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.

Culburra Beach is a small seaside town located at the mouth of the Shoalhaven River just north of Jervis Bay.

The Sunbaker print in the 'Vandyke album' was Dupain’s preferred version of the image and was published just once in Hal Missingham’s Max Dupain: photographs (plate 7), 1948.

The man portrayed in Sunbaker was publically identified as Englishman Harold Salvage only after Dupain’s death in 1992.

The ‘Vandyke album’ is the holy grail of Australian photography because we can see for the first time the nation’s most iconic photograph, Sunbaker, in the context in which it was taken in 1937.

All known prints of Sunbaker were taken from a different negative and were made between 1975 and 1991 (when the image became popular).

The first Sunbaker frame was only published once, back in 1948 in a collection of Max’s favourite photographs. The Sunbaker print in the ‘Vandyke album’ is the only one known to exist.

Culburra comes from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘sand’.