Spiritualism emerged as a cultural movement in the 1840s. It was associated with a belief in multiple heavens (and hells) and followers conducted seances to communicate with spirits that mediated between God and humans. Nearly 100 years later, in 1939, press photographer Ray Olson was sent by Pix magazine to photograph a group of spiritualists at a seance in the Sydney suburb of Balmain. Although the photo wasn’t published in the magazine, it may have been sparked by a story from England that had the Sydney papers abuzz: the text for a soon-to-be-published book, The Bird Goes Home was claimed to have been transmitted at weekly seances by Lady Zoe Caillard, who had died in 1935.