Spectacular Innovation and the Making of a New Kind of Audience within Colonial Modernity
Chapter 6 in Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand (Eds.). Circus and the Avant-Gardes: History, Imaginary, Innovation. (London and New York: Routledge Advances in Theatre Studies, 2022), 93-117.
Abstract:
One of the words most commonly used in the many advertisements and playbills for spectacular attractions in the Australian Colonies was ’novelty’. The desire to take part in the latest innovations in entertainment had a particular urgency for colonial spectators on the frontier, who acutely felt the experience of being a long way from the metropolitan centres. As they developed in the Australian colonies, spectacular attractions — with their key ‘circus’ tropes of the exaggerated body of the acrobatic clown, mechanical ingenuity and illusion, and audience awe and wonder — were central to this perpetual demonstration of ‘The New’. Using case studies, I will discuss how the circus was central to Colonial Modernity. I will use colonial modernity to challenge the usual avant-gardist assumption that innovation or reaction to historical change begins at the centre and spreads to the periphery. I will argue that in many ways colonial audiences were ‘ahead’ of their metropolitan brothers and sisters in their spectatorship of spectacular entertainments.
Figure 5: Troedel & Co. ‘Amphitrite. Afternoon & Evening. Daily’, colour lithograph, 1889. State Library of Victoria.
A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning, KINtop studies in early cinema 6, eds. Sarah Dellman and Frank Kessler (John Libbey Publishing and Indiana University Press, 2020), 39-50. ISBN: 0-86198-735-3.
Australians were “early adopters” of magic lantern technology. From 1830 audiences in the colonial capitals, as well as out in the remote regions, became well acquainted with all aspects of the technology. Magic lanterns were incorporated into the programs of the big metropolitan theatres, and itinerant lanternists used local mechanics institutes, schoolrooms, and hotels for their dissolving view entertainments. Although the hand painted slides they were seeing were the same as those exhibited in Europe, the colonial experience of those slides was profoundly different to that of European audiences. The magic lantern became a fundamental part of a colonial society which was often wracked with homesickness for the ‘Old World’ while simultaneously trying to make sense of their new social and physical environment. Through sampling the many newspaper reports of magic lantern shows from the 1830s to the 1890s we are able to chart the way disparate, sometimes estranged, individuals were formed into coherent colonial audiences, audiences amenable to further media developments in the twentieth century, after the federation of the colonies of into the nation of Australia.[1]
Darkness
You had to sit in the dark for a magic lantern show. This was a strange requirement when audiences were used to seeing performances in theatre auditoriums lit as brightly as the stage itself. Probably the first time an Australian theatre was plunged into darkness was in 1835, for a ghostly effect produced by a phantasmagoric rear projection of the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman, an effect first produced eight years earlier at London’s Adelphi Theatre. Sydney audiences going to the Theatre Royal were warned to prepare themselves for the moment at the end of act two when: “The House is suddenly observed to be in total darkness: the storm rages, and the Phantom Ship appears (a la Phantasmagoria)”.[2]
For theatre shows like The Flying Dutchman the sudden darkness of the auditorium and the sudden illumination of the magic lantern were intended to produce an emotional impact on the audience. But gradually audiences began to acclimatise themselves to the darkness that the lantern brought with it wherever it went. In 1846 the schoolhouse at West Maitland, a town about 175 kilometres north of Sydney, needed funds for improvements. One April evening a fundraising tea party was organised. After tea the Reverend J. J. Smith gave a magic lantern lecture on astronomy. But, before he did, the oil lamps in the schoolhouse had to put out. This novelty, the local newspaper authoritatively reported, was “to admit of the images which [the magic lantern] threw upon the wall being seen more vividly than they could in a lighted room”. However darkness also unexpectedly demanded new spatial arrangements. In the cramped and dark schoolhouse Smith had nowhere else to throw his images than on the wall and this created new problems for his audience:
“[…] the lantern itself was in the way of a large number of the audience, as it stood between them and the wall upon which the images were cast. If they had been thrown upon a screen of muslin, the spectators being on one side of it, and the operator and his lantern on the other, all would have seen perfectly the objects depicted in the form of transparencies.”[3]
Light
If darkness was a novelty, its counterpoint was light. Newspapers were constantly complaining that the darkness demanded by the lantern was failing to bring forth a commensurate amount of visual illumination. Many colonial lanternists found it difficult to regulate the flame, maintain focus and change slides at the same time.
When, in 1848, Mr Kesterton charged the Adelaide pubic half a crown to see a “Grand Illustrated Lecture on heavens and the earth, followed by a beautiful exhibition of 20 pictures and six exquisite Chromatropes”, he attempted to use gas rather than oil to project his images. But not only did he put in his slides upside down, but his dissolving views were “enveloped in mist”. Australian magic lantern audiences always measured their experience against an imagined British one so, after robustly castigating him, the South Australian Register concluded:
“We have made these remarks because we feel it to be our duty to shew Mr Kesterton that an attempt to foist a lame rehearsal on the public as an exhibition worthy of their patronage will not be tolerated here any more than in the mother-country; and that if he pretends to cater for the public amusement, he must take the trouble to perfect himself in the management of the apparatus.”[4]
Sometimes the power of pure light was demonstrated. In 1848 J. W. Newland concluded his dissolving view exhibitions by burning a naked block of lime, displayed the wonder of raw light itself.[5] In 1859 in Hobart the lanternist Mr Knight concluded his shows with a “chromatic fire cloud” produced by “driving a quantity of muriatic acid against a board suspended parallel with the ceiling; the acid is then ignited, and a cloud of fire of various colours appears to descend.”[6]
Audience behaviour
The play of darkness against light was not only a precondition for the ‘magic’ of the magic lantern to work, it also brought into play another important aspect of the colonial experience of the magic lantern — the audience’s behavior.
After the 1830s the magic lantern began to be regularly seen in Australian theatres. For instance, shortly after a lighting effect ‘a la phantasmagoria’ was incorporated into their staging of The Flying Dutchman, Sydney’s Theatre Royal featured the magic lantern apparatus itself as a stand-alone entertainment. As part of a program which also included the play Robinson Crusoe, the farce NO!, and a gymnast performing “a variety of evolutions on the slack rope”, the theatre presented a: “PHANTASMAGORIA or MAGIC LANTHORN, Being a Novelty never yet produced in the Colony and in which will be introduced Eighty Characters, by Mr. Allan”.[7] Later, in 1844, the popular comic actor George Coppin, one of the leaders of Australian theatre, brought a phantasmagoria lantern and dissolving views into his Sydney program.[8]
Australia theatre audiences were drunk, rowdy, and combative. There were brawls in the stalls, members of the audience threw missiles of various sorts or leapt on stage in the middle of performances, and the performers themselves often got into arguments with audience members. However the theatre architecture itself, as well as ticket prices, worked to more or less keep different social strata separated. Generally, prices started at three shillings sixpence for the dress circle down to sixpence for the gallery and the pit, and the dress circle and pit had separate entrances from the street.[9]
But the magic lantern tended to cut across the established, but unstable, architectural and inherited social divisions of the theatre. The pit was a particularly dangerous place, were patrons stood, or crowded onto benches. When, in 1848, J W Newland decided to place his magic lanterns in the pit of the Royal Victoria Theatre, Sydney’s successor to the old Theatre Royal, for his first shows of dissolving views of European scenes, comic slides, and chromatropes, he was courting trouble. The first show on Monday, 1 May, proceeded uneventfully. But, after his Tuesday performance Newland announced that someone had “maliciously injured” the magic lanterns, which had been located in the pit, so in future performances the apparatus would be set up on the stage.[10]Putting the apparatus up on stage may well have also added to the attraction by exhibiting the act of projection itself.
Newland was not the only lanternist to fall foul of volatile theatre audiences. When they visited Adelaide’s Port Theatre in 1864, Seymour and Gordon advertised boxes in the dress circle for three shillings, but nobody brought them, preferring to spend just one shilling sixpence for the pit, or sixpence for the gallery. As a result the audience, “being unable to appreciate the nature of the entertainment, created such confusion that it was with great difficulty that the exhibition was gone through. The views were good, but the descriptive part was rendered inaudible by the noise”.[11]
If Australian audiences were notoriously boisterous, even in the relatively regulated space of the major theatres, how would they behave in the hotel rooms, mechanics institutes and schoolrooms used by itinerant lanternists?
