The young man at the back of the room

Edward Ottway, an ‘operator’, ‘illuminator’ and ‘optician’

in the trans-imperial spectacles of entertainment and education 1879-1882

I gave this presentation at the Magic Lantern Society’s fiftieth anniversary international convention, held in Birmingham 9-11 October 2026. I illustrated it with some wood engravings made in Sydney around 1880, such as the one below. I even visited his grave at Waverley Cemetery.

Read it here.

‘The Tri-Unial Lantern illuminated with the Oxy-Hydrogen Light, in the Hall of the Balmain School of Arts’, Illustrated Catalogue of Optical lanterns and Transparent Views and the newest forms of Bi-Unial and Tri-Unial Dissolving View Apparatus, by William Mac Donnell, Sydney, 312 George Street, 1882. Author’s collection.

Abstract:

The youngest scion of a prominent family of London opticians, Edward Ottway came to the Australian colonies in 1879 as part of Professor Henry Pepper’s entourage. His job was to manage Pepper’s special Ottway triunial (three lensed) magic lantern, but he left the tour in Sydney to become the colony’s main ‘illuminator’, specialising in triunials. He even rescued one from the burning Victoria Theatre. These machines were as charismatic in Sydney as elsewhere, and in the next few years several more reached the colony through various routes. With Ottway’s skills, they became crucial to the emerging push for worker’s technical education. Unfortunately, he died tragically young, and initially was a suspected suicide. Ottway was not a showperson, he was a technician — the operator ‘at the back of the room’ — yet his relatively obscure life can teach us much about the role of new, spectacular technologies in developing global networks of education and entertainment.

Canberra Glassworks Residency: New Magic Lantern Chromatropes

I have been an artist in residence at the Canberra Glassworks, experimenting with ways of making new magic lantern chromatropes in contemporary glass. Historically, chromatropes – ‘colour turners’ – were magic lantern slides which used a rack-and-pinion to spin two glass discs in opposite directions. As the magic lanternist turned the handle, the carefully chosen colours painted on the glass mixed on the screen to produce additional colours, and the carefully designed patterns algorithmically iterated intricate virtual forms which seemed to pulse off the screen into the audience. They were extremely popular.

Translating this semi-industrial optical technology from the nineteenth century into the material universe of contemporary studio glass is a rewarding challenge, from which I am learning much. Below are three of the more successful results so far. They were made by expert glass blower Rob Schwartz with Gautirya Muralietharan, and cold worked by Halle Warrender. Sebastian Perri was an enormous support.

Three chromatropes made from Bullseye glass canes by Rob Schwartz at Canberra Glassworks, 2026.

Professor Pepper in ‘the Land of Bush Fires’.

My latest chapter is open access. 

“Professor Pepper in ‘the Land of Bush Fires’. The Colonial Experience of the Magic Lantern and Scientific Spectacle”, from Spectacles of Light The Magic Lantern as Popular Entertainment, 1810-1930, ed Kurt Vanhoutte, Eleonora Paklons, Evelien Joncheere and Leen Engelen, Brepols Publishers, Antwerp, pp145-167


In an illustration from the chapter, Professor Pepper’s (unsuccessful) attempts to break Queensland’s drought are cruelly satirised. 

https://www.brepolsonline.net/content/books/10.1484/M.TECHNE-EB.5.153061

Phantasmagoria in Tathra


A magic lantern show at the Headland Theatre, Tathra, New South Wales, 16 April 2026. With Martyn Jolly, Anita Pollard, Andrew Gray, Dean Gray, Nick Keeling, Steve Fitzgerald, and special guest April Phillips. Including a chromatrope meditation by April Phillips, a special effect of a magic poster produced with a slide painted by Waratah Lahy, and a series of special effects produced with food dye dropped into a water tank.

Charles Martin & Martyn Jolly

Reconstruction of

The Dream Tent

St Louis Sunday Post Dispatch, 4 June 1899
Drill Hall Gallery, 17 October 2025

Handout for Participants

You are about to experience some mind therapy from the late nineteenth century. The Dream Tent was invented by the New York neurologist James Leonard Corning in 1899, the same year Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams.

Corning’s idea was that the brain was susceptible to chromatic and sonic vibrations in the drowsy state before sleep. While in that state, doses of pleasurable colour and sound could induce pleasant dreams and thereby improve the patient’s waking life.

He reported to the International Review of Electrotherapy and Radiotherapy that with the aid of the Dream Tent he had cured Miss L of her Matutinal Depression and Inertia (not wanting to get up in the morning), Mr S of his Insomnia, Mr L of his Morbid Dreams, Mr S of his Imperative Conceptions, and H of his Nervous Irritability.

The pleasant colours were delivered to the patient’s retinas via a motor-driven chromatrope, a well-known optical device popular since the 1830s where two discs of glass painted with cycloidal patterns were rotated against each other in a magic lantern, optically mixing their colours and pulsing them off the screen. Our reconstruction uses authentic chromatropes and a magic lantern from the period.

The therapeutic musical vibrations were delivered to the cells of the patient’s brain via a canvas and leather ‘acoustic helmet’, into which Corning had stitched padded metal saucers supporting above each ear hollow metallic nipples connected by a long india-rubber tube to a wax cylinder phonograph, a machine for playing recordings popular since 1888. Our reconstruction uses a Bela Mini computer, programmed with three circular sonic layers, breathily resonating with the optical logic of the spinning chromatrope discs.

In Corning’s words, ‘pleasing scenes, fantasies, and combinations of color form and fade before [the] eyes’, while ‘the musical waves, surging into the labyrinth and onward to the sensorium, produce effects alike transcendent and indescribable’.

126 years after it was first used on sick patients, will you also experience some of the therapeutic benefits of our reconstructed Dream Tent? It’s time to find out.

Take off your shoes, lie on the divan, put on the headphones, and we’ll zip you up. Then, all you have to do is look steadily at the chromatrope.

One minute sample of the Dream Tent reconstruction experience with audio by Charles Martin

A 1967 government film re-edit

Made for the LocalJinni City night walk – a collective projection journey ANU campus 4, 11, 18 October 2025 in association with the exhibition Light Source, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, a re-edit of the government film:

The Australian National University.

Originally made by Tom Cowan and John Morris in 1967 with music composed by Moneta Eagles.

Thank you Fiona Hooton. Thank you ANU Archives.

Light Sources in Australia

My catalogue essay for the exhibition Light Source, Drill Hall Gallery, curated by myself and Tony Oates, 22 August to 19 October 2025.

First paragraph:

Yes, yes, we all know about ‘Australian light’, it’s hard and it’s harsh. It makes us squint into the red distance, across a haze of heat, towards the horizon. It makes us shade our eyes, our noses crossed with Pink Zinke, as we look out beyond the breakers into the blue. That’s the natural light we all live in, and supposedly ‘deal with’ in our art. But what about artificial light in Australia, the light that isn’t the signature of our national identity, but which we have nonetheless generated here? The following survey is derived from the work of many historians. It has detected, scintillating far off in the deep historical distance, brief flashes of the creative production of synthetic light for its own sake.  It turns out that a continuing engagement with the direct manufacture and manipulation of that purest of art materials — light itself — has been reflected and refracted, bouncing through different genres, medias and contexts, all the way down the long tube of Australian history

‘Light Sources in Australia’ complete essay PDF