The Oriental Bank, corner of Queen Street and Flinders Lane, Melbourne, c.1864.

Stereoscopic albumen print photograph, each individual image 74 x 72 mm (arch-top format), on pale yellow board mount 82 x 171 mm; verso with printed label worded ‘A. Morris & Co.’s Stereoscopic Views of Victoria. Oriental Bank [in ms.] Melbourne’, and with the firm’s address ’56 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne’ at lower right; both prints are in fine condition, as is the mount.

A wonderful early view of the Oriental Bank, which stood on the southwest corner of Queen Street and Flinders Lane. This extraordinary Greek temple-style building was designed by Robertson and Hale and was completed in 1856. It was photographed in 1858 by Daintree and Fauchery; this stereoscopic view by Alfred Morris was taken some six years later, but from virtually the same spot as the Daintree/Fauchery image, near the northeast corner of the intersection. The building was vacated by the Oriental Bank at the start of the 1880s, and was demolished in 1889.

We have not been able to trace another example of this Morris & Co. view, which we believe is almost certainly the second oldest photograph of the Oriental Bank extant.

The dates given by Davies & Stanbury (The Mechanical Eye in Australia) for Alfred Morris’s career as a photographic artist in Melbourne – ‘56 Elizabeth Street, c.1870‘ – are wildly inaccurate. In fact, from Morris & Co.’s advertisements in The Argus, we know that the firm’s studio moved a short distance from 60 Elizabeth Street to premises two doors away at 56, at some point between January and April 1864. Morris is known to have been taking stereographic views of Melbourne and regional Victoria from at least 1862, and prior to that had spent some time in Tasmania, where he also produced topographical stereoviews. From a much earlier notice that appeared in the The Argus on 13 August 1857, we learn that a firm by the name of Morris & Co., with premises at 65 Elizabeth Street, was seeking to lease a restaurant which it owned in Collins Street.