Henry Beaufoy Merlin: Australian showman and photographer

In 1951 one of Australia’s most significant collections of nineteenth century photographs was found in a garden shed in Chatswood, Sydney.

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Henry was the son of Frederik and Ann Harriett Merlin (Murlin) and was probably born in London in 1830. After the death of his father in 1845, he came to Sydney with his mother in December 1848.

In August 1852 Freeman’s Journal announced the opening of the Royal Marionette Theatre, in the saloon of the Royal Hotel, Sydney. These shows, popular in London, were a mixture of technology, farce and music which incorporated live actors, puppets, panoramas, magic lantern shows and song. In May 1853, a Henry Murlin took out a licence to establish a Marionette theatre in the old Olympic Circus building in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. A month later Murlin went on the road with the ‘burlesque theatre’ and held successful shows, which included a performance of Bombastes Furioso by William Rhodes.

Merlin then travelled to Maitland where he set up a theatre in High Street, Maitland in 1856 and started referring to himself Henry B. Muriel. The Following year, after the Maitland theatre burned to the ground, Merlin moved to Newcastle and worked as manager, actor and painter of scenery for the Newcastle Theatre.

In June 1858, he opened An Indian panorama a la Mont Blanc at the Lyceum Theatre in Sydney. The performance involved a series of scrolling panoramic scenes and projections over which a narrator would recount tales, offer scientific snippets, sing songs and offer humorous vignettes.

In 1865 Merlin moved away from theatrical presentations and in January 1865, under the name of H. Merlin, he opened the ‘Kyneton Photographic Studio’ in Piper Street, Kyneton, a small town in northern Victoria.

Merlin began advertising his services, taking photographs of public buildings and private residences, ‘at moderate terms and on the shortest notice’. By February 1869 his contemporaries were touting him as a successful travelling landscape photographer and on 21 June 1869, he formed the American and Australasian [sometimes recorded as Australian] Photographic Company (AAPC).

‘Mr. Merlin has armed himself with a beautiful frame of pictures to use as his credentials on making his first professional tour through this district and it is only common justice to say of these that they are pictures in the artistic sense of the word. The negatives he has taken have been forwarded to Melbourne to be printed, and will then be sent up for sale.’

Within a few short years the AAPC became a large and complicated business with Merlin at its centre. The large format camera used to take panoramic views of the city, the high-end finish of their painted photographs, the area covered by their workers and the scale of production pushed both the boundaries of the technology and the methodology traditionally used by photo studios in Australia.

On 27 November, Merlin left Sydney on the steamship Governor Blackall as a part of the Australian Solar Eclipse Expedition bound for Northern Queensland. Accompanying him on board were a ‘who’s who’ of Australia’s natural historians and scientists all of whom were travelling to Cape Sidmouth to view the solar eclipse on 12 December. Unfortunately, after they had set up their instruments on Eclipse Island the day proved too overcast for Merlin to take any successful photographs.

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Australian historians are remarkably lucky that one of Australia’s best-known landscape photographers, whose methodology was to photograph every building in a town, should arrive at the height of the gold boom with his cameras and equipment. For his part, Merlin seemed to have been captivated by the hustle and bustle of the towns, as well as the characters he met. He stayed in Hill End and documented the town and surrounding area for most of 1872 and returned off-and-on in 1873 to add to the collection.

The gold from the Star of Hope mine made Holtermann a very wealthy man and, by the end of December 1872, he left Hill End for his new home on the North Shore of Sydney. It was around this time that Merlin seems to have inspired Holtermann to start a new project. On 1 January 1873 several advertisements appeared in papers across the country describing a new and ambitious scheme to promote Australia to the world:

‘Holtermann’s Intercolonial Exposition of the Australian Colonies. … The undersigned, in directing public attention to the above outline of a projected display of the country’s industrial resources, cannot lose the opportunity of bearing testimony to the liberal spirit in which Mr. Holtermann has entered into this undertaking.’

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