About the Black & White photos in the exhibition:

The selection of Frank Hurley digital files were purchased from the National Library of Australia (NLA).

The NLA digital files are scans of the original Frank Hurley negatives that came from the Hurley family after the death of Frank Hurley.

When we enlarged these files it became very obvious that a lot of cleaning up work was required if these files were to be used to make large prints.

What the digital files revealed upon enlargement was that the darkroom standards within the downstairs room at the Hurley household were probably basic - in that there was a lot of dust and marks on all the files as well as the occasional watermark from the washing and drying process.

It took a couple of months work to have them in a state so that a couple of test prints could be made to see just how large the digital files could be printed.

Frank Hurley rarely used these files to produce anything much larger than A4.

Frank Hurley did produce the occasional very large print - but we suspect in doing so there was a lot of touching up done.

Over the years we had also collected a number of Frank Hurley's Australiana publications, being books, pamphlets, leaflets and publications on native plants.

What we saw was that within his books were some wonderful photographs that were printed according to the standards required for the Camera Study books of the 1950s. These did not contain high quality photographic printing as we are used to seeing today.

However among the many images were some gems. We had also looked through the digitised images at the National Library and again could see that amongst the thousands were many photographs that could make up the basis for an exhibition.

With the valuable assistance of Warren Macris at Hi Res Digital we were able to produce about 32 high quality Black & White photographs - being mostly about 60cm x 80cm.

The images have been selected to represent a very small sample of the works Frank Hurley produced - images of Sydney, images of Sydney Harbour, photographs of the family, and a couple of the Northern Beaches including Manly.

About the colour photographs of Native Plants in the exhibition:

One of the highlights of our research of many years was to realise that Frank Hurley was a passionate gardener. This was evident from the gardens he established at the homes the family occupied around Sydney Harbour at Rose Bay and Vauclause - and then later in their final home on Collaroy Plateau.

We visited these sites to see what was left of his gardens and were lucky enough to be able to walk around the garden at Collaroy about a decade ago when the house was being sold. Much of the hard landscape works, walls, pools etc, survived at the time.

Over the years a lot of the natives he grew have not survived - possibly many being taken by tenants etc.

We have not been able to identify exactly when Frank Hurley became passionate about native plants. It could have been as early as 1909-1911 when he used to spend time with his friend Harry Phillips in the Blue Mountains. Native plants appeared on many of his early postcards - so there is a link there but we cannot be sure when the interest changed from an 'interest' because the subject sold postcards - to one where he was seeking out plants and propagating specimens in his gardens.

An emphasis for this exhibition was always to be on Frank Hurley as a gardener and his passion for native plants. Originally we were going to use scans from publications to make this point.

Luckily in response to some articles placed in the local media in Manly, one of Frank Hurley's grand daughters made contact and said that she had some original transparencies. These she had rescued from the publisher when they had closed down and were about to throw them out.

When we visited her she showed us a stack of large transparencies. The colour had completely shifted and there was a bit of degradation. To our surprise in amongst the many photographs of scenes from around Australia were about twenty transparencies of native plants. We could not believe our luck.

However it took quite a bit of work to have these scanned, and then to shift the colour back to something close the original and to then digitally remaster them to fix the many faults.

In the end the selection of images printed up very well as large photographs - being about 60cm x 80cm.