South Australian Museum - North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000

Paul Foelsche was the Northern Territory's first police inspector, commanding its police force from 1870 to 1904. Foelsche not only policed the Top End – he also recorded it, in meticulous detail. His remarkable landscape and portrait photographs are windows onto the European-Aboriginal frontier of the late 19th century.

Paul Foelsche was appointed as the Northern Territory's first police inspector in late 1869. His first brief was to protect the tiny outpost of Port Darwin against the risk of Aboriginal attack. As the Territory's senior police official, he kept order for the next 34 years as South Australia's colonists expanded across the lands of the Larrakia, Djerimanga, Iwaidja and other Aboriginal groups.

Foelsche distributed his photographs as widely as possible, but it is unlikely that many of his Aboriginal subjects ever saw their own images. One aim of this exhibition is to restore this rich record of land and people to the descendants of those Larrakia, Djerimanga, and Iwaidja people whom Foelsche photographed more than a century ago. These portraits have never been shown in their entirety, and have never been seen in their original social groupings.

The photographs in this exhibition are new prints, created digitally from Foelsche's original glass negatives or albumen prints. These new prints are at least twice the size of Foelsche's originals. They reveal details which his own camera captured, but which he was unable to reproduce, except in large images projected with lantern slides.

Paul Foelsche possessed a remarkable gift for composing a scene, and for revealing the humanity of those in his portraits. His photographic record has greatly enriched our cultural heritage.

There are ten categories of information to browse online:

1. The Life of Paul Foelsche, 1831-1914
2. Foelsche's Darwin
3. Policing the Frontier
4. Images of Industry and Progress: Promoting the Territory
5. Entering the Landscape: Foeslche as Pictorial Photographer
6. Crocodiles and River Cruises: The Kintore-Stirling Expedition of 1891
7. Foelsche the Naturalist
8. Foelsche the Photographer
9. Foelsche the Anthropologist
10. Foelsche's Aboriginal Portraits