In the early twentieth century the Salvation Army Limelight Department harnessed emerging media technologies such as magic lantern slide presentations to prosecute its mission of social welfare and conversion. These presentations were multi-media events that included live music, group singing and a scripted narration to support the slides, and constituted a new form of religious instruction and entertainment.
Three people were largely responsible for the magic lantern slides in the collection: Cornelie Booth, Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry. Cornelie Booth was an important figure in the Army as a singer, composer, planner, producer and strategist. Herbert Booth, son of the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, was a talented performer, composer, and musician. The industrially organised and business-like Limelight Department, linking technologies of the modern era to the age-old task of saving souls and reforming behaviour, was their vision. Their innovation was to take previous genres — the sermon, the brass band concert, the temperance lecture, the Miracle or Mystery Play — and combine them with emerging technologies.
The magic lantern slides were produced and filmed at the Salvation Army Limelight Department at 69 Bourke Street, Melbourne, and distributed from there, in an almost entirely Australian endeavour featuring actors and models drawn from the ranks of the Salvation Army in Australia. Many of these performers have been identified by Salvation Army Museum research, making them unusually well-documented for the period.

The Limelight Department was at the forefront of the Salvation Army’s evangelism and social reform, and from the beginning women assumed significant and powerful roles within the organisation, and were integral to the Limelight Department’s production, manufacture, and distribution of slides and films. The magic lantern slide collection provides a detailed record of women’s important roles in the creative, technological, spiritual and religious work of the Salvation Army, and more broadly in cinematic media of the time.

The Limelight Department collection remains intimately linked to its historical context. It is housed in the building occupied by the Salvation Army since 1894 where the scenes were filmed and the slides developed, hand-coloured, marketed, and distributed.

The Salvation Army Limelight Department Collection includes lantern slides, associated scripts, brochures and ephemera. It is of national significance as a rare surviving example of a prodigious religious narrative multimedia collection created in Australia.