I hope people like this new series. I hope to turn the photographs into my first book, landscape format on heavyweight paper. If anyone knows a good publisher / printer for short run photobooks (not self publishing) please contact me at bunyanth@netspace.net.au. Thank you.
Please view the images on a larger screen. The whole series can be see with larger images on the A Day in the Tiergarten web page or you can enlarge the images below by clicking on them.
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In late 2019, I took a photographic research trip through Europe by train, visiting nine countries and seeing many exhibitions and photographs by master photographers (Güler, Capa, Lartigue, Katz, Frank, Sudek, Sander, Brassaï, Abbott, Kertesz). I also took over 8,000 photographs on three digital cameras. This series, this stream of consciousness – the images shown in the exact order that I took them, no sequencing – reflects my state of mind during the trip. It was a kind of an ascetic experience for me, embedded as I was in the spaces and architectures of the cities and landscapes of Europe, hardly talking to anyone for the duration of the journey.
A Day in the Tiergarten reflects this focus and clear seeing. Using camera and tripod the series, like a piece of music, moves from classical into surreal (the reflections of trees and water displacing the image plane), back to classical and on through Abstract Expressionism, ending in a peaceful coda of 4, 3, 2.
The series is an engagement with spirit – of wandering through a space of intimate desire and love. Love of trees, of being alone, of engaging with the self and nature. It was a magical day.
Views taken during Cleansing Operations, Quarantine Area, Sydney, 1900, under the supervision of Mr George McCredie, F.I.A., N.S.W. photographed by John Degotardi Jr. also known as The Plague Albums.
6 albums containing 379 photoprints
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 264. Professional Ratcatchers 1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Abstract
This text examines the photographs of John Degotardi Jr., photographer for the New South Wales Department of Public Works, who produced 6 photographic albums containing 379 photoprints of the plague in The Rocks, Sydney, 1900, also known as The Plague Albums.
It proposes alternate interpretations of the photographs, readings that both confirm the original purpose for their existence on the one hand, and subvert that purpose, and their formal legacy, on the other. In so doing we can begin to understand what an incredibly sophisticated photographer John Degotardi Jr. was, and how he deserves much more recognition than has been accorded him at present in the history of Australian photography.
Keywords
John Degotardi Jr., The Plague Albums, Sydney, Australia, bubonic plague, plague in Sydney, photography, art, urban landscape, the Prospect, prospectus, infection, rats, disease, plague, resumption, slum, community, The Rocks, Millers Point, Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Prospect/us, protect us: plague and resumption in fin de siècle Sydney
On John Degotardi Jr.’s The Plague Albums, Sydney, 1900
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During this time of pestilence, I came across several online articles about the outbreak of bubonic plague that occurred in Sydney in 1900 (in particular “Purging Pestilence – Plague!”1), the infection more virulent – don’t you love that word – in the harbour side slums around Darling Harbour, Millers Point and The Rocks but covering “the whole of the quarantine area, which stretched from Millers Point east to George Street, along Argyle, Upper Fort, and Essex Streets thence south to Chippendale, covering the area between Darling Harbour and Kent Streets, west to Cowper Street, Glebe, along City Road to the area bounded by Abercrombie, Ivy, Cleveland Streets, and the railway. The area east from George Street enclosed by Riley, Liverpool, Elizabeth and Goulburn Streets; Gipps, Campbell and George Streets were also quarantined, as were certain areas in Woolloomooloo, Paddington, Redfern and Manly.”2
Under the supervision of architect and consulting engineer Mr George McCredie, who was appointed by the Government to take charge of all quarantine activities in the Sydney area, work began on March 23, 1900 to cleanse the infected areas, and through compulsory purchase, or resumption (Australian law: the action, on the part of the Crown or other authority, of reassuming possession of lands, rights, etc., previously granted to another), to demolish slum properties. The buildings selected for demolition because of the health risks they supposedly raised, were recorded by photography,3 through the auspices of John Degotardi Jr., photographer for the New South Wales Department of Public Works, who produced 6 photographic albums containing 379 photoprints of the plague in The Rocks, Sydney, 1900, also known as The Plague Albums.
Degotardi Jr.’s photographs, commissioned as result of the outbreak, “are largely of buildings requiring to be demolished, and include the interior and exterior of houses, stores, warehouses and wharves, and surrounding streets, lanes and yards, thus providing a fairly clear indication of the state of the city during and immediately after the plague.” They document property and living conditions before, during and after the outbreak of plague. “George McCredie noted in a letter to Sir William Lyne that ‘Where it was found necessary to pull down premises or destroy outbuildings photographs were taken of them before their demolition, and in order to prepare in case of future litigation, each inspector was instructed to take careful notes of any property that might be destroyed.'”4
Probably taken on a large format glass plate camera (although no details are given), the resultant album photographs, now scanned, are available at high resolution (600dpi) and 130Mb file size images on the New South Wales State Archives and Records website copyright free, in the public domain. While it is admirable to have these photographs online, the scans have been left in their original condition, as is an archives want, in order to protect the presumed integrity of the original artefact. In other words, over 100 years after the taking of the photograph, this is the current physical state of the object and this is how the images should be seen today. You can see a couple of iterations of the original scans below, replete with their sickly yellow hue, which does not allow the viewer to really appreciate the scene, the photograph as a complete composition, or the skill of the photographer when observing and capturing the urban terrain. This is not how these photographs would have appeared when originally produced and their deterioration is akin to a layer of yellowing varnish that obscures the colours and details of some Old Master painting, which has discoloured with age. Conservators do not leave this layer of yellow in place, they remove it. The same can be said of discoloured photographs.
In this case, I spent many hours restoring these photographs to their pristine condition, removing colour and dust spots, so that I may study the scene intimately, zooming into the image (because of their high quality) to observe everyday nuances of Sydney life in 1900. In so doing we can begin to understand what an incredibly sophisticated photographer John Degotardi Jr. was, and how he deserves much more recognition than has been accorded him at present in the history of Australian photography. Let us set the stage, then, for the taking of these photographs.
We note that for the photographer this was a job, working as he did for the New South Wales Department of Public Works. He was to document the quarantine area to provide a clear indication of the state of the city during and immediately after the plague, those photographs of interiors and exteriors, of buildings and boundaries (streets) – things that “exist to insure order and security and continuity and to give citizens a visible status”5 – also needed in case of future litigation (presumably by aggrieved landowners) after they were compulsorily purchased. Here we begin to understand that the aesthetic of urban landscape photography is always contextual and political. In his photographs Degotardi Jr. maps out the boundaries of his, the governments, and the camera’s authority – one’s position (and that of his all seeing, ambivalent ‘mechanical eye’), “not just a matter of where one stands, but that it is more comprehensively spatial, social and economic.”6
Often in these photographs (not necessarily in this posting, but more generally in the images found online), Degotardi Jr.’s camera occupies and draws on “the seventeenth century device of the ‘prospect’, an oblique landscape viewpoint located between ground and aerial perspectives… The viewpoint of the prospect hovers in mid air between the aerial image and the landscape view, oblique to the terrain it is depicting. It provides an order that would otherwise be illegible to the grounded eye.”7 In other words, Degotardi Jr. positions his camera to best bring order to the urban chaos, picturing through the ritual of taking photographs, a surveyed and regulated order (both economic and legislative) that determines the urban grid – in this case, of the quarantine areas / remediated areas, dis-ease areas / proposed redevelopment, business areas – in some of the oldest suburbs of Sydney. Following Goldswain’s commentary on the photographs of John Joseph Dwyer and his mapping of the gold mining city of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, we might concur that, “It is not unreasonable to suggest that Dwyer’s [Degotardi Jr.’s] camera is literally prospecting, combining both senses of the word, mapping the city and its suburbs to find an economic potential in its ordered state…”8
In his “views”, Degotardi Jr.’s camera often portrays people (in)congruously in doorways or on streets, used to document scale or to bare witness to their surroundings. People, mainly men, go about their work often demolishing buildings or cleaning rubbish in the streets, stopping as the photograph is taken, or deliberately posed by the photographer. In some images the photographer sets up a scene that has no logic at all. For example, the photograph of Nos. 223, 225 Sussex Street (below) evidence a shoeless lad, a group of young men, a painter, and two firemen who hold a deflated fire hose which leads out of shot in one direction and terminates under the eves of a row of shops in the other direction, seemingly connected to nothing. Their surroundings are declamatory and, for today’s reader, insightful. In a building erected by P.R. Larkin in 1866, the row of shops includes a “Johnny All Sorts” – a business that bought and sold all sorts of things. To the right of the group are pasted billboards, much as today, two of which advertise a plague remedy and disinfectant soap (sound familiar in 2020?):
Avoid the PLAGUE!
Purchase at Once!!
Prof. VON ELSEBERG’S ‘KALTHA’
Just Arrived
Notice to householders BLACK DEATH
or Bubonic Plague SANITOL
Disinfectant soap
3d Double tablets 3d
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In other photographs, men stand in doorways, hidden in the shadows (No. 20 Upton Street). Many are images of workers, homeowners, citizens and families who live a hand to mouth existence. The intimacy of these photographs portrays, betrays, the place where societies rejects are housed, the setting (the place or type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an event takes place) of human lives; the “setting”, or settling, of human lives, as in the solidification of space and place, the environment of existence. As a group of photographs the series is an extraordinary social document of poverty and squalor, of the desperation of people just getting by.
To the photographer, and to the people and buildings he was photographing, the familiar serves as a point of departure. Firstly, Degotardi Jr. documents what was there – this diseased land, a landscape not only as a composition of spaces but also a composition of a web of boundaries. Secondly, he photographs to map out what was to be “resumed” through the Resumption Act 1900, the city “fathers” using the outbreak of bubonic plague as a convenient excuse to compulsorily purchase land in the loosely defined quarantine area, offering the residents compensation “estimated without reference to any alteration in the value of such land arising from any purchase or any appropriation or resumption for any purpose mentioned in this Act or the establishing of any public works on any land the subject of any such purchase, appropriation, or resumption.” These albums, then, become a prospectus, a prospect/us, an authentic record of the terms, the conditions and the contexts for the reformist attitude in the minds of these city fathers: not to protect us (the populace) but to prospect us, using land resumption as the tool to get rid of the old and bring in the new. The plan was to demolish the existing structures and rebuild to a grand design.
