square metres of floor space, it was the largest department store in the Southern Hemisphere and cost more than $1.8 million in today’s money. The design, with four piers, circular street awnings and extensive use of plate glass, increased light and ventilation inside the building.

1900

On the night of 29 February 1912, soldiers loyal to the first president of the Republic of China, Yuan Shikai, rioted across Beijing. By noon the following day, seven huge fires had engulfed the city. This panorama illustrates the level of destruction left in their wake. GE Morrison, an Australian correspondent in Beijing at the time commented in his diaries: ‘soldiers of the 3rd division had mutinied, had broken loose and were looting the city. Shots were flying but nobody seemed hit. It was some time before we realised that shots were being fired for intimidation only.’

Beijing, China

This photo of ice forming on rocks was captured by Frank Hurley during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. It was printed by Hurley for exhibitions in London and Sydney in 1919. Hurley printed the images for these shows using the carbon printing process. The enlargements from the original negatives were made with a carbon black pigment image suspended in gelatin which hardened when exposed to light. As they used pigment rather than silver, they are generally more stable and less sensitive to light than other formats. Green and blue hues were added by toning the pigment.

Antarctica

Sisters May and Mina Moore established their first photographic studio in Wellington, New Zealand, in about 1907. Initially, May specialised in operating the camera while Mina focused on printing, but they soon became experts in both fields. Running separate studios in Sydney and Melbourne between 1910 and 1928, they became known for their distinctive portraits and photographed many famous Australian artists, writers and theatrical figures. This portrait of artist Frederick McCubbin is typical of Mina’s seemingly unposed style.

Frederick McCubbin

This hand-coloured photo of the German battlecruiser Hindenburg was made in 1919 after the ship was scuttled, or deliberately sunk, at Scapa Flow in Scotland by Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. It is one of about 250 photographs compiled by Colarts Studios for the exhibition The Pictorial Panorama of the Great War, which toured Australia in the early 1920s. The photos were mostly taken by unnamed soldiers, then colourised and enlarged by ‘soldier artists’ at Colarts Studios.

German battlecruiser

By the end of the 1800s, the Sydney suburb of Epping, in Wallumedegal country, had become a centre for citrus and other fruit growers. The Sonters, one of the area’s more successful agricultural families, are seen here packing apples for the Sydney markets. The photographer Rex Hazlewood was born in Dulwich Hill in 1886 and moved to Epping with his family. He trained as a tailor and a Baptist minister before becoming a commercial photographer.

Packing apples

Beneath this photo, Henry Lawson has written a line from English playwright Henry Arthur Jones’ play The Silver King: ‘Oh God! Put back thy universe and give me yesterday!’ Lawson gave the portrait to his friend Claude McKay, a founder of the popular newspaper Smith’s Weekly, and it is a poignant reminder of the writer’s struggle with alcoholism and mental illness. It was taken by the New Zealand–born sisters May and Mina Moore, who ran separate studios in Melbourne and Sydney but often co-signed their work.

Henry Lawson

This photo of Shackleton’s ship Endurance trapped in ice during the long Antarctic night was taken by Frank Hurley using 20 flashes to illuminate the ship from below. The result is a spectral image of the doomed ship which, after nine months in the pack-ice, finally sank on 21 November 1915. This left Shackleton and his men marooned for months before the ice melted and allowed them to make an epic trek by boat to Elephant Island. Only 120 of Hurley’s photos survived the journey and they were kept on Elephant Island while Shackleton and five of the crew made the final perilous journey to South Georgia in an open boat. The expedition members on Elephant Island were finally rescued on 30 August 1916.

Shackleton’s ship

Harold Cazneaux took this portrait of Rose Soady around the time she married the artist Norman Lindsay. Born in Gosford, New South Wales, Rose met Lindsay in 1902, and became his principal model, business manager and printer for many of his etchings. When she was in her 70s, Rose wrote two memoirs, Ma and Pa (1963) and Model Wife (1967).

Rose Soady

In 1917 the Allies increased the use of aircraft in Palestine. For the Australian Flying Corps this included bombing and strafing missions, but their main focus was aerial reconnaissance and photography to fill inaccuracies in available maps. By 1918 photos taken from the air could be processed, printed and distributed on the ground within five hours. This photo of captured horse transports at Khurbet Ferweh in Palestine was taken by Hudson Fysh after the final battle of General Allenby’s campaign. Fysh went on to co-found Qantas.

Captured horse transport

As the largest department store in Sydney, Anthony Hordern’s Palace Emporium ran a fleet of horse-drawn wagons to service its customers. While these deliveries mostly ran smoothly, they were not without danger. In May 1912 a young apprentice, Thomas Skidmore, was left in charge of a Hordern’s cart on Cronulla Street, Carlton. While waiting near the train tracks, the horses took fright and bolted in front of an oncoming train. The cart was destroyed, but Thomas survived by jumping off before the train hit.

