Archive in the Spotlight
Archive in the Spotlight is an initiative where one of the team investigates a lantern slide series held in a public or personal collection around Australia. This process involves research into the series and, on occasion, an interview with a curator, librarian, or private custodian.
The Malle (sic) Scrub series
Lead CI, Martyn Jolly travelled to the State Library of Victoria to examine The Malle (sic) Scrub, a true story of three children who were lost in the Australian bush series with Research Librarian, Susan Long. Few stories gripped the popular colonial imagination more than that of the ‘Duff Children’, Jane and Isaac Cooper and their younger brother Frank Duff, who got themselves lost in the Victorian bush in 1864. After nine days they were rescued on the brink of death when Aboriginal trackers led search parties to them. Besides being widely reported in the press, their…
Rouse Hill House and Generations of Lantern Slide Performances
Curator Dr Scott Hill knows scores of fascinating stories about the extraordinary collection of Rouse Hill House and Farm, one of the properties of Sydney Living Museums that is located between Parramatta and the towns of Windsor and Richmond in Sydney’s North-west. But for Research Fellow Elisa deCourcy and Lead CI Martyn Jolly, one of the most exciting of his stories was the one about Dr John Buchanan Rouse Terry [b.1944], one of the sixth generation of the family to have lived at the house. As a boy in the 1950s he would take out the house’s antique magic lantern to give his…
The Salvation Army, lantern slide heritage and The Blind Man of Siolam series
Elisa deCourcy spoke with the Salvation Army’s chief archivist, Lindsay Cox about the Limelight Department and the Army’s rich history of magic lantern productions. Few organisations have been more involved in the early days of the magic lantern phenomenon in Australia than the Salvation Army. Climbing the newly refurbished staircase inside the Army’s headquarters at 69 Bourke Street, Melbourne you would be forgiven for thinking you were simply ascending through the various levels of their administrative and philanthropic centre. But after rounding the banister at level four and a short walk…
Anthropological Slides at The Queensland Museum
Recently, lead CI Martyn Jolly visited the Queensland Museum, where he explored the Museum’s lantern-slide collections with Karen Kindt, Assistant Collection Manager, Anthropology, and the Indigenous curator Michael Aird, Research Fellow, School of Social Science, University of Queensland. The Museum holds several major collections of slides related to science, religion, and anthropology. An example of the diversity of the Museum’s collections are the slides produced by Charles Joseph Pound, a Queensland microbiologist who identified tick-born ‘redwater fever’ amongst Queensland’s cattle and…
The antecedents to PowerPoint presentations: The slides of the Marks-Hirschfeld Museum of Medical History
Recently lead CI Martyn Jolly visited Dr James Nixon, curator at the Marks-Hirschfeld Museum of Medical History in the University of Queensland School of Medicine. James looks after two significant sets of slides. The first collection comes from Dr John Bostock, and is an integrated set of teaching slides and index cards. The slides still have their original cross-referenced index cards, filed in their original index box, and were used for psychology lectures to medical students between 1945 and 1955. Although politically very conservative, educationally Bostock was very innovative. As…
Ned Kelly, lantern slides and the genesis of “right-click” image-sharing culture
Enter the words ‘Ned Kelly’ into Google image search and you’ll be met with an array of images: nineteenth century photographs of the bearded man himself, woodcut illustrations from 1880 newspapers of Ned in his armour, images of Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger acting in their respective Kelly films, and kitsch souvenirs. If you visit the National Museum of Australia’s excellent online catalogue and search for a set of 77 Ned Kelly magic lantern slides, which were purchased as part of group of 146 slides in the early 2000s, you will return a not dissimilar grid of images. You won’t find Mick or…
Corsets, Inter-war Australian Femininity and the National Film and Sound Archive's Remarkable Collection of Berlei Lantern Slides
The National Film and Sound Archive holds an extensive lantern slide collection ranging from cinema slides, used in theatre advertising, song slides, employed in public recitals, and some of Australia’s first locally manufactured slides, such as Soldiers of the Cross. Elisa deCourcy spoke with curator, Jenny Gall and paper conservator, Shingo Ishikawa about the processes involved in lantern slide restoration. We also discussed a multi-set collection of Berlei instructional slides that fit rather uniquely in their archive. In 1910 Fred (Frederick) Berley bought the controlling share of E…
'A Universe in a box': The Expansive Lantern Slide Collection of Museums Victoria
Recently, Lead CI, Martyn Jolly spent an informative morning at Museums Victoria with Lorenzo Iozzi, Senior Collection Manager of Images for History and Technology. Of all the collecting institutions in Australia Museums Victoria is the furthest advanced in making its magic lantern collections available for research and engagement. They have over 11,000 slides in their History and Technology collection, 3,000 slides in their Natural Sciences collection, and 1,500 slides in their Indigenous Cultures collection. Their slide collections not only include thousands of regular square glass…
The travels of the Macleay (Chau Chak Wing Museum) slides: migration, war and exploration
Elisa deCourcy spoke with curator, Jan Brazier about the breadth and intricacies of the Macleay Collection of lantern slides at Sydney University. The Macleay Museum opened in 1890 as a repository for the natural history collection of the family whose name it carries. The collecting zeal began with Alexander Macleay (1767-1848) whose array of insect specimens was unmatched in England. He moved to Australia in 1826 to take up the post of Colonial Secretary to New South Wales, where his son and great nephew went onto expand the family’s collection to include all areas of zoology along…
Boa Constrictors Before Dinner on a Wednesday: Science in the Limelight at the Australian Museum
The Australian Museum in Sydney is the country’s first museum and is celebrating 190 years of collecting and exhibiting in 2017. At the end of July, the project’s Research Fellow, Elisa deCourcy, was lucky enough to get a preview of the Australian Museum’s 20,000 plus lantern slide collection with Vanessa Finney, Head, Archives, Rare Books and Library Collections. The slides are housed in the stores of the institution, many in lovely hardwood filing cabinets, watched over by resplendent taxidermied birds in glass vitrines. There is a palpable sense of the past about this archive. Photographic…