State Library of New South Wales

great

Pioneering times...

Could this photograph have been an inspiration for the Penguins in the film Madagascar?

To think how tough some people would find to do this now with modern clothes and photographic equipment.

Awesome photography.

brilliant photograph by one of our greatest!

Fantastic!

breathtakingly brilliant...

One of those pictures worth many thousand words.

This is a typically fake photograph by Hurley. When he took the photograph it was a cloudless sky. Not content with the drama of the scene of wounded Australian soldiers, he added the clouds from another photograph to manufacture this one. I use this particular monstrosity to demonstrate "drama" in my presentations on monochrome photography and how a cloudless sky is irrelevant if the drama exists in the subject, because that is where the viewer's eye goes. Hurley wrote in his diary of his arguments with Bean over his manufactured drama and how he felt that faking it was the only way to show it. He totally did not 'get it'.

A remarkable image from the collection of George Ernest (Chinese) Morrison (1862-1920), journalist, traveller and political adviser to the Chinese government, born on 4 February 1862 at Newtown, Geelong, Victoria, eldest son of George Morrison and his wife Rebecca, née Greenwood.
In 1900 Morrison, as The Times of London special correspondent, wrote the last terse and reliable reports before the Boxer siege of the foreign legations and the first full account after it. He also proved his physical courage, being severely wounded while rescuing another defender. His own newspaper, accepting a Daily Mail report of the massacre of all Europeans in Peking, published on 17 July three lengthy obituaries, bracketing Morrison with the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, and the head of the Imperial Customs Service, Sir Robert Hart. All three in fact survived. Morrison was praised as 'in every way a striking personality, essentially modest and unassuming, yet at the same time resolute and virile' who had sent reports which 'savoured of genius'.
adb.anu.edu.au/biography/morrison-george-ernest-chinese-7663

Some items are described as 'Photographs taken by William Meyrick Hewlett during the siege of Peking'.

From the Trove article:
'Hewlett was pre-destined to the service of Britain in China from childhood. When at Harrow, for he come from an English family which could afford to send its sons to "the school upon the hill," young Hewlett chose the Modern Side and began preparation for a student interpretership in China, Japan, Siam or some other centre in the East in which ferment and diplomatic trouble were unceasing.'
Great Friend of China (1943, November 30). North-Eastern Advertiser (Scottsdale, Tas. : 1909 - 1954), p. 1. Retrieved March 30, 2026, from nla.gov.au/nla.news-article151477259

The Nordenfelt gun was a multiple-barrel organ gun that had a row of up to twelve barrels. It was fired by pulling a lever back and forth and ammunition was gravity fed through chutes for each barrel. It was produced in a number of different calibres up to 25 mm (0.98 in). Larger calibres were also used, but for these calibres the design simply permitted rapid manual loading rather than true automatic fire.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordenfelt_gun