Beleura photo purchase on pointe
Justine Summers in the Australian Ballet’s Divergence, 1994, from Beleura’s recently acquired collection. Photo: James McFarlane
Beleura House in Mornington is among several institutions that have rescued precious photographs from the ill-fated Fairfax photo archive.
and Sydney staged by J.C. Williamson, the famous Australian theatrical management company whose boss Sir George Tallis bought Beleura, built in 1863, in 1916 as a holiday retreat. His son John, a composer, inherited the property in 1950 and left it to the people of Victoria when he died in 1996.
to a photo archive company in the US in 2013. As Fairfax Media struggled to stay afloat, it seemed like a good idea to send the collection off to be digitised and remove the costs of physical storage. The US operator would keep the originals and Fairfax would get a searchable digital archive in return.
Beleura, through its Tallis Foundation, bought 18,000 Fairfax photos last year: 8000 dance photos mainly of the Australian Ballet, and 10,000 of operas, dramas and musicals. Many are of performances in Melbourne
The ballet photos are being catalogued, mounted and inserted into protection sleeves and will be displayed at Beleura at some stage. The ballet and the performing arts collections were part of eight million photos sent
Two years later the digitising was only half done and some images were showing up for sale on eBay before the job had been completed. Then the FBI raided the US operator after sports memorabilia it sold turned out
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