Factored into the design of the Resumption Plans was the need to keep Dawes Point free for the construction of a possible bridge across the harbour. “While public health was a convenient excuse for resumptions, the need for a harbour bridge may also have motivated the authorities.”9
“Plans were underway even at these early stages and a good 23 years before construction of the bridge commenced. Even at the turn of the nineteenth century, it was clear that there would need to be a widened thoroughfare to accommodate traffic entering and exiting the bridge, and many buildings would need to be sacrificed to achieve this. The bubonic plague outbreak offered the ideal opportunity to highlight the inadequacies in a lot of buildings, and the chance to condemn the area as slum, whose only chance of redemption was through mass demolition.”10
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But as an article by Gillian McNally in The Daily Telegraph insightfully observes, “The reshaping of the city … provided a convenient “public health” excuse for resumption of private property. The NSW Government took back ownership of virtually the entire headland from Circular Quay to Darling Harbour and demolished hundreds of slum houses and businesses in what are now prime real estate precincts such as George St, Sussex St, Kent St and Martin Place. There was little attempt to define a slum area and there was no recognition of the rights of tenants as resumptions took out a house here, a street there and great swathes of properties in some suburbs to improve crooked roads and thoroughfares.”11
If we define a landscape as an environment modified by the permanent presence of a group of people,12 then what these photographs do, in one sense, is document the death throes of the communities that created this urban landscape. As J.B. Jackson notes, “No group sets out to create a landscape, of course. What it sets out to do is to create a community, and the landscape as its visible manifestation is simply the by-product of people working and living, sometimes coming together, sometimes staying apart, but always recognising their interdependence.”13
But, as Denis Cosgrove observes, the concept of landscape (and thus of community) is always powerful and political.
“Landscape was a ‘way of seeing’ that was bourgeois, individualist and related to the exercise of power over space. The basic theory and technique of the landscape way of seeing was linear perspective … and is closely related by [Alberti] to social class and spatial hierarchy. It employs the same geometry as merchant trading and accounting, navigation, land survey, mapping and artillery. Perspective is first applied in the city and then to a country subjugated to urban control and viewed as landscape. … The visual power given by the landscape way of seeing complements the real power humans exert over land as property.”14
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The photographs in these albums, then, evidence the real power of the city fathers over land as property, their property and not that of the citizens or the communities that had grown up in these unregulated buildings and shantytowns. They, the city fathers, ordered these pictures into existence. The landscape thus portrayed, is “a way of seeing, a composition and structuring of the world so that it may be appropriated by a detached, individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control is offered through the composition of space according to the certainties of geometry.”15 Residents, armed with lime, carbolic acid and sulfuric acid, were then enlisted to cleanse, disinfect and even burn and demolish their own houses in infected areas.16
But in another and far more important sense, what these photographs document are the lives of ordinary people, people who form a community of souls, for whom a sense of community was of vital, life giving importance. The photographs record their existence as traces and energies from the past that impinge on our consciousness in the present. Here are the ratcatchers, modest men with their traps and cages, bowties and pipes, all adorned bar one in the obligatory hat; here are two Chinese gentlemen surrounded by squalor and chopped wood, one sitting on a pile of rocks, both portrayed with a touching dignity; here in a rubble strewn Wexford street men resignedly sit on the ground or stare pensively at the camera, pondering we know not what, while on the other side of the street children stare inquisitively at the camera; and there smoke arises from amongst the demolished Exeter Place as labourers, persons doing unskilled manual work for wages, dance a ballet of destruction amongst the rubble. Children on a veranda, pails in a dirt back yard, chickens, and children, roaming free… and a rock tied on a piece of string guards the entrance to a door.
Pails and tins and rocks and wood and chickens and children and rats and butchers and dirt and sugar… and a rock tied on a piece of string, like the great pendulum of time, marking all their existences. And yet… and yet, what that most excellent photographer John Degotardi Jr. does (in this second sense), is not just to record as instructed, their quarantine, their dispossession – but through his photographs, he empathises with the people, with their community of existence. While his photographs are not sentimental about humankind, traces of humanity are ever-present in his pictures. Unlike the Parisian Eugène Atget, who established a beneficial “distance between man and his environment” here, Degotardi Jr. engages in a conversation with the people and the city. And in so doing, in so immersing himself in (t)his project, he lifts his photographs out of the ordinary, out of (t)his world.
As Jon Kabat-Zinn has so eloquently observed,
“Effortless activity happens at moments in dance and in sports at the highest levels of performance; when it does, it takes everybody’s breath away. But it also happens in every area of human activity, from painting to car repair to parenting. Years of practice and experience combine on some occasions, giving rise to a new capacity to let execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion, beyond thinking. Action then becomes a pure expression of art, of being, of letting go of all doing – a merging of mind and body in motion.”17
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It would seem to me that this is the great achievement of a Department of Public Works photographer who was hired to do a job: that he transcended his subject matter by letting execution unfold beyond technique, by immersing himself in the derivation of composition, perspective, light and form, place and context, feeling and emotion. So while these photographs in the obvious obey the command of the city fathers, of the planners, of patriarchy and the capital of industry, in the immersive and subversive they undermine the prospectus that first proposed them. Unable to protect the people, to protect us, from the demolition of community (to the benefit of commerce hidden under the “public health” excuse), John Degotardi Jr. leaves, through his photographs, a lasting legacy of lives that matter, not bureaucracy that doesn’t. He imagines streets and buildings and lives, pictured for eternity through the psychogeography of the city. And if we think of the long queues of unemployed in our current pandemic, here are also lives that matter – the lives of the dead and the destitute, each one a valuable, sentient, human being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 2,809
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Many thanks to the brains trust on the Lost Sydney Facebook web page for helping in my research in locating exact positions of some of the photographs and the location of the resumption maps online. Apologies if I have got anything incorrect. All photographs are in the public domain. More photographs can be found on the State Library of New South Wales website, New South Wales State Archives and Records website and the John Degotardi Flickr stream.
Footnotes
Anonymous. “Purging Pestilence – Plague!” on the New South Wales State Archives and Records website [Online] Cited 25 May 2020
NRS-12487 | Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney. Text from the State Archives of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 11/04/2020.
Alan Davies. “Photography in Australia,” in Celebrating 100 years of the Mitchell Library. Sydney: State Library of NSW, 2000. p. 86.
Footnote 1. NSW Parliamentary Debates, 1900, vol. CIII, p. 111 quoted in Max Kelly. Plague Sydney. Marrickville, NSW: Doak Press, 1981 in NRS-12487 | Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney. Text from the State Archives of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 11/04/2020.
J.B. Jackson. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 12.
Philip Goldswain. “Surveying the Field, Picturing the Grid: John Joseph Dwyer’s Urban and Industrial Landscapes,” in Phillip Goldswain and William Taylor (eds.,). An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer. UWA Publishing, 2010, p. 65-66.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 66.
Anonymous. “Purging Pestilence – Plague!” on the State Archives of New South Wales website (archived) [Online] Cited 10 April 2020.
Anonymous. “Bubonic Plague outbreak in Sydney in the 1900s helps Politicians to clear the way for transport progress & landmark,” on The Digger website 13th August 2016 [Online] Cited 10/40/2020.
Gillian McNally. “Bubonic plague Sydney: How a city survived the black death in 1900,” in The Daily Telegraph September 3, 2015 [Online] Cited 16 May 2020.
J.B. Jackson. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 12.
Ibid.,
Abstract in Denis Cosgrove. “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1985, pp. 45-62.
Ibid., p. 55.
McNally, op.cit.,
Jon Kabat-Zinn. Wherever You Go There You Are. New York: Hachette Books, 1994, p. 44.
The political landscape
“I am enumerating some of the simplest and most visible elements in what can be called the political landscape: the landscape which evolved partly out of experience, partly from design, to meet some of the needs of men and women in their political [ie. social] guise. The political elements I have in mind are such things as walls and boundaries and highways and monuments and public places; these have a definite role to play in the landscape. They exist to insure order and security and continuity and to give citizens a visible status. They serve to remind us of our rights and obligations and of our history.”
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J.B. Jackson. ‘Discovering the Vernacular Landscape’. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984, p. 12.
Boundaries
“The most basic political element in any landscape is the boundary. Politically speaking what matters first is the formation of a community of responsible citizens, a well-defined territory composed of small holdings and a number of public spaces; so the first step toward organizing space is the defining of that territory, after which we divide it for the individual members. Boundaries, therefore, unmistakable, permanent, inviolate boundaries, are essential.”
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J.B. Jackson. ‘Discovering the Vernacular Landscape’. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984, p. 13.
“If we return to the notion that photography is an extension of pre-existing pictorial conventions, then it could be argued that the common feature of all the preceding images is the photographer’s reliance on the ‘prospect’ as the compositional device. The viewpoint of the prospect hovers in mid air between the aerial image and the landscape view, oblique to the terrain it is depicting. It provides an order that would otherwise be illegible to the grounded eye. John Macarthur suggests that the difference between the grounded landscape views and the prospect was not simply that different kinds of views required different kinds of representations. For theorists of the picturesque, a prospect was kind of view that could not be a picture.16 Macarthur distinguishes between the prospect and the landscape view as the difference between the cadastral [(of a map or survey) showing the extent, value, and ownership of land, especially for taxation] and the pictorial. Geographer Denis Cosgrove argues that the prospect was first used to ‘denote a view outward, a looking forward in time as well as space’ and that by the end of the sixteenth century it carried the ‘sense of an extensive or commanding sight or view, a view of the landscape as affected by one’s position.’17. The inference is that ‘one’s position’ is not just a matter of where one stands, but that it is more comprehensively spatial, social and economic. Cosgrove’s analysis of the prospect suggests an economic imperative behind its use and he cites its importance in Tudor England, where in combination with the ‘Malicious craft’ of surveying, it reflected a command over developed and commercially run farming estates of Tudor enclosures and the new landowners of monastic estates.18 Cosgrove notes the emergence of the verb ‘to prospect’ in the nineteenth century as a result of the speculative activities of gold mining.19.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that Dwyer’s camera is literally prospecting, combining both senses of the word, mapping the city and its suburbs to find an economic potential in its ordered state… Dwyer produces what could be considered Cosgrove’s spatial, chronological and commercial narrative compressed into the frame of the photograph…”
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Philip Goldswain. “Surveying the Field, Picturing the Grid: John Joseph Dwyer’s Urban and Industrial Landscapes,” in Phillip Goldswain and William Taylor (eds.,). ‘An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer’. UWA Publishing, 2010, p. 65-66.
16. J. Macarthur. ‘The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities’. Routledge, London, 2007, p. 190.
17. ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ as cited by D. Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the landscape Idea”, in ‘Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers’, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1985, p. 55.
18. Cosgrove, “Prospect,” p. 55.
19. Ibid., p. 61, note 64.
The Bubonic Plague hit Sydney in January 1900. Spreading from the waterfront, the rats carried the plague throughout the city. Within eight months 303 cases were reported and 103 people were dead.
When bubonic plague struck Sydney in 1900, George McCredie (1859-1903) was appointed by the Government to take charge of all quarantine activities in the Sydney area, beginning work on March 23, 1900. At the time of his appointment, McCredie was an architect and consulting engineer with offices in the Mutual Life of New York Building in Martin Place. McCredie’s appointment was much criticised in Parliament, though it was agreed later that his work was successful.
The infected areas, and buildings selected for demolition because of the health risks they supposedly raised, were recorded by photography. Most of the buildings demolished were considered slum buildings. John Degotardi Junior (1860-1937) worked at the NSW Government Printing Office and was photographer with the NSW Department of Public Works from 6 January 1897-1919.
John Degotardi Junior (Australian, 1860-1937)
MR. JOHN DEGOTARDI.
