From the 1860s onwards, photography became
the dominant form of both aesthetic and documentary travel art. Photographers,
such as Adelaide’s Samuel Sweet, travelled widely with a horse-drawn
darkroom. Paul Foelsche documented the country in and around the new
settlement of Darwin, and Nicholas Caire, Charles Bayliss, J.W. Beattie
and Frank Hurley made landscape and exploration photographs that required
them to carry their bulky equipment through often remote and difficult
terrain.
Artists and photographers influenced each other’s visual and
aesthetic techniques. W.C. Piguenit undertook extensive bush walks
in Tasmania to paint monochrome oil studies of Mount Olympus and
Lake St Clair that resemble the photographic soft-focus ‘pictorialist’ aesthetic
popular at the time. Richard Daintree’s large oil-painted albumen
photograph Bush Travellers, Queensland (c.1865) is a surprising and
somewhat unlikely Antipodean reprise of Edouard Manet’s Le
déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863).
Taken in the backblocks of Queensland only two years after the Manet
was first exhibited, and over-painted in oil by an unknown artist
in London, it is a perfect example of the pictorial exchanges that
took place around the world.