On a recent visit to Mudgee we decided to visit Gulgong on our way back to Sydney. While I was aware that images of the town are featured on the original $10 bill issued in 1966, it was a very pleasant surprise to learn that the images on the $10 bill were from the Holtermann Collection and that the recently constructed museum presents that portion of the Collection that comprises 350 historic images of Gulgong during the gold rush in the second half of the 19th century. The images were taken by Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss, who were sponsored by Bernhardt Otto Holtermann, in 1872.
The first thing that struck us was the incredible clarity and detail of the images that were taken more than 120 years ago and captured on glass negatives through a complex process using cumbersome equipment. Photography during those early years was time consuming hard work, and also very dangerous due to the toxic chemicals used in processing the images.
After Beaufoy Merlin died in 1873 Bayliss stepped into the role of lead photographer. With Holtermann’s encouragement, he became even more adventurous technically, producing large and sometimes gigantic glass plates of up to a meter by a meter-and-a-half, the largest ever made.
In 1951 the collection of 3,500 glass plate negatives were found in the garden shed of Holtermann’s daughter-in-law in Chatswood, Sydney. Keast Burke the photographer, journalist and photographic historian who discovered the collection noted that there, “were incredible numbers of negatives, records that were in due course to disclose every detail of the lives of our goldfields pioneers – the men, the women and the children, their homes, their business enterprises, and their mining shafts, their populous towns and larger cities.”
The plates were donated by Holtermann’s grandson to the State Library of NSW in 1952. They included photographs of the Hill End Gold Fields as well as Sydney and Melbourne during the same period. The Holtermann Collection has been digitised by the State Library of NSW and in May 2013 was inscribed on the Australian register of the UNESCO Memory of the World.
The Gulgong Holtermann Museum, which was opened in 2019, presents more than 350 images of Gulgong that are now on permanent display. Touch screens installed throughout the museum enable visitors to enlarge the photographs to reveal their smallest details. The walls of the facility are lined with stunning mounted photos and a collection of cameras and other photographic equipment on display in the museum provides a vivid illustration of how far technology has advanced photography.