The death occurred yesterday at Lewisham private hospital of Mr John Degotardi formerly Government photographer. He was bom at Peacock’s Point Balmain on February 21 1860 and was a son of Mr John Degotardi one of the first professional photographers in New South Wales. Mr Degotardi, junior, was well known as an interstate oarsman. In recent years he was associated with Judge Backhouse as judge and starter at regattas. He has left a widow three sons (Messrs John, Albert, and Frederick) and three daughters Mrs. Delves, Mrs. Allen, of Nana Glen, and Mrs H R Brown.
Anonymous. “Mr. John Degotardi,” in The Sydney Morning Herald, Mon 15 Feb 1937 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 10/03/2020
Grateful thanks to Associate Professor James McArdle for this information.
Darling Harbour Wharves Resumption Act 1900 No 10
Mode of estimating compensation
The amount of compensation in respect of any land resumed, as mentioned in sections two and three of this Act, shall be estimated without reference to any alteration in the value of such land arising from any purchase or any appropriation or resumption for any purpose mentioned in this Act or the establishing of any public works on any land the subject of any such purchase, appropriation, or resumption.
Provided also that the amount of compensation in respect of any land so resumed shall be estimated without reference to any alteration in the value of such land arising from any proclamation declaring any place comprising such land to be a station for the performance of quarantine within the meaning of the Quarantine Act 1897, or arising from any things done in pursuance of any such proclamation.
Cover of from Vol. IV of Views taken during Cleansing Operations, Quarantine Area, Sydney, 1900, Vol. IV / under the supervision of Mr George McCredie, F.I.A., N.S.W. 1900
66 silver gelatin photoprints
28 x 49 cm
6 albums containing 379 photoprints also known as The Plague Albums
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 413017
Public domain
Index from Vol. IV of Views taken during Cleansing Operations, Quarantine Area, Sydney, 1900, Vol. IV / under the supervision of Mr George McCredie, F.I.A., N.S.W.including number 264 Professional Ratcatchers (above)
1900
66 silver gelatin photoprints
28 x 49 cm
6 albums containing 379 photoprints also known as The Plague Albums
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 413017
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 8. Sussex Street, looking South from Margaret Street 1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Intersection of Margaret Street and Sussex Street looking south, with the Edinburgh Arms Hotel at the end of the first block on the left
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 8. Sussex Street, looking South from Margaret Street (original scan)
1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Intersection of Margaret Street and Sussex Street looking south, with the Edinburgh Arms Hotel at the end of the first block on the left
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 8. Sussex Street, looking South from Margaret Street (details)
1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas , Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 15. No. 27 Sussex Street, Barangaroo (rear of) 1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 16. No. 11 Margaret Street, Barangaroo 1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Views 28 and 29 are diametrically opposite views of the same scene on Kent Street, Sydney
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 28. Cleansing the streets (Kent St. looking south across Margaret St. Union Hotel at 206 Kent St., Lazarus Rosenfeld at 208 Kent Street and Imperial Manufacturing Co. at 210-212 Kent St.) (original scan)
1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 28. Cleansing the streets (Kent St. looking north across Margaret St., Sydney to 202 & 204 Kent Street) 1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
This view is of St Phillip’s Anglican church in the distance, standing on Kent St. looking north across Margaret St., Sydney
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 28. Cleansing the streets (Kent St. looking north across Margaret St., Sydney to 202 & 204 Kent Street) (detail)
1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 29. Cleansing the streets (Kent St. looking south across Margaret St. Union Hotel at 206 Kent St., Lazarus Rosenfeld at 208 Kent Street and Imperial Manufacturing Co. at 210-212 Kent St.) 1900
From Vol. I of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Views 28 and 29 are diametrically opposite views of the same scene on Kent Street, Sydney. Notice the angle of the fire appliance wheels in both photographs. The fire appliance is a 1891 Shand Mason Steamer. The Union Hotel is at 206 Kent St., Lazarus Rosenfeld is at 208 Kent Street and the Imperial Manufacturing Co. is at 210-212 Kent St.
Kent Street, Sydney map showing the position from which both of the above photographs were taken (in red), and the position of the Union Hotel on the corner of Kent Street and Margaret Street, with St Phillip’s Anglican church in the distance.
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 69. Nos. 223, 225 Sussex Street 1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 69. Nos. 223, 225 Sussex Street, Sydney (details)
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
The details of Nos. 223, 225 Sussex Street show a shoeless lad, a group of young men, a painter, and two firemen holding a firehouse… that leads nowhere. Behind, in a building erected by P.R. Larkin in 1866, is a row of shops which includes a “Johnny All Sorts” – a business that bought and sold all sorts of things. To the right of the group are pasted billboards, much as today, two of which advertise a plague remedy and disinfectant soap (sound familiar in 2020?):
Avoid the PLAGUE!
Purchase at Once!!
Prof. VON ELSEBERG’S ‘KALTHA’
Just Arrived
Notice to householders BLACK DEATH
or Bubonic Plague SANITOL
Disinfectant soap
3d Double tablets 3d
“The Destruction of Rats,” in The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW: 1842-1954) Mon 24 Feb 1902 Page 8 from the Trove website mentioning the steamer Octopus (see below) and Sussex Street (above)
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 70. [Octopus] Cleansing the Wharves
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Housing and other buildings
The photos were taken by Mr. John Degotardi, Jr., photographer from the Department of Public Works and depict the state of the houses, ‘slum’ buildings and streets at the time of the outbreak – interior and exterior of houses, stores, warehouses and wharves, and lanes and yards – and the cleansing and disinfecting operations which followed.
The photos provide a fairly clear indication of the state of the city during and immediately after the plague.
Streetscapes
Quarantine areas were established. These stretched from Millers Point east to George Street, along Argyle, Upper Fort, and Essex Streets then south to Chippendale, covering the area between Darling Harbour and Kent Streets, west to Cowper Street, Glebe, along City Road to the area bounded by Abercrombie, Ivy, Cleveland Streets, and the railway. The area east from George Street enclosed by Riley, Liverpool, Elizabeth and Goulburn Streets, Gipps, Campbell and George Streets were also quarantined, as were certain areas in Woolloomooloo, Paddington, Redfern and Manly.
Cleansing
Cleansing and disinfecting operations in the quarantine areas lasted from 24 March – 17 July and included the demolition of ‘slum’ buildings. Local residents were employed to undertake the cleansing, disinfecting, burning and demolition of the infected areas, including their own homes. Shovels, brooms, mattocks, hoses, buckets, and watering cans, were tools used to clear, clean, lime wash and disinfect. Not only buildings and dwellings were subjected to the cleansing operations but also wharves and docks were cleared of silt and sewerage.
Cleansing agents used during the cleansing operations included: solid disinfectant (chloride of lime); liquid disinfectant (carbolic water: miscible carbolic, 3/4 pint water, 1 gallon); sulphuric acid water (sulphuric acid, 1/2 pint water, 1 gallon); carbolic lime white (miscible carbolic 1/2 pint to the gallon).
Rat catchers were employed and the rats burned in a special rat incinerator. Over 44,000 rats were officially killed in the cleansing operations.
Sydney Harbour Trust
In 1901 the Sydney Harbour Trust resumed hundreds of properties in The Rocks and Millers Point. While public health was a convenient excuse for resumptions,1 the need for a harbour bridge may also have motivated the authorities. Green Bans in the 1970s on the redevelopment of The Rocks helped preserve this historic area which is now a major tourist attraction. The Rocks area has been under the control of the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority since 1970 and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority since 1999.
Anonymous. “Purging Pestilence – Plague!” on the State Archives of New South Wales website (archived) [Online] Cited 10 April 2020
The dawn of a new century combined with the Federation of the Australian states to form the Commonwealth of Australia brought a new sense of expectancy, hope and vision for the future to the towns, cites and rural areas of Australia. The outbreak of the Bubonic plague in The Rocks area of Sydney in 1900 was just the catalyst needed to engender a reformist attitude in the minds of the city fathers. Land resumption was the tool used by the city council to get rid of the old and bring in the new. Large sections of The Rocks and Surry Hills were razed and rebuilt. The commercial waterfront areas of Darling Harbour were resumed en masse and redeveloped to better handle the vast amount of goods now passing through the port of Sydney, the existing facilities having become totally inadequate.
Anonymous. “The History of Sydney: Federation Sydney 1902-1917,” on the Visit Sydney Australia website [Online] Cited 10/04/2020
See also Darling Harbour Resumption Maps, 1900-1902 on the NSW State Archives website (archived) [Online] Cited 10/04/2020
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 80. No. 50 Wexford Street (rear), Chinese bedroom
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Wexford Street crops up repeatedly in the Cleansing photos … it was roughly where Wentworth Avenue now is. The whole area was demolished in slum clearance schemes and rebuilt. (Thank you beachcomber australia for the information)
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 82. Wexford Street
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Wexford Street, before it was cleared for the construction of Wentworth Avenue.
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 95. Rear of No. 16 Exeter Place
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 97. Rubbish tip in Campbell Street
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 97. Rubbish tip in Campbell Street (detail)
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 105. Exeter Place demolished
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 105. Exeter Place demolished (details)
1900
From Vol. II of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
NRS-12487 | Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
These are photographs of quarantine areas in Sydney, following the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900. The photographs were commissioned as result of the outbreak. Mr. George McCredie was in charge of cleansing and disinfecting operations in the quarantine areas. He commenced work on 23 March 1900. He was one of 28 temporary sanitary inspectors appointed by the Board of Health in conjunction with the Department of Public Works which was made responsible for the cleansing operations.
George McCredie noted in a letter to Sir William Lyne that ‘Where it was found necessary to pull down premises or destroy outbuildings photographs were taken of them before their demolition, and in order to prepare in case of future litigation, each inspector was instructed to take careful notes of any property that might be destroyed.'(1)
The photographs were taken by Mr. John Degotardi, Jr., photographer from the Department of Public Works. The photographs are largely of buildings requiring to be demolished, and include the interior and exterior of houses, stores, warehouses and wharves, and surrounding streets, lanes and yards, thus providing a fairly clear indication of the state of the city during and immediately after the plague.
The views cover the whole of the quarantine area, which stretched from Millers Point east to George Street, along Argyle, Upper Fort, and Essex Streets thence south to Chippendale, covering the area between Darling Harbour and Kent Streets, west to Cowper Street, Glebe, along City Road to the area bounded by Abercrombie, Ivy, Cleveland Streets, and the railway. The area east from George Street enclosed by Riley, Liverpool, Elizabeth and Goulburn Streets; Gipps, Campbell and George Streets were also quarantined, as were certain areas in Woolloomooloo, Paddington, Redfern and Manly.
They provide a visual report of the conditions in the area at the turn of the century. The bubonic plague was epidemic from 19 January to 9 August 1900. 303 people were stricken and 103 people died.
The President of the Board of Health and Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. John Ashburton Thompson, investigated the spread of the disease. In the 1890s it was recognised that there was a connection between rats and the plague. In 1900 the Department of Health believed the first defence against the disease was the extermination of rats. They employed 3000 men at the height of the epidemic to catch and kill rats.
