Ernest Gustav Brandon-Cremer
New Zealand-Australian moviemaker, newsman and explorer (1895-1957)
Ernest Gustav Brandon-Cremer (15 February 1895 – 1 March 1957) was a New Zealand/Australian moviemaker, newsman, explorer and adventurer. He was a key figure in Australian aviation history, and was especially known for his documentation of Lasseter's Gold Reef as well as his photography of the Solar eclipse of 21 September 1922 at Wallal, Australia.
Early life
In Dunedin, New Zealand, Brandon-Cremer was born to Albert Wilhelm Anton Brandon-Cremer and Annie Beaton in a theatrical family, his parents traversing New Zealand and Australia by horse and carriage over several decades in the early days of vaudeville in Australasia.
His childhood was marked by a never-present father and an alcoholic mother, a marriage soon to be dissolved with the children abandoned to the State. Brandon-Cremer ran away from home at age 11 and had to fend for himself. Brandon-Cremer claims that he was taken in by a travelling American minister working in Hong Kong before he ended up in the US and finally in Hollywood. Ernest was interviewed in 1926 by a Sydney Cinema Magazine, where these missing years were described in great detail.
Ernest travelled around North America working for the Vitagraph Company of America as an assistant camera man working on such silent films as 'Captain Alvarez', 'Memories That Haunt', 'The Juggernaut', The Wills of the Gods' and 'The Barrier'.
In 1913, he was tried in Adelaide for breaking and entering, including theft, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. A later court visit for vagrancy in June 1915 showed he was now in Melbourne.
The public source identifies “Ernest Gustav Brandon-Cremer” as new Zealand-Australian moviemaker, newsman and explorer (1895-1957). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ernest, Gustav and Brandon-Cremer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ernest Gustav Brandon-Cremer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.