Selectors’ camp, Yarra Ranges, Victoria, late 1880s.

Albumen print photograph, 240 x 290 mm, laid down on its original album page (split card) with caption in ink beneath image ‘Selectors Camp Gippsland’; a strong print with rich tones and excellent contrast; the detail is so sharp that the printed commercial labels on the tins of salmon in the men’s temporary shelter can easily be read.

This evocative image was taken by Melbourne photographer N. J. Caire in the foothills of the Yarra Ranges on Gippsland’s western fringe. The National Library of Australia holds another example, contained in a late nineteenth-century travel album, which has a manuscript caption that identifies the location as Ferntree Gully.