John Hunter Kerr

John Hunter Kerr: Photographer | Next article | 71 John Hunter Kerr: Photographer - No 76 Spring 2005 - La Trobe Journal State Library of Victoria > La Trobe Journal
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John Hunter Kerr: Photographer This Paper will attempt to describe what is currently known about the photographic images attributed to John Hunter Kerr. While there is definite information about the technical specifications of the photographic prints themselves, by whom and where they were printed is open to conjecture, and the conclusions presented here may change as further evidence becomes available. John Hunter Kerr (c. 1821â€"1874) arrived in the colony as a young man of eighteen, but after some farming experience he returned home to Scotland and his family for two further years.
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Kerr renamed the property ‘Fernyhurst’. The partnership did not flourish and they were forced to sell to an agricultural investment company in 1855. Kerr may have stayed on as manager until 1859, but by 1861, when he married Frances Murphy, he was living in the Wimmera region.
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Kerr is well documented as a keen amateur photographer in both contemporary and historical sources.
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However, in recent publications on photography, Kerr continues to be unrecognised as the photographer for the series of photographs taken at ‘Fernyhurst’. In 2004 a collection of three hundred nineteenth-century photographs on the Aboriginal peoples of Oceania was offered for sale at the 20th International Antiquarian Book Fair, in Melbourne. Listed, and illustrated in the catalogue, as no 27 was a salt paper print titled Groupe d'aborigines sous un campement, Australie avant 1860, (Group of Aborigines in Camp, Australia, before 1860).4 The photographer of this salt paper print is listed as ‘Anonyme’, although this image is instantly recognisable as one of the depictions of Aboriginal people at ‘Fernyhurst’ where Kerr lived from 1849 to the 1850s. The photograph's cardboard mount has been annotated with the word ‘Victorian’. Confusion over the identification of Kerr as the photographer of this group of images has probably occurred for a number of reasons. Kerr was considered to be an ‘amateur photographer’ and there is no record known of him exhibiting or publishing images under his own name during his lifetime. Many of the known prints of his work are not contemporary with the date the photographs were taken, but were most probably printed later by other photographers or by commercial photographic printers. These later prints, produced using photographic techniques not available when Kerr was
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Photographs which can be attributed to John Hunter Kerr Images of the early white settlement at ‘Fernyhurst’, and photographs of the local Aboriginal population of the Loddon region, are known through two collections in the La Trobe Picture Collection.
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Photographic techniques used by John Hunter Kerr and later prints of his photographs Kerr was living at ‘Fernyhurst’ from 1849 to the late 1850s, during the infancy of photography. Unfortunately, he did not document his photographic techniques, leaving only general references to his hobby. Until the early 1850s the only photographic technique available to Kerr would have been the calotype photographic process, which used paper negatives and contact prints such as prints on salted paper.
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It cannot be ascertained with accuracy if Kerr was the photographer. All other photographic prints in these collections were produced as contact prints from collodion wet plate negatives, using either salted paper or the albumen silver printing process. Use of wet plate collodian negatives was introduced to Australia after 1851, and this fact establishes the date of photographs of ‘Fernyhurst’ subjects as being from approximately 1853 until the late 1850s when Kerr left ‘Fernyhurst’.11 It seems most likely that Kerr used this photographic process to produce these images. He may, of course, have experimented earlier with the calotype process. Over thirty different ‘Fernyhurst’ images are known. It is an impressive achievement that Kerr was able to produce so
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Kerr was an amateur photographer and his photographs are far from technically perfect. His lack of technical skills may mar the quality of the images, but they do help identify the photographs as being by the same photographer. Many of his images show a characteristic lens aberration, since he was unable to focus the entire image across the width of the photographic plate. As might be expected, Kerr has chosen to focus the centre of his image and leave the periphery out of focus. In many of his landscape images, there is a characteristic blur on the periphery.
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I am also grateful to Elizabeth Willis, Senior Curator at Museum Victoria, who introduced me to the work of John Hunter Kerr, and to the conundrum of the Lang and Priston Albums.
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Appendix 1: Photographs attributed to John Hunter Kerr in La Trobe Picture Collection
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John Hunter Kerr, Glimpses of Life in Victoria: by ‘A Resident’, Introduction by Marguerite Hancock, Carlton Victoria, Miegunyah Press, 1996.
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John Hunter Kerr, Glimpses of life in Victoria: by ‘A Resident’, Introduction by Marguerite Hancock, Carlton Victoria, Miegunyah Press, 1996. p. 17.
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John Hunter Kerr, Glimpses of life in Victoria: by ‘A Resident’, 1996.
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26â€"27, where in the text salt paper prints, are attributed to John Hunter Kerr but the image caption credits ‘Montagu Eugene Scott’ [sic] as the photographer.