The Government cleansed large areas of the city. Contacts with the disease were isolated, actual cases hospitalised and people living in the infected areas were inoculated. By carefully plotting reported cases on large scale maps the course of the plague was traced and it became evident that rats preceded outbreaks of the disease.
Each volume is labelled: ‘Views taken during cleansing operations, quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900, under supervision of Mr. George McCredie, F.I.A., N.S.W.’ There is a numerical list of photographs [labelled as ‘index’] inside the front cover of each volume. The volumes are incomplete, volume VI lacking almost half the views listed in the ‘index’, the great majority of which are of the Manly area. Sundry pages are also missing from all but volume IV.
Text from the State Archives of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 11/04/2020
Endnote
(1) NSW Parliamentary Debates, 1900, vol. CIII, p.111 quoted in Max Kelly, Plague Sydney, Marrickville, NSW, Doak Press, 1981.
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 154. No. 1 Victoria Place
1900
From Vol. III of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 154. No. 1 Victoria Place (detail)
1900
From Vol. III of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 177. Nos. 1, 3, 5 Blackburn Street
1900
From Vol. III of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Amazed to find that this terrace (1, 3, and 5 Blackburn Street) survived the slum clearance and road widening in this area of Surry Hills. The houses are STILL THERE albeit much altered. See Google Maps Street View – goo.gl/maps/nLFbY – (Thank you beachcomber australia for the information)
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 179. Clearing the rubbish at Smith’s Wharf
1900
From Vol. III of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
“Smith’s Wharf” was on the western edge of Millers Point – we are looking south up Darling Harbour. The wharf was redeveloped shortly after and was then known as “Dalgety’s Wharf”. The amazing thing is that John Degotardi Jnr the photographer managed to make a routine photo of a barge clearing rubbish from a wharf into an interesting study in composition, perspectives, light and shapes. (Thank you beachcomber australia for the information)
I couldn’t have put it better about the photographer – he certainly knew his stuff!
Plan E of the Darling Harbour Resumptions noting the position of Smith’s Wharf
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 179. Clearing the rubbish at Smith’s Wharf (details)
1900
From Vol. III of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 211. No. 20 Upton Street
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 211. No. 20 Upton Street (details)
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
La Peste (The Plague)
Albert Camus
What does plague mean for humanity – in his philosophy… we are all, unbeknownst to us, already living through a plague. That is, a widespread, silent invisible disease that may kill any of us at any time and destroy the lives we assumed were solid [death].
The actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely concentrations of a universal precondition, they are dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that we are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated, by a bacillus, an accident or the actions of our fellow humans. Our exposure to plague is at the heart of Camus’s view that our lives are fundamentally on the edge of what he termed ‘the absurd’.
For Camus, when it comes to dying, there is no progress in history, there is no escape from our frailty; being alive always was and will always remain an emergency, as one might put it, truly an inescapable ‘underlying condition’.
Plague or no plague, there is always – as it were – the plague, if what we mean by this is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless.
Life is a hospice, never a hospital.
Camus writes: ‘Pestilence is so common, there have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.’
In one of the most central lines of the book, Camus writes: ‘This whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.’
In the words of one of his characters, Camus knew, as we do not, that ‘everyone has inside it himself this plague, because no one in the world, no one, can ever be immune.’
Anonymous. “Camus and The Plague,” on the School of Life website [Online] Cited 16/05/2020
Albert Camus – The Plague
There is no more important book to understand our times than Albert Camus’s The Plague, a novel about a virus that spreads uncontrollably from animals to humans and ends up destroying half the population of a representative modern town. Camus speaks to us now not because he was a magical seer, but because he correctly sized up human nature. As he wrote: ‘Everyone has inside it himself this plague, because no one in the world, no one, can ever be immune.’
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 224. No. 841 George Street (kitchen)
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
841 George Street was on the site of the TAFE Marcus Clarke Building (1910).
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 224. No. 841 George Street (kitchen) (detail)
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 227. Newtown Garbage Tip and Punt, Blackwattle Bay
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 236. Johnstone’s Lane
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 239. No. 36 Owen Street (rear)
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 239. No. 36 Owen Street (rear) (detail)
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 244. Sutton Forest Butchery, No. 761 George Street
1900
From Vol. IV of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
A Sydney butcher’s, 1900. Taken by Mr. John Degotardi, Jr., photographer from the Department of Public Works, the images depict the state of the houses and ‘slum’ buildings at the time of the outbreak and the cleansing and disinfecting operations which followed. Sutton Forest Butchery, No.761 George Street, Sydney Dated: c. 17/07/1900
Bubonic Plague outbreak in Sydney in the 1900s helps Politicians to clear the way for transport progress & landmark
By the end of August 1900, the outbreak had concluded, and whilst there was only a reported 103 deaths (significantly low when compared to mortality rates from other infectious diseases of the time), the effect that it had on the reputation of The Rocks and Millers Point, as well as its inhabitants, was damaging. The state resumption and its demolition programs left behind a series of questions regarding the motives behind the government’s orchestration of this movement.
The geographical structure of The Rocks, as well as Sydney’s unique historical beginnings as a penal colony credited the often rugged housing conditions. Eleven decades of unregulated building development, as well as uneven and irregular land surfaces meant that often housing was unstructured and haphazardly built. Dwellings sprouted from rocks and other buildings in an “oyster-like” fashion, and the practice of “land sweating” (the construction of multiple structures on one piece of land) was commonplace. The City of Sydney Improvement Act of 1879 highlighted these issues and encouraged demolition of any existing substandard housing.
This set the precedent for the destruction programs that were to follow after the bubonic plague outbreak.
Health Board Acts
On the afternoon of 20th January 1900, van-driver Arthur Payne, a resident of 10 Ferry Lane, The Rocks, became Sydney’s first reported victim of bubonic plague. This was somewhat unremarkably in itself, the arrival of the plague had been duly anticipated by authorities for months prior as it raced through Hong Kong and New Caledonia. What was notably, however, was the wave of public panic that the outbreak prompted, and how it was responsible for community disruption and mass demolition of one of Sydney’s oldest precincts, The Rocks and Millers Point. The outbreak bred panic and brought emphasised authoritative attention to the living conditions of the area, and much time and effort was devoted to surveying conditions and proposing subsequent remedies of improvement. State resumption of the precinct followed swiftly after the outbreak, coming into effect on 3rd May 1900, and forced quarantining of the site swiftly followed, with areas surrounding the wharves being sectioned off, and mass disinfection and demolition processes commencing soon thereafter.
Over the next decade, more than 3,800 properties were inspected, hundreds were pulled down, and hundreds of families and individuals were dispossessed.
Land Resumption
Another motivating factor for the resumption of the area was to lay the groundwork of the proposed bridge link between Sydney city and the North Shore. Plans were underway even at these early stages and a good 23 years before construction of the bridge commenced. Even at the turn of the nineteenth century, it was clear that there would need to be a widened thoroughfare to accommodate traffic entering and exiting the bridge, and many buildings would need to be sacrificed to achieve this. The bubonic plague outbreak offered the ideal opportunity to highlight the inadequacies in a lot of buildings, and the chance to condemn the area as slum, whose only chance of redemption was through mass demolition.
The middle class mentality and its effect on The Rocks inhabitants
From the 1860s to the early 1900s the middle and upper classes began deserting the area and relocating to the suburbs, divorcing themselves physically from the working and lower classes, who tended to remain in the city and close to the waterfront areas and their place of employment.
Naturally as a point of import and export, and a site that saw a high exchange of people, livestock and products on a global level, the harbour foreshore was more susceptible to the outbreak of disease.
When bubonic plague erupted along the waterfront precinct, the area became heavily associated with disease and unsanitary conditions, and consequently its inhabitants were assumed to be unwashed and living in a state of constant filth. This has helped to create an historical consensus that waterside housing and urban living conditions were universally appalling.
The middle and upper classes were able to dissociate themselves with the presence of the plague, given their geographical distance from the harbour foreshore and the point of outbreak.
The resulting effect was a longstanding assumption that The Rocks was in such dire state that there was no alternative option but for mass slum clearance. Whilst there is no doubt that many properties were definitely substandard, and many families lived in abject poverty and poor conditions, not all the buildings that were demolished were of such a shocking standard, and many were in fact still of a solid and serviceable condition.
…
Following the plague outbreak the NSW Government carried out cleansing and disinfecting operations on the waterfront, and quarantined the residential suburbs of The Rocks and Millers Point. Under the Darling Harbour Resumption Act 1900, the newly created Sydney Harbour Trust oversaw the compulsory resumption of wharves, houses, shops, laneways and pubs in these harbour-side suburbs. The plan was to demolish the existing structures and rebuild to a grand design. The need to keep Dawes Point free for the construction of a possible bridge across the harbour was factored into the design.
Between 1900 and 1910, wharfage was acquired and demolished, along with buildings associated with the Dawes Point Battery. The c. 1870 public bathhouse on the west of Dawes Point was demolished in c. 1910. Works by the Public Works Department and Sydney Harbour Trust, under the presidency of R R P Hickson, included Pier 1 on the bathhouse site (1910-14), Hickson Road and the widening of Lower Fort Street (1906-22), and the four Walsh Bay finger wharves (1912-21).
Works by the Housing Board in The Rocks were also part of the resumption and rebuilding program, and included the realignment of George and Cumberland Streets and the construction of an associated retaining wall between 1913 and 1916. A fountain and garden, and public toilet facilities completed the structure, built in 1916-20.
These works also anticipated the construction of the approaches for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Anonymous. “Bubonic Plague outbreak in Sydney in the 1900s helps Politicians to clear the way for transport progress & landmark,” on The Digger website 13th August 2016 [Online] Cited 10/40/2020
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 266. Rat Incinerator
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 266. Rat Incinerator (detail)
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Powerhouse mechanic working on steam pump
1920
Gelatin silver print
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 275. Rear of 129 Gloucester Street
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 275. Rear of 129 Gloucester Street (detail)
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
115 Gloucester Street looking down towards 129 Gloucester Street
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 289. From 207 Elizabeth Street
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
St George’s Presbyterian church steeple, Castlereagh Street on the far right.
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 289. From 207 Elizabeth Street (detail)
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 290. No. 7 West Street off Oxford Street (rear)
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 290. No. 7 West Street off Oxford Street (rear) (details)
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
No. 7 West Street (on the left) looking up towards Oxford Street, Surry Hills
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 309. Rear of No. 12 Robinson Lane
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937)
NSW Department of Public Works photographer 309. Rear of no. 12 Robinson Lane (details)
1900
From Vol. V of Views taken during cleansing operations. Quarantine areas, Sydney, 1900
Gelatin silver print
New South Wales State Archives & Records NRS-12487 Photographs taken during cleansing operations in quarantine areas, Sydney
Public domain
9 – 7-11491 John Degotardi jr PWD card 001
NRS 12535 Staff record cards, c. 1890-1953 [Department of (Secretary of) Public Works]; [7/11491]
What strikes me about this card is the pay drop he took to become a photographer for Public Works and the fact that it took him 10 years to get back to where he was on the salary scale. A dedicated craftsman. (Thank you to ArchivesOutside for the information)
9 – 7-11491 John Degotardi jr PWD card 002
NRS 12535 Staff record cards, c. 1890-1953 [Department of (Secretary of) Public Works]; [7/11491]
James Cantlie How To Recognise, Prevent and Treat Plague (Title page, p. 5, p. 8)
1900
Cassell and Company, Limited
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, born England 1958) Untitled
1995-96
From the series Sleep/Wound
Gelatin silver print
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it;
but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect
how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but
eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky,
whose bottom is pebbly with stars.
