1285
dresses to its members. In August 1848, the daguerreo-
typist H.B. Sealey was invited to become a member
of the Mechanics Executive Committee after he had
presented an address on the daguerreotype.
Elsewhere in the South Pacifi c, with smaller centres
of population, it would be diffi cult to maintain anything
approaching a society or an institution.
However, as missionaries were very active with
cameras, it may have occasioned an instance whereby
one of their party may have given a talk or demonstra-
tion of their skills. Their audience may have included
land owners, government employees and traders. For
instance, the French settlement in New Caledonia saw
a number of photographers from 1848.
After the discovery of gold in payable quantities,
some cities like Melbourne in Australia and Dunedin
in New Zealand’s South Island, demonstrated their
wealth with trade exhibitions. These colonial events
attempted to follow that which had been established in
London in 1851 with The Great Exhibition. They were
ideal platforms for displaying photographs and elicited
great attention whenever they were staged. Dunedins’
fi rst exhibition was in 1865 and it was repeated again
in 1889/90, when it carried the more impressive title of
title of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition.
Gradually, as some of the wrinkles were removed
from photography an ever growing number of educated
people began to take up the craft as a recreational pur-
suit. Some of these amateurs formed themselves tem-
porarily into groups like those who met on 8 December
1858 in Sydney under the auspices of the Philosophical
Society of New South Wales.
This may well have been the fi rst such group in
Australasia. As amateurs tended to push the boundaries
of photography, there eventually came a need to show
their handiwork to a wider audience. The amateur pho-
tographer Rev. John Kinder (1819–1903) exhibited a
selection of his photographic views at two exhibitions
run by the Auckland Society of Arts in 1870 and again
in 1873. Despite these developments, photographers
in Australasia had to wait many years before anything
resembling a photographic society of some signifi cance
got off the ground.
In New Zealand the fi rst photographic organisation
to appear on the scene was the Amateur Photographic
Association of 1882, which met on a monthly basis
and had its base in Wellington. A prominent member
of this Association was Arthur Thomas Bothamley
(1836–1948), a civil servant who played an important
role in New Zealand’s exhibit at the 1876 International
Exhibition in Philadelphia. Also active about this time in
the Association was an amateur who went on to become
a member of the New Zealand’s Parliament, William
Thomas Locke Travers (1819–1903). In 1871, Travers
read an important paper to the Wellington Philosophical
Society on “Out-door photography,” a report which drew
attention to some photographic characteristics peculiar
to this part of the world, like the effect of ultra violet
light on photographic emulsions which had been devised
mainly for use in the northern hemispheres.
The 1890s witnessed a period of tremendous expan-
sion as easy-to-use cameras of all description became
available at low cost. Photographic clubs and societ-
ies were formed in nearly every major settlement. A
highlight in their annual calendar of events was the
Intercolonial Exhibitions which saw entries from both
sides of the Tasman Sea gathered together where they
were judged and awarded medals and certifi cates.
Attempting to bond these widely spread groups into
a united front fell unwittingly into the lap of several
publications which were established in the early 1890s.
Two of these were Australian journals. They were
Harrington1s Photographic Journal which, though
printed in Australia, was also released in New Zea-
land. It was founded in 1892. Similarly, the Australian
Photographic Review also found its way across the
Tasmanfrom 1894. In New Zealand, Sharland’s New
Zealand Photographer, also commenced publication in- This was edited by Josiah Martin, (1843–1916) a
commercial photographer who amongst other things op-
posed soft focus photography and actively campaigned
for a number of matters which identifi ed injustices to
photographers when it came to government agencies
who were undercutting professionals who were involved
in supplying prints for the lucrative tourist market.
As the nineteenth century came to a close, New Zea-
land photographers were able to measure themselves
for the fi rst time against their overseas counterparts.
A British annual called Photograms of the Year, which
published a yearly survey of fi ne art prints from around
the world, despatched a folio which included examples
by H.P. Robinson. These were toured in Australasia by
photographic clubs and societies in 1896.
William Main
See also: Daguerreotype; and Photograms of the Year
(1888–1961).Further Reading
Dunn, Michael, John Kinder: Paintings & Photographs, SeTo
Publishing 1985.
Newton, Gael, Shades of Light—Photography and Australia,
Colins 1988.
Kakou, Serge, Découverte Photographique de la Nouvelle-Ca-
lédonie 1848–1900. Actes Sud 1998.
——, International Exhibition Catalogue 1865.
——, New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Catalogue
1889–1890 Hocken Library, Otago University, Dunedin
New Zealand.
Main, William, Wellington Through a Victorian Lens, Millwood
Press, 1972.