William Henry Corkhill and the Tilba Tilba Collection
William Henry Corkhill (1846-1936),
The John Poole Family, c. 1895, glass negative, nla.pic-an2441607
In 1890, at the age of 44, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba, accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager, decided to become a photographer. There is no record that he received any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom taking his camera beyond the confines of his local community. Corkhill’s collection of glass plate negatives, reduced over the intervening decades to about 1,000 in number, were offered to the National Library by his daughter in 1975. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As we see Tilba Tilba through William Corkhill’s eyes, he too, as the creator of this singularly focused, longitudinal record, becomes fascinating.