Frank Hurley Australian Railway

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FRANK HURLEY AUSTRALIAN RAILWAY PHOTOGRAPHER EXTRAORDINAIRE This selection of Hurley images, all from 1908- 1910, includes a train leaving the Hawkesbury River Bridge (right), Pitt Street Sydney with trams (top left), a night scene of Sydney station (centre left), and the English Mail train at Sydney station (bottom left). Frank Hurley: Australian Railway Photographer extraordinaire Frank Hurley (1885-1962) is one of Australia’s most famous photographers. His renown rests primarily on his images of exploration in Antarctica and of the desolation on the Western Front during World War I. Hurley travelled to Antarctica with the Mawson (1911-1913) and Shackleton (1914-1916) expeditions. His most famous images are of the death throes of Shackleton’s Endurance being crashed by sea ice. Hurley was an adventurous and brave man. As a survivor of the wreck of the Endurance and an official war photographer with the Australian Army in both World Wars, he experienced great deprivation and danger in pursuit of his craft. Less well known is Hurley’s railway photography, but this was the field in which he first made a statement of his daring and innovation in photography. In the period 1908-1911 Hurley worked as a commercial photographer and produced a large number of extraordinary action photographs of trains. Some were taken around Sydney station but others were at various dramatic locations within an hour or so by train from the city. Hurley sold these as a series, Power and Speed, and also published two articles on the topic. In these he described his daredevil methods of jumping from the path of trains just in time to avoid disaster. ROBERT LEE was born in 1952 and was educated at Macquarie and Sydney Universities. He is an As- sociate Professor at the University of Western Sydney where has taught history since 1979. He is especially interested in the transport history of Australia and Asia. He has published six books. His The Railways of Victoria was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s History Prize in 2008. His latest book, Transport: an Australian history has been nominated for the same prize for 2011. .

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