Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer, composer, music and language teacher, author, civil engineer and soldier, was born in Rozsnyo, Hungary. After training as a civil engineer he joined the Hungarian forces in the uprising against the Austrian Empire in 1848, becoming aide-de-camp with the rank of captain to General Görgey. With the failure of the revolution Rochlitz fled with others to Hamburg, Germany, in 1849, and from there to England in 1850 where he found work as a language teacher. When the British government offered the Hungarian refugees a subsidy of £12 to emigrate, Rochlitz was one of the twelve who chose Victoria rather than the United States. In company with Ernest (Erno) Szumrak, he embarked in the Marlborough on 1 August 1852.

On landing at Melbourne, Rochlitz and Szumrak travelled with five companions to the Mount Alexander (Castlemaine) diggings. They had no luck and the group broke up. Szumrak and his two new partners soon struck it rich with a nugget weighing over 9 pounds; Rochlitz, instead, had set up a photographic studio in a 'two storied wooden house’ near the Golden Fleece Hotel, Lydiard Street, Ballarat. He ran this business in 1854-55 but in 1856 sold it to Cowley and J. Noble Wilson, remaining as their assistant for some months. Later that year he moved to Beechworth and formed the photographic partnership of Acley & Rochlitz in Ford Street. A display of their cartes-de-visite of Beechworth is in the local Robert O’Hara Burke Memorial Museum.

When naturalised in 1857 Rochlitz gave his profession as that of civil engineer. In 1858, however, he was still working as a photographer, travelling around southern New South Wales and visiting rural properties on speculation with his equipment. He recorded that his clients 'always treated me as a gentleman’. His brother Koloman (Kalman) reached Melbourne on 25 January 1860 and was registered as a medical practitioner on 26 July 1862, by which time Rochlitz was also living in Melbourne, teaching music and languages and composing his Geelong-Melbourne Railway Polka. He had left Victoria by 1864 and by 1866 was in London, where he published Love Letters for the Lovers of Truth. Kunz believes that this pamphlet indicates that he was 'suffering from schizophrenic delusions’, yet the following year he returned to Hungary and took up a teaching position in the English Department of the University of Budapest. He died at Budapest in 1886.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011