The invention of photography coincided with the founding of Australia and helped capture the excitement and drama as settlers struggled to tame this new wild land. From the madness of the Gold Rush to the growth of its famous cities, it has all been captured for posterity.
Click through the gallery for incredible images of the early days of Australia, all taken before the various colonial states federated and became a nation in 1901...
This portrait is the earliest known surviving photograph taken in Australia. It was taken by George Baron Goodman, the young colony’s first commercial photographer. He opened a studio in Sydney in 1842 and began capturing images of the city’s leading citizens, including this one of surgeon Dr William Bland. Bland was an ex-convict who had been transported for murder after a duel in Bombay, India in 1813. After he was pardoned in 1814, he established the first private practice in the colony and went on to become a member of parliament.
Early Australian photographers soon left the confines of their studios and went in search of subjects further afield in the colony. This photograph of settlers with members of the local Indigenous population is believed to have been taken in 1855. Little else is known about it.
Australia has always been a land of drought, fire and flood. And right from the earliest days of the colony, photography was used to capture the aftermath of these terrible natural disasters. Here we see residents of West Maitland survey the effects of a flood that swept through the area in 1857. The photo is one of a set of four images taken by Elijah Hart and is believed to be the oldest photograph of the Hunter region, approximately 155 miles (250km) north of Sydney.
By 1858, photographers in the colonies were getting more creative, the best example of which is an impressive panorama of Sydney created by Swedish-born painter-turned photographer Olaf William Blackwood. Made up of 11 separate photos taken from the tower of Government House (one of which is pictured here), it is the oldest surviving panorama of the city. The 10-foot-long print (3m) was available for sale within weeks of being taken and copies were often bought to send back home to friends and family in Europe.
Taken the same year as Olaf Blackwood’s panorama of Sydney, this photo features Swanston Street looking north from Collins Street, Melbourne’s most important thoroughfare. Not much else is known about the photograph, but it is interesting to note that the different personalities of Australia’s two biggest cities are already apparent. The focus of the Melbourne photo is on the city’s financial and business institutions. The Sydney panorama is all about the city’s famously gorgeous harbour.
This photo of busy Campbell's Wharf on the western side of Circular Quay in Sydney shows just how important sea transport was to the growing city. Shipping in Australia in the 19th century provided a vital link to the outside world and was the principal means of communication between the fledgling Australian colonies.
Australia’s first international sports team was an all-Aboriginal cricket team formed by a pastoralist’s son from Western Victoria. They were coached and captained by an ex all-England cricketer, Charles Lawrence, and toured England to much curiosity between May and October in 1868. This photo was taken alongside the Melbourne Cricket Ground Pavilion in December 1866, before they set off for the Old Country.
On 12 February 1851, a prospector discovered flecks of gold in a waterhole near Bathurst in New South Wales and one of the biggest gold rushes in history began. Hundreds of thousands of 'diggers' from other parts of Australia, Great Britain, Poland, Germany and even California descended on goldfields in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. Here we see a group of Scottish diggers gathered around their minehead in Gulgong in the NSW Central Tablelands.
The Gold Rush transformed society and the economy of the colonies. They were no longer seen as places of convict exile but rather as a place to seek your fortune. And not just by striking gold: those who established businesses on the goldfields, like the store pictured here in Gulgong, prospered too. Historians argue that the Gold Rush also hastened the move to more self-government in the colonies.
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Large investments were also made in transportation, leading to the construction of roads, railways and bridges to move people to and from goldfields and cities. One such project was the D & M Railway connecting Moama on NSW’s border with Victoria and the town of Deniliquin, seen here on the day it opened in 1876. It is said that a whole bullock was roasted and eaten in honour of the event.
The chance to find a fortune in the gold fields saw farm labourers abandon the vast wheat farms of NSW and Victoria in huge numbers. The cost of labour skyrocketed so enterprising landowners began making crude machines that could reap and bind grain, often built from leftover machine parts and scraps of metal, like the contraption pictured here. Such was the demand that the government of Victoria held a competition offering a prize of AUS £1,000 for the most viable reaper and binder machine.
In America, they had outlaws. In England, it was highwaymen. In Australia, the bandits who 'bailed up' stagecoaches, banks and small settlements were called bushrangers. In the early days bushrangers were generally escaped convicts. By the middle of the 19th century they tended to be free settlers who had fallen foul with the authorities. The last major bushranger – and the most notorious – was Ned Kelly, pictured here the day before he was hanged in 1880.
Ned Kelly famously wore a suit of armour, fashioned from the thick metal parts of a farmer's ploughs (seen here laid out by police). The suit made him impervious to bullets and made him seem large and intimidating. The suit did, however, leave his legs exposed, a flaw exploited by the police during a siege in the small Victorian town of Glenrowan, when Kelly was brought down by police gunfire.
