“Cherry Mount” homestead, Western District of Victoria, c.1890.

Albumen print photograph, in very large 220 x 290 mm format; on the photographer’s mount, 300 x 420 mm; manuscript caption ‘CHERRY MOUNT’ in the negative lower centre; verso wet-stamped ‘The “Herodotus” Studio, C.G. Greenham, Photographer, Hawthorn’; the print is in fine condition; the mount has residual glue marks from where the mount was once housed in a frame.

Cherry Mount was a pastoral station situated near the township of Glenthompson in Victoria’s Western District. In 1889 its then owner, William Bell, sold the property to Fitzgerald Brothers, and the homestead was then occupied by Thomas H. Fitzgerald and his family until well into the twentieth century. This photograph of the homestead, its laid out garden and greenhouse was taken by travelling photographer Charles Greenham.

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.