Curio

State Library of New South Wales
The ‘Vandyke album’, camping trips on Culburra Beach, NSW, 1937

The ‘Vandyke album’, camping trips on Culburra Beach, NSW, 1937

SAFE / PXA 1951
Album of 108 silver gelatin photographic prints
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anthony C Vandyke and John A Vandyke, May 2012

The ‘Vandyke album’ is of exceptional importance to Australia’s photographic history as it gives context to one of Australia’s most iconic photographs, Sunbaker. The photographic prints in the album are a personal record of a group of Max Dupain and Olive Cotton’s friends camping by Culburra Beach, including Harold Salvage and his future wife Gladys Harrison, Chris Vandyke, Una and Peter Dodd. Dupain and Cotton were childhood friends who shared a passion for photography and married briefly in 1939.

A bastard like this

By Avryl Whitnall, 2014

Black leather bound album of 43 silver gelatin photographic prints: ‘A few shots from “home”, Damien Parer to look at occasionally. Max – Xmas, 1940’byMax Dupain, PXA 28

(referring to a photograph of Olive Cotton on the previous page)

‘Fancy a smart innocent thing like this marrying a –

bastard like this!’

(open at a profile photograph of Max Dupain with camera in hand).


The ‘Vandyke album’

By Alan Davies, Curator of Photographs, 2013

In the album we also see the 'Sunbaker' side-on which provides hard proof that the man in the photograph is Englishman Harold Salvage – supposedly the ‘quintessential Australian’ – who joined Max Dupain, Olive Cotton and others on their camping trips to Culburra Beach in 1937.