The Holtermann Photographic Collection at the State Library of NSW
We are very fortunate to have a significant photographic record of people and places in Hill End & Tambaroora between 1872 and 1875. The full story of the collection and biographies of those associated with it can be found at the website dedicated to Keast Burke. His initial work with this collection has helped make it available to us today.
Bernardt O. Holtermann ON 4 Box 23 No 777 Digital order no: a2823861
The State Library of New South Wales has provided an overview of this collection in one of their Discover collections. This is well worth a look.
Accessing the Holtermann Collection at the SLNSW (July 2021)
There are a couple of ways of viewing the collection. If you want to just browse the entire collection of 3500 glass plate negatives, then go to the State Library website https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/ and select “Digital Collections” from the 2 tab options given at the top of the page.
Where it says “Enter a Keyword” type in “American & Australasian Photographic” in inverted commas. This will bring up the entire collection for you to browse through.
If you want to search for specific images, you can then filter the search by adding Tambaroora or “Hill End” also in inverted commas to just view those that have been identified as coming from Hill End etc.
Depending on your search terms you will get a different number of results:
e.g.
Showing 1 – 100 out of 115 grouped results for “American Australasian photographic” “Hill End” “Tambaroora”
Showing 1 – 100 out of 172 grouped results for “American Australasian photographic” “Tambaroora”
Showing 1 – 100 out of 686 grouped results for “American Australasian photographic” “Hill End”
Search the collection for specific locations or family names.
e.g. “American & Australasian Photographic” Mobbs
To search for individual family surnames, add the name after “American Australasian photographic”. Searching just on the family name and then selecting the appropriate ones can provide better results than putting in a full name. Keyword searching relies on the search terms that you have entered appearing in the catalogue entry somewhere. Hence “less is best” may provide more results.
Don’t forget to search on alternative spellings of names as well.
Once the results of your search appear on the screen, you can select any that you wish to view more closely.
As you move your mouse over each image the caption will appear. To view more details about each image, click on that image and it will take you to the actual photograph and the individual catalogue entry which may give you more information about the image.
Use your mouse scroll button or the buttons on the screen to move around and zoom in on the photograph where the most amazing details can be seen.
Right click on the photo and you get a number of options for saving the image to your computer wherever you keep your photos for later viewing.