My name is John Kerr, freelance photographer and owner of Blazing Star Photography, Great Ayton, North Yorkshire.

John Hunter Kerr, the photographer, was a squatter who took up the land in 1849, acquiring an existing station, ‘Edgar's Run’, and re-naming it ‘Fernyhurst’ after the Kerr clan's ancestral castle in the Scottish borders. (There are several variants of the spelling of the name: unlike the present owners, Kerr used ‘Fernyhurst’, and his usage has been followed here.) Kerr, aged 28 and then unmarried, was in partnership with Robert Neill, and they ran sheep and cattle on the land.
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Kerr had previous experience of squatting, as he had first taken up land on the Yarra in 1840. He was a ‘gentleman squatter’, the great-nephew and namesake of Vice-Admiral John Hunter; and he later became a local magistrate and joined the Melbourne Club. His colourful autobiography, published in 1872,2 reveals a man with a lively sense of curiosity who was observant of and sensitive to his new environment. He wrote about the beauties of the bush and its dangers, work routines on the station, bushrangers, the impact of the gold rushes, and the experience of being part of a new colony.
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At Fernyhurst, Kerr knew numbers of Indigenous people. Aborigines, probably mainly from the Dja Dja Wurrung tribal groups that Kerr called ‘the Loddon and Murray tribes’, camped close to his house. Kerr recognised that they ‘revisit[ed] periodically the spots which had been their old hunting grounds’, to hunt in the traditional manner and also to receive food and other support from the squatters.6 By the mid 1840s, well before Kerr settled on the land, virtually all the Dja Dja Wurrung's traditional lands had been taken up by squatters.
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Kerr employed some of the men as shepherds and drovers, and others acted as guides to European travellers.

Kerr seems to have had good relationships with the Indigenous people. In his autobiography, he described his interest in his ‘Aboriginal neighbours’, and claimed to have been ‘always on very friendly terms’ with them. He wrote of being invited to join in their hunting expeditions for kangaroo, possum, and wild turkey. He was honoured by being invited to attend many of their ceremonies, including corroborees and the burial of an elder; he later sensitively described the people's grief and the funeral rituals. He described family relationships within the tribe, and the people's work, trading routes, daily life and beliefs. When Kerr wrote about Aboriginal ‘treachery’ and ‘cruelty’, he was generally summarising events that had been reported by other Europeans. In contrast, he described the trustworthiness, ‘natural quickness, and aptitude to learn’ of many of the Indigenous people he knew.10 R.E.Johns, who met Kerr at the Sandhurst Exhibition, recognised Kerr's interest and expertise as an observer of Aboriginal life and traditions.11 Kerr was interested â€" how could he be otherwise? â€" in how European settlement was affecting the Indigenous people. His first contact with Indigenous people was in 1839; ten years later he met a different group on the Loddon, and was able to make some comparisons. He shared the prevailing European belief that colonisation meant that ‘the doom of their race was fixed’. But he looked at the people around him through the lens of someone seeking to understand and record the transition from what he called ‘the savage pur et simple’ to a people ‘undergoing a great change of habits and character since their intercourse with white men’.12

