Reference: [ABORIGINES; GOLD MINING] Scenes in Victoria, Australia, by Nicholas Caire et al. 1876-1877 (but including a group of photographs of Aborigines taken prior to 1870). Contemporary album, quarto, 290 x 250 mm, ornate gilt green cloth boards (rubbed, hinges split), upper board titled 'Scrap Album', containing [67] albumen print photographs, [55] in format 130 x 180 mm to 140 x 240 mm, [12] in standard carte de visite format (105 x 65 mm or smaller), mounted recto and verso of the album leaves of thick card, with contemporary manuscript captions beneath the images, a page with manuscript title Scenes in Victoria, Australia originally bound in at front (now detached), scattered light foxing to the leaves, but the photographs in good condition, the majority strong prints with excellent tonal range.
The fifty-five larger format photographs in this album were taken by renowned photographer Nicholas Caire, and date to around 1877. Caire had just returned to Melbourne after living in Adelaide and Sandhurst and, as manager of the Anglo-Australasian Photo. Co., he produced a commercial portfolio of his images of Melbourne and regional Victoria titled Views of Victoria. The photographs in this portfolio were sold with printed captions on the mounts, but could also be purchased individually, evidently also in an unmounted format. The compiler of the present album clearly purchased an unmounted series of Caire's views from the Anglo-Australasian Photo. Co. and mounted them in his/her own album, entering the captions, which overlap with many of Caire's own, in a fine copperplate hand. The chosen manuscript title, Scenes in Victoria, echoes - but is not identical to - Caire's portfolio title, Views of Victoria.
The larger photographs include several important gold mining images. The complete range of subjects is as follows: Caledonian gold diggings on the Upper Yarra; a digger outside his bark hut at Diamond Creek on the Upper Yarra; gold mining at Anderson's Creek on the Yarra; Murray River at Echuca (2); Campaspe River in flood; views of Ballarat and Sandhurst townships; scenes in the Dandenong Ranges (12); carting wine at Yering Station, Healesville; New Chum Line of Reef and an open mine at Sandhurst; Esplanade, St. Kilda; views at Heidelberg, northeast of Melbourne (2); Melbourne's Botanical, Carlton and Fitzroy Gardens (7); views of Melbourne public buildings, including St. Patrick's Cathedral under construction (20); shipping at Queens' Wharf, Melbourne.
Perhaps the most significant images in the album, however, are the portraits of Aboriginal people of Victoria and Queensland. This group of twelve carte de visite format albumen prints, mounted three to a page across the lower sections of four leaves at the centre of the album, date to the late 1860s and were not taken by Nicholas Caire. Four appear to have been taken at Coranderrk Station, Healesville: a close-up portrait of woman in mission clothing, perhaps attributable to Italian ethnologist Enrico Giglioli, who visited Coranderrk in 1867; a woman weaving a large basket; a woman and child with animal skin and completed basket; and a seated woman draped in a kangaroo skin (the latter three perhaps attributable to Charles Walter); the other eight photographs, of Queensland subjects, were taken in the Brisbane area. At least one has been firmly attributed to Thomas Bevan; the others are probably by either Bevan or Daniel Marquis (see Michael Aird's essay Aboriginal people and four early Brisbane photographers, in Calling the shots, edited by Jane Lydon, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2014).
$ 12,000.00 AUD
Publishing details: listed in Douglas Stewart Fine Books catalogue, January, 2015.
Location: 1000