.
Thoreau, Walden
The series Sleep/Wound appeared in my solo exhibition titled The Cleft in Words, The Words As Flesh, at Stop 22 Gallery, St Kilda, Melbourne in 1996.
The series consists of ethereal, intimate photographs of my partner and myself in sleep positions, taken on infra-red film, the only time I ever used such film. I was fascinated (and still am) with the positions of the body in space, and how it moves in different environments.
The second part of the series are photographs of a performance, that of the cutting of my partners back. Paul and I held a dance party at a house on Punt Road in South Yarra where our friend Woody (David J. Wood of Bent Metal fame) was being evicted. The party, naturally enough called Eviction, was held to raise money for HIV/AIDS. Paul and I decorated the house, painting large, colourful kundalini symbols such as snakes and mandalas on the walls. In one room, painted with the seven colours of the main chakras, and to ambient music connected to earth, spirit and cosmos – I cut my partners back. Half the people fled, but the other half recognised the powerful spiritual connection that was happening in the performance (remember at this time, blood in terms of being gay, was tainted because of HIV/AIDS infection). I then smeared Paul’s blood on the walls of the house with my hands, crossing the boundary of the taboo by touching a bodily fluid whist acknowledging something that is essential to human life.
After packing up all the equipment from the party, we both headed to the Tasty nightclub (if any of you remember the Tasty raid) to have a good dance, with the blood still drying on Paul’s back. People were shocked at seeing his cut back. When we got back home at 6am in the morning I took out my trusty Mamiya RZ67 and took these beautiful photographs of one of the most connected, spiritual experiences of my life.
My thankx go to Paul as always for being my muse and partner without whom these experiences and photographs would never have been possible.
Marcus
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Flinders Street railway station)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Another mountain of work scanning and cleaning 50 of these 2 1/4″ square (6 x 6 cm) medium format black and white negatives which come from the collection of my friend Nick Henderson. In Part 2 of the posting the family travel to Melbourne, Colac and Tasmania. The photographs of postwar Melbourne are fascinating. There are also pictures of mining works, a speedcar racer, picnic, pub, dogs, ballerinas, actors, children and some stunning, Frank Hurley-esque photographs of Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The photographs seem as though from another world. The Pacific Highway in North Sydney is almost deserted of traffic. A fascinating set of four photographs are Road accident, hay truck, Albion Park, New South Wales. In the first photograph from a distance we observe that a hay truck has lost its load, possibly after rounding the corner from left at too fast a speed, the intersection marked in the road by a small metal bollard. Small children inspect the underside of the truck while a boy on a bike rides to join them. What strikes one is the openness of the scene, the lack of other cars, and the spareness of the landscape, with only the “milk bar” with the Peters ice cream sign showing any sign of commerce. In the second image the photographer has moved around to the front side of the truck which tilts at a crazy angle. Two forty-gallon oil drums, possibly from the truck, have been placed upright on the road while bales of hay little the bitumen. In the background a petrol station advertises PLUME, Mobiloil, and Atlantic tyres(?) and on the right we can make out the Albion Park Hotel and the intersection around which the truck came.
In the third image which again shows the underside of the truck men have joined the scene, talking to presumably the shirtless truck driver in peaked cap, sheepishly standing among the twisted axles and staring at the camera. To the left two shoeless boys observe the scene. In the last photograph of the front of the truck we see kids sitting on the hay bails posing for the camera, while at far right the shirtless truck driver may be in conversation with others. What a glorious sequence of Walker Evans type social documentary photography… a brief context, an accident, a shooting star in the timeline of the galaxy.
My two favourite photographs in the posting: the almost solarised image of the Convict-built church at Port Arthur convict colony ruins; but more especially Number 42 tram going to Mont Albert. This photograph should become a classic in the annals of Australian photography. In one dynamic image the photographer has captured the hustle and bustle of postwar Melbourne – the women striding purposefully towards us, the Silver Top taxi cresting the rise at speed, the number 42 tram to Mont Albert kicking up dust from the tracks, the shadows, the gothic buildings, the towers behind and the vanishing point. A superlative image.
Hopefully there will be part 3 of this series when I get chance to scan some more negatives. In the meantime you can view Part 1 and these images. Enjoy!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to Nick Henderson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All photographs collection of Nick Henderson. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Y.M.C.A, City Road, South Melbourne)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Collins Street, Melbourne looking west from just above the Swanston Street intersection, Town Hall on the right, and then the Manchester Unity building across Swanston Street, probably taken from in front of the Regent Theatre)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Looking at Flinders Street railway station on Elizabeth Street, Melbourne)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Centreway Building on Collins Street, 259-263 Collins Street)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Melbourne street)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (A. C. Goode House at 389-399 Collins) (the Gothic building at right)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Russell Street taken from near Collins Street)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Russell Street with police radio tower viewed from Collins street. American 1930’s car’s that where popular then, Dodge, Chevy, Lincoln & Fords! Yellow cab at left, and the cars are facing the same way both sides of the road. The Holden Motor Company built Buick, Chevy & Pontiac from “CKD” kits from the USA. Parking in the middle of the road (so we are not seeing the other side of the road).
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Exhibition Street, looking from Collins Street, down past Flinders Lane)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Collins Street looking up towards Old Treasury Building)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Number 42 tram going to Mont Albert)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Photograph taken where – Collins and Swanston Street? The lady is walking towards or just beyond the Melbourne Town Hall, the tram is on the other side of the road going the opposite way towards Mont Albert. In the centre background is the APA Tower and in front of it is the Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co (MLC) building. In the far distance is the Federal Hotel and Coffee Palace. Silver Top Pontiac Taxi (1937) slippery leather seats! Front bench seats with full length grab bar too hold on when cornering! (centre of image).
Many thankx to James Nolen for help identifying this image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne looking from Flinders Street railway station)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Princes Bridge, Melbourne on the Yarra River with Flinders Street railway station to the right)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Seagulls, rowing sheds on the Yarra River, Melbourne)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bill Edwards speedcar, Victoria)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bill Edwards speedcar, Victoria)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Union Club Hotel, Colac)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Union Club Hotel, Colac
2010 Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Picnic, family and car)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
z
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Two women and two girls)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Girl)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Girl)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Two lads and two children)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Three dogs)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Port Arthur convict colony ruins, Tasmania)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Port Arthur convict colony ruins, Tasmania)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Port Arthur convict colony ruins, Tasmania)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Convict-built church at Port Arthur convict colony ruins, Tasmania)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Pirates Bay Lookout, Tasmania)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
One of the Tasman Peninsula’s finest coastal lookouts is actually on the Forestier Peninsula, high on the hillsides above the Tesselated Pavement. Pirates Bay Lookout gives panoramic views down the east coast of Tasmania Peninsula and overs spectacular vistas towards Cape Hauy and Cape Pillar, which are both visible on a clear day. The lookout is on Pirates Bay Drive, the turnoff to the left off Tasman Highway being around 2 km before reaching Eaglehawk Neck when approaching from Dunalley. The lookout can also be accessed from Eaglehawk Neck. Simply take the Scenic drive past the Lufra Hotel.
Text from the Our Tasmania website [Online] Cited 29/03/2020
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Men and shark)(location unknown)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Mining landscape) (location unknown)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Mining landscape) (location unknown)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Mining landscape) (location unknown)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Three dogs)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Two dogs)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Smiling girl with pigtails)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Two ballerinas)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Man and ballerina)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Women in gown)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Three girls)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Two women, a man and a dog)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Road accident, hay truck, Albion Park, New South Wales)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Road accident, hay truck, Albion Park, New South Wales)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Road accident, hay truck, Albion Park, New South Wales)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Road accident, hay truck, Albion Park, New South Wales)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bridgeview Motors, 267 Pacific Highway, North Sydney with Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Lavender street, Lavender Bay looking towards the Sydney Harbour Bridge)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Dawes Point ferry, under the Sydney Harbour Bridge looking to Fort Denison)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Sydney Harbour Bridge, south looking north showing the North Sydney Olympic Pool in the background left)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
The North Sydney Olympic Pool is a swimming and exercise complex located adjacent to Sydney Harbour at Milsons Point in North Sydney between the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Luna Park. Designed by architects Rudder & Grout in the Inter-War Free Classical style with art deco-style decorations, the Olympic-sized outdoor pool was built on part of the Dorman Long workshops site following the completion of the Harbour Bridge. The pool opened 4 April 1936 and hosted the swimming and diving events for the 1938 Empire Games.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Sydney Harbour Bridge, north looking south showing DC current power station stack to the left)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, north looking south showing DC current power station stack to the left)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (girl on porch)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
One of the great joys about compiling this archive is the ability to rescue unloved and unknown images. To give them a voice in the contemporary world.
These 2 1/4″ square (6 x 6 cm) medium format black and white negatives come from the collection of my friend Nick Henderson. There is no marking on any of the negatives, leading me to believe that the film numbers were on the backing paper of the 120 film roll. The negatives are housed in paper packets adorned with a logo and words ‘APS Developing and Printing Service’ – perhaps Australian Photographic Services? Each packet contains basic title information for some of the photographs. Looking at the photographs and their perspective on the world, it would seem that the camera is a waist view camera, in other words the photographer was looking down into the viewfinder, the camera not held at eye level. The camera could possibly have been a Voigtländer or similar camera (see below). The quality of the negatives is reasonable, with some fall off in terms of sharpness occurring at the edge of the image. The photographs can be dated to 1946-1947 due to the February 1947 expiry Victorian registration label on the Chevrolet (thank you Simon Barnfield for spotting this!), are taken by an unknown photographer (probably male)… photographs of life in Sydney, his family and their travels around Australia. This is the first tranche of photographs with roughly the same number to come in the second part of the posting.
What makes these photographs particularly interesting is:
the breadth of subject matter taken just after the Second World War and the fact that they are medium format
the relaxed nature and beauty of the photographs of the children, and the light!
the unknown images of places such as Bondi Beach and historical monuments, such as that of the forlorn The Dog on the Tuckerbox
the photographs of the motor sport activity of hillclimbing, unfortunately no place known but its has been suggested it could be the 90-years-old Maldon hill climb at Mt Tarrengower because of the box-ironbark (and the fact that there are photographs of Maldon in the collection).
.
Variously we have country towns, theatrical groups, sailing, boating, churches, Sydney ferries, a trip to Maldon in Victoria for the Maldon Show, family picnics, cars and caravans, houses and horse riding, churches and children, and the oh so cute dogs in their own car boxes. So Australian. The photographs really give an extensive insight into suburban life in Australia just after the privations of the Second World War… and the photographer had a good eye. That is what is most important – that they knew how to take a good photograph.
