Panoramas
In 1875, Charles Bayliss produced the most famous works in nineteenth-century Australian photography: panoramas of Sydney taken from the 27-metre tower B.O. Holtermann had constructed at his St Leonards’s home on Sydney’s North Shore. Although these were not the earliest examples of the panorama, it was the size of the panoramas he created with Holtermann that secured his pre-eminence in the area.
The largest negatives measured about 1 by 1.5 metres (each sheet of glass weighed 16 kilograms). The whereabouts of the resultant panoramas is unknown but some of the negatives are held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. The mammoth negatives were the largest wet-plate glass negatives produced in the world at that time. They were a source of national pride and international acclaim.
Bayliss appears to have produced few large-scale panoramas ubsequently, although he produced panoramas of Melbourne and Stawell, Victoria, at around this time. The main exception is an extended view taken from the lantern dome of the near-completed Garden Palace built to house the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 (the building was completely destroyed by fire in 1882). Here, it was featured in a large display of photographs devoted to B.O. Holtermann’s collection and was met with an extremely favourable response. According to one Sydney writer, it was:
the best panorama of Sydney we have ever seen … As a specimen of photography it is almost faultless, the clearness and completeness is surprising … the cleverest work that has issued for a very long time from a colonial gallery.
(Keast Burke, Gold and Silver: An Album of Hill End and Gulgong: Photographs from the Holtermann Collection. Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1973, p. 51)
Sydney
Panorama of Sydney, August 1879 albumen prints 37.5 x 547.45 cm in total nla.pic-an24497444
Stawell
Panorama of Stawell, Victoria c. 1874–1875 albumen prints 27.5 x 174.0 cm National Archives of Australia
A1719/678245
