“Nangwarry” homestead, southeast South Australia, c.1890.

Albumen print photograph, in very large 220 x 290 mm format; on the photographer’s mount, 330 x 400 mm; manuscript caption ‘NANGWARRY’ in the negative lower left, and with the photographer’s pencilled signature ‘C. G. Greenham’ below the image at right; verso wet-stamped ‘The “Herodotus” Studio, C.G. Greenham, Photographer, Hawthorn’; both the print and the mount are in fine condition.

Nangwarry was a pastoral station situated roughly midway between Mount Gambier and Penola, near the border of South Australia and Victoria. Established in the 1840s, it was purchased in the 1850s by Andrew Watson, who changed its original name, Kilbride, to Nangwarry, a Buandik phrase meaning “path to the cave”. Today the local township retains this name. The property was acquired in 1873 by Captain Robert Gardiner, a prominent early pioneer and pastoralist of the Mount Gambier district; by the 1890s the property was run by Captain Gardiner’s sons, Abram Gardiner and Robert Melville Gardiner, and it remained within the Gardiner family until well into the twentieth century. This photograph was taken on the homestead lawn at Nangwarry by travelling photographer Charles Greenham. Pictured are presumably members of the Gardiner family: a young woman, five children aged between 3 and 15, and their two dogs.

Charles George Greenham (1853-1925) appears to have commenced his career as a professional photographer in Melbourne in the late 1880s. Based at his Fairmount Park property in Hawthorn (Fairmount occupied what is now Elm Street, Oak Street and part of Barkers Road), Greenham chose the commercial name Herodotus Studios. He later worked in Camperdown and Portland in Victoria’s Western District, before moving across the continent to Western Australia in the 1890s. It was there, in partnership with his wife, Laura Evans, who was also a photographic artist, that the firm of Greenham & Evans became one of Western Australia’s most well-known and well-travelled photographic enterprises of the gold rush era of the late 1890s and early 1900s. During their time in Western Australia Greenham and Evans were based in both Perth and Coolgardie. The couple then crossed the continent for a second time, and worked in Sydney and Newcastle into the 1920s.