professional photographer, bookseller and publisher, was born on 4 January 1832 at Tenterden, Kent, son of Harriett and Amos Cole. In 1850 he emigrated to the Cape of Good Hope and tried farming, but two years later set sail for the Victorian goldfields, arriving at Melbourne in the Sebrin on 12 November 1852. Latterly famous in Melbourne for his showmanship in promoting his Book Arcade with its rainbow trademark, and familiar to generations of Australian children for his Funny Picture Book , Cole’s first ten years in the colony were far from successful.
He failed at both gold-prospecting and land speculation. Then, in 1861 at Castlemaine, he met George Burnell who, equally disenchanted with goldfields’ life, was working for poor pay in a hay and corn store. Burnell had recently purchased a camera and chemicals from Mr Golightly , a travelling photographer, and Cole – who in his later career was to demonstrate a keen interest in every form of gadgetry – immediately offered himself as Burnell’s assistant. With a horse and cart bearing the legend 'Cole & Burnell / Photographic Artists / Views and Likenesses taken’, they set off on their new venture. The order of the names 'Cole & Burnell’ perhaps belied their respective inputs to the enterprise; Burnell took the photographs and Cole developed them.
By Christmas (1861) Cole and Burnell had reached Echuca on the Murray River, where they purchased a flat-bottomed boat. Early in the New Year they set out for Adelaide, the journey to Lake Alexandrina taking four months of rowing (and drifting). They photographed the scenery along the way: harsh mallee scrub, bustling river ports, Aboriginal camps, paddle-steamers and the river itself. A suggestion that they use their photographs as the basis of a travelling illustrated lecture came to nothing; Cole’s biographer, Cole Turnley, suggests that they had spent too long together in the cramped conditions of the row-boat to have remained friends. They did, however, market their photographs as stereographs in sets of sixty; the South Australian Register called these the colony’s first views of river scenery. A complete set of their albumen silver Stereoscopic Views of the River Murray 1861 is held at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Cole soon returned to Melbourne. His subsequent career, from itinerant pie-seller to bookseller extraordinaire, has been well documented. His Book Arcade, which offered live music and live monkeys, was as much sideshow as bookshop and became a Melbourne institution. He advertised for a wife in the Herald of 5 July 1875 and married 'the only serious applicant’, Eliza Frances Jorden of Hobart, a month later. Yet, for all his love of gimmicks and naive faith in the benefits of modern technology, Cole seems never to have incorporated photography into the multifarious attractions of the Book Arcade, although he did of course sell photographs and postcards there.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
