The Holtermann Collection is the name given to a collection of over 3,500 glass-plate negatives and albumen prints, many of which depict life in New South Wales goldfield towns. It also includes numerous photographs of Australian rural towns and the cities of Sydney and Melbourne taken between 1871 and 1876. The collection is held by the

State Library of New South Wales The State Library of New South Wales, part of which is known as the Mitchell Library, is a large heritage-listed special collections, reference and research library open to the public and is one of the oldest libraries in Australia. Establish ...

.The Holtermann Collection, State Library of New South Wales.
Retrieved 6 June 2014.

Gold Rush, Regional Towns and Cities

Many of the 3500 wet-plate glass negatives and albumen prints in the Holtermann collection capture life in the goldfield towns of Hill End and

Gulgong Gulgong is a 19th-century gold rush town in the Central Tablelands and the wider Central West regions of the Australian state of New South Wales. The town is situated within the Mid-Western Regional Council local government area. It is locate ...

Home Rule Home rule is government of a colony, dependent country, or region by its own citizens. It is thus the power of a part (administrative division) of a state or an external dependent country to exercise such of the state's powers of governance wit ...

and Canadian Lead between 1872 and 1873. Photographs covering the goldfields, regional towns and cities in New South Wales and Victoria between 1871 and 1873 are attributed to the American and Australasian Photographic Company employees Beaufoy Merlin and

Charles Bayliss Charles Bayliss (1850-4 June 1897), photographer, was born in Hadleigh, Suffolk, England in 1850. Merlin had done commissioned work for Holtermann while at Hill End in 1872 but sometime around January 1873, Merlin was commissioned by Bernhardt Otto Holtermann to start taking photographs for his new 'Holtermann Exposition' project to promote Australia to the world. The Holtermann collection seems to have been formed around this time and Merlin may have contributed some of his earlier photographs to this project.

The Colossal Glass Plate Negatives

Berrys Bay and Goat Island, Sydney XR 45a

The largest glass plate negatives produced in the nineteenth century appear to have been made in Sydney, Australia, in 1875, and three are held in the Holtermann Collection,

. Intended for display at International Exhibitions they were made by the professional photographer

Charles Bayliss Charles Bayliss (1850-4 June 1897), photographer, was born in Hadleigh, Suffolk, England in 1850.Bernhardt Holtermann Bernhardt Otto Holtermann (29 April 1838 – 29 April 1885) was a successful gold miner, businessman, politician and photographer in Australia. Perhaps his greatest claim to fame is his association with the Holtermann Nugget, the largest gold sp ...

who also funded the project. Only four of the colossal glass negatives produced by Bayliss and Holtermann have been identified and all of them were taken from Holtermann’s purpose-built camera in the tower of his mansion in North Sydney. Two were 160 x 96.5 cm (5.1 ft x 3.08 ft) and formed a panorama of Sydney Harbour from Garden Island to Millers Point. The other two were 136 x 95 cm (4.4 x 3.1 feet) and were of the Harbour Lavender Bay and Fort Maccquarie and Berry’s Bay and Goat Island. All four colossal negatives were acknowledged at the time as being the largest negatives made and appear to have remained so until 1900 when George R. Lawrence built his (4.5 x 8 ft) camera to photograph the Alton Limited locomotive. In 1876 one of the negatives was viewed by the Photographers Art Society of the Pacific Coast (PASPC) who acknowledged it as being the largest negative ever produced. The society declared,

The Holtermann Panorama

Panorama of Sydney from Lavender Bay (1875)

In 1875 Charles Bayliss and Bernhardt Holtermann produced a large panorama of Sydney harbour made from a series of twenty-three wet-plate negatives measuring 56 by 46 centimetres many of which were duplicated four or more times to obtain the best image. The finished panorama was nearly ten metres long. It was photographed from the central tower of Holtermann's house in North Sydney. Sitting some 27 metres above a ridge that was already well-elevated the tower gave a special vantage from which to photograph Sydney and the harbour of

Port Jackson Port Jackson, consisting of the waters of Sydney Harbour, Middle Harbour, North Harbour and the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers, is the ria or natural harbour of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The harbour is an inlet of the Tasman Sea (p ...

