Tag Archives: Magic Lantern Show

Wrecked in the Shoalhaven — a magic lantern performance

Shoalhaven Regional Gallery and Nowra School of Arts Annex

Saturday 12 December 2026

2pm and 6pm

Tickets and information

Join an incredible cast of musicians, performers and singers for a unique experience that once thrilled audiences over a century ago. We’ll gather to witness dramatic shipwrecks, hear tragic songs, see phantasmagoric apparitions, and experience beautiful colours whirling and pulsing above us in the dark.

It’s a magic lantern show!

‘Wrecked in the Shoalhaven’ will tell stories of the coast through an authentic brass and mahogany magic lantern from the Victorian era projecting actual magic lantern slides — detailed pictures painted by hand on glass, mechanically operated to produce special effects on the screen.

Contemporary musicians and singers will add to the magic as we experience the Walter Hood, driven on to a reef near Bendalong during a storm in 1870, or the Dandenong, sinking off Jervis Bay/Booderee  in 1876.

The dramatic images of Samuel Elyard, famously eccentric historical painter of a wild and tempestuous  Shoalhaven, will be seen like never before.

But that’s not all, there’s heartbreaking scenes of drunkenness and cruelty to be revealed and visions of damnation to be conjured.

And there may even be a man eating rats!

Phantasmagoria in Tathra


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

‘The Light of the World’

Magic lantern slide projection

At the conclusion of the Australian National University, School of Art and Design, Art History and Art Theory seminar, ‘Led By The Beam’, where Dr Keren Hammerschlag, Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney and myself discussed the extraordinary phenomenon of Holman Hunt’s famous pre-raphaelite painting The Light of the World, Anita Pollard and myself projected ten original magic lantern slides of the painting, each one hand-coloured slightly differently. As the images of the painting dissolved one into the other the audience heard Charles Gounod’s sacred song ‘Nazareth’. This had been sung to the magic lantern projection of the painting by the celebrity singer George Snazelle during his tour to Australia in the 1889. We used a Newton and Co. biunnial magic lantern from the same period.

Documentation of the six minute projection is now on Youtube.

Now online: ‘When it’s Moonlight on the Prairie’ and other songs and chromatropes

A magic lantern show  with Crank Williams and Patsy Decline for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, 26 August 2023. The magic lantern slides: six mechanical chromatropes c. 1880s – 1890s; The Lights of London Town, York & Son, 1892; Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers, Bamforth & Co., 1897; The Gin Fiend, c. 1885; When It’s Moonlight on the Prairie, c. 1910; ‘Goodnight’ mechanical  chromatrope, c. c. 1880s – 1890s.

Crank Williams and Patsy Decline in performance with the magic lantern.

Powerhouse Late Magic Lantern Show online

A magic lantern show devised by Martyn Jolly with musician Charles Martin and artist Anna Madeleine Raupach to respond to the Powerhouse drawing exhibition ‘A Line A Web A World’, performed at Powerhouse Late, Ultimo, Sydney, 3 August 2023. We used a Newton & Co. biunial lantern, c. 1896; vintage hand coloured, painted, and mechanical magic lantern slides c. 1880s — 1900s; and contemporary inkjet slides from the Anna Madeleine Raupach works ‘Signal to Noise’ and ‘Light Echoes/Standard Stars’, 2023. Charles used field recording, digital synthesisers and touch pad instruments.