"This collection of glass plate negatives consists largely of illustrations used within various books written by Australian author Ion "Jack" Idriess (1890-1979). Other plates in the collection contain images covering several themes, including Australian authors and other notable personalities and sailing ships from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ion Idriess served at Gallipoli and in the Middle East during World War I. Both before and after the war he travelled extensively throughout Australia, working in a variety of occupations including mining, boundary-riding, crocodile hunting, and droving. Much of Idriess' work is autobiographical, coloured by his own experiences of the place, industry or people he was writing about. From his forewords, it becomes apparent that some of the photographs used to illustrate Idriess' books were taken by Idriess himself, although the specific details necessary to assign creatorship to each image are lacking. Consequently, the captions for most of these negatives do not contain a creator field. Illustrations from the following titles are included within this collection: Back O' Cairns, Drums of Mer, Forty fathoms deep, Lightning Ridge, Man tracks, Our living stone age, Our stone age mystery, and The silver city. For individual images, the name of the book (if known) that the image was published in has been provided, as well as the earliest edition that it can be found in, the page number, etc. The caption that was published with the image is used as the title, with additional information added where necessary (and when available!). This information has been collected via an exhaustive search of Ion Idriess publications held by the National Library of Australia. Because the National Library of Australia does not hold every Idriess title, or every edition of every title, it is possible that some of the images without publication information were indeed published. As a rule, in the case of images that appear to be unpublished, if the plate itself contains a caption that caption (in full) has been used as the title. Titles such as Argent St Broken Hill No 70 burnt Nov 5 1888 are the result ... "No 70" likely refers to Idriess' own numbering system for his plates. Those without any caption accompanying the image have been given descriptive titles, based upon the contents of the image."--Acquisition documentation.
In some captions Mer refers to Murray Island and Eroob to Darnley Island, both of which are Torres Strait Islands.
Find in other libraries at Trove