Historical information

This image depicts people walking down the street in the early 1900s, giving a glimpse into everyday life of the Edwardian era in rural Australia. The image also captures the Beechworth Post Office, located on the corner of Ford and Camp Streets. The stone post office building was built in 1858 to replace the inadequate wooden building on the same location. It was built from granite sourced from the area and features Architectual designs of the era including a hipped slate roof and a colonnaded entrance surmounted by a parapet.

Lantern slides, sometimes called 'magic lantern' slides, are glass plates on which an image has been secured for the purpose of projection. Glass slides were etched or hand-painted for this purpose from the Eighteenth Century but the process became more popular and accessible to the public with the development of photographic-emulsion slides used with a 'Magic Lantern' device in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Photographic lantern slides comprise a double-negative emulsion layer (forming a positive image) between thin glass plates that are bound together. A number of processes existed to form and bind the emulsion layer to the base plate, including the albumen, wet plate collodion, gelatine dry plate and Woodburytype techniques. Lantern slides and magic lantern technologies are seen as foundational precursors to the development of modern photography and film-making techniques

Significance

This glass slide is significant because it provides insight into Beechworth's social amenities and religious infrastructure in the late Nineteenth Century. It is also an example of an early photographic and film-making technology in use in regional Victoria in the time period.

Physical description

Thin translucent sheet of glass with a square image printed on the front and framed in a black backing. It is held together by metals strips to secure the edges of the slide.