professional photographer, was living in Castlemaine, Victoria, with his wife (née Taplin) and two children in the 1850s. Having failed at gold-digging, he was working in a hay and corn store in 1861 when he purchased a complete photographic outfit from Mr Golightly , a travelling photographer. Golightly had demonstrated the quality of the camera and the wet-plate albumen print process by photographing the Burnell family posed in front of their house. The resulting photograph was so clear that it inspired Burnell’s friend E.W. Cole to suggest that they set up a photography business too. Burnell and Cole bought a horse and cart, painted a sign which read 'Cole & Burnell, photographic artists, views & likenesses taken’, and set out to become travelling photographers in their own right. Burnell took the photographs, Cole processed them.
By Christmas 1861 they had reached Echuca on the Murray River. Burnell proposed travelling down the river to Adelaide, where he intended to open a photographic studio. They bought a flat-bottomed boat, refitted it, and spent the first four months of 1862 rowing and drifting the length of the river, taking views en route. On 2 May 1862 they reached Point McLeay where Rev. George Taplin, Burnell’s brother-in-law, ran an Aboriginal mission station. While staying there they took photographs of the Aborigines. Although rejecting Taplin’s suggestion to take their views of the Murray on an illustrated lecture tour, they did sell sets as stereographs. These were commended as both informative and artistic by the South Australian Register . A complete set of sixty albumen silver Stereoscopic Views of the River Murray (1862) is held at the Art Galley of South Australia.
Burnell and Cole dissolved their partnership soon afterwards, and Burnell brought his wife and three children to Adelaide where he continued to work as a photographer. There is, however, no record of a firm bearing his name in Adelaide and he apparently was employed by another photographer. The photographs of Aboriginal people and their artefacts included in Taplin’s The Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines (Adelaide 1879) have sometimes been attributed to Burnell, but Robert Holden has shown that the landscape frontispiece, at least, was taken by Samuel Sweet .
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