The photographs: why and for whom were they taken? Photography was introduced to Melbourne in 1845, when George Goodman gave the first demonstrations of the new ‘sun pictures’.13 Kerr, a ‘gentleman amateur’, was fascinated by the new invention, and was well-placed to experiment with its marvellous possibilities.
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They were probably taken over a period of several years.15 Kerr initially made contact prints from glass negatives on salted paper. Later, further prints were made from his negatives, using the albumen silver process.16 Kerr records that his major purpose was ‘to take a likeness’ of the Indigenous people. He described their love of bright colours, their capacity for imitation, and how they appropriated with ‘great pride and exultation’ articles of clothing discarded by Europeans.17 In this context, he wrote that ‘The vanity of the natives was always flattered by an offer to take their likeness, and they were patient sitters for photography.
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It is not clear whether Kerr intended the images to be initially for any other audience. Kerr's correspondence with family in Scotland has not been traced, so we do not know if he sent copies of the images to them, or, like John Cotton, tried to sell the images through his British connections.20 The prints seem to have circulated to a very limited extent. None of his photographs are known to have become the basis of illustrations in Victorian illustrated papers at the time. They are not mentioned by any other contemporary writer about Victorian Aborigines, or in any other Victorian memoir. Perhaps Kerr kept control over the distribution of the photographs because, like Charles Walter, he ‘did not wish his black friends to be sold in every shop at the rate of sixpence each!’21 Salted paper prints of some of Kerr's photographs, including five of Indigenous people, were stuck into an album compiled by squatter Alexander Denistoun Lang that was completed before 1870.22 Lang may have met Kerr at the Melbourne Club, as they were both members in the 1850s.
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At some time probably during the early 1860s, Kerr took some at least of his glass negatives to Eugene Montagu Scott, a photographer in Collins Street, who made them into salted paper prints within cardboard mounts.23 The surviving mounts are all titled and marked in Kerr's handwriting: ‘Fernyhurst/Australia Felix/ JHK’.
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The Howitt family may have obtained them through their friend, F.R.Godfrey, who was Kerr's neighbour.24 Two of Kerr's images are held in the Oxley Library, in an album of photographs attributed to Richard Daintree that was donated by the Daintree family in the 1960s.25 Daintree left Victoria in January 1865, and the Kerr photographs were probably in his possession by then.
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Photography was only one medium that Kerr used to record Aboriginal life. He tried his hand at drawing, and his pen and ink sketch of one of the older women is now held by the Dixon Library.28 He also collected examples of tools, weapons, toys and art works from the Indigenous
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Kerr took landscapes, long-range views, individual portraits, and close-ups. Some of the photographs seem to have been taken in sequence, with a clear comparative aim. He also took more casual shots, where the people are not so obviously posing, although they must have been conscious of being photographed. Kerr experimented with different effects, and at one stage â€" probably later in the 1850s â€" nailed canvas to the wall of a slab hut and posed people against it, in an attempt to increase the reflected light on the faces of his subjects. In the following discussion, the groupings are mine; we do not know the order in which Kerr took the photographs.
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Figure 3, entitled (not by Kerr) ‘Lubras in Mia Mia’, is a group of women and girls in a different bark shelter.
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However, artists illustrated the camps of Europeans in the bush or on the road, and Kerr may have thought of this image as in the same genre. In Figure 6 two women â€" who also appear in Figures 7 and 8 â€" sit near the remains of a campfire. An empty wine bottle lies near a third woman who is lying on the ground. Kerr commented that ‘When the diggings broke out, the propensity of the natives for strong drink was greatly increased by the facility with which they could obtain it. Its effect on their constitution was most pernicious, and greatly contributed to the rapid diminution of their numbers.’ Did the photographer deliberately intend in this photograph to record this tragedy? Figure 7, entitled ‘Natives quarrelling’, later became an engraving with the same title. It is a posed battle that was used in 1872 to illustrate Kerr's description of a fight between two men when their father ‘King William’ died. There is a disparity between the ritualised but real violence that Kerr described and the equanimity of those posing here.
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Kerr was unique among the collectors of Aboriginal material culture in the 1850s as he collected items used by women and children, as well as those used by men.32 The two children seem confident in front of the camera and happy to stay still long enough for the exposure to be completed. In Figure 13, a young girl lies in front of a bark shelter, posed with her head on her hand. She wears a woven rope necklace and has a grass basket that women and children used for carrying food. She has nestled modestly into her cloak, and she looks openly up into the camera lens. The image might have been sexually provocative because of her unclothed upper body, but was it designed to be? In contrast to Antoine Eauchery, who posed a pubes

Photographer: John Kerr

John Hunter Kerr: Photographer

Photographer: John Kerr

This article was researched by John Kerr, a freelance writer and websmith.
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Christina Elvin can be contacted by e-mail: elvin@oes.compulink.co.uk; John Kerr welcomes visitors to his website: http://www.manyagem.com or e-mail john@manyagem.com.

The CANEGROWERS Council, in recognition of Sir Joseph McAvoy's contribution to sugar industry progress, commissioned historical writer John Kerr to examine his career.