Robert George Tucker, undertaker, and his wife Georgina Herd (Passmore) Tucker. Rockhampton, Queensland, c.1863.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 100 x 62 mm (mount); verso with the back mark of ‘J. W. Wilder, Photographer, Rockhampton’, and two fully contemporary inscriptions, the first in ink: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Tucker, formerly Miss Georgina Passmore’, and the second in pencil (in the same hand): ‘Mr. & Mrs. Tucker’; both the print and the mount are in excellent condition.

In 1863, in the fledgling town of Rockhampton, undertaker Robert George Tucker (1826-1878) established what is today acknowledged to be the oldest funeral home in Queensland, known since 1886 as Tucker and Nankivell. At that stage, it had scarcely been five years since Rockhampton had been surveyed and proclaimed a township. Robert and his wife, Georgina Herd Passmore (1825-1876), had married in Devon, England before emigrating to Port Phillip during the gold rush. In 1863 they left Melbourne and moved north to Queensland with their four young children. This studio portrait of the couple, taken in the studio of Joseph Warrin Wilder, probably marked their arrival in Rockhampton in the second half of 1863, at the start of a new chapter in their lives.

Like the Tuckers, American-born photographer Joseph Warrin Wilder (1823-1892) emigrated to Port Phillip at the height of the gold rush, and started his Australian career on the Victorian goldfields before settling in Rockhampton in 1862.