Talking to my friend James McArdle who writes the oh so excellent On this Date in Photography website (essential reading!), he was unaware of the time it takes to prepare images for these postings. It has literally taken me hours and hours of hard work to scan these negatives and then digitally clean and balance them. All to give them a new lease of life in the world, to preserve their captured memories and histories. I hope you can appreciate all the hard work and admire the images I have revealed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to Nick Henderson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All photographs collection of Nick Henderson. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
APS (Australian Photographic Services?) Developing and Printing Service Film packets and negatives
1946-47 Negatives: 2 1/4″ square (6 x 6 cm) Packet (closed): 3 7/8 x 3 1/4″ (10 cm x 8 cm)
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Voigtländer Billiant 1930s
Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr
The Voigtländer Brillant is a range of pseudo-TLR cameras, and later true TLR cameras, taking 6 × 6 cm exposures on 120 film, made by Voigtländer from 1932. Famed Hungarian-Dutch photographer Eva Besnyö used a Brillant for her early work.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Circular Quay, Sydney)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Karrabee ferry, Sydney, leaving High St Wharf, Kurraba in the background)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Karingal and Karrabee ferry
Karingal and Karrabee were built by Morrison & Sinclair, Balmain for Sydney Ferries Limited, being launched in 1913. They were the smallest of the round-ended K-class Sydney ferries, and could carry 608 and 653 passengers respectively.
They were near identical sister ferries operated by Sydney Ferries Limited and its NSW State Government operated successors on Sydney Harbour from 1913 until 1984. Wooden ferries built at the time of Sydney Ferries’ rapid early twentieth century, they were the smallest of the round-end “K-class ferries”.
The ferries were built as coal-fired steamer and were converted to diesel in the 1930s – the first Sydney Harbour ferries to be so converted. Unlike many early twentieth century Sydney Ferries, they survived the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1930s, and the State Government takeover in 1951.
Karrabee sank at Circular Quay after taking on water during the Great Ferry Race in 1984 – an incident that received extensive media coverage – and did not return to service. Karingal, and the other three remaining old wooden ferries, were taken out of service shortly after Karrabee’s sinking. In service for 71 years, they were among the longest-serving ferries on Sydney Harbour.
“Karingal” and “Karrabee” are Australian Aboriginal words meaning ‘happy home’ and ‘cockatoo’ respectively.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bondi Beach, Sydney)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bondi Beach, Sydney)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bondi Beach, Sydney)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (The Dog on the Tuckerbox)
Gundagai, 1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (The Dog on the Tuckerbox)
Gundagai, 1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
The Dog on the Tuckerbox
The Dog on the Tuckerbox is an Australian historical monument and tourist attraction, located at Snake Gully, approximately five miles (eight kilometres) from Gundagai, New South Wales as described in the song of the same name.
The inspiration for the statue has been traced to a doggerel poem, “Bullocky Bill”, published anonymously by “Bowyang Yorke” in 1857 (other references have 1880 in the Gundagai Times, however confirmation of either is hard to find), which humorously describes a series of misfortunes faced by a bullock driver, culminating in his dog either sitting on or spoiling the food in his tucker-box (an Australian colloquialism for a box that holds food, similar to a lunchbox, but larger). …
A dog monument was first erected at a site nine miles from Gundagai in 1926. Gundagai stonemason Frank Rusconi suggested a memorial using the legend of the Dog on the Tuckerbox in 1928; and in 1932 the proposal was taken up by the community…
The Back to Gundagai Committee chose the Five Mile camping site rather than the Nine Mile Peg as a location for the monument on the basis that it was more convenient to the Hume Highway and closer to the town, thereby more beneficial to tourism.
A nationwide competition was held to obtain the most suitable inscription for the monument. The chosen inscription on the base of the monument was written by Brian Fitzpatrick of Sydney. The inscription says:
“Earth’s self upholds this monument
To conquerors who won her when
Wooing was dangerous, and now
Are gathered unto her again.”
The dog section of the monument was modelled by Rusconi and cast at ‘Oliver’s Foundry’ in Sydney. Rusconi also sculpted its base.
The Dog on the Tuckerbox monument was erected in 1932 as part of ‘Back to Gundagai’ week, and a large crowd “gathered to her again” to witness the unveiling by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons on 28 November 1932. It was planned to donate money placed in the wishing well at the base of the monument to the Gundagai District Hospital. A souvenir shop was also opened nearby. Copyright on the monument was vested in the Gundagai Hospital, who for many years received a useful income from receipt of royalties from firms using the iconic image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) (detail)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) (detail)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (hillclimb, possibly at Maldon, Victoria) (detail)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boat)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boat at sea)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (child on porch)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy outside house)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy smiling)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy and girl smiling)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (child on lawn)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (child and chairs)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (man and woman)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (house)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (boy on horse)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (dog and saucepan)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (1932 Chevrolet)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Chevrolet and caravan)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (1932 Chevrolet and dogs)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
The photographs can be dated to 1946-47 due to the February 1947 expiry Victorian registration label on the Chevrolet. Thank you to Simon Barnfield for spotting this.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Chevrolet and caravan)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (man and car)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (family picnic)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (man and car)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (house on hill)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (room interior)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Future Miss Maldons, Maldon Show, Maldon, Victoria, with Maldon Timber & Hardware at 28 Main Street in the background)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Where are they now, so many ghosts with flowers in their hair.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Scottish band, Maldon Show, Maldon, Victoria)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (church)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (church)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (group of actors)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (actor and ballerina)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (actor)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (band performances)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Unknown photographer (Australian) Untitled (Bilsons, country town)
1946-47
Medium format negative
Collection of Nicholas Henderson
Exhibition dates: 23rd November 2019 – 9th February 2020
Curator: Gareth Syvret
Artists: Gordon Bennett, Polly Borland, Pat Brassington, Eric Bridgeman, Jeff Carter, Nanette Carter, Jack Cato, Zoë Croggon, Sharon Danzig, Rennie Ellis, Elizabeth Gertsakis, Christine Godden, Alfred Gregory, Craig Holmes, Tracey Moffatt, Derek O’Connor, Jill Orr, Deborah Paauwe, David Rosetzky, Damien Shen, Wesley Stacey, Christian Thompson, Lyndal Walker, Justene Williams, Anne Zahalka.
Installation view of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Making an appearance
There are some stimulating and challenging works in this first exhibition curated by new MGA Associate Curator Gareth Syvret, who was parachuted into the project at the last moment. The curator has pulled together work that examines the complex interweaving of “cultural scenarios,” “interpersonal scripts,” and “intrapsychic scripts” that ground how the camera, and the photographer, picture our relationship to dressing up…. and how we see ourselves pictured by the camera.
In various ways, the works interrogate how clothes (or the lack of them) reinforce the postmodern fragmentation of the individual or group, the self being decentred and multiple, as when we change from work clothes, to drag, to leather, to wearing our footy beanie and scarf… and how these e/facements, these everyday performances (for that is what they are), camouflage or reveal our “true” nature. Do we dress up to fit in (to a tribe or group, or representation), or do we rebel against the status quo, as did that enfant terrible who refused all categorisation throughout his life, the Australian fashion pioneer Leigh Bowery. How do we turn our face towards, or away from, the camera? (turning away is a re/action to the power of representation, even if a negative one)
Firstly we must recognise that “cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them.” And secondly, we must acknowledge that, “the analysis of images always needs to see how any given instance is embedded in a network of other instances”1 through intertexuality – where we, reality, our representation, and the image, are just nodes within a network whose unity is variable and relative.
“Critical to understanding the construction of these constantly shifting networks in contemporary society are the concepts of weaving and intertexuality. Intertextuality is the concept that texts do not live in isolation, ‘caught up as they are in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network… Its unity is variable and relative’ (Foucault, 1973). In other words the network is decentred and multiple allowing the possibility of transgressive texts or the construction of a work of art through the techniques of assemblage [Deleuze and Guattari] – a form of fluid, associative networking that is now the general condition of art production.”2
This weaving of surfaces disrupts histories and memories that are already narrativised, already textualised. It disrupts this marking, the continual reiteration of norms, by weaving a lack of fixity into objects, namely how we see ourselves, how we pictures ourselves. Through dress, and the camera, through a constant process of reconceptualisation of space and matter, we can redefine the significations of the body of the animal in the fold of inscription, through a process of materialisation. The production of this materialisation (the matériel, or arms, of sartorial elegance) – of this signified – is open to struggle, the simulation “by virtue of its being referent-free invites a reading of a different order: it is a perpetual examination of the code.”3 A code which, Julia Kristeva notes, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself. “[A]ny text,” she argues, “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”4 And this is what is happening in this exhibition – work, and images, which are a mosaic of quotations fighting over unity and fragmentation, reality and representation… and the construction of identity.
What this exhibition, and this materialisation, does not, and cannot answer, is the critical question: why do we dress up in the first place? What is the overriding reason for this ritualistic, performative enactment, this action, which happens time after time, day after day. And what is that face that we present to the camera during this performance? As Roland Barthes lucidly observes in Camera Lucida, “The PORTRAIT-PHOTOGRAPH is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.”5
So, who I am?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 2-3
Foucault, Michel cited in Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 01/04/2011 no longer available online
Tseëlon, E. The Masque of Femininity: The Representation of Women in Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1995, pp. 128-130
Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialog and Novel”, in Moi, Toril (ed.,). The Kristeva Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p, 37 quoted in Keep, Christopher; McLaughlin, Tim and Parmar, Robin. “Intertextuality,” on The Electronic Labyrinth website [Online] Cited 07/02/2020
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, London, 1984, p. 13
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Many thankx to Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All installation photographs proceed in a clockwise order around the exhibition. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dress and clothing are so much a part of the way people present themselves to the camera and this subject provides a strong theme through which to explore MGA’s extraordinary collection. Some photographs in the exhibition are well known, others have not previously been shown. All are equally compelling in showing the way photographers record and manipulate dress to tell their stories.
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Gareth Syvret, MGA Associate Curator
As cultural hybrids, images are used as if they simultaneously block and unveil truth, reality, ways of seeing and understanding.
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Ron Burnett. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, & the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 237
The meanings of clothes may usefully be divided into two types, ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’, each working in its own way on its own level. … Denotation is sometimes called a first order of signification or meaning. It is the literal meaning of a word or image… Connotation is sometimes called a second order of signification or meaning. It may be described as the things that the word to the image makes a person think or feel, or as the associations that a word or an image has for someone…
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Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge, 1996
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne with at left, Gordon Bennett’s Self-portrait (Nuance II) (1994) and at right, Deborah Paauwe’s Foreign body (2004)
Gordon Bennett Self-portrait (Nuance II)
1994
Gelatin silver prints
50.8 x 40.6 cm (each)
Photographer: Leanne Bennett
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1995
Courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Bennett and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne)
Gordon Bennett’s Self -portrait (nuance II) performance was staged for the camera rather than a live audience. The artist prepared for the performance by painting his face with polyvinyl acetate glue. The process of peeling away the pale skin, created by the dry glue, was then documented in a series of photographs. This work is a subtle critique of simplistic oppositions between people who have light skin and people who have dark skin. Bennett discovered that he was of Aboriginal descent when he was 11 years old, but he resisted identifying as an Indigenous Australian for another 20 years. Conceived as a self-portrait, this work alludes to Bennett’s own process of ‘coming out’ as an Aboriginal man; removing his white mask. But, rather than representing this process in terms of a simple opposition, the photographs emphasise the nuanced ambiguities and transitory nature of identity.
