Charles Louis Gabriel (25 June 1857 – 10 February 1927) was an Australian photographer and medical practitioner. He was born in Kempsey, a remote New South Wales settlement, to Dr. Charles Gabriel and Emma Rudder. Despite his upbringing in this remote colonial and coastal fringe, like his father and grandfather before him, Louis became a physician. At Scotland’s prestigious Edinburgh University he won additional medical qualification in surgery and maternity, with distinction. On his return voyage, he probably practiced his new skills as a ship’s doctor. After practicing briefly in Sydney, he left for Gundagai, an inland pastoral town half way between Sydney and Melbourne, in 1887.
The new doctor dedicated himself to medical work, only taking up the hobby of photography twelve years later, around 1899. Over the following decade or so he produced over eight hundred glass plate negatives, many of the images astonishing and accomplished. Now in the National Library of Australia (NLA), they are a valued record of Australia—and Gundagai, its most iconic town.
Contemporary documentaries and articles present his photographs as acutely observed documentary images. However, he has been quaintly portrayed as a typical, country medico, a gentleman and talented amateur. But his imagery and his story belie it.
Table of Contents
- 1 Death
- 2 Career
- 2.1 Louis-Gabriel Guillemain: Flute Quartets, Op. 12
- 2.2 Douze Caprices, Op. 18 Pour Le Violon Seul
- 2.3 Louis-Gabriel Guillemain: Amusements
- 2.4 Sergei Prokofiev - Orchestra Of Radio Luxembourg , Laszlo Varga , Gabriel Tacchino , Louis De Froment - Sinfonia Concertante For Cello / Piano Concerto No.1 - Turnabout - TV-S 34585
- 2.5 Monkey Day (Gabriel Louis Grind Remix)
- 2.6 Divertissement De Simphonie / Concerto No. 5
- 2.7 Move Me (Gabriel Louis Grind Remix)
- 2.8 A Spotless Rose - Music for Advent and Christmas - Vinyl LP Record
- 2.9 Move Me (Gabriel Louis Grind Remix)
- 2.10 Black Bird (Gabriel Louis Grind Remix)
Death
On his death Louis Gabriel’s photographs were stored away and largely forgotten until the 1950s. As an important town in the Australian mythology, Gabriel’s photographs were reproduced in local booklets on Gundagai’s history from the 1950s. In the 1970s the images, then held by Cliff Butcher and Oscar Bell, were donated to the National Library of Australia. The town also has a little museum dedicated to him.
With the National Library’s message of The Gundagai Album in 1978, there was a additional focus upon his photographs. Many reviewers noted their clear style, a habit of seeing and organizing people epoch and place. They were personalized, sometimes reflective, often gone a strong sense of the documentary observation informed by his medical training. They moreover made distinctive use of the photographer’s shadow and the camera’s wide-angle lens, often giving them a suitability of paradoxical hostility from the subjects and secretive involvement.
Several television programs followed, an gate in the Bicentennial Biography, and supplementary publications. In 2007, a novel, Belonging, was written by G. McDougall upon the doctors liveliness and times. The novel integrated Gabriel’s photographs into the body of the story.
Career
He proficient in Gundagai from 1887 to his death in 1927. He became Gundagai Hospital’s chief (and sole) medico in 1889. The 1890s depression hit the subscription-based funding of the hospital, and several disputes considering the Management Committee led to his sacking. It was complementary five years back he regained the position, after an outstretched period of cutting conflict similar to fellow doctor and enemy to the hospital position, Dr O’Dwyer. Louis Gabriel held this point of view until his death in 1927.
Curiously his incline as Government Medical Officer from 1893 had a complex influence on him. He championed the causes of Modern Medicine, not through surgery – his specialty – but through community and public health. He keenly, and to his cost, persistently advocated enlarged hygiene standards in food and water, in the grant of private and public spaces, and events in the prevention of major diseases. He particularly campaigned for the instigation of reticulated water supplies, and greatest of all, construction of a extra Gundagai Hospital based on modern medical principles. Noteworthy too was his request that people of all races be equally treated in Gundagai Hospital, this at a time following Aboriginal people
were largely prohibited town access.
Louis Gabriel was Catholic. His marriage to Jessie Walton in 1892 appears to have been short-lived.
Last update 2021-08-06