. Some of the photographs, including the panorama, were displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, where they won a bronze medal. The panorama was also displayed at the 1878 Exposition Universelle Internationale in Paris.

Rediscovery

In 1951 the negatives were discovered in a garden shed in

Chatswood, New South Wales Chatswood is a major business and residential district in the Lower North Shore of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia, 10 kilometres north of the Sydney central business district. It is the administrative centre of the loca ...

. Credit for the discovery of the photographs goes to

Keast Burke Eric Keast Burke (16 January 1896 – 31 March 1974) was a New Zealand-born Australian photographer and journalist. Early life and education Burke was born at Christchurch, New Zealand. He was the only child of Walter Ernest Burke, and his wife ...

and Vyvyan Curnow who worked for the ''Australasian Photo-Review''. While writing a story on the gold nugget discovered by Bernhard Holtermann they found photographs donated by Holtermann at the

Mitchell Library The Mitchell Library is a large public library and centre of the City Council public library system of Glasgow, Scotland. History The library, based in the Charing Cross district, was initially established in Ingram Street in 1877 following a ...

. This led Curnow to visit one of Holtermann's descendants who was living in Chatswood, Sydney. Here he discovered some 3,500 glass plate negatives which had been locked for many years in a garden shed. The collection was in remarkably good condition as the plates had remained undisturbed in a safe place out of the light for over seventy-five years. In time, the find proved to be one of the most important to document life on the goldfields of Australia.

International significance

The international significance of the collection is due to its size and quality combined with the level of detail captured in the glass plate negatives. It is a rare survivor of a large-scale nineteenth-century Australian photographic archive. The collection includes three of the largest surviving wet-plate negatives in the world. In May 2013, the Holtermann Collection of glass plate negatives at the

was included on the

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

Memory of the World Register – Asia and the Pacific The first inscriptions on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register were made in 1997. By creating a compendium of the world’s documentary heritage, including manuscripts, oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communic ...

. Three giant views of Sydney Harbour, the largest measuring over 1.6 metres wide, were added to the UNESCO International Memory of the World Register in November 2017.

Collection

*Collection o
3,500 glass negatives
photographs of goldfield towns in N.S.W. and Victoria; Sydney and Melbourne streets and buildings, 1871-1876.
PXD 352/vol. 1
Drawings, coloured and uncoloured albumen prints of New South Wales Scenery.
PXD 352/vol. 2
Uncoloured albumen prints of Victorian Scenery, Bernard O. Holtermann, gold mining scenes Ballarat.
PXD 352/vol. 3
Albumen prints of Victorian Scenery includes panorama Victorian Sth Yarra etc.
PXD 352/vol. 4
Coloured and uncoloured albumen prints, silver gelatine prints and photo-mechanical prints of portraits and European scenes.
MLMSS 968
Bernard Otto Holtermann papers, 1864-1876.
PXE 1373 and R 2019
41 albumen prints, 3 medals, 6 Waterhouse stops.

Digitisation

In 2008, the collection was digitised at high resolution and images like this one o
On Gay & Co., general storekeepers (grocery & drapery), Hill End
were made available through the Library's image viewer. In 2015,

Gulgong Holtermann Museum Gulgong Holtermann Museum is a community project and a museum space located in gold rush town of Gulgong, New South Wales. Two of the town's earliest buildings, also featured on Australian ten-dollar note (see The Greatest Wonder) renovated and ...

which uses many of these hi-resolution images was launched in

,New South Wales.

References

External links

The Holtermann Collection.
State Library of New South Wales. Retrieved 6 June 2014. *Panorama of the city and harbour of Sydney from North Sydney; Campbell's Wharf/Parbury ...(?) & Co.; Holtermann panorama of Sydney; Market street looking west from its intersection with Elizabeth Street, State Library of New South Wale
ACCESSION RECORD , Pic.Acc.6617
*N.S.Wales scenery, no. 30-35: panoramic view of Sydney Harbour & suburbs taken from the residence of B.O. Holtermann, Esq. for his intercolonial exposition, 1874, State Library of New South Wale
XV1A/N Syd/2
{{coord missing, New South Wales Photo archives in Australia History of New South Wales Memory of the World Register