“Group of Blacks, Swan Hill, Victoria” (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 yellow card, 83 x 173 mm; fully contemporary inscription in ink verso: ‘Group of Blacks, Swan Hill, Victoria’, with the original owner’s initials ‘M.A.H.’ and their collection number ’74’; some very light foxing to both albumen prints and the verso of the mount.

This early and extremely rare stereoscopic photograph was taken near Swan Hill in 1862 by George Burnell (1830-1894), during his expedition down the Murray River from Echuca in Victoria to Lake Alexandrina in South Australia 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 end of the trip at Point McLeay Mission, where Burnell’s brother-in-law, George Taplin, was the superintendent.

The only other copy of this photograph we can trace in Australian collections is the one held in the Art Gallery of South Australia (Accession no. 805HP70(44)), which has paler prints than the present example, in square (not arch-top) format and on a buff (not yellow) mount. The AGSA example also has a caption on the verso: ‘Group of Aborigines near Swan Hill, Murray River, Sinclair, Nelly, Hughy, Toby’, along with ’44’, 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.