The very first Australian magic lantern audience recorded were the boys of Captain Beveridge’s Mercantile and Naval Academy, Sydney, who at Christmas time in 1830 were treated to a phantasmagoria show which made them “laugh till they could laugh no more”.[12] Perhaps it was relief at just finishing their exams which made them so cheerful, but the uncontrolled behavior of audiences became a source of anxiety for subsequent lantern shows. As in the UK, the US and Europe, the lantern travelled throughout the colonies and was incorporated into, or competed with, a range of other “scientific” entertainments: phrenological lectures, wax works, spectral illusions (pirating Pepper’s Ghost), camera obscuras, panoramas, dioramas and illuminated transparencies.[13]
For instance in 1865 South Australians could see “an entertainment consisting of the exhibition of a number of dioramic and dissolving views, lately arrived from London”, along with the performance of some “lightning calculations” by a Mr H. Miller who was able to calculate at a glance the number of matches thrown on a table.[14] While phrenologists such as W. Stark and Nicholas Caire combined magic lantern exhibitions of local views with their phrenological readings of the bumps on the heads of their audience. Nicholas Caire would also, as part of the show, administer electric shocks from a galvanic battery to members of the audience who desired it.[15]
Volatile audience behaviours may have been encouraged by the literal volatility of the apparatus itself. For instance in 1882 a gasbag exploded in the Baptist Church Parramatta, blowing out all the windows and setting fire to the organ.[16] And in 1909 exploding lantern set the Casterton Christ Church Hall on fire.[17]
Anxieties were not only over the behaviours of the audience, but the direct effect the magic lantern might have on impressionable minds. The lantern was recognised as particularly appealing to juveniles. In early 1847 a newspaper, commenting on a magic lantern show attended by 390 people, noticed that: “judging from the uproarious laughter and applause of the younger audience, [the dissolving views and phantasmagoria] were exactly adapted to the taste of the juveniles. The house was crowded, and many fashionables attended”.[18] However the lantern’s distant origins and phantasmagoric associations with the occult clung to it as it migrated into mainstream entertainment. For instance later that year another newspaperworried over the same show:
“The exhibition was sort of mélange, consisting of optical illusions, phantasmagoria, fun, and harlequinade. The dissolving views were numerous and diversified, but contained too few representations of local objects. Some of the personal figures bordered upon indelicacy; so much so, as, in our opinion, to deter parents from treating their children to an otherwise harmless amusement; and it struck us that the dance of death savoured too much of profanity, and dangerous disregard […] a prudential change in their exhibition, with an improvement in the mechanical arrangement, would make it worthy of general patronage.”[19]
Other newspapers had more mundane advice to give. In 1852 Alfred Cane put on a dissolving view exhibition at Sydney’s Royal Hotel. After visiting the show, one journalist helpfully offered “two or three suggestions”. Firstly, that “the issue of tickets should be more proportionate to the accommodation”, because many who brought tickets, “far from being able to get seats found it impossible to procure even a standing place from whence a good and clear sight could be obtained of each view”. Secondly, that some steps be taken to repress the “unruly propensities” of the “fast-boys” who “persist in standing up so as to hinder the view of those sitting behind, and indulge in other freaks equally amusing to themselves but unpleasant to others”. Thirdly, that the lanterns be brighter and sharper, because the views were “scarcely distinct as to their finer lines when seen from any distance”. And lastly, “that the music should be so arranged that each air may bear some analogy to the view actually before the audience”. This reviewer wasn’t all that impressed with the quality of the slides either. While admitting that, as a whole, the views were “truly beautiful”, he complained that:
“[…] the artist has indulged somewhat too freely in tints of green and deep blue, and that […] there is far little light and brilliancy in the skies. In most of the scenes the light appeared rather to flow from the earth than from the Heavens”.[20]
Adelaide had a solution to Cane’s problem with “fast-boys”. In 1854 nearly a thousand people attended the Mechanics Institute for “Mr Knight’s beautiful and picturesque views”:
“Considerable annoyance has previously been caused by the pranks of some mischievous schoolboys; last night two constables with dark lanterns were placed at the doors, and the boys were removed to the lower end of the room, where they were perfectly visible the whole evening; they were also under proper guardianship.”[21]
Fear
If juveniles had trouble containing themselves, adults also felt the new and peculiar power of the apparatus. Sometimes the lantern made adults almost feel afraid, but it was a fear suspended within the terms laid down by the apparatus, like the fear we experience in an amusement park ride today. In 1848, when J W Newland projected live weevils through an oxy-hydrogen microscope, their: “extraordinary size and quick and ferocious movements almost gave rise to a feeling of fear in the mind.”[22] In 1859 the landlord Smith O’Brien gave an annual entertainment for his tenants. However, “Some of the magic lantern ‘apparitions’ almost terrified many of the rustic spectators, as most of them had never before witnessed a like performance.”[23]
Tears
Not only fears, but also tears, could be provoked by the lantern. In 1853, at St Mary’s Seminary, “[t[he enthusiastic bursts of applause with which the views of the venerable ruins of our Fatherland were received proved how deeply rooted she is in the affections of her children”.[24] When the English baritone G. H. Snazelle presented Tennyson’s poem Enoch Arden at the Adelaide Town Hall in1891 he brought tears to they eyes of many in the audience.[25] And, during the 1880s, the entertainment The Old Home: Or England Past and Present, and similar entertainments which mixed views of England with portraits of the Queen, were given in Adelaide, and were concluded with the tearful singing of God Save the Queen.[26]
Reverie
These examples indicate the consternation, both positive and negative, caused by the apparatus of the lantern. However that consternation eventually transformed itself into either imaginative reverie or optical wonder. Two developments effected this transformation: firstly, audiences disciplined themselves with self-control; secondly, the images on the screen were disciplined with music and commentary.
The issues lanternists encountered with controlling audience behavior, while at the same time controlling their complex apparatus, certainly weren’t unique to Australia, they were encountered in Europe, the US and the UK as well. But at the edge of the British Empire a heightened awareness of time and geography ran through the Australian experience, not only of the time it took for new inventions to reach them in the form of the new entertainments that they could patronise, but also the various personal and biographical distances those experiential novelties measured. This was not only a distance from metropolis to province, but from one end of the world to another, and from a nostalgically remembered past to a frontier present.
Some magic lantern shows directly conjured this sense of distance as audience experience. Although, for one captious writer, the over-sale of tickets, the antics of “fast-boys”, the dim projections, the random music, and the poorly painted slides had marred Alfred Cane’s exhibition, for another writer Cane’s “dissolving views recently imported from England” were hugely enjoyable because he could relate to them personally, since he too had come to Australia on a long sea voyage. Despite his present geographical distance from home he could still weave the lantern images into his own feelings of British loyalty. But as a colonist he also took exception to being fobbed off with views that reinforced his sense of distance from the motherland, rather than shrinking that distance. His experience therefore became a kind of emotional push and pull:
“‘A ship in a calm’ was a particularly truthful representation of that most tedious, most trying, most wretched predicament. Gazing at the view, one might almost fancy one saw the lazy sharks crawling about in the blue water, […] Then suddenly the scene changed, the ship is caught in a storm, and with double-reefed foresail only set, struggles vainly against the furious surge, which too fatally drives her onto the inexorable rock. These two representations of the chances of the ocean were followed by “the ship on fire”, and “the raft”, and elicited several rounds of applause, especially from the juvenile portion of the audience, who, with true British feeling, seemed to delight in the danger, although “twas but in show. […] A very interesting picture of Balmoral Castle, her Majesty”s residence in the Scottish highland, was followed by ‘Windsor Castle’. Both these views were good; the former having a peculiar interest from the associations connected with the mountain glens where the most popular and most worthy of England”s sovereigns loves to breathe the free air for a season, and take rest from the cares of state. […] a variety of other very good views passed before our eye in rapid succession; among which we must not forget to mention a scene representing “Summer”, which was dissolved into “Winter”, (same subject) and that again into a snowstorm, which, whatever might be its merit, appeared to the Australian spectator somewhat outré. A variety of chromatropes ensued, the exhibition concluding with very so-so portraits of Her Majesty and Prince Albert, evidently painted shortly after the year one. Considering the immense number of excellent recent representations of the Royal Pair which exist, we really think something better than a cold delineation of ‘Victoria and Albert in their honeymoon days,’ in ‘their hey-day of youth,”‘might have been presented to Her Majesty”s loyal lieges of Australia.”[27]
In 1855 the journalist James Smith developed this sense of transport in an exhibition he grandly titled the Cosmopoligraphicon, which was very unusual for sustaining a six-week season in Melbourne. Smith’s hand-painted slides of European travel scenes were rear-projected, so the apparatus itself wasn’t part of the spectacle, and the sequence of slides was geographically ordered, smoothly narrated, and expertly propelled by music from a harmonium (which he called a megaphonicon). The audience settled down for a sustained period of attention during which they cultivated their homesickness.
