When and where did Marius Sestier, the Lumière operator commissioned to exhibit the cinématographe in India and Australia, meet the Australian portrait photographer Henry Walter Barnett?
The main source that tells how they got together is Jack Cato's The Story of the Camera in Australia.1 Later historians - Wasson,2 Baxter,3 Barnouw,4 de Serville,5 Reade,6 Neill,7 and probably others - directly or indirectly refer8 to this book, sometimes spicing up the story à la "Chinese whispers".21 The relevant text from Cato is as follows.
One of [the Lumière brothers'] cameramen was a Frenchman named Maurice [sic] Sestier, who, with his wife, set out to cover the palaces, the temples, and the picturesque life of India. ...In January, 1896, Walter Barnett left Falk's Studio, Sydney, for a holiday in London, returning later to Australia in a liner that called at Bombay. There in the Taj Mahal Hotel, Barnett met Sestier who was very disappointed with the reports on his work from Paris.
This version of events was criticised soon after it was published (in 1955)
by Albert James Perier,9 but Perier specified that his notes were
"NOT TO BE OPENED DURING THE LIFETIME OF MR. JACK CATO, Melbourne"
.
Cato died in 1971.
Perier writes of the above:
Cato includes a very generous survey of Walter Barnet, [sic] but the statements are somewhat wide of the facts. His connection with the introduction of the [Lumiere] Motion Picture to Australia was purely accidental. Monsieur Sestier and his wife were fellow passengers with Barnett on a M.M. steamer, Sestier having been appointed sole concessionaire for the introduction for the instrument to Australia.
Cato, born in 1889, was only seven years old at the time these events putatively occurred. In 1909, in London, he was hired as an operator by H. Walter Barnett, and all or most of what he learned about Sestier and the first Australian movies would have been told to him by Barnett - obviously with Barnett's biases. Furthermore, his book was published 45 years after his time with Barnett, and possibly the details were not well-remembered when written about. Cato's story cannot be considered reliable. (He didn't even know Sestier's forename, an error that has polluted much, and continues to pollute, subsequent writing.)
Perier, on the other hand, was 25 at the time, employed with the photographic firm of Baker and Rouse, involved with the local photographic society, and had an active interest and involvement in the introduction of motion pictures to Australia. He could, and did, say, "I was there".10 But, again, when he wrote his criticism, his memory of the events of the time may not have been 100%.
I will examine the evidence for both versions of the story, looking at Perier's first.
On their voyage from France to Australia, Marius Sestier and his wife travelled on three ships (all of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes):
The passenger list for the Yarra notes that Sestier and wife were passengers (presumably just for Bombay) but there is no mention of Barnett. The Yarra left Bombay on 2 July 1896 for various ports on the way to Yokohama, Japan; again there is no Barnett amongst the passengers listed.14
The Yarra waited at Colombo for the arrival on 6 July 1896 of the Australien on its way to Australia. There is no Barnett in the list of passengers disembarking from the Australien at Sydney on 26 July 1896.15 (The ship did not dock at Melbourne.)
When the Calédonien left Bombay for China and Japan, via Colombo, the Sestiers were the only passengers listed for Sydney and there is no Barnett listed as going to Melbourne.12
And the various lists of passengers on the Polynésien16,17,18 do not include Barnett. In fact, he was in Sydney on 10 September 1896: he and his wife attended the wedding of the actor Scot Inglis and the actress Yda Hamilton at St Stephen's Church, Phillip St on that day. It is not impossible that soon after the wedding Barnett went to Melbourne and took the ship back to Sydney; nonetheless, he is not listed as a passenger.
It thus appears extremely unlikely that Sestier and Barnett met on a ship going to Australia.
Interestingly, Harry Rickards and family were on the Polynésien from Melbourne to Sydney. Almost certainly Sestier and Rickards met on the ship, so did this somehow get confused to Sestier meeting Barnett?
Cato says that Barnett left Sydney in January 1896 for a holiday in London.
In the lists of passengers departing by ship published in The Sydney Morning Herald for January 1896, the only time the name Barnett appears is for a passenger going from Sydney to Melbourne on 27 January 1896 on the F.M.S. Ville de la Ciotat. This could well have been H. Walter Barnett, but he wasn't listed as leaving the country. However, it is not unusual for the destination placename in these lists to be incorrect.
But Barnett's name has not been found in many passenger lists and indexes of lists for 1896, both for departing and arriving passengers in England and Australia. This does not mean, of course, that he did not travel from or to Australia in this year: his name might have been misspelled in a list or mistranscribed, or might somehow have been omitted from a list. Or he might have travelled under a pseudonym, or even had his name removed from published lists.
Another problem with Cato's story is that the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay was built in 1903.
Considering that there are other errors in Cato's book, in particular with his dates, it is likely that the story of the meeting in a hotel in Bombay is false.
To date, there is no evidence other than Cato's statement that Barnett was away from Australia at any time in 1896. (He did go to England in 1897, leaving on the Polynésien - the CMM steamers were very comfortable for those who could afford first class - on 1 February 1897.)
A more prosaic version of the meeting is that Barnett, as a photographer, was a customer of the Lumières, maybe using or marketing their famous Blue Label photographic plates, and that he was therefore an obvious person for Sestier to contact when he reached Sydney.19
Or even more simply, when Sestier arrived in Sydney he sought someone in the photography business; he either first contacted Barnett, or eventually met him. As (apparently) Barnett was fluent in French and Sestier's command of English was not strong, and in the absence of another photographically-minded person whose French was good, Barnett would certainly have been able to help Sestier get established.
