Adelaide panorama
A Snapshot of Adelaide in 1865
In 1865, the year of the second voyage of the 'City of Adelaide' to South Australia, the colony's leading photographer of the time, Townsend Duryea, took a series of photographs that captured the development of colonial Adelaide.
He climbed on to scaffolding surrounding the newly completed tower of the Adelaide Town Hall for a bird's-eye view of the surroundings.
Starting in the morning, he worked his way around the tower in an anti-clockwise direction to avoid shooting directly into the sun. He then joined the 14 pictures to form a panorama of the growing colonial city.
But even an early experimenter such as Duryea would have been amazed to discover the fate of his handiwork more than 130 years later. Thanks to Adelaide multimedia company Fusion Design Consultants, Duryea's panorama has now entered the world of virtual reality.
Fusion's staff worked with the State History Centre to produce an interactive Virtual Reality program that allows viewers to spin the circular panorama and relive 1865 Adelaide. Hotspots developed by Fusion give users small nuggets of information on buildings and other landmarks.
The idea for a digital panorama came from State History Centre staff when it seemed the original could not find a home. Although it was eventually displayed in the Adelaide Arcade, Fusion staff decided to go ahead with the project as a promotion, as well as a prototype showing what could be done with the huge archives at the history centre.
The Passion for Panoramas
The first panorama was exhibited at the end of the eighteenth century by Robert Barker, who also coined the name. He painted an all-round view of Edinburgh from the highest spot in the city, which he exhibited in London in 1789. It was such a success that he built a huge brick rotunda near Leicester Square to show other panoramas, including one of London and scenes from Napoleon’s battles.
Barker started a craze for panoramas which spread to Europe and the United States and Australia and continued throughout the nineteenth century. Moving panoramas, sometimes called dioramas, also became popular. A continuous scene was painted on a giant roll of canvas and passed slowly from one roller to another before the audience. It can be seen as a nineteenth century forerunner to motion pictures.
The Duryea Panorama
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The Duryea Panorama was not painted but made up of a series of photographs. Townsend Duryea took this circular view of Adelaide late in 1865. His pictures, fourteen in all, were taken from the scaffolding around the newly completed tower of the Adelaide Town Hall.
He began in the morning, facing north, and worked his way around the tower in an anti-clockwise direction to avoid the sun shining into his camera lens. Joined together, the pictures give a bird’s view of colonial Adelaide.
Many prints of Duryea’s panorama were sold in the 1860s. The 1986 version, the first ever displayed in the round, was the brainchild of Dr. John Tregenza, then the History Trust Historian. He used new transparencies photographed from a set of Duryea’s original prints held in the Mortlock Library.
The 1986 version first appeared in the Jubilee 150 Treasures Room at the Mortlock Library. It was moved to Old Parliament House in 1991.
The History Trust of South Australia conceived the idea of a version of the panorama when it seemed that no suitable space could be found in Adelaide for the 1986 version.
The 1865 Duryea Panorama has been rejuvenated by Fusion as an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) experience for the digital age. This new media presentation allows the viewer to explore the panorama and gain an insight into the various landmarks of Adelaide in 1865.
(The source for the information on this webpage and the Vitual Reality version of the Duryea Panorama have been provided with the kind permision of Fusion.)
Who was Townsend Duryea?
Townsend Duryea was born in Long Island, New York in 1823. He was trained as a mining engineer, then took up photography. He left the United States for Melbourne in 1852 and three years later moved to Adelaide where he soon became the colony's leading photographer.
When Queen Victoria's son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh visited Adelaide in 1867, he chose Duryea to be his official photographer. Duryea's studio was on the corner of Grenfell and King William Streets. In 1875 a spectacular fire destroyed both the studio and Duryea’s entire collection of 50,000 glass plate negatives. He gave up professional photography and moved to the Riverina in NSW, where he farmed until he died in 1888.
What method did he use?
The panorama was photographed using the wet-plate process. This had replaced the Daguerreotype because any number of prints could be made from the negative plate. Daguerre’s process (the first practical photographic technique) produced only a positive print, which could not be copied.
The wet-plate process required a portable darkroom for any outdoor photography because if the plate dried between exposure and development, it was ruined. Duryea must have taken his darkroom with him up the Town Hall tower so that he could develop each picture as soon as it was exposed. It must have been a nerve-racking process.
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