Seven years earlier, at Sydney’s Royal Victoria Theatre, J W Newland had shown various views of European cathedrals and other sites, as had Alfred Cane at Sydney’s Royal Hotel four years later. But in Melbourne Smith organised his dissolving views into a grand tour:
“What need of travel, when the results of travel are brought to your own door? Why endure the dust, heat, fatigue, vexations and extortions, the short sleep and the long bills of foreign inns, the garrulous twaddle of the ciceroni, and “all the thousand ills which travellers are heir to,” when you can sit in a cosy seat, in a comfortable room, see all the best “bits” of continental scenery produced before your eyes.”[28]
His first view was the church of St. Hilders, Paris, shown empty. Then the dissolving apparatus and the megaphonicon began to work their magic:
” … a general air of repose diffused throughout the whole edifice; a shadow and a dimness passes over it, the pealing organ is heard reverberating through the long-drawn aisles, which are now seen to be alive with people – the priests in their episcopal robes, and the congregation paying their reverence to the host.”[29]
His performances re-connected his audience to Europe through such fantasised content, but they also conjured, at least to newspaper reviewers, effulgent personal reveries of cultivated homesickness:
“Some of [the views] called up pleasurable recollections of the past, and revived associations that memory has made very dear,… How humanizing – how soul-purifying, and how it wakes from torpor our better nature, and makes us divest ourselves of the selfish cynicism with which we are prone to enwrap ourselves. Who, we ask, could see that old village church, with its winter dress, and not think of the bright calm December Sunday morning that he has walked up the pathway to the portal with some dear form that now lies cold beneath its walls? The hymn that seems to peal from the open latticed windows is the one in which he has so often joined, and, anon, as night steals over the coldly quiet scene, and the light streams from the diamond panes, he thinks himself in the old pew in the corner and forgets that sixteen thousand miles of ocean are rolling between him and that beloved spot he never may see again?”[30]
Distance
But not only did Smith’s audience reconnect with home through the content of his projections, they were also able to self-consciously compare the experience they were having, in Melbourne in 1855, with the experience that may be being had by others, at the same time, back in Britain; or the experience they remembered having before they had left Britain to emigrate to Australia. Smith himself had previous experience as a writer, editor and public lecturer in Britain before he emigrated, and the Melbourne Cosmopoligraphicon may have featured slides painted by the English miniature painter Walter Francis Tiffin because, as opposed to Alfred Cane’s slides with their dark skies, the high quality of Smith’s slides was immediately noted:
“The excellence of their workmanship is most exquisite, both as to composition, effect and colouring; and they are, it may safely be asserted, of a character infinitely superior to anything that has been exhibited on this side of the equator.”[31]
Colonial reviewers assessed their experience of the magic lantern in a global context. The Cosmopoligraphicon was, to use a phrase which was to become overused in twentieth century Australian culture, ‘world class’:
“Such of us as have lately dwelt in the modern Babylon have most pleasant reminiscences in connection with these sources of recreation, and we feel a glow of unfeigned pleasure in the opportunity that is now presented of renewing these yet vivid impressions of enjoyment, and in comprehending new joys of a like nature.”[32]
“[For] those of us who retain a vivid recollection of the wonders of the London Polytechnic, this exhibition will not in any way suffer by comparison. […] to those who have not had an opportunity of observing the immense improvement which has been effected in this branch of art during the last few years, these pictures will appear truly astonishing.”[33]
“The Cosmopoligraphicon, as a place of entertainment, is a most valuable addition to our places of amusement. There is nothing in the attractions it offers that the most refined taste can object to, but on the contrary, much that will help to compensate our fellow-colonists for the elegant places of public entertainment to which they relinquished their opportunities of access when they quitted Europe.”[34]
Smug and pompous reassurances such as these undergirded the internal emotional transport of the exhibition with an imagined network of global citizens, securely gridded together across both imperial geography and imperial history.
By the 1860s the lantern was regularly taking audiences on intercontinental journeys. Lantern shows bridged the geographical distance between Australia and the mother country in imaginatively collapsing space, but they also united the colony and the mother country in their joint technological progress through historical time. After experiencing “the pair of magnificent apparatus [which] astonished and charmed a town hall full of people” on a night in 1868, a Melbourne writer mused on how far the magic lantern had come, both through the temporal space of technical progress and the geographical space of the Empire, since the “galantee showmen” of his British youth, when:
“the exhibition, although thought so highly of then, was in truth but a very simple and unpretending affair, consisting only of a white sheet pinned against the wall, on which were revealed in dim and misty outline a few rude subjects, generally of the coarsely comic order”, but now, after the advances represented by the Polytechnic, “the lantern was able to illustrate the most striking features presented to the voyager on the long route overland from Southampton to Calcutta. Most of these views are admirably painted, and have besides the merit of being exact portraitures of the places they represent. We may specially instance the views of Cintra, Malta, Boulac, the dead camel in the desert, Joseph”s well, Cairo, Mocha, and Pondicherry.”[35]
Conclusion
The lantern pacified and shaped Australian audiences, as it did audiences everywhere. It trained them to politely sit together, shoulder to shoulder in the dark. Their collective reward was to be taken on virtual voyages back to the worlds they had left behind. After the show they could reflect on their experience, and compare it to the experience they imagined others were having across the globe. Australian audiences were pioneers in more ways than one, they were at the outer edge of empire, and they were at the outer edge of a globalised, technologised experience.
Illustrations
‘The Tri-Unial lantern illuminated with the Oxy-Hydrogen Light, in the Hall of the Balmain School of Arts.’ Catalogue of Optical Lanterns and Transparent Views, with the newest forms of Bi-unial and Tri-unial Dissolving View Apparatus, by William MacDonnell, Sydney, 1882
Joseph Fowles, ‘Interior of the Royal Victoria Theatre, Sydney’, Sydney in 1848 Illustrated with copperplate engravings of the principal streets, public building, churches, chapels etc, from drawing by Joseph Fowles, J Fowles, Sydney, 1848
S T Gill, ‘Dress Circle boxes Queens Theatre, Lucky Diggers in Melbourne, 1853’, watercolour, 1880. State Library of Victoria.
‘Limelight successes in the far north. Captain Perry Takes the Cake and Shuts Up a Crowd of Theatricals.’, The War Cry, Melbourne, 14 December 1895, p6.
Martyn Jolly
[1] For a discussion of the magic lantern in Australia in the early twentieth century see: Martyn Jolly, “Soldiers of the Cross: Time, Narrative and Affect”,Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 11, no. 4, (2013): 293-311. For an overview of the magic lantern in Australia see: Elizabeth Hartrick, The Magic Lantern in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publications, 2017).
[2]Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, (12 September 1835): 3.
[3]Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, (15 April 1846): 2.
[4]South Australian Register, (19 January 1848): 3.
[5]Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, (6 August1848): 2
[8]Sydney Morning Herald, (14 September 1844): 4, (12 October 1844): 1.
[9] Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australia Theatre 1788-1914, (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1985), 33-34. Philip Parsons and Victoria Chance (ed.) Companion to the Theatre in Australian, (Sydney, Currency Press, 1995) pp65-66.
[11]The South Australian Register, (26 October 1864): 2.
[12]Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Saturday, (25 December 1830): 2.
[13] The research into this rich field of colonial modernity has only just begun, see: Mimi Colligan, Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth Century Australia and New Zealand, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). Anita Calloway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth Century Australia, (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000). Elizabeth Hartrick, The Magic Lantern in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publications, 2017).
[14]South Australian Register, (16 November 1865): 2, (26 December 1865): 3.
[15]South Australian Register, (31 August 1861): 3, (14 September 1866): 3.
[16]Morning Bulletin, (Rockhampton) (21 April 1882): p2.
This article was published in The Magic Lantern Journal, Number 25, December 2020, pp4-7 and was based on a paper read at the conference ‘Camera Education: Photographic Histories of Visual Literacy, Schooling, and the Imagination’, at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, June 2020.
Box for Our Colonies, c.1906. W. Butcher & Sons
Among the thousands of magic lantern slides offered up for sale on auction sites every year, there are always hundreds of chromolithographic transfer slides. They are often of hackneyed fairy tales or cliched subjects, so they are not highly sought after. But the fact that they are so readily available, one hundred and twenty years after they were first produced, indicates that they must have played an important role in the visual culture of the period.
One of the biggest producers of these slides was the British firm W. Butcher & Sons. In November 1900 the magic lantern trade journal announced that Butcher’s were:
at present making a special feature of lithographic slides pertaining to the Boer war. Of course slides made by this process cannot for a moment compare with photographic slides, but all things considered they are good of their kind, and with, say, an oil light, will look very well when projected on a screen. These sets of slides are known as the Junior Lecturers’ series, and are sold at a low price.[1]
Like many British magic lantern firms, Butcher’s was vertically integrated. It imported and manufactured apparatus — the ‘device’ — and also produced the imagery which their lanterns would project — the ‘content’. Within a few years they had given the series the brand name ‘Primus’.
The genius of the Primus series was that it brought together several different new industrial processes and emerging social developments into the one package. The slides themselves were an offshoot of the massive chromolithography industry which had been growing in popularity throughout the nineteenth century. The image was drawn in separate colours onto multiple stones, but instead of being printed in registration onto paper or cardboard for posters or packaging, the layers of pigment were printed onto a transparent decal, and then transferred to a square of glass.[2] The decorated boxes in which the slides were packaged made use of developments in cardboard manufacture and offset printing in coloured inks to look attractive in the retail space of a fancy goods store, and to be of a comparable price to the toys and games with which they were competing.
Through chromolithographic transfer a diverse range of different pictorial sources from different periods could be brought together into sequences of visually homogenous images. The format of eight numbered and boxed slides could be expanded progressively into different series and sets, comprising a large ‘library’ in many different genres. Eventually there were almost 200 different boxed sets.[3]
The series was aimed not at the assembly hall but at the home parlour. Most importantly, the Primus series was interactive, children could unfold the prepared readings included in the box and read them as the corresponding slide was passed though the lantern. Supported by this systematic structure a child with a ‘Primus’ lantern and slides could become a ‘Junior Lecturer’ for their friends and proud parents. As their catalogue claimed:
The colouring is of the finest quality and is very transparent, so that the slides give perfect results with the minimum amount of light, making them very suitable for home use where incandescent gas or electric light bulb is the only illuminant available. The sets are all carefully selected, and offer a varied choice of humorous, historical, educational, and religious subjects suitable for both young and old. The slides are prepared in many instances from specially taken photographs — others from drawings by famous artists. In every case the draughtsmanship and colouring leave nothing to be desired. […] [They] are accompanied by a well written and interesting lecture.[4]
The series was launched with five sets about the Boer War.[5] As many scholars have argued, the Boer War was a media watershed because public demand for up-to-the-minute war news catalysed well established media such as the telegraph, illustrated newspapers, music halls and the magic lantern with new technologies such as the cinematograph and half-tone newspaper reproductions. This produced an emergent media space where different kinds of immediate experience were developed for audiences who were reconstituting themselves in new ways.[6]
‘The Boer War of 1900’, advertisement in The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, November 1900, x.