Ned Kelly’s heroic stand only cemented him as a folk hero and the saying 'as game as Ned Kelly' quickly passed into local parlance. The way Ned and his gang challenged authority resonated with the population, so much so that a movie of his exploits was made in 1906. The Story of the Kelly Gang was over an hour long and is generally regarded as the world’s first feature film.
As the gold rush petered out, the colonies turned again to farming to provide wealth and prosperity. The industry was devastated by a severe rust epidemic in 1889, costing the wheat industry up to AUS £3 million in lost production. Here we see workers harvesting wheat near Molong in New South Wales the following year. Continuing problems of rust saw the development of a rust-resistant, high-yielding hybrid, created by pastoralist William Farrer.
One industry that flourished toward the end of the 19th century in rural Australia was wool. The industry dates back to 1797, when John Macarthur, a lieutenant in the New South Wales Corps who went on to become a large landholder, imported Spanish merino sheep to the colony. By the 1880s business was booming, making squatters (who illegally occupied crown grazing land) and pastoralists, like these ones classing ewes in Goondiwindi in Queensland, immensely wealthy.
It was back breaking work for shearers, of course. An average merino fleece weighs up to 40 pounds (18kg) and the blade shears they used weren’t much more sophisticated than gardening clippers. They were paid the relatively large sum of 11 shillings per hundred sheep, with rations. One shearer at the time said that if he had a good run of shearing he could “take a trip to one of the big centres and live like a lord the rest of the year.” The shearers pictured are blade shearing on the Lilyfield property in Jindera, NSW.
Like much of the hard work in rural Australia, a lot of the shearing was done by Aboriginal workers. Here we see some children of Aboriginal shearers sitting on a poddy lamb (an orphan) while their fathers work on a farm in Walgett in NSW.
As prosperous and modern as the Australian colonies were becoming, they still remained largely undeveloped. This photo of coastal rock formations at Coogee, only five miles (8km) from the centre of Sydney, was taken in 1885.
Similarly, Melbournians could lose themselves in pristine temperate rainforest barely 60 miles (97km) from their city. Here we see a horse and buggy on the way to Maryville, driving along the Black Spur Road, in 1885. This photograph was taken by German-born photographer John William Lindt, who is also well-known (or infamous, as the images are problematic today) for his photographs of Aboriginal people, produced in 1875 and 1876.
At the same time, some of the more remote corners of the country were being explored for the very first time. Here we see Aboriginal hunters with their haul of stingrays on Sunday Island in the far northwest corner of Western Australia. This whole region opened up in 1889 after the submarine telegraph cable from Indonesia, which originally connected to Darwin, was rerouted through Broome because of volcanic activity in the Arafura Sea.
By the end of the 19th century a distinctive Australian way of life began to evolve. While the early British settlers had initially been wary of the sea, by the end of the 19th century local residents – particularly from the cities – embraced the seaside. Beaches became places of leisure, freedom, independence and enjoyment, as seen by this joyful gathering on Brighton Beach in Victoria on Boxing Day in 1880.
It is around this time that Australia’s legendary love of sport began to develop. The country’s best known horse race, the Melbourne Cup, was first held in 1861 and by the end of the 19th century had become firmly entrenched in the sporting calendar. Here we see crowds gathered on the rails to watch the end of the race in 1897. Famously known as 'The race that stops the nation', it is held on the first Tuesday of November to this day and is a public holiday in Melbourne.
Australians have always loved a 'flutter' (a bet), a pastime that took hold during this period of the country’s history with the introduction of the game of Two-Up. The game started with diggers in the gold mines in Broken Hill and was soon being played wherever people gathered in numbers, like the group of men pictured here. At its most basic level, the game involves a designated 'spinner' tossing up two coins and people in the crowd betting on the outcome. These days it is only played on Anzac Day. Just watch for a crowd shouting: 'Come in spinner!'.
By the end of the 19th century, the Australian colonies that had begun as British outposts had grown and prospered, as seen in this photo of Sydney in 1897. Each of the six Australian colonies had their own governments and made their own laws. Towns had developed into capital cities, centres of trade and cultural life, but the different taxes, customs fees and even rail gauges between the colonies were holding development back. The case for the colonies to federate and become a single nation became irresistible.
Finally, on 1 January 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia was born. As many as 60,000 people gathered in Centennial Park in Sydney (pictured) to witness the proclamation of the Federal Constitution, uniting the six formerly independent colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania as one nation. The first Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, and the first federal ministry took their oaths of office around Queen Victoria's writing table.
Finally, Australians were 'one people', under 'one flag' sharing 'one destiny'. Federation was celebrated gleefully across the nation with parades, street parties, picnics and fireworks. Ties with the mother country were not severed completely, as seen in this very English maypole dance that formed part of the celebrations in Melbourne.
On 9 May 1901, the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia was held in the Exhibition Building in Melbourne. The location of the parliament was one of the first great controversies that beset the young nation. Both Sydney and Melbourne believed they should be the centre of government. In the end, a compromise was made – Melbourne would host parliament until a new capital city, Canberra, was built on a former sheep farm equidistant between the two cities.
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