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J.W. Beattie
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.

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