professional photographer, taxidermist and museum assistant, was employed at the Australian Museum, Sydney, as a taxidermist and photographer from 1859. He took many official photographs for the museum, one of a diamond snake being later enlarged by Victor Prout . His brother Robert also worked there, as taxidermist and carpenter. Both did private work on occasions for the natural history collector James Cox (one of the museum’s trustees) and Henry also did private commercial work.

Henry Barnes made skeletal plaster casts of the giant extinct Diprotodon australis for a display at the museum in 1864 to complement its two (real) skulls of the animal. In July 1867 the Illustrated Sydney News reported that Barnes had taken photographs on an Australian Museum scientific expedition to the Wellington Caves, New South Wales. In a letter to the paper the museum’s director Gerard Krefft stated: 'An attempt to obtain a photographic view of the interior by the aid of the magnesium light failed, and the artist had to content himself with views of the valley and the bold limestone rocks in the neighbourhood of the Caves. Five fine pictures were thus secured, many more being spoiled through the myriads of flies which penetrated everywhere’. All were taken in the vicinity of 'the second, or Brescia Cavern’.

In 1873, with J.F. Heney, Henry Barnes produced photographs of the funeral procession of William Charles Wentworth that were offered for sale in the city. The brothers Barnes had another, less respectable, sideline too—selling obscene photographs. The fact that these were being sold on museum premises was announced at a sensational trustees’ meeting on 5 March 1874 when business was interrupted by one of the trustees, Captain Arthur Onslow , and two detectives. A parcel of Henry’s photographs was impounded by Detective-Constable Patrick Lyons and used as evidence at the parliamentary inquiry into the museum then being held. Attempts were made to implicate Krefft in the affair (which, at most, he may have condoned) and after the inquiry Krefft was called upon to resign. The Barnes brothers stayed on.

With the assistance of E.G.W. Palmer, Henry Barnes arranged the Australian Museum’s ethnological display at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. He retired in 1897 but the family continued to figure prominently among the museum’s employees throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including one Henry Barnes junior (employed 1878-1913).

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011