Publisher: Tatchell, Garritty, & Dobson, Victoria.
Format: Softcover oblong octavo, string bound, illustrated paper wrapper, unpaginated [30pp] lithographed sheets, 12 x 18.7cm.
Text continues “Issued by the officers of the post and telegraph departments. Containing illustrations by Walter Withers, Ernest Ferris, Fred Kneebone. Photo-lithog. by John Clements. Compiled by O. Dobson.” Shows views throughout Australia and New Zealand of buildings and landscapes. The Geelong Advertiser said of the publication “It is a beautifully executed series of sketches of all parts of the Australian continent through which the telegraph line runs, many of them being of great interest. It gives the portraits also of all the principal men engaged in working the various telegraph systems.”
Walter Withers (British/Australian, 1854–1914) was a known illustrator and landscape painter who, as a member of the Heidelberg school, won the inaugural Wynne Prize in 1897.
Frederick Kneebone (Australian, c1865–1939), was a “pioneer member of the artists’ staff of The Herald and Weekly…[who] joined the company in 1890…He was associated in the early days with newspaper pictorial work, when blocks for illustrations were engraved by hand. He shared in the revolution of newspaper illustration through the half-tone process.” (The Herald, 11.12.1939.)
Mr O. Dobson (Australian, c.1857–1892) was the postmaster at Dandenong, Victoria. “He was a caricaturist of no mean order, and his pen and ink sketches, as published in the Christmas booklets issued by the officers of the postal department.” He died at 35 of typhoid fever, one year after the publication of this booklet. (South Bourke & Mornington Journal, 30.3.1892.)
Foxing, chips and creases to fragile wrappers, stain lower left to prelim pages, mostly clean throughout.
