Aboriginal Tasmanian Fanny Cochrane Smith Singing into her Phonograph, 1903

Captured here: Aboriginal Tasmanian Fanny Cochrane Smith Singing Into Her Phonograph In 1903. Without Her Efforts To Preserve Her Culture, We Would Have No Audio Traces Of The Tasmanian Language. Pretty OSC. Made in 1903, it is the kind of image that turns a date in a history book into something you can actually see.

Fanny Cochrane Smith was an Aboriginal Tasmanian woman who recorded songs in the Tasmanian language onto wax cylinders between 1899 and 1903. Those recordings are the only audio of any Tasmanian Aboriginal language ever made, which gives the photographs of her recording sessions extraordinary documentary value.

Inventors of this era worked in public, testing their ideas in streets and fields rather than laboratories, and press photographers loved them for it. Images like this one document how much trial and error sits underneath the technology we now take for granted.