A 1901 newspaper advertisement from the Victorian town of Castlemaine illustrates the changing structure of this crowded media space very well. It promises Australian made films of that year’s Federation celebrations as well as ‘All the Latest War Films’ from South Africa. But more encouragingly for the audience, it also promises ‘No dreary lecture, no magic lantern’.[7] In this context, while capitalising on the established educational prestige of the lantern lecture, the Junior Lecturer slides were also careful to place themselves not in the ‘dreary’ world of old, but in the new world of ‘the most interesting entertainment’.
‘Theatre Royal, Castlemaine’, Mount Alexander Mail, Victoria, 7 February 1901, 3.
To keep ‘up to the minute’ Butcher’s contracted with illustrated newspapers such as the The Graphic and The Sphere. The Sphere was a new illustrated newspaper that had begun in late 1900 as a response to the public’s appetite for images of the War. The monochrome paintings made by the special war artists it sent to South Africa were translated into square colour slides by artists for the Junior Lecturers’ Series.
‘The Latest from the Front. Colonel Thorneycroft’s Gallantry at Spion Kop’, The Sphere, 24 February 1900, 8.
Thorneycroft at Spion Kop, c1901, Chromolithographic transfer slide number 12, ‘The Siege of Ladysmith’, chapter 2, The Boer War of 1900, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
Such immediacy continued to be an aspect of the Junior Lecturers’ Series. For instance, in November 1901 both the death of Queen Victoria and the accession of King Edward was marked in a trade advertisement for ‘New Lithographic Slides’.[8]
‘New Lithographic Slides’, advertisement in The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, November 1901, v.
Fourteen years later, with the beginning of the First World War, the series once more began to produce up to the minute historical sets. Eventually numbering ten sets, twice as many as for the Boar War, The World War slides once again relied on illustrated newspapers such as The Sphere, but illustrated newspapers no longer used paintings by war artists, but photographs by press photographers.
‘The Crowd Outside Buckingham Palace Awaiting Britain’s Declaration of War’, The Sphere, August 1914.
The Crowd at Buckingham Palace, August. 4, 1914, 1915. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 4 from ‘A Call to Arms’, chapter 1, The World War, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
However, the set on which I now want to concentrate is not ‘historical’, but putatively educational. That set is ‘Australia’, the third ‘chapter’ in the series Our Colonies, which also included Canada, New Zealand, India and South Africa. Although produced around 1906, the Australian set seems to reside in some a-temporal time of empire — a time which was already disappearing because of Federation in 1901. To provide context for this anachronistic colonial imagery I want to look at three other British and American lantern slide firms who sent photographers to Australia during this period.
Firstly, in the late 1890s the Scottish firm George Washington Wilson hired an Aberdeen photographer Fred Hardie to travel by train and horse cart across Australia. He eventually produced five sets of photographic slide lectures with accompanying readings, one on each colony except Western Australia.[9]
Secondly, between 1909 and 1910 the artist and photographer Hugh Fisher travelled though Australia on an itinerary organised by the geographer Halford Mackinder. He was gathering lantern slides for the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee who were producing forty-two lectures to show the empire to British children. Of these, the committee eventually produced eight lectures on Australasia.[10]
Although part of the Colonial Office, The Visual Instruction Committee had to enter the highly competitive business of lantern slide retailing as a semi-commercial body in order to manufacture and distribute their slides. Their slides and textbooks were made and sold by Butcher’s main rival, the firm Newton & Co. The entire set of 489 hand coloured photographic slides from Australasian could be purchased from Newton’s for 39 pounds — a hefty nineteen pence a slide. For the ordinary consumer this price compared unfavourably to the boxes of eight Butcher’s Junior Lecturers’ slides which retailed from a mere two shillings a box, less than a sixth of the price.[11]
Thirdly, in 1907 and 1908 the American stereograph company Underwood & Underwood sent their photographer James Ricalton to New Zealand and Australia.[12] The stereographs he shot became the ‘Australia and New Zealand Tour’ within the Underwood & Underwood ‘Travel System’. This system boxed printed guides, maps, stereoscopes and sets of sequenced stereographs into faux book bindings.
Like the other firms, Underwood & Underwood also saw value in a systematic global library of stereoscopic and lantern views aimed at educating children. A few of the stereographs Ricalton shot became a small part of their massive visual library marketed as: The World Visualized for the Class Room: 1000 travel studies through the stereoscope and in lantern slides classified and cross reference for 25 different school subjects. Of the 1000 slides in the set, a grand total of nineteen, less than two percent, came from Australasia and Oceania[13].
However, when it comes to Our Colonies, unlike George Washington Wilson, the Colonial Office, or Underwood & Underwood, Butcher’s did not send a photographer to Australia. Nor did they contract with specific magazines such as The Sphere and The Graphic as they had for their historical sets. And nor, as they claimed in their publicity, were the slides prepared from ‘specially taken photographs’ or ‘drawings by famous artists’. Rather, the images seem to have been found, more or less at random, from within the vast pool of colonial imagery which had been produced and reproduced over the previous thirty years, and which was swirling around in the London printing trade.
The Illustrated London News was one useful source for the slides. For instance, an engraving from 1876 of the Prince of Wales killing a tiger did duty forty years later as the source both for a slide in the set ‘India’, and in the set ‘Wild Animals and How They Are Hunted’. And another Illustrated London News engraving, the entirely fanciful Kangaroo Hunting in Australia of 1876, also did duty thirty years later to represent Australian sport in Our Colonies.
Shooting a Tiger, c1905. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 5, ‘Wild Animals and How They Are Hunted’, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
Tiger Hunting with Elephant, c1905. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 32, ‘India’, chapter 4, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
‘The Prince of Wales Tiger-Shooting with Sir Jung Bahadoor: The Critical Moment. From a Sketch by One of Our Special Artists’, Illustrated London News, 25 March 1876.
‘Kangaroo-Hunting in Australia’, Illustrated London News, 9 September 1876.
A Kangaroo Hunt, c1906. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 23 from ‘Australia’, chapter 3, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
The opening image of the set, ‘Government House Melbourne’, comes from twenty years before 1906, from an 1886 book Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil.[14] This introductory slide demonstrates the extraordinary laziness of the series as a whole. The text reports that the colonies had recently federated to become a commonwealth, but rather than showing the grand exhibition buildings in which the first parliament had been held, the slide shows the unprepossessing residence of the Governor of Victoria, whose powers had recently been diminished by Federation.
Government House, Melbourne, c1906. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 17 from ‘Australia’, chapter 3, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
‘Government House, Melbourne’, by Skelton and W. Measum in Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, BY HOWARD WILLOUGHBY OF ‘THE MELBOURNE ARGUS’, WITH A MAP AND ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS FROM SKETCHES AND PHOTOGRAPHS, ENGRAVED BY E. WHYMPER AND OTHERS. LONDON: THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY. 1886.
Sheep Shearing, c1906. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 20 from ‘Australia’, chapter 3, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
‘Sheep Shearing’, by the French drawers and engravers Achille Sirouy and C.H. Barbant in Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, BY HOWARD WILLOUGHBY OF ‘THE MELBOURNE ARGUS’, WITH A MAP AND ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS FROM SKETCHES AND PHOTOGRAPHS, ENGRAVED BY E. WHYMPER AND OTHERS. LONDON: THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY. 1886.
The same 1886 book is the source for the background image in the final slide of the set, ‘Australian Aborigines’. The foreground image comes from even earlier, from the South Australian photographer Samuel Sweet’s 1880 album ‘Views in South Australia’. The eye-watering racism of the lecture children were meant to read out as they projected this slide contrasts with the slightly more enlightened lecture produced by the geographers at the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee for their equivalent slide. For Butcher’s: ‘The Australian “black fellow” is a savage of a decidedly low type: he has a steady objection to work, has no ideas on the subject of crops, but is marvellously acute as a tracker, and an adept at throwing that peculiar weapon — the boomerang’.[15] But the attitude of the Colonial Office was more nuanced: ‘The hostility of the native to the European colonists often arose from their interference with his natural food supply, or to their careless ignorance of his semi-religious ideas or customs, such as the tabu’.[16]
‘Native Encampment’, in Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, BY HOWARD WILLOUGHBY OF ‘THE MELBOURNE ARGUS’, WITH A MAP AND ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS FROM SKETCHES AND PHOTOGRAPHS, ENGRAVED BY E. WHYMPER AND OTHERS. LONDON: THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY. 1886. LONDON
Samuel Sweet, Aboriginal man, Point McLeay Mission, South Australia. c1880. Albumen silver photograph in the album Views in South Australia.
