The Intercolonial Exhibition (1866): Representing the colony of Victoria

Abstract

The Victorian colonial experience was one of disruption where settlers, who uprooted themselves from Europe and other parts of the globe, found themselves in unsettled circumstances. By contrast, nineteenth-century Europe conceived itself in terms of settled traditions.1 If photography depicted the colonial and the European in terms of the foreign and the familiar, both colonial and European photography reflect the disruption which was part of modernity. However, colonial photography presents a different representation of modernity from Europe where the new erased the old, as with Charles Marville's photographic portrayal of the ‘Haussmannisation’ of 1860s' Paris.2 In colonial circumstances, the photographic view works on a number of levels. Colonial photography, while sharing a sense of progress conceived of in terms of European time and space, simultaneously figures displacement from Europe. It is these intersections between European and colonial discourse that this paper will examine.