Australian Dictionary of Biography

Henry Beaufoy Merlin (1830-1873), by American & Australasian Photographic Company, 1870-75

State Library of New South Wales, Home and Away - 42003

Henry Beaufoy Merlin (1830–1873), photographer, was born on 20 March 1830 at Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, England, son of Frederick Murlin, chemist, and his wife Ann Harriett née Beaufoy, daughter of Lieutenant Benjamin Beaufoy, Royal Navy. As Henry Murlin, he arrived in Sydney from London with his widowed mother on 8 December 1848, and soon moved to live at Goulburn where he joined an amateur dramatic group as Henry Beaufoy. In August 1849, with William (Jack) Holland who showed marionettes, he presented some ‘mechanical theatre’ scenes. Murlin was in England when his mother remarried in 1851. She had separated by the time he returned to Sydney in January 1852, and as Mrs Forster was known as a maker of wax flowers.

In 1853 Murlin was granted three licences for marionette performances and from April to May was based in the former Olympic Circus, Castlereagh Street, advertising as the Royal Marionette Theatre, which he claimed was the company of that name that had opened in London in 1852. The program included ‘mechanical theatre’ scenes as well as marionettes. When the show transferred to Maitland in May he began using the name Henry Muriel, which he kept until 1857. He was granted licences to display scenes of the Crimea, Russia, in 1855, to open theatres at Maitland (1856) and Newcastle (1857), and then to display animated scenes in Sydney. In 1858, by then as Henry Merlin, he gave a lecture to accompany Guy and Merlin's Grand Indian Panorama in Sydney. In December he advertised lectures on celestial phenomena at the Sydney Young Men’s Christian Association hall.

With his mother, Merlin lived in Victoria between December 1860 and June 1862, then travelled to England. On 27 January 1863 at the parish church of St Mary, Stratford Bow, he married Louisa Eleanor Foster (b.1844). They arrived in Melbourne in May 1863. In August, together with Edward Wollaston, a chemist, and Louis Laurence Smith, a medical practitioner, he became responsible for a ‘ghost’ illusion inspired by ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ which had first been shown in London in December 1862.  After Melbourne showings, he took the ‘ghost’ to theatres in regional Victoria, but the tour ended when the large sheet of glass needed for the illusion was shattered when crossing a bridge.

Merlin had returned from London with a technique for chromo-lithographic stained glass, samples of which were exhibited in the café of Melbourne’s Theatre Royal and at his mother’s wax-flower showroom in Collins Street. With his wife and mother, he moved to Kyneton in March 1864, and in January 1865 opened the Kyneton Photographic Studio in Piper Street. Four months after the well-equipped studio opened he was declared insolvent. The family moved to Ballarat where, in December 1866, he was offering for sale his photos of Tom Wills’s Aboriginal cricket team as it passed through on its way from the Wimmera to Melbourne.

In June 1868 Merlin, ‘Artist and Landscape Photographer’ (Portland Guardian 1868, 3), began photographing public buildings and private residences in western Victoria and Mount Gambier, South Australia, using the difficult wet plate collodion technique of making glass negatives. The Merlins moved from Ballarat to Melbourne in 1869. He established the American and Australian Photographic Company at Emerald Hill, South Melbourne in June. That year he presented to the governor of Victoria photographs of the Western District. From late September 1869 he travelled towards Sydney, photographing buildings in towns on the way. He established the American and Australasian Photographic Company when he arrived, advertising under the name Beaufoy Merlin, which he would use from then on. In late 1871 he was an official photographer on a scientific expedition to northern Queensland to observe the solar eclipse. His three-part account was published under his by line in the Empire (Sydney) and elsewhere.

Merlin sold his Sydney business interest to Alexander Carlisle in February 1872, and in March his A. & A. Company, which included his assistant Charles Bayliss, began photographing at Hill End and the surrounding goldfields. Images were exhibited in Sydney in April. After three months at Hill End, with visits to the Turon River and Tambaroora mining settlements, Merlin began photographing at Gulgong, systematically recording every building, with people standing in front—an impressive documentation of the town for which he is best remembered.

On 19 October 1872 Merlin photographed the German-born goldminer Bernhardt Otto Holtermann with the huge ‘Holtermann’s nugget’ when it was displayed in Hill End soon after it was brought to the surface, and wrote an article about him for the Australian Town and Country Journal (2 November 1872). Later that year Merlin was engaged to work on Holtermann’s Intercolonial Exposition which would publicise the Australian colonies overseas. On a tour of the New South Wales central west in early 1873, he took photos at Bathurst, Orange, Dubbo, and smaller towns. That year the Merlins returned to live in Sydney, where he contributed further articles to the Australian Town and Country Journal.

Merlin died of pneumonia on 27 September 1873 at lodgings in Abercrombie Street, Chippendale. He was buried in the Anglican section of Balmain cemetery, survived by his wife and their two daughters and two sons, and his mother. His work reflected a mastery of a difficult technique and talent for composition. Many of his photographs were lodged as part of the Holtermann Collection at the State Library of New South Wales. His Gulgong images were used in the design of Australia’s first ten dollar note. The Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, acquired twenty-two of his cartes-de-visite, taken in 1872.

♦♦ This article was substantially revised on 4 August 2026