Australian Aborigines, c1906. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 24 from ‘Australia’, chapter 3, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
Although most imagery in Our Colonies was decades old, some images were contemporary, but they were taken by photographers who were themselves retailing a retrospective, nostalgic view of Australia. The source images for the slide In the Bush were the popular ‘bushmen’ photographs of Nicholas Caire. At this time Caire was himself also turning his stock of negatives into lantern slides and postcards for the expanding tourist trade. Caire’s customers, who were day tripping office workers catching the train from the bustling modern metropolis of Melbourne to nearby beauty spots, saw these photographs as nostalgic evocations of a disappearing past.
Nicholas Caire, Big tree camp, King Parrot Creek, Victoria, Australia, hand coloured albumen silver photograph, c1903. Collection: National Gallery of Victoria.
In the Bush, c1906. Chromolithographic transfer slide number 22 from ‘Australia’, chapter 3, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
In conclusion, the vertically integrated W. Butcher & Sons were extraordinarily successful in appropriating images from a residual nineteenth century print and photographic culture and an emerging twentieth century media culture for the cheap chromolithographic slides which they used to sell their magic lanterns into homes around the world. In this respect they, and other firms like Underwood & Underwood, are like later media conglomerates such as computer game corporations, where the development of the technology is integrated with the development of content.
‘Butcher & Sons, Farringdon Ave’, in The Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, Vol 1, 1905, 280.
But, even in the context of the period, the imagery of the Junior Lecturers’ Series was egregiously reactionary, ignorant, racist and, frankly, lazy. This was because their business model was not the middle-brow visual instruction of George Washington Wilson, nor the imperial geography of the Colonial Office, nor the virtual travel of Underwood & Underwood. Although they borrowed the rhetoric of ‘education’, their ultimate purpose was not, in fact, educational. It was to sell apparatus into homes, and ‘education’ was a useful way for children to activate the apparatus by enacting the new role of ‘Junior Lecturer’. For decades the watchwords for ‘reputable’ magic lanternists had always been ‘instruction AND entertainment’, but Butcher’s innovation was to turn those familiar watchwords into: ‘instruction AS entertainment’.
Martyn Jolly
[1] ‘Butcher’s Lithographic Slides’, The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, November 1900, 150.
[2] Hermann Hecht, ‘Decalcomania: some preliminary investigations into the history of transfer slides’, The New Magic Lantern Journal, vol. 1, no. 3 (March 1980), 3-6.
[3] See examples at the following websites: lucerna.exeter.ac.uk; luikerwaal.com; ehive.com (enter the search term Heritage in the Limelight)
[4] Quoted in Mike Smith, ‘Primus Slides’ in David Robinson, Stephen Herbert, Richard Crangle, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern (Rippon: The Magic Lantern Society, 2001), 240.
[6] Simon Popple, ‘”Fresh from the Front”: Performance, war news, and popular culture during the Boer war’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 8:4 (2010), 401-418. Denis Condon, ‘Receiving news from the seat of war: Dublin audiences respond to Boer war entertainments’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 9:2 (2011), 93-106.
[7] Advertisement, Mount Alexander Mail, Victoria, 7 February 1901, 3.
[8] Advertisement, The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, November 1901, v.
[9] Mark Butterworth, ‘Imaging a Continent: George Washington Wilson & Co.’s lantern slides of Australia’, Early Popular Visual Culture 7:3 (2009) 253-271.
[10] James Ryan, ‘Visualizing Imperial Geography: Halford Mackinder and the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee, 1902-11’, Ecumene 1:2 (1994), 157-176.
[11] A. J. Sargent, Visual Instruction Committee Handbook, Australasia, Eight Lectures Prepared for the Visual instruction committee of the Colonial Office (London: George Philip & Son, 1913).
[12]Advertiser (Adelaide), 1 January 1908, 8; Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 11 September 1907, 6.
[13] Frank McMurry, The World Visualized for the Class Room: 1000 travel studies through the stereoscope and in lantern slides classified and cross reference for 25 different school subjects (New York: Underwood &Underwood, 1915).
[14] Howard Willoughby, Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, By Howard Willoughby of ‘THE MELBOURNE ARGUS’, with a map and one hundred and seven sketches from sketches and photographs, Engraved by E. Whymper and others. (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1886)
[15] Printed reading to ‘Australia’, c1906, chapter 3, Our Colonies, Primus Junior Lecturers’ Series, W. Butcher & Sons.
Figure 21. Detail from Centennial Photographic Company, Philadelphia International Exhibition, ‘Queensland Court, Philadelphia ’76, Evening Before Opening’, 1876.
Abstract
Richard Daintree is well known as an Australian colonial photographer and geologist. I look at six international exhibitions he created from 1872 to 1879 that promoted the colony of Queensland by systematically integrating spectacular grids of painted photographs with displays of scientific samples. By analysing installation views, I argue that the popular success of these exhibitions came from the use of various new photographic technologies within the space of the exhibition, where the frontier directly interacted with the metropole. Further, I argue that Daintree’s personal passion for the science of geology profoundly structured the colonialist narrative of his exhibitions, which combined the latest apparatuses of scientific knowledge and imperial communication, revealing him to be an innovative and internationally significant creator of synthesised exhibitionary experiences.
It is little wonder the life of Hemi Pomara has attracted the attention of writers and film makers. Kidnapped in the early 1840s, passed from person to person, displayed in London and ultimately abandoned, it is a story of indigenous survival and resilience for our times.
Hemi has already been the basis for the character James Pōneke in New Zealand author Tina Makereti’s 2018 novel The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke. And last week, celebrated New Zealand director Taika Waititi announced his production company Piki Films is adapting the book for the big screen – one of three forthcoming projects about colonisation with “indigenous voices at the centre”.
Until now, though, we have only been able to see Hemi’s young face in an embellished watercolour portrait made by the impresario artist George French Angas, or in a stiff woodcut reproduced in the Illustrated London News.
Drawing on the research for our forthcoming book, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the global career of showman daguerreotypist J.W. Newland (Routledge, November 2020), we can now add the discovery of a previously unknown photograph of Hemi Pomara posing in London in 1846.
This remarkable daguerreotype shows a wistful young man, far from home, wearing the traditional korowai (cloak) of his chiefly rank. It was almost certainly made by Antoine Claudet, one of the most important figures in the history of early photography.
All the evidence now suggests the image is not only the oldest surviving photograph of Hemi, but also most probably the oldest surviving photographic portrait of any Māori person. Until now, a portrait of Caroline and Sarah Barrett taken around 1853 was thought to be the oldest such image.
For decades this unique image has sat unattributed in the National Library of Australia. It is now time to connect it with the other portraits of Hemi, his biography and the wider conversation about indigenous lives during the imperial age.
‘Hemi Pomare’, 1846, cased, colour applied, quarter-plate daguerreotype, likely the oldest surviving photographic image of a Māori. National Library of Australia
A boy abroad
Hemi Pomara led an extraordinary life. Born around 1830, he was the grandson of the chief Pomara from the remote Chatham Islands off the east coast of New Zealand. After his family was murdered during his childhood by an invading Māori group, Hemi was seized by a British trader who brought him to Sydney in the early 1840s and placed him in an English boarding school.
The British itinerant artist, George French Angas had travelled through New Zealand for three months in 1844, completing sketches and watercolours and plundering cultural artefacts. His next stop was Sydney where he encountered Hemi and took “guardianship” of him while giving illustrated lectures across New South Wales and South Australia.
Angas painted Hemi for the expanded version of this lecture series, Illustrations of the Natives and Scenery of Australia and New Zealand together with 300 portraits from life of the principal Chiefs, with their Families.
In this full-length depiction, the young man appears doe-eyed and cheerful. Hemi’s juvenile form is almost entirely shrouded in a white, elaborately trimmed korowai befitting his chiefly ancestry.
The collar of a white shirt, the cuffs of white pants and neat black shoes peak out from the otherwise enveloping garment. Hemi is portrayed as an idealised colonial subject, civilised yet innocent, regal yet complacent.
Angas travelled back to London in early 1846, taking with him his collection of artworks, plundered artefacts – and Hemi Pomara.
Hemi appeared at the British and Foreign Institution, followed by a private audience with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. From April 1846, he was put on display in his chiefly attire as a living tableau in front of Angas’s watercolours and alongside ethnographic material at the Egyptian Hall, London.
The Egyptian Hall “exhibition” was applauded by the London Spectator as the “most interesting” of the season, and Hemi’s portrait was engraved for the Illustrated London News. Here the slightly older-looking Hemi appears with darkly shaded skin and stands stiffly with a ceremonial staff, a large ornamental tiki around his neck and an upright, feathered headdress.
An idealised colonial subject: George French Angas, ‘Hemi, grandson of Pomara, Chief of the Chatham Islands’, 1844-1846, watercolour. Alexander Turnbull Library
A photographic pioneer
Hemi was also presented at a Royal Society meeting which, as The Times recorded on April 6, was attended by scores of people including Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and the pioneering London-based French daguerreotypist Antoine Claudet.
It was around this time Claudet probably made the quarter-plate daguerreotype, expertly tinted with colour, of Hemi Pomara in costume.
The daguerreotype was purchased in the 1960s by the pioneering Australian photo historian and advocate for the National Library of Australia’s photography collections, Eric Keast Burke. Although digitised, it has only been partially catalogued and has evaded attribution until now.
Unusually for photographic portraits of this period, Hemi is shown standing full-length, allowing him to model all the features of his korowai. He poses amidst the accoutrements of a metropolitan portrait studio. However, the horizontal line running across the middle of the portrait suggests the daguerreotype was taken against a panelled wall rather than a studio backdrop, possibly at the Royal Society meeting.
