In a photograph from 1879, the NSW Department of Mines filled its portion of the exhibition building, the Garden Palace, with gold ingots, silver ores and samples of tin. On the balconies above were coal sections and geological maps.
Visions of nature allowed for a different kind of investment in the colonial earth. They paid off in feelings of belonging even for those who never turned a sod. These photos reveal, as the American environmental historian William Cronon has insisted, that nature itself is a profoundly human artefact.
