Police Station, Goolwa. – Murray River. No. 59.

[Title from contemporary inscription in ink verso]. Stereoscopic albumen print photograph, each image approximately 74 x 70 mm, on original flat mount of buff-coloured card, 83 x 177 mm; fully contemporary inscription in ink verso; each albumen print has a few tiny marks, and the mount is a little dusty but otherwise clean and stable.

An extremely rare photograph of the Police Station at Goolwa, near the mouth of the Murray River, South Australia, taken in 1862 by George Burnell (1830-1894). The only other copy of this photograph we can locate in Australian collections is the one held in the Art Gallery of South Australia (Accession no. 805HP70(59)), which has an identically-worded caption and the same sequence number 59 on the reverse. (The AGSA example is mounted on pale green, rather than buff-coloured card).

In 1862 Burnell travelled 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 Point McLeay Mission, where Burnell’s brother-in-law, George Taplin, was the superintendent.

Fifty-one (of a complete set of sixty) of this set, titled Stereoscopic Views of the River Murray (1862), are held in the collection of the Art Galley of South Australia. 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.

The handwriting in the inscription on the back of the present stereoview is most likely to be that of George Burnell, although it is possible that the caption was written by E.W. Cole.