Hemi has grown since Angas’s watercolour but the trim at the hem of the korowai is recognisable as the same garment worn in the earlier painting. Its speckled underside also reveals it as the one in the Illustrated London News engraving.
Hemi wears a kuru pounamu (greenstone ear pendant) of considerable value and again indicative of his chiefly status. He holds a patu onewa (short-handled weapon) close to his body and a feathered headdress fans out from underneath his hair.
We closely examined the delicate image, the polished silver plate on which it was photographically formed, and the leatherette case in which it was placed. The daguerreotype has been expertly colour-tinted to accentuate the embroidered edge of the korowai, in the same deep crimson shade it was coloured in Angas’s watercolour.
The remainder of the korowai is subtly coloured with a tan tint. Hemi’s face and hands have a modest amount of skin tone colour applied. Very few practitioners outside Claudet’s studio would have tinted daguerreotypes to this level of realism during photography’s first decade.
Hallmarks stamped into the back of the plate show it was manufactured in England in the mid-1840s. The type of case and mat indicates it was unlikely to have been made by any other photographer in London at the time.
‘New Zealand Youth at Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly’, wood engraving, The Illustrated London News, 18 April 1846.
Survival and resilience
After his brief period as a London “celebrity” Hemi went to sea on the Caleb Angas. He was shipwrecked at Barbados, and on his return aboard the Eliza assaulted by the first mate, who was tried when the ship returned to London. Hemi was transferred into the “care” of Lieutenant Governor Edward John Eyre who chaperoned him back to New Zealand by early December 1846.
Hemi’s story is harder to trace through the historical record after his return to Auckland in early 1847. It’s possible he returned to London as an older married man with his wife and child, and sat for a later carte de visiteportrait. But the fact remains, by the age of eighteen he had already been the subject of a suite of colonial portraits made across media and continents.
With the recent urgent debates about how we remember our colonial past, and moves to reclaim indigenous histories, stories such as Hemi Pomara’s are enormously important. They make it clear that even at the height of colonial fetishisation, survival and cultural expression were possible and are still powerfully decipherable today.
For biographers, lives such as Hemi’s can only be excavated by deep and wide-ranging archival research. But much of Hemi’s story still evades official colonial records. As Taika Waititi’s film project suggests, the next layer of interpretation must be driven by indigenous voices.
The authors would like to acknowledge the late Roger Blackley (Victoria University, Wellington), Chanel Clarke (Curator of the Maori collections, Auckland War Memorial Museum), Nat Williams (former Treasures Curator, National Library of Australia), Dr Philip Jones (Senior Curator, South Australian Museum) and Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Professorial chair of History of Art, University of Oxford) for their invaluable help with their research.
Elisa deCourcy, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow 2020-2023, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australian National University and Martyn Jolly, Honorary Associate Professor, School of Art and Design, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University
Taking a photograph from the 1906 Australian tour of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World as my starting point, I explore the special relationship colonial audiences had with magic lantern shows and related entertainments. I examine the sense of ‘transport’ that audiences felt at collectively witnessing images that had been ‘transmitted’ to them from Britain. I argue that their reactions were more complex than those felt in the metropole, and in many ways anticipate our own contemporary experience of globalized media.
Among the various new modes for making photographs that were explored by Australian photographers in the first decades of the twentieth century, three in particular – Pictorialist images, authentic records, and personal snapshots – had far-reaching implications for the institutions of Australian photography. Pictorialist photographs are now the foundation of many Australian art museum collections; photographic records produced at the time have become iconic in Australian public history, forming the backbone of many social history collections; and personal snapshots from the period are increasingly reproduced in social histories. Historians of Australian photography have discussed and analysed each of these modes1, but they have tended to treat them separately, or even in opposition to each other, and to concentrate on the distinct careers of individual photographers. This article looks at this crucial period, and these key photographic modes, from the point of view of the worldwide networks and systems for the distribution, exhibition, collection, and indexing of photographs. We show how these modes, far from being distinct, overlapped one another as each grappled with the same issues of nation, history, and memory, and as each articulated their nationalistic concerns through international networks and idioms.
Working through Anne Zahalka’s excellent website Zahalkaworld I came across this old essay of mine, so I OCRed it.
Flocking Australians
If you wanted to write the story of recent Australian photography you could say that, about ten years ago, some photographers of Anne Zahalka’s generation found themselves engaged in a kind of oedipal drama with the grand traditions of photography.
They began to doubt whether photography’s contiguity with the real automatically guaranteed the privileged access to social, historical and psychological truth which it claimed for itself. They also doubted whether the camera’s internalisation of Renaissance perspective automatically created a universal language innocent of contextual inflection.
Against photography’s core documentary and transcendental traditions they counterposed an array of critical strategies: a deliberate play with its significatory codes; a seditious appropriation of its most persuasive and pervasive images; and a provocative flirtation with either the theatrical or the filmic mise-en-scene.
Photographic denotation now came chaperoned by irony. And the viewer’s simple delight in the photograph’s self-evident truth was displaced by a knowing complicity with the photographer’s intertextual virtuosity.
Very good. And all, by now, more than familiar. But perhaps, in the heat of their battle, these photographers surrendered what remains one of photography’s main functions – the recording of our social environment. In their strategic opposition to the assumptions that underpinned photography’s entrenched, but exhausted traditions —such as Documentary — they neglected the task of ‘The Social Record’. The two are not necessarily identical.
You don’t have to look far past the critical spotlight to see that the visual representation of our current historical formation is still in the thrall of those who are themselves enthralled by dead photographies. Not only does the Australiana book-mill continue to churn out their all too familiar images of ‘social history’, but even our galleries have an institutional stake in maintaining the continuity of their own art-historical investments.
Of course no theoretically aware photographer ever believed that their critiques of the dominant traditions would revolutionise the mainstream of visual representation, or even end up as anything other than yet another art-historical moment. But by re-addressing their obligations to The Social Record on their own terms, and re-using the visual tactics developed in their skirmishes with the problematics of picturing, a long overdue re-occupation of abandoned territory can begin. Photographic records of us, which are now no longer beholden to the monosemic truths of the documentary tradition can circulate in the media.
Take Bondi for instance. How can you photograph somewhere which is not so much a place, as a site for the contestation of nationhoods? Bondi is invested with so many different meanings by so many different people that it resembles one of those thick, gluey wads of rival dance-party posters which slowly slough off hoardings under the increasing weight of their own commitment to splintering cultural identity. Or perhaps it’s more like a bus shelter onto which so any messages have been sprayed that no one graffitist’s contribution is actually legible. How do you photograph Bondi without simply adding another layer to this furious accumulation? To document it – to collect its ‘characters’ and ‘sights’, and celebrate its freedom’ and ‘diversity’ – is simply to do what Bondi already demands, expects and requires: it is only to confirm it as the effect of prior representations, and therefore further aggrandize its mythological status. How, then, to record it without also succumbing to it?
Bondi, we are often told, is the place to which overseas visitors and Australians are equally attracted. They flock there in a kind of instinctual migration. But Bondi is no originary site, it is the birthplace of nothing and has been sanctified by no momentous events. Its significance as a place resides solely within the national rituals it is witness to every day. The flocking tourists are drawn to the various versions of Australiahood which are eternally enacted there. It is only when they arrive that they realise that they have contracted to be both spectator and spectacle, because the symbolic economy of Bondi runs on mutual voyeurism and exhibitionism.
If Bondi has no ‘essence’ other than the eternal flame of enactment, then maybe the time-honoured conventions of the stage are a way of recording it. With this in mind Anne Zahalka turned the amphitheatre at the back of Bondi Pavilion into a temporary stage cum studio. She strung up a backdrop onto which had been painted three broad bands of sand, sea and sky; she brought in some of the beach’s sand to spread over the concrete; she unrolled some Astro-turf; and she dragged in a few park benches and picnic tables. Bondi wasn’t so much recreated as imploded.
Under a mixture of sunlight and artificial fill-light Bondi’s cast of character-types hold themselves in timeless containment. Each pose typifies and distils the parts they play. Each tableau illustrates one aspect of Bondi’s cultural cavalcade. These portraits share their premise with the nineteenth century studio portrait — in which backdrops, clothing, furniture and pose were similarly deployed in order to firmly install the sitter in a pre-existent social niche. Their air, however, is quite different. Rather then the solemn density of the nineteenth century studio, Bondi’s players are portrayed in the transparent gelato colours of an imagined ‘perfert day at the beach’ – cool, charmed, and impossible.
But this imploded, distilled, typified Bondi no longer performs its usual function of invitation and promise. All the other photographs of Bondi we have seen, from postcards to sociological studies, say ‘where are you, why are you absent from this census of flocking Australians?’ Anne Zahalka’s formally complete images do not invite us to enter them. Only in these closed tableaus is our absence not included, because there has been no place left for us on the stage.
As The Beach Inspectors adopt their characteristic stance to gaze into the infinity of nature we certainly recognise Bondi, but we also realise that the inspectors are really only staring at the painted backdrop which hangs a mere four feet in front of their noses. We are therefore not invited to identify or anticipate, but rather to observe, compare and notice. We observe the firm plant of their feet, we compare their broad backs and sensible hats, and we notice how their walkie-talkies are worn in such a way as to draw our attention to a lifesaver’s best assets.
