The Unofficial Guide to the Thames Goldfield - Ten Vignettes

Richard (Dick) Wilkins In this series of posts, I will assemble my research on the Thames Goldfields.  There is no central theme and I have just picked aspects that interested me, hence the term “Vignettes”.  There may well be ten, there could be more or less.  Why do it?  Very good question, but a few years ago I realised that there are few people left with any kind of first hand knowledge of Thames in the 1950s when it was still “semi-raw” with evidence of the mining days still visible in the town and the hills. Our family was somewhat unique (some would say unusual) in that the Residence Site(s) occupied by my great grandfather Richard Ross from 1867 on Eureka Hill were still occupied by the Ross family until 1966 – some forty years after all other families had left for the township. Richard Ross was an old fashioned patriarch, often called “King Dick” and behind his back some of the family referred to him as a “Prodigious Progenitor”.  I cannot claim either ...

Richard (Dick) Wilkins Introduction When photographers came to Thames in the late 1860s, the bulk of their business was portraiture.  Pictorial photography was not common, whether it be of street scenes around the town or, occasionally, of remote areas of the Goldfields, for the simple reason that it was not a financially attractive activity.  The only real source of income from pictorial photography was selling postcards produced by contact printing;  fortunately, many of these survive today and are of surprisingly good quality.  Taking photographs more than a few hundred metres from the studio involved the transport of bulky items including a darkroom, camera, tripod etc and photographic plates had to be prepared and developed on site. In the first part of this article, I will discuss the cumbersome techniques using wet plate photography that were employed until almost the end of the 19th Century when dry photographic plates were introduced. Despite these limitatio...