Queen Mary and King Billy outside their mia miac. 1880
This photograph shows an Indigenous couple sitting in front of their bark shelter (mia mia). The female (identified as Queen Mary) holds a woven basket. The male figure wears a king plate that identifies him as King Billy. Some sources identify this particular King Billy (a frequently used sobriquet in the nineteenth century) as King Billy of Ulupna on the Murray River.
Fred Kruger took photographs of Indigenous Australians throughout his career. His most substantial work on this subject was produced around 1877 and 1883 when he was working on behalf of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines (BPA) at Coranderrk Station outside Melbourne. The BPA required visual propaganda that would present the troubled and contentious settlement of Indigenous Australians in a positive light. Kruger responded to this brief in a range of ways, with studio-style portraits, staged re-enactments of traditional activities, and sweeping vistas of contemporary life on the settlement. Commentators have noted the subtle and sometimes contradictory ways that Kruger’s Coranderrk photographs tell the story of a transition from ‘savage’ to civilised.
This photograph is one of a number of portraits staged in front of the mia mia that some residents continued to inhabit at Coranderrk. The inclusion of both tradition and modern utensils, along with the opposition between Indigenous architecture and pastoral landscape, captures a sense of Indigenous life being in a state of transition.
(2014)
The albumen print was invented in about 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802–72), and was prevalent until about 1890. An albumen print is created by floating a thin sheet of paper in a bath of beaten egg white and salt, making the paper’s surface glossy and smooth. Once dried, the paper is then sensitised with a layer of silver nitrate before being dried again, this time in the dark. The now light-sensitive paper is then pressed against a glass or waxed paper negative and exposed to sunlight for a few minutes or hours, allowing an image to form on the paper. The print is then fixed in a solution and washed thoroughly. Albumen prints can be toned during processing for colour variations. After 1855 they were often toned with gold chloride in order to enrich their colour and increase their permanence.
Albumen prints can be distinguished by the yellow or yellowish-brown stains that appear in the whites and highlight areas. They are also often adhered to a backing board due to the fragile nature of the paper used for their production.