Basedow collection history

Piecing together the clues to Basedow’s life – and the photographs in the Institute’s collection – was a painstaking process. The documentation of the photographs was limited and in many cases did not include anything more than Basedow’s name. The prints mounted on card were mostly of Aboriginal people but there were also some of non-Aboriginal subjects. As I better understood Basedow’s work it became apparent that, apart from a small group of family photographs, the photographs were all related to his expeditions. This insight had been partly masked because the prints had been arranged by subject. When I decided to reorganise the photographs by expedition, it was a major breakthrough, for now the images were arranged by place and time, and related photographs could be grouped together, even if they showed different subjects.

Given the dearth of documentation, this was no easy task. As I became more familiar with the photographs, trends became apparent. The same people and vehicles, for example, featured in a range of photographs. Also, Basedow had published many of the images and from these I had a base group for reference. The Institute had some of Basedow’s publications and I began to locate others. He published widely, in anthropology in particular, but also geology and, early in his career, zoology. Photographs were included in most of his publications. I also consulted his papers at the Mitchell Library in Sydney and books of newspaper cuttings relating to Basedow at the State Library of South Australia.

During this research I discovered more photographs that could be attributed to particular expeditions among the negatives and slides that had not been printed. The Institute had its own dark room, so I began to make prints of photographs that had not been printed.

Over the next few years I continued to build a profile of this fascinating man. At the Mitchell Library, which holds most of Basedow’s papers, I trawled through Basedow’s prints, some loose and some in albums, gleaning what information I could to assist in documenting the photographs. I soon noticed inconsistencies in the labelling of some of the prints in the library and that the documentation contained errors. To compound the problem, the Institute had borrowed Basedow’s papers from the library in the 1960s and had incorporated these inaccuracies onto the records. So the task of improving the documentation now included working out what information was correct and what was not. The errors included incorrect dates and placements; in others it was the subject of the photograph. Unfortunately, some of these mistakes found their way into Basedow’s second book, Knights of the Boomerang, published two years after his death. These errors were made by whoever labelled the prints, not by Basedow.*

Once Basedow’s publications and papers had been consulted, there were still many photographs that remained undocumented. It was now time for some lateral thinking. I noticed that some of the negative forms were glass and some were film, and that they came in many sizes. This reflected Basedow’s use of different cameras at different times, and the fact that sometimes he took more than one camera on an expedition. Eventually, I worked out which negative forms related to which expedition. Occasionally a negative form was specific to one expedition while some were used on several different trips. This is where knowledge of who the people were in the images or the landscapes depicted proved useful. For example, the square format film negative was used on four expeditions between 1903 and 1926; two in central Australia and two in the far north. In each case the personnel and modes of transport were different, as was the nature of the country between the two regions. Once the expedition was determined, at the very least this provided a year and approximate location of where the photographs were taken.