I’m pretty sure that today marked the first time I’ve had to research an Australian. I could be wrong but I don’t remember having to do another so I’m going to live under the assumption that I’m right and go on from there.
It was a photograph. A photograph of a face I knew very well. His was the face on the back of the old $20 note – the paper ones not the new plastic ones which aren’t really new any more but newer than the paper ones which are no more. He was the man with the box kites, the father of aviation in Australia…even though he was originally from Greenwich and never felt completely Australian although he spent almost his entire life there. He is a name I remember from school. He was Lawrence Hargrave.
Although I created a record for Lawrence and researched him quite thoroughly, it’s not him I wanted to talk about. No, it was the guy who took the photograph. His name was Charles Kerry.
Charles was born in 1857 at Bobundra Station in the Monaro region of New South Wales. He ended up in Sydney where he figured he’d quite like to take up photography. He fell in with a chap by the name of Lamartiniere and, for a while, they worked well together. Then Lamartiniere convinced Charles to come into partnership with him. All he had to do was to buy in to the business with a small amount.
Charles went for it and very soon afterwards Lamartiniere went on the lam with all the dosh! But this didn’t phase Charles Kerry. He simply renamed the company and turned it into one of the biggest and best known photographic studios in Australia.
Not only was he a great businessman but he was also a fantastic photographer, making and selling those great carte-de-visite postcards that were all the rage in the late 19th century. And he brought the vision of Australia to the rest of the world as well as at home. He even went so far as to sell albums of high-quality pictures of the countryside to anyone, anywhere.
He was made official photographer to the governor general at one stage and even invented the first, very quick developing service by racing back to his studio between rounds of a big boxing match and putting the photos in his shop window.
By 1913, however, he decided to retire from the business and left it in the hands of the completely incapable hands of a relative who completely destroyed it in three years. Charles, on the other hand, in retirement decided to take up mining (as you do). He spent a lot of time in Malaya and Siam (as it was) and kept up the mining malarkey until his death.
One of the things I most liked about Charles was how he just hated getting bored. In 1897, for instance, he just took a group of mates and climbed Mt Kosciusko. This resulted in the opening up of skiing in the Snowy Mountains and there’s even a ski run named after him.
And he died as suddenly as he lived, dropping dead in his house in Neutral Bay in 1928.
Charles Kerry, a total Australian
And something I’ve just discovered, apparently Sir Frank Packer named his son ‘Kerry’ after him.