professional photographer, jeweller, publican and farmer, was born of German parents in London on 29 December 1838. At the age of ten he came to South Australia with his father, Christian Ernest Moser, his mother having died while Herman was still a baby. They settled in Hindley Street, Adelaide, where Christian Moser established himself in business as a goldsmith. In the 1850s they returned to Germany, but Herman soon came back to Australia, choosing Victoria, obviously because of the discovery of gold, and establishing himself as a jeweller at Clunes, near Ballarat. On 18 October 1859 he married Jane Gill of Melbourne, giving his occupation on his son’s birth certificate the following year as hotelkeeper of the Burnt Bridge Hotel, Bunninyong. He was both a jeweller and publican at Clunes when his second son was born in 1864. In 1867 the family were living at nearby Creswick and Herman had opened a photographic studio. This quickly built up an excellent reputation.
In 1866 Moser was chosen by the Creswick shire and borough councils to photograph local views to be exhibited at Ballarat, then at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition; they were then sent on to the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition. After this success Moser was appointed official photographer for the Ballarat leg of the Duke of Edinburgh’s 1867 68 Australian tour. By then he was maintaining two portrait studios, one at Creswick and one at Daylesford (open Saturdays and Mondays only). After the royal tour he renamed his Daylesford premises in Burke Square the Royal Alfred Studio. He moved to Daylesford about 1871 and continued to take views for local councils throughout the district. In 1873 his photographs were shown at the Vienna Universal Exhibition. Sets of photographs he took for the Daylesford and Mount Franklin shire councils to send to the 1873 London International Exhibition were each awarded a gold medal.
Jane Moser had given birth to seven children before she died on 7 February 1873. After his remarriage later that year, to 17-year-old Elizabeth White, Moser’s family continued to grow. Altogether he had twenty or twenty-one children. Probably because of the need to support such a large family (at least fifteen children appear to have survived infancy), Moser turned to farming, an appropriate way of employing such a plentiful labour force. The last time his photographic studio at Daylesford is mentioned in council rate books is 1876. Soon afterwards the family moved to Echuca, then to a sheep station near Deniliquin, New South Wales. With the move to the land Moser seems to have abandoned professional photography; the photographer J.C. Moser who was working in the Deniliquin area in 1880-84 must have been a son.
The dairy and sheep property Moser ran for some years on Coobool Island in the Riverina, not far from Swan Hill, appears to have been a success. Shortly before his death he leased Coobool and purchased an orchard at Tyntynder South, naming this property Winterfold. Moser died at Tyntynder from tetanus following an accident to his hand on 31 August 1905. His obituary stated that he had been 'a man of straight and clean character, ever a true friend and generous opponent, large and warm-hearted and totally without guile … Genial and hearty to a degree, he was held in the highest esteem by a very large circle of friends’.
