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 Mathew's Collection at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
A set of important magic lantern slides has recently been catalogued and digitally preserved by AIATSIS. It was fascinating for Elisa deCourcy and Martyn Jolly to discuss where the slides came from with the donor, Mrs Diana Williams, who lives in Canberra, and with David Jeffery, AIATSIS’s Collection Manager (Photographic). Between 1932 and 1939, Wallace H Mathews and his son Arthur G Mathews, a Western Australian missionary at the United Aborigines Missions at Ooldea, Mt Margaret, Warburton and Gnowangerup, made a collection of lantern-slides illustrating mission life. In the decades that…
Sydney Camera Circle, Methodist Missionaries and the National Art Archive's Lantern Slide Collection
In December 2016 the supremely knowledgeable Eric Riddler, who is Visual Resources Librarian at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, guided Elisa deCourcy and Martyn Jolly through two significant magic lantern slide collections in the National Art Archive, housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. One collection has been in the Gallery for many years, while the other has just recently been acquired. The first collection came into the Gallery in the mid 1990s as part of a gift from the family of Henri Mallard, a member of the Sydney Camera Circle, who were an elite group of…
Thomas Baines' (incomplete) exploratory series
The Project’s Research Fellow, Elisa deCourcy spoke with Nat Williams, Treasures Curator at the National Library of Australia about a curiously incomplete collection of lantern slides created by the British artist and explorer (John) Thomas Baines. The glass lantern slides, hand-coloured photographic copies and adaptations of Baines’s paintings, have been mounted in thick wooden frames.Thomas Baines was born Norfolk, England in 1820 into a middle class home. His father worked as a master mariner, but both his maternal grandfather and father had a keen interest in painting and drawing. Baines…