ABSTRACT

George Baron Goodman was Australia’s first professional photographer. Reportedly instructed in the process by M. Daguerre himself, in 1842 he had obtained a licence to use the process in the British colonies from Daguerre’s British patentee Richard Beard. Newland’s Daguerrean Gallery opening coincided with an expanding Australian visual culture, which was already filling with local and global visual representations of people and faces. Phantasmagoria lanterns, lit by the whale oil carried by trading ships that criss-crossed the Pacific, became relatively common in the Australian colonies from then on. Newland would then have needed a rubber bag from which the oxygen would be mixed with a jet of coal gas to heat a block of calcium oxide to operate the first limelight apparatus in the Australian colonies. Blackface minstrelsy in general, and Hydes, in particular, quickly found a home in colonial Australian theatres.