Though Charles Bayliss is considered a leading figure in Australia’s photographic heritage in contemporary terms, Bayliss has not yet received his due.

Bayliss is well known for his 19th century panoramas, notably of panoramas of Sydney taken from the 27-metre tower Holtermann had had specially constructed at his home at St Leonards on Sydney’s North Shore. Bayliss also photographed the city, leisure activities, and the landscape. His images recorded the impact of modernisation on the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales in the decades after the gold rushes. The landscapes he photographed (Three Sisters and the Grose Valley in the Blue Mountains and the Fitzroy Falls in the Southern Highlands) were generally within striking distance of Sydney and increasingly accessible to tourists eager for contact with nature as an antidote to city life.

In 1886, Bayliss produced one of the most memorable photographic series of his career while working as the official photographer for the Lyne Royal Commission on Water Conservation. This had been set up by the Governor of New South Wales in 1884 to assess the situation along the Darling River, which had been suffering the crippling effects of drought. The irony was that the commissioners on the 1886 fact-finding expedition encountered extensive flooding of the Darling and Murray rivers.

The expedition set off from Bourke and travelled by paddle-steamer down the Darling, arriving at Wentworth three weeks later. The commissioners interviewed local residents along the way and assessed the condition of the land. Bayliss meanwhile took an extended series of photographs of the flooded Darling and surrounding landscape, and of the activities in what had rapidly become an important wool-growing area. Some of the events he photographed, such as the crossing of the Darling River by a huge mob of bullocks, were spontaneous occurrences, while others he constructed for the camera.

Helen Ennis in A Modern Vision: Charles Bayliss, Photographer, 1850–1897 says that:

His understanding—and use—of the photographic medium is, however, modern in another more profound way: its self-consciousness. Bayliss’s picture making displays a debt to prevailing pictorial conventions, such as the topographic view and the aesthetics of the picturesque and sublime, but it also confidently declares its innovatory nature. This can be seen, for example, in the choice of unexpected vantage points and the creation of complex compositional structures that have the effect of making the viewer conscious of the photograph as a purposefully constructed image, as artifice. Bayliss’s interest in narrative—which is evident in the production of series and carefully arranged sequences of images—also prefigures later developments in photography.