070 | 4WDTouringAustralia
Photographer Harold Cazneaux founded the Sydney
Camera Circle, which could have been any group of geeks
meeting in a dark room with their new toys.
But he and his mates were different. They were driv-
en by the motto of showing “Our own Australia in terms
of sunlight rather than those of greyness and dismal
shadows.”
Cazneaux’s distinct style became known as the Sunshine
School, and it was a technique that de ned the Australian
landscape in tone.
Exhibit A, being the picture printed on the next page,
from the turn of the century, using new forms to document
the changing face of terrace houses encroaching where
the bush met the big smoke. It features a lone young
gure walking into a future that was equal parts bright and
prosperous, equal parts dark and terrifying.
Perspective and composition were everything to
the man nicknamed ‘Caz’, and he preceded the rise of
Melbourne’s German transplants and Sydney’s post WWII
art dandies by a good 40 years.His most famous pic came on a trip to Wilpena Pound,
when he captured an old and scarred gum that was
thriving despite living in an inhospitable crater in the mid-
dle of the Flinders Ranges.
The red gum is still alive (the story of which featured
in our photo annual two years ago) and has become a
frequent stopover now known as The Cazneaux Tree.
This pic ‘Misty Morning’ is almost as iconic as his
desert gum, this being the start of a modern century when
new structures grew amoeba-like over the wild scrub that
fringed Sydney’s harbour: a modern century that delivered
daily conveniences that seemed trivial when compared to
the spectre of the world wars it also produced.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography nally gave him
the credit he deserved in 1979, with a retrospective on his
Sunshine School that was the foundation from which all
future Australia photography would be built upon.
“His frontispiece photograph for the rst issue of The
Home in 1920 used sunshine effects so successfully that it
sparked a new trend in local photography.”Harold Cazneaux
‘Misty Morning’, 1908
North Sydney, NSW
Cazneaux Collection: National
Library of Australia