Album of Cave Photographs.

£2,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A fine group of images of the interior of caves in Hastings in the south of Tasmania and Mole Creek, which is just to the west of Launceston. The sixty images here includes interiors of King George’s Cave, Newdegate Cave, Beattie Cave, and Queen Mary’s Bower in Hastings; and King Solomon’s Caves (the Sparkling canopy), Marrakupa (now Marakoopa) Cave, Scotts Cave, Baldock’s Cave, and Gunns Plains Cave by Mole Creek. In the background of image 28, captioned “The Entrance to Great Hall Newdegate Cave Hastings”, stands the sole human figure in the entire group: a man wearing a white laboratory coat over his suit. If not a picture of Spurling himself, it is certainly one of his assistants. The majority of images are signed in the negative “Spurling” which could be either Stephen Spurling the second or the third. Both are known to have photographed Tasmanian caves during their career: Spurling II was based in Launceston and was known to have made trips to Tasmania’s west and photographed caves and mining activity in the 1880s. Among Spurling III’s achievements are his “landscape shots of Tasmanian wilderness [… and] a series of cave photographs in the Gunns Plains area” (Long, 107). It should be said that this album feels more like the product of the early twentieth century than the late nineteenth. Over three generations, the Spurling family were an early and important firm of photographers in Tasmania. Stephen Spurling I (1821-92) operated from Hobart and was primarily a studio p

• Year: 1920

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