The Holtermann rephotographs
In the mid-1970s, Sue Ford first exhibited her Time series. These photographs, straightforward mugshots of herself, her friends and acquaintances, are fascinating documentations of the changes wrought by time. In three or four frames, people grow older before our eyes. Television 's "Seven-Up" documentaries brought the process to life, tracing the progress of a group of English school children into adulthood.
John Grech's Holtermann Rephotographs series applies this principle to geographical location, looking at what a hundred years has done to a particular area of New South Wales. And this is a particular area. Hill End, which was once (if you believe the legend) the largest inland city in Australia, is today along with its neighbour, Gulgong, a virtual ghost town. That fact alone gives this little group of settlements a special place in Australian folklore. We retain today a kind of nineteenth-century moral fascination with the spectre of the boom-town gone bust, with all its Ruskinian overtones of the frailty of human endeavour. The fall from grace of Hill End has an almost biblical dimension. Human greed and ambition will be punished and nature will emerge triumphant in the end. it's the sort of stuff that Romanticism is made of.
Fortuitously, from an historical point of view, Hill End and Gulgong are also two of the most thoroughly documented nineteenth-century Australian rural towns, thanks to a gold-wealthy citizen named Otto Holtermann. Holtermann commissioned the American and Australasian Photographic Company to document the entire area, street by street, in 1872-3 and the company's photographers, Beaufoy Merlin and his assistant, Charles Bayliss, put together an archive of over three-thousand images. The Holtermann Collection, now in the State Library of New South