BSR VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS

After crossing the Great Australian Bight, the Orvieto docked at Port Adelaide on 8 August 1914. Three days later, Ashby joined the BAAS botanists on a day trip in the Adelaide Hills. They stopped for afternoon tea at Mt. Lofty, where he snapped this photograph of Eucalyptus trees clinging to steep sides of a rocky gully (perhaps, its Waterfall Gully). In the Australian series, this image is one of many idyllic landscape which belies the cascade of seismic events at this time. Only a few days earlier, whilst they were crossing the Bight, Balfour recalls how the ship received:

War news by wireless. Ship has orders to abandon the naval course + it is steering a more northerly one, also to reduce the lights. The German vessel "Seidlitz" said to have filled up with coal at Sydney + to have slipped away armed. Many of the passengers much depressed + nervous over the war-news. The Germans on board … feel it keenly. (Balfour, 1914, 6 August)

Britain and Germany were now at war – a moment that marked a turning point in Ashby's life and in the lives of many others.

Photograph by Thomas Ashby, BSR, Thomas Ashby Collection
Adelaide Hills, South Australia, TA-XLVI.060.  
Diary: Henry Balfour, 1st of a 3-notebook diary from Australia. 1914. BAAS, Pitt Rivers Museum. 
Article: 'Great Britian Makes Formal Declaration of War', Daily Herald (6 August 1914). 5.