The Japanese honeymooners photographed being photographed in Tourists are, as always, cute as buttons. But now they are not simply our spectacle, and we are not theirs. Instead it is Bondi’s economic exchange of mutual spectacle which we see.
Although Anne Zahalka photographs the various cultural sub-groups that make up the ‘colourful’ population of Bondi, she is not interested in describing ethnicity as it is accommodated within the bureaucratic regime of Multiculturalism. Each of her characters, although typified, is not abstracted – each retains his or her particularity. In her photographs, as in Bondi itself, Asians hang with Asians and Anglos hang with Anglos. And judging by the inflated poses brandished by some members of those groups, Bondi’s sun has provided no benediction for broader social conflict.
She also addresses that aspect of Bondi with which it has been associated the longest — the nationalist surf-cult of health, strength and purity. The historical phallo-anglo-centrism of Australian beach culture is addressed in two pastiches which appropriate key icons from our collective beach memory. In the classical beach Arcady of Charles Meere’s 1940 painting Australian Beach Pattern the white nuclear family is presented as the paradigm of the Australian race. The Australian body is painted as though it was the finest product of Imperial engineering – almost as smooth and powerful as an aircraft engine. In Anne Zahalka’s elaborate restaging the physical individuality of mortal flesh is re-introduced, breaking both the metaphorical connection between the natural family and the national race, and the historical nexus between the colonial beach and the Imperial battlefield.
Similarly, the shock of red hair and pale skin of her The Sunbather #2 gently lightens the masculine weight of Max Dupain’s monument to Modernist bodily architecture — his Sunbaker 1937. But her images are not just the blank parody of Postmodernist pastiche. Within this context they serve to record a Bondi which is changing on both a material, and an ideological level.
Finally, acting as visual pauses within the exhibition, are photographs of ‘raw’ nature – the sun, surf and sky which were painted onto the backdrop. This is Nature’s Infinity – Bondi’s gift to the city of Sydney. But in this context the ambiguous squares of abstracted Nature lose all their pre-cultural significance. The ‘natural’ of Bondi is not a tabula rasa upon which we have written our culture. There never has been a clean bus shelter or an unpostered hoarding at Bondi. The Natural is something which is always already deployed within the culture of Bondi. For instance, the munificent bounty of the sun now becomes an insidious, cancerous threat just as it once caused madness and sunstroke. The cleansing briskness of the surf now becomes a toxic source of infection, just as it once threatened the pioneers with shipwrecks, sharks and drowning. Similarly, Anne Zahalka’s squares of nature only become a natural landscape within their specific cultural context.
If you wanted to establish the importance of this show you could say that, at last, it indicates the beginnings of a return by some of our photographers to what will always be one of photography’s primary tasks — the maintenance of The Social Record. Yet in recording Bondi today it continues to refuse an easy nostalgia for the truth of Bondi. The beach remains the stage it always was.
The paper I read and powerpoint I showed at the conference Imagineers in Circus and Science: Scientific Knowledge and Creative Imagination, ANU, 3-5 April, convened by Dr Anna-Sophie Jürgens
Introduction
The 1870s was a big decade for the colony of Victoria. The money flowing from the gold fields had led to rapid growth in its size and sophistication. By the early 1870s passengers could reach Melbourne from England in as little as two months, and Morse code messages could be relayed from London in just seven hours. Victorian colonists were feeling themselves more connected to the rest of the world than ever before. They too were part of the tension between traditional religion and the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century. They too craved novelty and modern experience. But their place in the world meant that they engaged with these ideas in ways that were distinctly their own. During the decade three events cast emerging ideas of ‘science’, ‘belief’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘technology’ into new configurations for the colonists of Victoria.
Spiritualism
Modern Spiritualism, the belief that human personality survived beyond death and that the dead could communicate with the living, was an integral part of the general foment of 1870s Victoria. It was part of the broader Free Thought movement, reconciling the terrifying divisions that seemed to be opening up between religion and science.
In the powerful experience of the séance the Spiritualist believer, suffering from what psychologists would now call apophenia, or cognitive confirmation bias, was gradually enmeshed into a seductive relationship with a ‘medium’, who used techniques of misdirection learnt from stage magic to convince them of what they wanted to believe — that their dead could return to them.
In 1870 William Terry opened a shop as a bookseller, Spiritualist medium, and magnetic healer. Customers could buy imported herbs for the ailments which Terry had clairvoyantly diagnosed, they could buy the latest copies of spiritualist journals and pamphlets published in Australia or imported from the US and the UK, and they could buy factual evidence of Spiritual truths in the form of carte de visite spirit photographs.
Spiritualists thought they were at the forefront of progress, leading the way for the rest of the world. They embraced rational scientific methods, which they thought were equivalent to the methods that were leading to the other great technological breakthroughs of the age. Terry claimed that:
spiritual intercourse can be proved as conclusively as telegraphic communication, postal delivery, or any other fact know to one section of the world’s inhabitants, and not to others.
In late 1873 visitors to Terry’s shop may have perused the latest copy of the London magazine The Spiritualist and read that the medium Florence Cook, a young girl of 17, had produced what was known as a ‘full body materialization’ of the spirit Katie King. Florence materialized the Spirit at a séance while supposedly entranced and tied to a chair in a curtained-off cabinet. On 7 May the spirit was photographed by the ignition of magnesium powder. The Spiritualist reproduced an engraving produced directly from one of the photographs. The magazine advised its readers:
The efforts of the experimentalists have been successful, and the large engraving […] is about a faithful a copy as wood-cutting can give […] In the photograph itself the features are more detailed and beautiful, and there is an expression of dignity and ethereality in the face, which is not fully represented in the engraving, which, however, has been executed as nearly as possible with scientific accuracy, by an artist of great professional skill.
There was at least one enthusiastic Melbourne reader of this amazing account. He was William Denovan, a successful gold miner, parliamentarian and chairman of a séance circle in Bendigo called The Energetic Circle. There were many séances held in the goldfields during this period. They successfully produced Spiritualistic phenomena because, it was reasoned, the deposits of quartz running underground along the veins of gold were acting as crystal concentrators for spiritual forces.
As the Energetic Circle held hands, prayed, and sung hymns, they slowly began to experience more and more manifestations of spirit communication. After a period, the male medium began to levitate, they smelled delicious perfume, felt cool breezes, and spirit lights appeared. Then the sitters began to brushed by spirit lips and spirit hands, then they began to see disembodied arms. Then, finally, in June 1874, the Bendigo female medium fully materialized the beautiful spirit Katie King, almost a year after she had been photographed in London. She stood in the middle of the séance room illuminated only by the dying embers of the fire, and clothed head to foot in ‘robes of white muslin or gauze’. Denovan marveled how:
… those who saw the face of Katie King on Sunday evening state that she wore a turban on her head just as she appears in the photograph of her published in the London Spiritualist of the 15th of May 1873. […] The face appeared to some of swarthy colour, to others fair, with fair hair, and parted down the middle; but to me it appeared copper coloured, with drapery round it and over the head similar to the photograph of Mrs MacDougal Gregory, of London, and her spirit sister. […] as [Katie] made herself visible to all present — distinctly and unmistakably visible — all became deeply impressed, and several sobbed audibly. None who were present will ever forget what they saw on this occasion, and the feeling of solemnity and awe to which the sight gave rise, and all inwardly offered up their thanks to Almighty God for his goodness in thus having by his great natural laws vouchsafed to them by positive demonstration, the reality of another life. It was a solemn yet joyous moment never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it. And it is just the beginning.
But Denovan and his circle hadn’t only witnessed a modern miracle, they had witnessed it in Bendigo. The Spirit of Katie had instantaneously travelled to where the mediumistic power was concentrated. Denovan declared:
I have now the satisfaction of informing you that we have no need to go to England or America to see the spirits in mortal from, as they are here in our midst.
To you or I, the fact that the materializations in Bendigo wore the same style of drapery as seen in the photographs and magazines sold in Terry’s shop may be evidence that the huckster mediums were simply copying the photographs. But to the Spiritualist believers it was corroborative. It was powerful proof that it was the actual Katie King they were seeing, who was able to travel from a séance in London to a séance in Bendigo even faster than an electric telegraph message.
While these extraordinary Bendigo visions were being reported, a new spirit photograph was also being discussed in Melbourne. The Melbourne Spiritualist Dr Walter Lindesay Richardson had attended a photographic séance in London. He wrote back to Victoria:
… a draped figure projected itself beside my likeness. I send you specimens. During the process [the photographer] afforded me every facility for scrutiny, allowing me to clean the glasses myself, to follow them through several stages, and to see them developed.
Terry tried to wrap his head around exactly what he was seeing:
… a Gothic chair is standing before the sitter with its back in close proximity to his knees; a female figure which is kneeling in front of him seems to permeate the chair, portions of the chair being visible through the form, as though the matter of the chair offered no obstruction to the more refined material of the Spirit form
So, this form must be a transition stage to full materialization.
As far as we understand it, the Materialized Spirit form which appears on these occasions, is a condensation of sublimated matter, brought about by a scientific process known to Spirits who have studied Chemistry. The power used is Electricity, brought to bear through the magnetic emanations of the Medium.
