H. H. Tilbrook
Henry Hammond Tilbrook (1848–1937) was a Welsh-born Australian landscape photographer, inventor and traveller, who later in life co-founded the Northern Argus newspaper in the Clare region of South Australia. Biography Tilbrook was born in Llandudno, Wales, in 1848. His father was a gamekeeper originally from Weston Colville, Cambridgeshire. When Tilbrook was about six years old, the family sailed to South Australia on the Albermarle. He worked for a short time as a typesetter at the Register in Adelaide, as well as working as a lamb minder for a short time. Enticed by the gold rush at the time, Tilbrook moved to New Zealand to try to make a living prospecting. After having no luck with gold, he moved on to work for the Grey River Argus in Greymouth. Shortly after returning from New Zealand, Tilbrook founded the Northern Argus newspaper in Clare. On 19 February 1869, when he was 21, the first edition was published. On 1 January 1870 he married Marianne Clode in Noah, Adelaide. Marianne Clode was the daughter of Richard and Charlotte Clode from Windsor in England. Tilbrook died on 9 September 1937 in St Peters. Photography In 1870, Tilbrook took up photography. He practiced the dry plate method. When he retired to East Adelaide in 1891 photography had become his full-time focus. Tilbrook was a keen believer in photography as an accurate and clear way to record images, and was always concerned with the quality and composition of his works. Tilbrook disliked the photography of the then new South Australian Photographic Society, especially artists like John Kauffmann and Frederick Joyner, whose pictorialist photographs would usually be blurred and "fuzzy". While speaking of one of his own photographs which during exposure had been affected by wind, Tilbrook said "in fact it was of the fuzzy order of photography - a thing to be avoided and shunned, even banned.’" He believed that to truly portray the beauty of the Australian landscape, his images needed to be sharp and focused. Photographic excursions During retirement, Tilbrook went on various photographic trips between 1894 and 1905 throughout the Australian outback to document the landscape. Travelling mainly around the Mount Gambier and Flinders Ranges areas, he also ventured to many other smaller towns and regions. Tilbrook never made any commercial gains from the photographs he took on his trips; however, some of his prints were supplied to the railway department in 1901 to decorate the walls of train carriages. Whilst photography was Tilbrook's main goal for the trips, he was also a keen hunter; and most of his early trips were primarily for hunting. These hunting trips gave Tilbrook the inspiration to take his camera along to future excursions. In his diary, he speaks of his 1894 trip to the Flinders Ranges: "although I took my combined hammerless gun and rifle with me, I decided as my main objective to obtain photographic records of the scenes of our explorations." While on his photographic excursions, he would often spend time on his own