Deborah Paauwe Foreign body
2004
From the series Chinese whispers
Chromogenic print
120.0 x 120.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2004
Courtesy of the artist, GAGPROJECTS Greenaway Art Gallery (Adelaide) and Michael Reid (Sydney)
Deborah Paauwe’s photographs are loaded and coded psychosexual puzzles. In this photograph Foreign body, who are the subjects and what is their relation? What is the nature of the embrace Paauwe concocts: eroticism or comfort? In their opposition as clothed and naked Paauwe’s models perform a drama, on desire, for the camera in which dress is figured as a method for revealing or concealing the body as the border between eye and flesh.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Eric Bridgeman’s Woman from settlement with boobs (2010) and at right, two photographs from Tracey Moffatt’s series Scarred for life
Tracey Moffatt Job hunt
1976 1994
From the series Scarred for life
Off-set print
80.0 x 60.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1998
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Sydney)
Scarred for life is a series of works based on true stories about traumatic childhood experiences. In response to each story, Moffatt has staged and photographed a scene that illustrates the tragic tale. The photographs have been made to look like snapshots from a family album, emphasising the everyday nature of the incidents and their ongoing significance as memories. The photographs have been presented in a way that mimics the format of the 1960s American magazine, Life, which was well known for publishing photo-essays in this captioned format. Moffatt often draws on the story-telling conventions of magazines, cinema and other popular forms of visual communication in ways that give her photographs a heightened sense of drama. In Job hunt the tension between the fictive nature of Moffatt’s artistry and the ordinariness of the subject’s dress as a schoolboy dramatises the everyday. This effect is explored further in The Wizard of Oz where the awkwardness of Moffatt’s casting of a boy in a dress as Dorothy in her own fiction is heightened by his father’s overblown gesture.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Christian Thompson’s Gods and kings (2015) and at right, Damien Shen’s Ventral aspect of a male #1 and #2 (2014)
Christian Thompson Gods and kings
2015
From the series Imperial relic
Chromogenic print
100.0 x 100.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2018
Courtesy of the artist and Michael Reid (Sydney + Berlin)
In this photograph by Christian Thompson the artist wears a makeshift hooded cape fashioned out of multiple maps of Australia charting different and conflicting Indigenous and colonial histories. The melding of these narratives through a careful but fragmented process of folding references the instrumentality of the map as a weapon of territoriality to challenge the idea of colonial power predicated on the designation of Australia as terra nullius. Describing his use of portraiture Thompson says, ‘I don’t think of them as being ‘myself’, because I think of my works as conceptual portraits. I’m really just the armature to layer ideas on top of … I really like the idea of wearing history, I like the idea of adorning myself in references to history.’ By wearing his cloak of maps, Thompson transfigures his body into a terrain where difficult histories are re-explored.
Damien Shen Ventral aspect of a male #1
2014
From the series On the fabric of the Ngarrindjeri body – volume II
Pigment ink-jet print
59.4 x 42.0 cm Photographer: Richard Lyons
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2016
Courtesy of the artists and MARS Gallery (Melbourne)
This work is from Shen’s series On the fabric of the Ngarrindjeri body – volume II (2014), which comprises 12 black-and-white photographs showing the artist and his uncle, a Ngarrindjeri elder known as Major Sumner. Across the series, the two subjects are shown from different angles, either together or individually. Their bodies have been painted in the traditional Ngarrindjeri way and they perform in front of the camera in a studio setting. While the majority of the images were taken in front of the studio backdrop, four of the images document Major Sumner ‘behind the scenes’.
This series is typical of Shen’s practice in that it explores his Indigenous identity and family history through portraiture. For Shen this series is extremely personal, as it documents his uncle sharing his cultural knowledge and experience with him. However, the series was also created to more broadly document Ngarrindjeri culture and the history of his ancestors. Furthermore, Shen’s use of a plain studio backdrop and sepia toning, along with his prosaic titles, directly reference 19th-century ethnographic portraiture, drawing attention to the history of the representation of Indigenous people. The candid backstage images are not sepia toned and have been juxtaposed with the staged portraits in a way that further highlights the artificiality of the studio setting.
Damien Shen Ventral aspect of a male #2
2014
From the series On the fabric of the Ngarrindjeri body – volume II
Pigment ink-jet print
59.4 x 42.0 cm Photographer: Richard Lyons
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2016
Courtesy of the artists and MARS Gallery (Melbourne)
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Jill Orr’s Lunch with the birds (1979) and at centre, Zoë Croggon’s Lucia (2018) and at centre right, Justene Williams Blue foto (2005)
Jill Orr Lunch with the birds #3
1979
Ink-jet print, printed 2007 Photographer: Elizabeth Campbell
30.0 x 44.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2008
Courtesy of the artist
Jill Orr’s Lunch with the birds performance took place on St Kilda beach on a wintery day in 1979. It was conceived as a shamanistic ritual that would provide an antidote to the junk food that is often thrown to scavenging seagulls. Dressed in her mother’s wedding gown, Orr lay on the beach surrounded by a meal of whole bread, fresh fish and pure grain, and waited for the birds to come and commune with her on the foreshore. Apart from the photographer Elizabeth Campbell, who had been commissioned to document the event, there was no human audience on the beach. Like other performances that Orr has enacted in the landscape, nature itself is the primary audience for this ritual. All the same, Orr is quite conscious of using photography to share the performance with gallery audiences. Working with the photographic documentation after the event, Orr composed the images as a narrative sequence (from which these works are taken) and presented them on black mount boards to suggest a filmstrip.
Zoë Croggon Lucia
2018
From the series Luce Rossa
Pigment ink-jet print
65.0 x 79.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Daine Singer Gallery (Melbourne)
Zoë Croggon uses collage techniques to explore spatial relationships between the human form, architecture and the physical world. Her practice is informed by her experience of studying ballet and dance. In many of Croggon’s works, found photographs of the human body are cut out and re-placed, in tension, against surface and structure to explore the politics and poetics of space. For the series Lucia Rossa, the source materials are derived from Italian pornography, eroctica and fashion magazines. Although it is not overtly depicted, this work responds to the ways that the female body is ‘arranged, fragmented and presented for consumption…’ As such, ‘Lucia’ considers the condition of fabric, clothing and dress as a space for the body, laden with the politics of sexuality.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Justene Williams Blue foto (2005) and at right, Christine Godden’s photographs
Christine Godden Untitled
1976
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 22.8 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with the assistance of The Robert Salzer Foundation 2015
Courtesy of the artist
Christine Godden’s photographic work is a highly personal and poetic form of documentary practice, which is informed by a feminist interest in developing distinctly female perspectives on the world. Godden’s familiarity with the tradition of fine art photography in North America is evident in her commitment to high quality printing, which accentuates the sensuality of her subject matter. This photograph is from a body of Untitled works that was originally exhibited in 1976 at George Paton Gallery, Melbourne and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. This tightly organised sequence of 44 photographs intended to show ‘how women see [and] how women think.’ The photographs present fragments or tightly cropped glimpses of textures and bodies (usually of women) that, with their combination of tenderness and formal rigour, take the appearance of being ‘female,’ while at the same time unpicking or unhinging the logic of a feminine imagery or style.
Christine Godden Untitled
1976
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 22.8 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with the assistance of The Robert Salzer Foundation 2015
Courtesy of the artist
Christine Godden Untitled
1976
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 22.8 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with the assistance of The Robert Salzer Foundation 2015
Courtesy of the artist
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Christine Godden’s photographs; at middle left David Rosetzky’s photographs; and at far right Sharon Danzig’s No escape (2004)
David Rosetzky Hamish
2004
Chromogenic prints
50.0 x 61.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2005
Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne)
This work by David Rosetzky is an early examples of cut-out and collaged photographic portraits that he has been producing periodically since 2004. To create these images, Rosetzky produces slick studio portraits of young models, referencing the style of photography prevalent in advertising and fashion magazines. He then layers a number of portraits on top of each other before hand-cutting sections to reveal parts of the underlying prints. Through this method of image making he seeks to represent the identity of his subjects as multi-layered, shifting and often concealed.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Sharon Danzig’s No escape (2004) and at right, the work of Pat Brassington
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing work from Elizabeth Gertsakis’ series Innocent reading for origin (1987)
Elizabeth Gertsakis Innocent reading for origin
1987
Gelatin silver prints
74.0 x 48.5 cm (each)
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1994
Courtesy of the artist
For the series Innocent reading for origin, Elizabeth Gertsakis uses photographs of her family taken at the time of their migration to Australia from Florina, Greece, her birthplace, when she was an infant. These photographs are presented with typescripts of her readings and observations about the photographs. As viewers we are witness to how the images form the artist’s words and, placed alongside them, how her words form the images. The dress of the people in the photographs is particularly significant for their interpretation and description and the ways that these images operate on the artist and the viewer. Gertsakis is concerned here with how photographs transmit memory and meaning in private and public. By shifting the format and scale of family photographs from shoebox to gallery wall, Gertsakis calls into question the status of the medium as vernacular and/or fine art.
Elizabeth Gertsakis Innocent reading for origin
1987
Gelatin silver prints
74.0 x 48.5 cm (each)
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1994
Courtesy of the artist
As necessity or luxury, to integrate or rebel, in freedom or oppression, dress is the nexus of selfhood. Photography and dress are forever entwined; from its inception in the 1840s one of photography’s main objectives has been the making of portraits. Clothing has been imaged by photographers ever since. In documentary mode, photography provides a record of the ways we dress and how clothing has changed over time. As an instrument of empire photography was used for the purpose of recording the dress and appearance of Indigenous people. Since the early twentieth century the practice of fashion photographers has posed body and garment to create brands and promote lifestyle choices to sell us the clothes we wear.
This exhibition draws together photographs from the MGA collection that feature dress or clothing as a significant element in their making. Some of the photographers included have produced works with documentary intent. For many, a classification of their practice is not so clear cut. These artists photograph dress, clothing and the body to actively question appearances. They use photography as a tactic for testing the nature of consumer culture, challenging social norms or protesting histories of colonisation and discrimination. Shaping and shaped by the individual, our clothes can conceal, reveal and transform who we are. Like the photographs in this exhibition they are the bearers of memory, emotion and time.