Furthermore, a contemporary newspaper20 states:
[Marius Sestier] came out unostentatiously in one of the French mail-boats, and was immediately seized upon by Mr. Walter Barnett, of the Falk Studios, who, in conjunction with Mr. C. B. Westmacott, arranged for him to exhibit his wonderful machine in Pitt-street.
And there is no mention of Barnett in connection with the cinématographe until almost 2 weeks after Sestier arrived in Sydney, and a week after the first advertisements for exhibitions were published. If he had known it was coming to, or was actually in, Sydney, surely he would have publicised it earlier. Nor has any contemporary record been found of Barnett stating that he was responsible for bringing Sestier and the cinématographe to Australia.
There is another scenario for Sestier meeting Barnett that is worth consideration. In mid-September 1896, when Sestier arrived in Sydney, Barnett was living at 94 Elizabeth Bay Road, Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, and he had previously lived at 49 Elizabeth Bay Road. At number 53 was Eugène Blanc, the principal Australian agent for the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, and it is not unlikely that in this well-to-do neighbourhood Barnett and Blanc had become acquainted. In 1896 Blanc visited France for business matters, and returned to Australia on the same voyage of the Polynésien that brought Sestier to Australia. (Blanc disembarked at Melbourne and returned to Sydney by train, so he arrived there a day before the ship.) Blanc would have seen (or at least known about) the on-board cinématographe presentations that Sestier gave for evening entertainment on the way from Colombo to Australia, and in all likelihood would have met Sestier.
Maybe it was Eugène Blanc who told H. Walter Barnett about
the Lumière operator Marius Sestier who had come to Australia to exhibit
the cinématographe, and Barnett immediately saw the business opportunity
and "seized upon
" Sestier.
(This scenario also recovers the 'meeting on a ship' element of Perier's version.)
Cato also states that
Walter Barnett offered to finance and bring Sestier to Australia in the same ship, under some loose partnership arrangement which must have been agreeable to the Lumieres, for they continued to supply their film.
The first part of this is demonstrably false. Sestier's mission for the Lumières was from the start to go to India first and then on to Australia. The first review of Sestier's Indian exhibitions published in The Bombay Gazette on 9 July 1896 says:
Messrs. Lumiere Brothers, [sic] who are on their way to Australia, are the exhibitors of [the cinematographe], ....
(It was some time before The Bombay Gazette managed to get Sestier's name correct.) Perier points this out, too.
Cato also implies that the "same ship
" on which Barnett supposedly arrived in Bombay stayed
in dock long enough for Sestier to communicate with the Lumières (in France) to obtain
their agreement to Barnett's offer, and for Sestier to finalise his stay in Bombay.
It's not impossible, but usually the steamers only stayed in port a day or two.
And Barnett certainly didn't "bring Sestier to Australia"
in the ship because,
as pointed out above, Barnett was in Sydney a week before Sestier arrived there.
In summary, there are too many errors in Cato's version of events for any of it to be accepted as fact. It is most unfortunate that for several decades this story has been the "standard version".
[1] Jack Cato, The Story of the Camera in Australia
(Georgian Press, Melbourne, 1955 (1st ed.)), p.116.
The second and third editions, of 1977 and 1979, have identical content to the first.
[2] Mervyn Wasson, The Beginnings of Australian Cinema (Australian Film Institute, Melbourne, March 1964).
[3] John Baxter, The Australian Cinema (Pacific Books, 1970).
[4] Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford University Press, 1993 (2nd revised ed.)).
[5] Paul H. de Serville, entry on Henry Walter Barnett in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol.7 (Melbourne University Press, 1979), pp.182-183.
[6] Eric Reade, Australian Silent Films: A Pictorial History of Silent Films
from 1896 to 1929 (Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970), p.9.
The relevant material is repeated in:
Eric Reade, The Australian Screen: A Pictorial History of Australian Film Making
(Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1975).
Reade neither cites nor acknowledges Cato, but he obviously used his book as a source.
[7] Roger Neill, Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2000).
[8] The various relationships between sources are summarised as:
1955 1964 1970 1974 Cato <- Wasson <- Baxter <- Barnouw ^ ^ | | | de Serville 1979 | | | v +---- Reade 1970 | ^ | | +---- Neill 2000
[9] Albert James Perier, Some comments on Jack Cato's professional photographic "Story of the Camera in Australia" (National Library of Australia, manuscript MS1488, c.1956).
[10] Keast Burke, I was there - Celebrating the Ninety-first Anniversary of the Birth of A. J Perier (Australian Popular Photography, May 1962), pp.30-35.
[11] The Bombay Gazette, 1 July 1896, p.3f, Shipping Intelligence.
[12] The Bombay Gazette, 27 August 1896, p.3f, Shipping Intelligence.
[13] The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 September 1896, p.6h, Arrival of the Polynesien.
[14] The Bombay Gazette, 3 July 1896, Shipping Intelligence.
[15] The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 1896, p.4a, Shipping.
[16] The Age (Melbourne), 10 September 1896, p.6i, M.M.S Polynesien at Albany.
[17] Public Record Office Victoria, Index to Unassisted Inward Passenger Lists to Victoria 1852-1923.
[18] The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 September 1896, p.4a, Shipping.
[19] Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet (ed.): Letters: Auguste and Louis Lumière (Faber and Faber, 1995), pp.xvii-xviii, 27-28.
[20] The Referee (Sydney), 14 October 1896, p.7g, People Prominent, M. Marius Sestier.
[21] With amusing results.
Cato starts with:
... Sestier ... was very disappointed with the reports on his work ...
Wasson gets a little stronger:
Sestier had just received a letter ..., castigating him ...
Baxter ups the ante:
... an abusive letter received from the home office.
and Barnouw goes to extremes:
Sestier ... had a blistering letter from the home office ...
Film historians would love to read this putative letter!
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