Annie Rees, Loddon Tribe. Coranderrk, c.1878.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 102 x 62 mm (mount); no photographer’s imprint; verso with contemporary inscription in ink: Annie Ries (sic), Western Port  (sic) Tribe; a strong print with rich tones; light surface marks lower left; otherwise excellent condition.

This studio portrait of Annie Rees, with Kruger’s instantly recognisable fern backdrop, is clearly related to the series of photographic portraits taken by Kruger at Coranderrk, near Healesville, around 1878. These portraits of Victorian Aboriginal women with their children all share a similar compositional arrangement, with the women often holding the same tall spear as a prop (see, for example, the State Library of Victoria collection, H41139/5a, for one of the group titled ‘Six portraits of Aboriginal Australian women‘). The same studio backdrop was used by Kruger a year earlier in the portrait series he published as Souvenir album of Victorian Aboriginals, kings, queens etc (1877). This Kruger portrait of Annie carrying her child is reproduced in Jane Lydon’s Eye Contact (plate 52; see also p 142).

The German-born Fred Kruger was perhaps the most significant photographer of Victorian Aborigines in the late 1870s. His studio portraits and his portraits and outdoor views taken at Coranderrk constitute an important visual record of Indigenous Victorians, most of whom had by this time been forcibly removed from their traditional lands.