Charles Bayliss

[1] At the goldfields around Hill End, New South Wales, Merlin and Bayliss met Bernhardt Otto Holtermann, who had become wealthy as the result of successful gold mining.

[2] Bayliss, then 23 years old, was contracted to continue the work on the project in both New South Wales and Victoria and, in 1874, Holtermann purchased a mammoth Plate camera for Bayliss and the first images taken with it were of Holtermann's recent purchase of the Post office Hotel in Sydney.

[1] On 4 June 1897 Charles Bayliss died at his home, "Hadleigh" in Wemyss Street, Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney.

In 1951 approximately 3,500 glass plate photographic negatives were found in the possession of Bernhardt Holtermann's descendants.

He quoted from an obituary for Bayliss, which appeared in the Australasian Photo-Review on 19 June 1897, two weeks after the death of Bayliss: "He also took the well-known panorama of Sydney and the harbour from the great dome of the Garden Palace in the Domain and, to get this, performed some astonishing and risky feats of climbing and balancing on the outside of the dome.

He took a vast number of photographs of Sydney, the suburbs, mountains, and country, as far as the Victorian border, as well as groups and portraits.

"[4] Holtermann and Bayliss together made the largest glass plate negatives produced in the nineteenth century.