Raymond Priestley’s polar lantern slides

Vice-Chancellors of universities these days tend to be men and women of the intellect, with academic backgrounds in public policy and leadership, and keen political sensibilities that help them guide their institutions through the intricacies of higher education governance.

But Melbourne’s first paid Vice-Chancellor, Raymond Priestley, who officiated between 1934-38 and was a geologist by profession, was originally a polar explorer!

Priestley participated in two Antarctic expeditions, the British Antarctic ‘Nimrod’ Expedition of 1907–1909 led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the British Antarctic ‘Terra Nova’ Expedition of 1910–1913 led by Robert Scott where he served as a meteorologist.

Among the Department of Geology Collection held by the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) are several thousand glass-plate negatives as well as an extensive collection of teaching lantern slide sets and lantern slides.

Project Archivists Christine Elias and Emily Lochowicz says that within this collection there is a discrete set of 1339 lantern slides which were used by Sir Raymond during his Australian lectures on polar exploration.

Illustrated ublic lectures for education and entertainment were common at the time, and Priestley took his slides and presentations on the road, mostly in Melbourne and regional Victoria.

The magic lantern was an early type of image projector that used mirrors to concentrate light onto a small glass plate – the lantern slide. The slide contained an image or photograph which was then projected onto a screen, often creating a slightly 3D effect. 

Ms Lochowicz says the slides complement the existing Raymond Edward Priestley Collection held by UMA, which includes his Australian Diary. 

“According to the diary, Priestley travelled with three sets of slides for use in his lectures,” she says, “presenting general Antarctic topics, as well as details on the Scott and Shackleton expeditions, polar ice, polar animal life, psychological aspects of polar exploration, and Australian involvement in the Antarctic.

“Some of the photographs are from Priestley’s own camera as well as those by photographers Frank Hurley and Herbert George Ponting, surgeon George Murray Levick, geologist Frank Debenham, physicist Charles Seymour Wright, pilot and photographer Henry Cozens, surveyor and ornithologist Frederick Chapman, chief surveyor Alfred Stephenson, meteorologist Quintin Riley, and chief of scientific staff and biologist Edward Adrian Wilson.”

Ms Elias says Priestley annotated his slides by hand using a numbered sequence on the paper frame (there are also several which are printed or not numbered). While the slides are numbered up to 4066, the UMA collection is incomplete, comprising a total of only 1339 slides. 

She says an entry in Australian Diary from 1 November 1937 seems to indicate that after he decided he would never give historical lectures again, he commenced the task of sorting and weeding slides in the collection, with a view to donating the majority of them to the Geology Department.