99
sy”). Marketed as The Last of the Tasmanian Natives,
Mary Ann, Truganini and Pinnanbothac were dressed
in crinolines and William Lanne in a three piece suit.
The women wore head-dresses of Oyster Cove shells to
signify their Tasmanian origin. The publication of this
photograph as an engraving in the Illustrated Sydney
News (November 1864) and the Illustrated London Jour-
nal (January 1865) achieved international notoriety.
German born photographers appear to have had
an anthropological predilection for photographing
Aboriginals in all corners of Australia. Charles Walter
(1831–1907) made view stereographs of Aborigines at
prayer in European clothing at Lake Tyers Mission Sta-
tion, Gippsland and ethnographic portraits of people at
Coranderkk in 1867–68. Frederick Kruger (1831–88)
visited Coranderrk in 1877 to take portraits of Ab-
originals for the Victorian Board for the Protection of
Aborigines. Copies were sold in albums. John William
Lindt (1845–1926) made a tableau vivant portfolio of
“Australian Aboriginals” in his studio at Grafton, New
South Wales in 1873–74. Semi-naked for white people’s
gaze, the anonymous people with their traditional cloth-
ing and weapons are uncomfortably displaced against
painted backdrops, dried fl ora and dead native fauna.
These images were widely published in the 1880s as
engravings in encyclopaedias. In the far north, Police
Inspector, Paul Foelsche (1831–1914) made forty-eight
portraits of Port Darwin and Port Essington Aboriginals
which were displayed by the South Australian govern-
ment in the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879.
The fi rst commercial portfolio to contain views of
Melbourne, the Victorian goldfi elds and Aborigines was
Sun Pictures of Victoria by Frenchman Antoine Fauch-
ery (1823–61) and Richard Daintree (1832–78). Pro-
duced in ten monthly instalments, from November 1857
to early 1859, each part had fi ve albumen photographs
mounted on card (La Trobe Library, State Library of
Victoria). Before leaving Melbourne in February 1859,
Fauchery summed the series up in a letter accompanying
an album to the French Minister of Public Instruction
and Worship: “There are some of great men, some of
towns, some of the mines, some of the savages. There
is a little of everything.”
Fauchery became an official war correspondent
and photographer for the French expeditionary force
in China. Daintree, a trained geologist made hundreds
of photographs of Queensland in his capacity as the
Geological Surveyor of North Queensland. After taking
an exhibition of his pictures and mineral specimens to
London in 1871, he was appointed the London Agent-
General for Queensland from 1872–76. His landscape
views were scientifi c and as well as documentary, in-
spiring others to take their photographic vans into the
country for the views trade.
Paper photographs became the choice of amateurs
and professionals alike as soon as the collodion wet
plate process arrived in Australia in 1854. Prints made
from the calotype had a brief fl ush of popularity in
the 1850s with amateurs, but because of the long
exposures involved was little used by professionals.
Daguerreotypes were more durable in their cases, and
although in decline after 1860, were still available until
the late 1860s. Cased ambrotypes were popular from
1855 until 1865. The American trained photographer,
Thomas Skelton Glaister (1824–1904) and the Freeman
Brothers (w. 1853–95) from England specialised in the
collodion ambrotype. Joseph Lyne Brown (w. 1854–80)
introduced the process to Sydney in 1854 and J. S.
Scarlett (w. 1854) to Melbourne the same year. William
Blackwood (1824–97) and James Freeman (1814–90)
saw the advantage of using the collodion glass nega-
tive to make limitless albumen paper copies before the
ambrotype completely fell out of favour.
The carte-de-visite (cdv) was patented by A.A.E.
Disdéri on 27 November 1854 and introduced to Brit-
ain by the French fi rm A. Marion and Company, but
received little notice there or in Australia until some
years later.
William Blackwood announced the Australian launch
of the cdv on 12 May 1859. This “Novelty in the Fine
Arts” a new style of miniature visiting card portrait was
available for 12 shillings a dozen. The Sydney Morning
Herald prophesised: “Truly this is producing portraits
for the million.” Although meant metaphorically, it
would be some time before the population approached
this fi gure as only 350,000 people lived in the colony
of New South Wales in 1859. Indeed, the whole of
Australia’s population did not exceed one million until
1861.
Blackwood’s announcement met with total public
indifference. He re-advertised “portraits on visiting
cards” on 18 May, but not again. In fact this indiffer-
ence extended to the whole Sydney profession as no one
else advertised “visiting cards” in the Sydney Morning
Herald until 9 November 1860. Why? An important
accessory was missing—the photograph album.
John Jabez Edwin Mayall’s (1810–1901) portraits of
the British Royal family taken at Buckingham Palace on
10 May and I July 1860 launched the cdv in the British
Empire and the United States of America. Copies of
Mayall’s portraits housed in the Royal Album arrived
in Sydney by 18 October 1860 (“Per Overland Mail,”
Sydney Morning Herald).
Sydney photographer William Hetzer (w. 1850–67)
can be credited with the successful introduction of the
cdv to Australia in 1860. In 1858, noticing the popularity
of imported stereographs, he created a market for ste-
reographic views of Sydney and its surrounds. Eighteen
months later he created the market for the carte-de-visite
album portrait in Australia.