The Queen's Album

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a kind of ‘open scholarship’. Through this process,
we established The Queen’s Album Trove list,
which collated a selection of the articles that had
assisted us in our research (see https://trove.nla.
gov.au/list?id=125289). As we reappraised articles,
one from the Evening News on 19 April 1882 stood
out. It noted that when the Agent General, Saul
Samuel, presented the album to Queen Victoria
on 27 February, it was accompanied by ‘a watercolour
drawing of the town and harbour of Sydney,
which her Majesty was graciously pleased to accept’.
A recent search of the Royal Collection Trust
catalogue for watercolours from the period
revealed Sydney: the town and harbour, 1879,
by Edward Baker Boulton. This, it would seem,
was the ‘drawing’ presented to Victoria with the
album. The whereabouts of the album, however,
at this point, remains unknown.
Post-colonialism has ushered in a rethinking
of the role and authority of State-run cultural
institutions, particularly in relation to how
collections have been developed and interpreted
through practices and frameworks that have their
roots in a 19 th Century world view. In this context,
publics are passive recipients to be imparted with
an institution’s knowledge, expertise and power:
to be ‘educated’ and ‘civilised’. Contemporary
approaches, however, see the public and audiences
as partners; co-contributors to research,
interpretation and knowledge-making. Social
media and other interactive online spaces provide
a vehicle for institutions to open up a dialogue with
the public, with the aim of enhancing and sharing
the knowledge and understanding that they have of
their collections. This is the approach that we have
adopted here. A social media campaign has been
put into place inviting the public to help us solve
the mystery of the Queen’s album. A series of posts
that link to The Queen’s Album Trove list compel
our ‘sleuths’ to read, transcribe, share and tag
reports and accounts of the album. It is anticipated
that word of our quest will spread, fuelled by the
interest in the 200 th anniversary of the birth of
Queen Victoria and the renewed popularity that her
descendants—the current British Royal Family—are
now enjoying. We hope that someone, somewhere,
will know where the album is. Then, we can reunite
it with the people of NSW.
A REIMAGINING:
THE QUEEN’S ALBUM
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland, ruled from 20 June 1837
to 22 January 1901. In NSW, her 63 year reign
overarched and shaped fundamental social,
political, cultural and economic developments.
The Colony, which had been established to exile
and punish Britain’s felons, transformed itself
from a penal experiment to a free and enterprising
society during Victoria’s rule. It built its success
on the land’s natural resources—while dispossessing
Indigenous people of their lands and culture—and
the adoption of technological advancements made
possible by the Industrial Revolution. In NSW
and other ‘colonial possessions’, progress was
to be celebrated and expressed through symbols
of civilisation: edifices constructed to promote
knowledge, engineering feats, scientific inquiry,
the cultivation of nature and displays of Imperial
power and benevolence.
Victoria never visited NSW or Australia, instead
relying on reports from her envoys and extended
family members who did. She understood the
Colony through the lens of others. Sir Henry Parkes
sought to advance the narrative of progress to
the Queen, and in doing so, receive Her Majesty’s
affirmation that NSW was an exemplar of Empire
and loyalty to the Crown.
Photography, which was fast-evolving in its
technology and popularity in the late-19 th
Century, offered not only the means to faithfully
represent a subject, but one which could be
shaped towards an aesthetic or agenda.
As we interpret the photographs in the Queen’s