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The mainstay of Lundager's work as a photographer in Mt Morgan were the commissions for Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company to photograph the mine, and to take individual and group portraits of mine owners and managers and company guests, as well as domestic group portraits of professional and managerial staff and their families. Lundager also photographed groups of mine workers as well as town panoramas and various activities and events within the town itself.
Photographs of Aboriginal and Islander people are rarely seen and it is thought that only a handful of images have survived including a rare cdv of an aboriginal mother and child photographed in central Queensland in the late 1880s or early 1890s (see below blog Friday, 13 May, 2011). It is possible there were other photographs depicting Aboriginal people but they have been lost when Lundager's Rockhampton studio was destroyed by fire. The above image is from Mt Morgan.
He was commissioned in 1885 to create a photographic album for the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by order of the Queensland Government. Within this album held by Gladstone Art Gallery and Museum is an image from the deck of the Blackbirding ship 'Lizzie' with 120 labourers from the New Hebrides photographed in Cleveland Bay, Townsville in 1883.
Arrival of teams at Camooweal, a rare early photography by J. T. Needham, Gregory Downs, Burketown
William Landsborough in 1861 named the Barkly Tablelands after the Governor of Victoria, His Excellency, Sir Henry Barkly. The first settler to the area was John Sutherland, who took up the Rocklands lease in 1865. Stock losses to the local dingos and Wedge-tailed Eagles; lack of water and isolation soon forced him to abandon his lease. The Englishmen Benjamin Crosthwaite and William Tetley, who were marginally more successful, took up the lease again in 1876.
The initial town of Camooweal was gazetted in 1884 to be built on a 4-square-mile (10 km2) plot by Lake Francis. A year later the present site was re-gazetted and within a year a post office was built. Other milestones for the town were the addition of a police station in 1886, opening of a provisional school in 1893, drilling of the town bore in 1897.
Caption on verso reads 'Arrival of teams at Camooweal with general goods from Burketown, a seaport 240 miles away'.
Little is known about J. T. Needham but his studio stamp appears on this cabinet card (see below).
Albert Lomer (Active Period c.1865-c.1895)
Albert Lomer was a professional photographer and colourist of Brisbane, Sydney and Queensland who worked throughout the mid to late 19th century. He worked in Melbourne before 1865 when he opened a studio at Sydney in partnership with Andrew Chandler. They advertised as being from W. Davies & Co. of Melbourne, where both had presumably trained. Their studio, The London Photographic Company, was at 419 George Street, next door to Lassetter’s ironmongery store. By February 1867 Lomer was continuing alone but promising that 'the business will be conducted in the same efficient manner and under the same liberal principles as hitherto’. He had reduced the old price for cartes-de-visite to two for 5s or 15s a dozen and sold cabinet and other portrait photographs 'beautifully coloured (on the premises) in oil or water’. Lomer appears to have been his own colourist, regularly advertising as both 'artist and photographer’ (which this normally signified).
In 1872-73 Lomer was working at 57 Bourke Street, Melbourne. He then established a very successful Brisbane studio at 158 Queen Street which lasted from 1874 until 1905, although he apparently no longer ran it after 1880. Branch studios were opened in various parts of the colony: the Lomer studio at Mackay in 1887 (managed by J.P. Kemp), a studio at Toowoomba (1893-96) and one at Ipswich (1898-99). Numerous photographs from Lomer’s Brisbane studio also survive, mainly family portraits in carte-de-visite format.
Few large format landscape photographs have survived and the above image (and detail) of the Rocks at Noosa is considered rare. A photograph of the same location but from a more distant vantage point is held in the State Library of Queensland.
The below image depicts Norman Creek.