Delivery cart

Frank Hurley took this photo of Adélie penguins in Antarctica during his time as the official photographer on Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Taken over 100 years ago, the image is hugely popular with the Library’s audience on the photo-sharing site Flickr with over 9.5 million and 27,000 ‘faves’.

After the blizzard

The western base contingent of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition made a camp on the top of the Shackleton Ice Shelf in February 1912. Andrew Watson set up a photographic darkroom in the main hut and he, along with geologist Charles Hoadley and meteorologist Morton Moyes, took most of the photos. This photo was taken sometime after 30 October 1912, while members of the group were on a five-week sledging party to survey the land to their east.

Eastern sledging party

This crowd is welcoming Australian Harry George Hawker and Anglo-Canadian Kenneth MacKenzie-Grieve at London’s Kings Cross station after their failed attempt to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. They were rescued mid-ocean by a passing freighter, the Mary. The photographer Rex Hazlewood saw active service overseas with the Australian Imperial Force, and after the Armistice became an official army photographer until his return to Australia in late 1919.

Failed Atlantic crossing

Australians were notified of the end of the First World War at 7 pm on 11 November 1918, and within an hour huge crowds had gathered in Martin Place, Sydney. Over the following days spontaneous gatherings continued across New South Wales, including at the town of Glen Innes where this photo was taken. The war’s end had come at a huge cost. Of the 330,000 Australians who served in the army, nearly two-thirds were injured and more than 60,000 died.

Armistice Day, Glen Innes

This lantern slide is part of a series documenting a road trip to the summit of Mount Kosciuszko in the early twentieth century. The photos were taken about 10 years after the Kosciuszko National Park came into existence on 5 December 1906, when it was named the National Chase Snowy Mountains. The series was compiled by Myles Dunphy, one of Australia’s first conservationists.

Car trip, Kosciuszko

By the early 1900s, rabbits — which had arrived in Australia in 1788 with the First Fleet — had multiplied into the millions and were causing massive damage to the country’s environment and agriculture. Attempts to control them included shooting, which had the financial incentive of selling the meat and skins. At that time, the industry was one of the most profitable in Australia, with whole rabbits shipped to England for about $40 in today’s money and sold for $140. As poisoning became the preferred killing method, the market for rabbit meat dried up.

Packing rabbits

‘I think that winter was the longest we had ever had while we were there,’ wrote Wodonga resident Cyril Holmes in Melbourne’s Weekly Times about the 1917 floods, ‘for the first floods started in June and they kept on coming until November ... From our house it was just like looking out to a sea, for only the tree tops were visible and the nearest land was 2 miles off ... the water was so high we used to be able to row a boat ... through the cow shed. When we used to get off our seats from milking the cows our stool used to float away.’

Flood, Wodonga

This photo of naturalist Charles Laseron standing next to sea ice forming at Cape Denison was taken by Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. While Frank Hurley was the expedition’s official photographer, 19 other members also took photographs. After the expedition returned, Laseron enlisted in the army and served at Gallipoli in the 13th Battalion. He was wounded at Anzac Cove and after being medically discharged worked at the Technological Museum in Sydney.

Charles Laseron, Cape Denison

One of the more unusual pieces of technology brought to Antarctica was the air-tractor sledge. Essentially an aeroplane frame and engine on skis, it proved to be the bane of the mechanic Francis Bickerton’s time with the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. It landed in January 1912 but took until June before the engine was running. Expedition leader Douglas Mawson made the following comment on its utility: ‘on the polished, furrowed and crevassed coastal slopes or over the rough sastrugi ridges [parallel waves in the snow caused by wind] of Adelie Land its probable performance was a matter of great doubt’.

Air-tractor sledge, Antarctica

Ferocious winds and blizzards severely limited exploratory trips made by leader Douglas Mawson and the men camped at Cape Denison on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. It was nearly 10 months before they were able to set out on their planned sledding trips. This photo was taken while official photographer Frank Hurley was on the southern party, which worked its way toward the southern magnetic pole. The pole seen on their sled in the background acted as a mast for a sail that, when the weather allowed, helped move the sled over the ice.

Encamped in snow

In 1919 the Library purchased 125 original photographic prints by Frank Hurley recording Australia’s activities in the First World War. In the foreword to the catalogue, official war photographer Hurley stated: ‘I make no claim to pictorial merit; the pictures are records, and except for several of the larger ones are faithful reproductions of the scenes they portray. In order to convey accurate battle impressions, I have made several composite pictures, utilising a number of negatives for the purpose.’ In this composite work, Hurley has created a more dynamic scene by superimposing planes and explosions onto an image of soldiers leaving the trenches.

