Woman seated beside a man standing and holding an axe. Brisbane, circa 1870.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 104 x 61 mm (mount); verso with wet stamp of ‘S. Duesbury, Photographer, Brisbane’; a superb print with rich tonal range, in excellent condition.

Staffordshire-born photographer Samuel Duesbury was active in Brisbane from 1868. Along with Thomas Bevan, Daniel Marquis, and John Watson, he was one of the four Brisbane photographers known to have taken studio portraits of local Aboriginal people in the 1860s and early 1870s.