IDNO

P.75180.VH

Description

Archive’s list: “20. Tommy Burnfield – Goulburn - about 28 years”

Half-length portrait of a 28-year-old Taungurong (Goulburn River) man from Goulburn River named Tommy Banfield (Burnfield) and settled at Coranderrk Aboriginal station. He is also known as Petrark. He has sideburns and a moustache. He is wearing a white shirt and a dark jacket buttoned up at the top. The background is plain. [WV 26/8/2009]

Place

Oceania Australasia; Australia; Victoria; Kulin confederacy; Woiworung; Coranderrk; Goulburn River

Cultural Affliation

Taungurong [historically Goulburn River]

Named Person

Tommy Banfield (Burnfield); Petrark

Photographer

Walter, Charles (Carl)

Collector / Expedition

Date

1866

Collection Name

Von Hugel Collection

Source

Format

Print Black & White Mounted

Primary Documentation

Other Information

P.75043.VH to P.75217.VH were transferred from Large Box Q VH1/4/9, Bay 102 in the Paper Archive.

P.75178.VH to P.75186.VH are mounted onto one piece of card.

This print has been catalogued with the support of the Getty Grant Fund.

Archives: The archival record VH1/2/19 entitled:”List of the Aborigines settled at Coranderrk there approx. Age and former place of Abode (or tribe)” lists the following: “20. Tommy Burnfield – Goulburn - about 28 years” [WV 17/8/2009]

Publication: Image published in Lydon, Jane, 2005. Eye Contact. Photographing Indigenous Australians. Durham and London: Duke University Press. p. 79 with the following caption: “Charles Walter, “Portraits of Aboriginal Natives Settled at Coranderrk.” Panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866. Accession number H91.1/1-106. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.” [WV 17/8/2009]

Publication: Image published in Lydon, Jane, 2005. Eye Contact. Photographing Indigenous Australians. Durham and London: Duke University Press. p. 80 with the following caption: “Charles Walter, “Portraits of Aboriginal Natives Settled at Coranderrk.” Top-centre detail of panel produced for Intercolonial Exhibition, 1866, showing males (full-blooded).” Accession number H91.1/1-106. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.” [WV 17/8/2009]

Publication: Image published in Lydon, Jane, 2005. Eye Contact. Photographing Indigenous Australians. Durham and London: Duke University Press. p. 111 with the following caption: “Charles Walter, “Tommy Banfield” [sic]. Accession number XP 1960. From the Green family album. Museum Victoria, Melbourne. [WV 26/8/2009]

Photographer: Lydon (2005) gives some biographical information on Charles Walter: “Charles Walter has been the subject of a number of portraits himself: he had arrived in the country in 1855 from Germany and was collecting for the botanist Ferdinand von Mueller by 1856. His earliest known photograph is dated 1862, and he was advertising as a “Country Photographic Artist” by 1865. Gael Newton locates him at the vanguard of “the new breed of photographers” specialising in landscape work who, from the mid-1860s, set off on solo expeditions into remote parts of Victoria in search of picturesque views. As Isobel Crombie has noted, these professionals understood “that city dwellers were as enthusiastic to buy images of idyllic fern gullies and tranquil rivers as photographs that showed the destruction of those same areas for timber, minerals or farming.” The Dictionary of Australian Artists called Walter “possibly Australia’s first photojournalist,” and Newton comments that his subject matter was the “standard fare” of the illustrated newspapers, which represented him as a heroic explorer, describing the difficulties he surmounted in getting to the remote and picturesqueplaces he photographed. In 1866, Walter described a trip he had made to Torbreck Falls with “his apparatus and tent upon his back – the whole weighing about fifty pounds [twenty-one kilosgrams]”; he travelled alone and lived off the bush. He used a more portable stereo camera for most work but also produced half-plate and whole-plate negatives. In 1873, a drawing showed “our artist” off to work in pith helmet, axe, and camera bag. These sketches portray an explorer who collected both plants and images, and whose work satisfied an urban need to experience the bush.
In 1874, another newspaper engraving showed Walter photographing an Aboriginal “pin-up girl,” alluding to his work with Aboriginal subjects and indicating the legendary status his travels had achieved. The accompanying text explained that
Out engraving illustrates a characteristic phase of Australian bush life. A travelling photographer on the look out for subjects has come upon a camp of natives. One, half-caste girl, has attracted his attention by her wild beauty and he had placed her in position, and is taking her photograph. Some of the natives squat close by watching the strange and mysterious process, and presently their grim figures will also be photographed, to serve as ethnological specimens and curios to send to France and England as examples of the rapidly disappearing Australian race.
This slightly prurient fantasy bears no relationship to Walter’s oeuvre, which does not contain any images of naked women. The cartoon showing the “half-caste girl” suggests a gypsy rather than an Aboriginal woman, although the group in the background bears a resemblance to some of Walter’s 1869 stereoscopic Gippsland views, also circulated as newspaper illustrations. The writer combines romantic fancy with an early illusion to taking photographic souvenirs of the dying race.”
Walter did not take many photographs of Aboriginal people, nor did they become famous, although he was known in Victoria, then as now, for these early and powerful records of a significant moment in Aboriginal history. In general, Aboriginal people were viewed in the wider context of a developing popular interest in the environment. But Walter’s photographs “improved on nature,” using various techniques to comply with contemporary stories told about his Aboriginal subjects, or to invent new ones; his images intersect systematically with contemporary rhetoric about the process of civilizing and Christianizing Aboriginal people. We can also recover something of his personal relationship with Coranderrk and its residents, which points to mutual sympathy from his photographs.” (Lydon, Jane. 2005. Eye Contact. Photographing Indigenous Australians. Duke University Press: Durham and London, p. 35-37).

This catalogue record has been updated with the support of the Aboriginal Visual Histories Project, Monash University. [Wonu Veys 14/8/2009]