Studio portraits of Alice and William Bond Helliar, of Natte Yallock, just north of Avoca in the Pyrenees region of Victoria. St. Arnaud, early 1870s.

Two albumen print photographs, carte de visite format, 103 x 63 mm (mounts); versos with the back mark of ‘Hy. Bewley, Photographer, St. Arnaud Dispensary’, and contemporary captions in ink identifying the sitters as siblings Alice Helliar and William Bond Helliar; the vignette portrait of William is a little overexposed, but otherwise both prints are in very good condition, as are the mounts.

A pair of studio portraits of children Alice Joan Helliar (1859-1946) and her younger brother William Bond Helliar (1860-1917), of the tiny Pyrenees township of Natte Yallock. The photographs would have been taken during a Helliar family visit to St. Arnaud, a larger town situated a little under 50 km to the northwest of Natte Yallock, around 1871 or 1872.

These extremely rare cartes de visite are the only surviving examples we have been able to trace of the St. Arnaud studio of photographer Henry Bewley. Having run a pharmacy in Bendigo in the 1850s, Bewley settled in St. Arnaud at some point in the early 1860s, where he became the town’s pharmacist, postmaster and (in 1875) mayor. Bewley Street in St. Arnaud is named after him.