“Life in Queensland”. Three outdoor photographs, late 1860s.

Three albumen print photographs, in uniform 73 x 98 mm format, mounted recto of a 19th-century album leaf, with fully contemporary caption in ink beneath the images ‘Life in Queensland’; all three albumen prints are in very good condition; the mount has a few spots of foxing.

Although the photographer and precise location(s) are not identified, this remains an interesting trio of images from an early visitor to Queensland’s travel album, possibly taken in the Darling Downs region. The top image shows an early railway with a haulage truck at left, and in the background workers outside a bark-roofed horse stable and shelter; the lower right image shows are large group of shearers outside a shearing shed with a bark shingle roof, including an Aboriginal man at centre of back row; and the image at lower left shows three Europeans and an Aboriginal youth posed in front of a bark slab hut.