Battle of Zonnebeke

William Mulready was listed by the Australian Imperial Force as a 16-year-old schoolboy from Paddington, Sydney. But it is likely he was only 15, making him the youngest Australian to leave with the First Contingent in 1914. ‘We were in the first line of defence, the absolute thick of it in the first attack,’ says Mulready in his account of the engagement at the Battle of Romani in Egypt on 4 August 1916. ‘No sooner did we hit the top of the ridge than they began to fire into us. You never heard anything like it. We ... started firing. I got off 25 rounds of ammunition.’

William Mulready, Romani

Taken at Anzac Cove at about 8 am on 25 April 1915, this is one of the earliest images from that day. It shows the 4th Battalion disembarking, and the mules for the 26th Indian Mountain Battery. Lying on the sand is the body of Sapper Fred Reynolds of the 1st Field Company Engineers — he was one of the first to die in the Gallipoli campaign.

Gallipoli landing, 25 April 1915

This photo captures pilots Paul McGinness and Howard Bowden Fletcher with squadron mascot Mitch in a Bristol Fighter F-2B in Palestine. The McCaughey Battleplane was named after New South Wales pastoralists Samuel and John McCaughey, who donated money for the newly formed Australian Flying Corps to purchase the plane. On 24 August 1918 near Qalqilya in Palestine, McGinness and Fletcher, along with pilots in another plane, attacked seven enemy aircraft, crashing two. McGinness would go on to co-found Qantas with Hudson Fysh.

McCaughey Battleplane

This self-portrait of Frank Hurley under the bow of the Endurance is from a set of only 17 colour photos that survived from Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. Taken using the newly invented Paget process they are unique one-off images, and are the only ones from the expedition taken in colour. A further 15 photos were taken in South Georgia by Hurley in 1917. All 32 colour plates are held by the Library.

Shackleton expedition

‘I spent the day with Sir E selecting the first of my negatives from the year’s collection. 120 I reordered and dumped about 400. This unfortunate reduction is essential as a drastic cutting down on weight must be effected owing to the very limited space that will be at disposal in the boat transport.’

Frank Hurley’s diary, 9 November 1915

This photo of a smoke bomb demonstration by Australian troops in Palestine is one of hundreds taken by Major James Allan Chauvel while he was with the 2nd Australian Remount Unit. He appears to have used a Kodak Panoram camera, with a mechanised lens that moved across curved film to minimise distortion when creating a panorama. These cameras were small enough to use without a tripod, and we can see Chauvel’s shadow in the centre of the image. James’s brother was First World War commander General Sir Harry Chauvel, and his son was filmmaker Charles Chauvel.

Smoke bombs

On 11 September 1919, Colonel Hughes of the Graves Registration Unit left for Gallipoli with Survey Officer Geoffrey Hawkins and seven other officers. Their mission was to register every known grave they could reach, and mark and fence any new grave they found. Hawkins had been an architect in Perth before he enlisted in 1915, and was sent to fight at Gallipoli and then on the Western Front. This photograph of the group’s work is part of Hawkins’ collection of sketches, notebooks and photographs held by the Library.

Turkish skeletons, Gallipoli

This internment camp for German internees opened on 1 August 1915 at the site of the disused Trial Bay Gaol, near Kempsey. The prisoners were confined to the gaol surrounds but were mostly free to move around the site during the day. In this image you can see the beach huts and houses built by prisoners that were dotted along the beach in front of the gaol walls. In July 1918 all the internees were moved to Holsworthy Internment Camp in Sydney.

Internment camp, New South Wales

The Allied forces in Palestine launched regular campaigns against Turkish and German troops in 1917 and 1918. The success of these operations meant Australian forces were forced to manage large numbers of prisoners — which included feeding them. This image by James Allan Chauvel shows prisoners and soldiers working together to prepare meals in large oil drums over open pit fires. Chauvel’s son Charles recreated elements of this scene in his film Forty Thousand Horsemen in 1940.

Turkish prisoners

Lady Rachel Dudley accompanied her husband, William Humble Ward, the 2nd Earl of Dudley, to Australia when he was appointed Governor-General of Australia in 1908. She helped establish an Australian District Nursing Scheme, and this autographed photo is dedicated to the NSW Bush Nursing Association. Lady Dudley was described by Australian journalist Ada Holman as ‘beautiful as a marble statue … a carved lily’.  She returned to the United Kingdom and established the Australian Voluntary Hospital in London at the beginning of the First World War.

Lady Dudley

This ordinary-looking notebook contains nearly 100 rare photographs documenting Australia’s first engagement in the First World War. Australian journalist Frederick Spencer Burnell took the photos while working as a correspondent with the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force sent to seize and destroy wireless stations in German New Guinea in 1914. One photo shows William George Vincent Williams on a stretcher on a ship’s deck. He was the first serving Australian to lose his life in the First World War.