Douglas Thomas Kilburn (1811 or 1813–10 March 1871) was an English-born watercolour painter and professional daguerreotypist who operated in Melbourne 1847–49, producing some of the earliest portrait photographs of indigenous Australians.

It is likely that they were supplying others also; the brothers set up a partnership as Custom House and Commission Agents which was dissolved by mutual consent in August 1848 after Douglas' establishment of a studio.

"[5] Creating an indispensable historical record,[6][7] around 1947-8 Kilburn, on his own undertaking made the earliest surviving daguerreotypes of "the curious race of Aborigines," as he was reported calling them;[8] Boon Wurrung people of the Yalukit clan from around the Yarra River and Port Phillip Bay, and the township of Melbourne founded only 12 years before.

[12] The date of Browne's photograph of a Tasmanian First Nations group Walter, Mary Ann and David Bruney, is sometime during the 1847–1855 governorship of William Denison, at either Government House cottage, New Norfolk, on 27 December 1847, or before 31 January 1848 in Hobart Town.

He lost no opportunity in persuading them, by small bribes, when they wandered into Port Phillip, usually for the purposes of begging: but, in return, they appeared always willing to render any assistance in chopping wood, &c. At length, Mr. Kilburn succeeded, and the result is here presented to the reader.

In the preface of his book Westgarth remarks on these images:“The drawings of the aborigines are copied from some excellent daguerreotyped likenesses brought home by Mr. Robert Cunningham, late of Port Phillip, now of Glasgow, and kindly lent to me for the purpose.

[14] According to Professor Gil Pasternak of Photographic Cultures and Heritage at De Montfort, one anonymous contemporary reviewer of Westgarth's discussion of Australian Indigenous people wrote that it was "a disagreeable subject, because so soon as our curiosity is gratified, every philanthropic hope is destroyed by the conviction, forced upon us by the failure of repeated attempts, that the race is incapable of elevation.

"[27] Brenda L. Croft provides a contemporary First Nations reaction in a vehement re-reading of Kilburn's photography, pointing in her essay Laying Ghosts to Rest,[23] to;"The younger man, [who] with his equally direct gaze at the viewer and the photographer, appears greatly amused by the whole scenario, exuding a confidence that belies the impending fate of thousands of his compatriots.

[48] Kilburn was a jury foreman in cases of murder, rape of a child[49] and burglary,[50] became a Justice of the Peace and Magistrate in 1854,[51] then entered politics that year and ran unsuccessfully in municipal elections[52][53][54] before he became an MP in the Tasmanian parliament until 1862,[55] in which role he advocated for the Hobart Town Artillery and was its paymaster, called for cancellation of the telegraph construction on the basis of cost, opposed pensions for public servants,[56][57] as a landlord himself agitated about rises in water rates,[58] and called for a tax on all vehicles.