This magic lantern show tells the story of an actual double drowning in the Shoalhaven River at Bundanon. Local actors will read newspaper reports and give the testimony of eyewitnesses that were published in the Shoalhaven Telegraph on Wednesday 1 February 1922. The original magic lantern slides Martyn Jolly will project through two nineteenth century ‘dissolving-view’ magic lanterns which date from the 1870s were made between the 1880s and the 1920s. Some were made by amateur Australian photographers, while others were manufactured in the UK and the US and exported to Australia to be used as part of popular melodramatic, musical, instructional or comic entertainments. The slides will be accompanied by live music and electronic samples from Alexander Hunter and the ANU Experimental Music Studio. Travelling magic lanternists had been visiting the Shoalhaven region since the 1870s, but by the time of the drowning they had largely been displaced by the movies. If Helen MacKenzie and her father Ken MacKenzie hadn’t died that day perhaps they may have gone to see an Australian silent picture, The Blue Mountains Mystery, which was showing that week at the Nowra School of Arts. This thriller, directed by Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell, is now lost, but we know the plot involved murder and a mistakenly identified corpse. The price of admission was a shilling, or a shilling sixpence for the gallery.

For further details see: https://bundanon.com.au/whats-on/siteworks-2016/ 

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