“Group of Aborigines, Lake Alexandrina” (1862).

[Title from contemporary inscription in ink verso]. Stereoscopic albumen print photograph, each image approximately 70 x 75 mm (arch-top format), on original flat mount of pale green/azure card, 85 x 180 mm; fully contemporary inscription in ink verso: ‘Group of Aborigines, Lake Alexandrina’, with the original owner’s initials ‘M.A.H.’ and their collection number ’79’; the right-hand albumen print has a few tiny ink spots, otherwise both prints are in fine condition; the mount is clean but has some pinholes at left and right edges.

This early and extremely rare stereoscopic photograph was taken at Point McLeay Mission on Lake Alexandrina, South Australia, in 1862 by George Burnell (1830-1894), at the end of his expedition down the Murray River from Echuca in Victoria with his friend (and possibly business partner) E. W. Cole. Burnell recorded the trip with a stereoscopic camera he had purchased in Castlemaine on the Victorian goldfields; Cole, whom he had trained, developed and printed the photographs for him. Burnell’s views included a short series taken at the Point McLeay Mission, where Burnell’s brother-in-law, George Taplin, was the superintendent.

The only other example of this photograph we have traced is held in the Art Gallery of South Australia (Accession no. 805HP70(52)). The AGSA example is in square (not arch-top) format, on a buff-coloured mount. It also has a caption on the verso: ‘Aborigines in their wurley, Point McLeay, Lake Alexandrina’, along with ’52’, which is the photographer’s own sequence number.

Fifty-one (of a complete set of sixty) of this set of Burnell’s photographs, titled Stereoscopic Views of the River Murray (1862), are held in the collection of the AGSA. In early 1863, after Cole’s subsequent return to Melbourne (where he would later become that city’s leading bookseller), Burnell made another trip in the reverse direction up the Murray to Wentworth in New South Wales. The photographs Burnell took on this second Murray excursion were commissioned by Governor Daly and apparently presented to him on Burnell’s return to Adelaide. Karen Magee (Dictionary of South Australian Photography 1845-1915) notes that although the whereabouts of this commissioned set is unknown, copies of some of the 1863 views may have been given to members of Burnell’s family.