Professor Pepper’s Scientific Festivals
One of the major figures of the London entertainment scene was Professor Henry Pepper who had become synonymous with the popular Royal Polytechnic Institution. In the 1850s and 60s Pepper developed a spectacular lecturing style incorporating many new ‘scientific’ entertainments that demonstrated the principals of physics, chemistry and optics, while also feeding the audience’s appetite for illusion, wonder, and even the occult.
At the Polytechnic he patented an illusion that directly fed into the public’s appetite for gothic and spiritualist effects. The ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion required the use of a new technology developed for shop windows, plate glass, and a magic lantern. The angled glass reflected a concealed figure brightly lit against a black background, while the audience could still see the scene behind the glass. As the original inventor of the illusion said:
Mesmerism throughout all its harlequinade, down to its present disguise under spiritualism or spirit rapping … has never had nerve enough or nous enough to produce such thorough full-length ghosts as are now every day to be seen.
Pepper’s Ghost was both a theatrical illusion and a scientific curiosity at the same time. In one of the first illustrations of the illusion Professor Pepper himself stands off to one side, observing the materialization with cool detachment. Pepper was therefore caught in a paradox. He needed to protect the secret of his illusions to maintain audience interest, but to also be a ‘scientific’ professor he needed, at some point, to explain the scientific principles behind the illusion.
Pepper eventually left the Polytechnic, but increasingly found it hard to get audiences. There was even criticism of what had come to be seen as his ‘ponderous and didactic’ delivery style. He developed another mirror illusion, the Metempsychosis. But even this wasn’t enough to revive Pepper’s flagging British career so, in 1879, he decided to lecture in Australia.
He arrived with ‘a large amount of scientific exhibition apparatus and full staff of professional assistants’. ‘Pepper’s Scientific Festival’, billed as an ‘ILLUSORY ENTERTAINMENT’ featured all of his Polytechnic hits, with the added excitement of an electric light. Like the many other touring celebrities, Pepper’s fame preceded him. Shortly after his arrival, Melbourne’s St Georges Hall was crammed with people ‘evidently anxious to hear the wonders of Nature unfolded and explained by the lecturer, who for more than a quarter of a century has amused and at the same time instructed thousands in London.’ Unlike in London, where his oratorical style had seemed ponderous and didactic, in Melbourne, ‘[h]is luminous and genial mode of elucidating the various phenomena which he exhibited rendered the lecture a genuine treat.’
Judging by newspaper reviews, for his new audiences Pepper was able to rebalance the tension between ‘illusion to entertain’ and ‘illusion to demonstrate scientific truths’. On the one hand ‘one might be tempted to believe that he possessed supernatural powers’. On the other hand ‘[he] is a man of science [who recognises] that the time has passed when the secrets of nature were explained only in the cloister’.
Some even recognized that Pepper’s doubling of the idea of ‘the marvelous’ could be a weapon against the errors of Spiritualism. The journalist Marcus Clarke wrote:
[A]mid the nonsense being talked and written on all sides concerning “Spiritualism” and miraculous intervention, it might be a good thing if the Government would suffer the children it educates to see some of the marvels which can be produced by human ingenuity. A course of Pepper would give a tone to the youthful stomach, and brace it to the withstanding of tales of dancing tables and hovering apparitions of dead children.
Conversazioni
Pepper’s arrival was greeted with well-orchestrated fanfare. However, the press noted:
Not that we have no scientific men amongst us; on the contrary, they are as plentiful as in other civilized lands; but our scientists have neither the time nor the opportunity of coming before the public as Professor Pepper does in the cause of natural philosophy.
This comment must have come as an insult to the Royal Society of Victoria, which had in fact been promoting science to the public since the early 1870s. They had even held a ‘conversazione’ a year before Pepper arrived. Conversazioni were mixtures of entertainment and education, where gentlemen and ladies could promenade, have hands-on interactions with new technologies, listen to lectures, and talk to individual ‘proficients’ who were drawn from science, academia, government and commerce.
At each conversazione the President of the Royal Society summed up the previous year’s progress in colonial science. In 1878 he commented on the pace of technological change:
In my last address I referred […] to the then recent invention of the telephone. Since then this wonderful little instrument has been greatly improved, and is now in actual use in Melbourne, not only as a scientific toy, but as a means of communication. We had no sooner become familiar with the telephone than we were astounded by accounts of a still more wonderful apparatus, the ‘phonograph’, […] Still later we heard of the ‘microphone’ […] although their practical applications are as yet limited, there can be but little doubt that they will eventually become of great value […].
Two years later he noted approvingly that the sophistication of the colonists was keeping pace with this heady technological change:
… the subject of science attracts in this community the same keen attention, and is pursued with the same ardour, given to it in all intelligent communities. We are at least able to show that the intellect of the colony perceives the importance of scientific investigation; that the Government and the public are liberal in its support …
But people went to conversazioni to see inventions. In 1878 a phonograph played Rule Britannia and He’s a Jolly Good Fellow which ‘sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a cracked voice.’
The phoneidoscope reproduced the vibrations of words sung into its mouthpiece as an ‘an endless variety of exquisite designs, resembling those observed in the ordinary kaleidoscope’, on a film of soap water and glycerine.
The microphone, powered by a galvanic battery, amplified the sounds of a telephone so that a ‘[t]he ticking of a watch could be heard at the other end of the room.’ Ammonia gas was liquefied under pressure, and microscopes showed rock sections, algae and invertebrates from across the colony, while the siren produced ‘melancholy and discordant’ sounds throughout the night.
In his address the President of the Society had speculated about the future offered by these inventions. But, once they had tried them themselves, the ordinary visitor to the conversazione found they could speculate about the future just as well as he could. The ‘remarkable nature’ of the displays ‘was productive of much wonderment’, but they also ‘gave rise to varied speculation as to their ultimate development’.
1000 people, including many ladies, attended the 1879 conversazione. An Edison phonograph was displayed, and a working printing press. But the magic lantern was the central apparatus. Amongst other things, the magic lantern showed some striking experiments with vortex rings and astronomical views.
Many of the ladies and gentlemen caught in the newspaper illustrations of 1880 look remarkably contemporary, like customers at an Apple Store Genius Bar, as they confidently manipulate the various devices on offer. Technology had gone from ‘philosophical toy’ to ‘personal device’
Conclusion
The people in these three case studies thought they had very little in common with each other. Although he flirted with the occult, Professor Pepper ultimately regarded the Spiritualists as gullible dupes. He and his audience knew that his illusions were just that — illusions — and that if he chose to, he could scientifically explain how they were created. If you had asked them, the members of the Royal Society would have most probably looked down on Pepper’s broadly popular audience. To these middle class consumers of knowledge, science didn’t need Professor Pepper’s carnival effects. To them the effects of science were being felt in the actual utilitarianness of its inventions, which were usefully recording invisible phenomena such as sound or performing real actions at a distance.
At face value these three case studies could therefore be seen to be following a familiar developmental trajectory: from the observer being tricked by hucksters into believing something that isn’t true, and in any case is no longer necessary; to observers willing ‘suspending disbelief’ for the duration of a scientific entertainment, and experiencing an occult illusion in order to have it deconstructed into its scientifically knowable components; to, finally, observers becoming individual operators of new technologies, and rehearsing their forthcoming role as consumers of technological devices as future customers of Bell Telephones, IBM, and Apple.
It is tempting to see a millennium’s worth of progress refracted into the decade. But although we can easily arrange these case studies into a single developmental line, we can also arrange them into at least two different constellations that are perhaps more illuminating.
The first constellation is phenomenological. Although there are epistemological differences between the three case studies, there are also deep phenomenological similarities. There is an identical sensation of science that persists through the arc of progress. Through seeing Spirits with their own eyes, and then correlating their vision with the photographic proofs sent from England, the Spiritualists knew the truth of Spirit return. Through having their eyes willingly ‘tricked’ by Pepper’s machinery and then being shown how it ‘really’ worked, attendees at Pepper’s shows felt they knew a little bit more about the nature of light and reflection. By placing their mouth to the mouthpiece, or their ear to the earpiece, or their eye to the eyepiece, and then seeing, hearing or feeling the invisible, conversazioni participants felt the future enter their own bodies.
In each case a single observer is instantiated as the ground for belief and understanding. To reach forward into a future where they would routinely converse with the dead, as the Spiritualists expected; or routinely call each other up on the telephone, as visitors to the conversazioni expected, each visitor was asked to stand on no other evidential ground than themselves. But in each case, the human test subject of perception is only instantiated through, and within, the apparatus.
The second constellation is geographical. It interests me that all of the experiences from my three case studies are in some sense ‘airy’. They happen up in the air in some virtual space in front of the observer, which is sort of still ‘in Victoria in the 1870s’, but sort of ‘all over the world’ as well. And all of my examples — spirit materializations, wonderful illusions straight from London, telephones, microphones and phonographs — collapse time and space. Although they were seven hours ‘behind’ via the telegraph, or two months ‘behind’ by ship, in some sense these colonial audiences were ‘ahead’ of the rest of the world in this new experience of the globe. I think that the experiences of instantaneity, simultaneity, immediacy and proximity were more powerful for colonial audiences, who were part of the same currents of modernity as everyone else, but who joined hands in Bendigo, or bought a ticket to St Georges Hall or attended a conversazione, in Melbourne, at the outer edge of the modern world itself.
Kieran Browne, AI chromatrope video screengrab
Martyn Jolly 