Text from the Monash Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 22/12/2019
Installation view of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing the work of Polly Borland from her Bunny series (2004-05)
Polly Borland Untitled XXIII
2004-05
From the series Bunny
Chromogenic print, printed 2008
25.3 x 17.1 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2008
Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room (Melbourne)
This photograph is from Polly Borland’s Bunny series, which consists of more than 50 images. Borland worked over an extended period of time in close collaboration with actress Gwendoline Christie as the subject of the photographs. The Bunny series plays upon the physicality of its model – who is extraordinarily tall – rendering tense, awkward and absurd poses. The surreal character of Bunny created through gestures of masking and dressing up acts as a darkly playful riposte to the objectification of the Playboy centrefold. Through a process of costuming explored between photographer and subject these images lampoon the fetishism of the glamour shot, supplanting it with their own fantasies both revealed and concealed.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left the work of Alfred Gregory, at centre the work of Jack Cato (1930s-1940s), and at right Lyndal Walker’s Lachlan sprucing by the hearth (2013) from the series Modern romance.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing the work of Jeff Carter at left: Saturday arvo, Cronulla Beach (1960) and Clan gathering, Wangaratta (1955); and at right, Rennie Ellis’ Richmond fans, Grand Final, MCG (1974)
Jeff Carter Saturday arvo, Cronulla Beach
1960
Gelatin silver print
26.8 x 38.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1992
Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Carter Clan gathering, Wangaratta
1955
Gelatin silver print
29.1 x 31.9 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1992
Courtesy of the artist
Rennie Ellis Richmond fans, Grand Final, MCG
1974
Chromogenic print
26.7 x 40.7 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2007
Courtesy of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive (Melbourne)
This is one of the most famous photographs of the most important date in the Australian football calendar: Grand Final Day. Ellis turned his lens off the field onto the fans of the winning side on 28 September 1974, the Richmond Tigers. Ellis’s photograph encapsulates the centrality of clothing and colour to the tribalism of football fandom – in particular among ‘cheer squads’ – some of it official merchandise, some adapted or homemade. The image brilliantly exemplifies the unique ability of still photography to render human physicality and a moment in time.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Derek O’Connor’s Untitled (1981-84) and at right, four Rennie Ellis photographs (see below).
Rennie Ellis Confrontation, Gay Pride Picnic, Botanic Gardens
1973
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
22.8 x 34.3 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2016
Courtesy of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive (Melbourne)
Rennie Ellis Drag queens and security guard
1973
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
30.0 x 44.0 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2016
Courtesy of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive (Melbourne)
In 1973 the Australian Gay Liberation movement instigated a series of Gay Pride festivals in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. This was a time when homosexual sex was classified as a criminal act across Australia, and the Gay Pride events sought to challenge these repressive laws and openly celebrate gay and lesbian culture in public spaces.
Rennie Ellis, one of the most prolific photojournalists of Australian society during the 1970s and 1980s, documented Melbourne’s Gay Pride Week with his characteristic warmth and candour. Commissioned to photograph the event for the National Review, Ellis captured everything from transgressive cross-dressers and camped up political banners to same-sex couples enjoying romantic interludes on the lawns of the Botanic Gardens.
Ellis made the only substantial visual record of Melbourne’s first gay and lesbian festival. These photographs show the importance of dress as a method for open expression of gay and queer identities. Since the making of these photographs, significant progress has been made on this issue, most notably with the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill, 2017 providing equal rights to same sex couples. Continued work and education towards the eradication of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, however, remains imperative.
Installation views of the exhibition Dressing Up at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne showing at left, Derek O’Connor’s Untitled (1981-84) and at right, two photographs by Wesley Stacey, both Untitled (1973) from the series Friends
Derek O’Connor Untitled
1981-84
From the series Amata
Image 2 of a series of 4
Gelatin silver print
50.8 x 61.2 cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2007
Courtesy of the artist
Derek O’Connor took this series of photographs in the early 1980s while he was living at Amata, an Aboriginal community situated in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara / Yankunyjatjara Lands in the far northwest of South Australia. They show a group of Aboriginal youths congregating around a campfire on the outskirts of the township, casually incorporating various elements of capitalist culture into their own communal space: second-hand ’70s clothing, a portable cassette player, a tin can with a Hans Heysen label, and petrol.
Photographs of this sort, which represent Aboriginal people as fringe-dwellers on the margins of White Australia, date back to the nineteenth century. Early examples of this genre typically cast Aboriginal people as a dying race, whose way of life was rapidly being undermined by the colonial regime. In O’Connor’s photographs, however, the Aboriginal youths personify a sense of persistent vitality, in spite of their circumstances. As O’Connor explains, ‘there is no self-pity or passive resignation in the way they face the camera. Their quiet defiance has a palpable sense of integrity.’
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
Remembering all my lovers, friends, and everyone who has passed or been affected by this disease on World AIDS Day.
To survive the initial wave was just luck of the draw. We lost so many people. Thinking of you all.
Marcus xx
The titles from this period tend to be poetic, pragmatic or composed, like Japanese haiku. The two photographs How will it be when you have changed and Tell me your face before you were born (1994, above) were included in the seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Just putting this out there in the ether of the cosmos because you never know, its spirit might hear you.
I am looking for a research fellowship or postdoc work in photography anywhere in the world.
I have been working at Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for years, 4 days a week making websites. This is because of my bipolar and anxiety disorder. It has been a job to get me through the tough times. But after my recent photographic research trip to Europe, I realise that I need more stimulus – to fully concentrate on photography at an elite level. To research and write a book on photography.
In 2021 I will have been an artist for 30 years and my first writings date from 1998. I have been writing Art Blart now for 10 years… a lot of research and writing for this cultural memory archive, perhaps used as the basis for a book on the spirit of photography in the 21st century. But I am open to any research project. I have to do something to be able to immerse myself fully in photography.
If you have any ideas or knowledge of friends with connections please let me know at bunyanth@netspace.net.au.
Thank you!
Marcus
New work
All photographs are from a new body of art work I am working on for 2020, provisionally titled ‘(How I) Wish You Were Here’, taken during my recent European research trip. These are difficult photographs to understand but please take the time (critical in looking at photographs) to feel them.
My mentor and friend said: “This is the most difficult work to organise yet. There is something to see in every picture – but it is so subtle – not everyone will see it, but it is for people who look at pictures a lot. MG0028 (the yellow entrance with stone pillars) is lovely – the entrance painted a warm sickish colour, a sort of terrible colour aesthetically – and the cropping is just a little brutal: what is it really showing at this camera to subject distance?
But it all works brilliantly, and they are all like that – there are subtle things that can’t be traced: i.e. are they the photographer: or are they the camera or are they just inevitable in this world? It is a type of anti-spirituality meets spirituality… and any number of other meeting points.”
And my friend Elizabeth Gertsakis said: “Spatial as well as surface tactile. Fascinated randomness. The human figure appears as a singular frozen device. Post-apocalyptic as well.”
I said: the spirit has left the earth, the body; something NQR. Eventually, the whole purpose of the series is not to tell the viewer where they are in the world, just give little clues as the viewer moves through time and space… something that photography is very good at: disrupting time and space.
Marcus
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing ISBN: 9781925801859
Hardback Purchase
Book cover to We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans. Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019.
I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who worked on the book, and an especially big thank you to the wonderful Jenner Zimmer who edited the book and without whose help it would not be the book it turned out to be. Her research in tracking down who the people were in the photographs, their correct names, the location of some of the photographs, and her layout of the book, was magnificent to say the least. Through her excellent work, we can now place these photographs not only in a personal context, but in an important historical context in relation to the development of the civil rights movement in Australia directly after the Second World War.
The book is a reflection of the times, an insight into the nascent civil rights movement of the late 1940s-1950s that reached full bloom in the 1960s. As I observe in the foreword below it also becomes a reflection on how photography and friendship go hand in hand… and how this transformative process leads us to reassess our relationship to the world through the act of taking photographs.
Marcus
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Foreword
Nothing emerges from nothing
“… every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.”
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Helen Levitt. In the Street 1948.1
The gift of friendship between two people is a truly magical thing, a relationship built on the nurturing of respect between them, over time. The alchemical gift of a photograph does not arrive fully formed in a moment, for its magic is grounded in the context of its taking, informed by the wisdom, vision and creativity of the photographer. How Joyce Evans was touched by a connection between photography and friendship is another transformative process, one that leads her to reassess her relationship to the world through the act of taking photographs. Nothing ever emerges from nothing.
My friendship with Joyce Evans began when a joint acquaintance who knew of our love of photography introduced us. Over numerous years since – through trips to Sydney to see Joyce’s favourite photographer Julia Margaret Cameron; through visits to many exhibitions where we have discussed our reactions to the work (often with completely opposing views); through vigorous debate about the merits of different artists; through her promotion of Australian photography; and through her deep knowledge of the world, of life, and of art – I have come to know and love this vibrant and intelligent women. To begin to understand this complex human being and her approach to photography and life. The photographs, text and poetry in this book show evidence of the early maturing of this spirit of life.
Imagine being a nineteen year old who has been studying in America after the end of the Second World War, who has arrived in poverty-stricken England to meet friends who were mutually interested in the peace movement. Imagine travelling across Europe by car with those same friends, as mass migrations of people across Europe were still happening after the war, staying in youth hostels, to camp outside the city of Vienna. Then to cross the “Iron Curtain” and journey with thousands of other people from eight-two countries around the world to the city of Budapest for the Second World Festival of Youth and Students – a festival movement that grew out of the ashes of the war to proclaim, to shout, that youth would never again allow the horrors of fascism to terrorise the world. What a journey of discovery, love, friendship, excitement and danger that must have been!
Using her intelligence and the informed nature of her artistic being to define what interested her most, Joyce documented what she saw of the world around her.2 In so doing, these early photographs set the stage for concerns that have remained consistent in her work to this very day: peace, freedom, place, identity and humanity. While the photographs are a mirror of the times, portraying the improvisational vitality of everyday life, they also represent how the mind of the photographer can be embodied in the physical world, providing a glimpse into that most secret room of all – the core beliefs of a human being, their humanity, their soul.
The Australian photographer Max Dupain stated that the ‘mission of the photograph is to clarify the subject’.3 But perhaps the mission of the photograph is also to help clarify the identity of the artist. As the Austrian-born American photographer Inge Morath eloquently observes:
“Photography is a strange phenomenon. In spite of the use of that technical instrument, the camera, no two photographers, even if they were at the same place at the same time, come back with the same pictures. The personal vision is usually there from the beginning; result of a special chemistry of background and feelings, traditions and their rejection, of sensibility and voyeurism. You trust your eye and you cannot help but bare your soul. One’s vision finds of necessity the form suitable to express it.”4
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The form that Joyce found so early in her life was the music and poetry of humanist photographs, images that are subjective, lyrical, and reveal a state-of-mind. Here is passion and belief in the life of human beings, and the exquisiteness, beauty (and death) of the lived moment. You could label them “social documentary photography” if you were so inclined, but labels don’t capture the frisson of the creative process nor the joyous outcome of Joyce’s portraits. It’s as though Joyce, in a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, is making love to the world through her images: neither rational nor cerebral they evoke sensations and feelings, of being here and there, in that past space and time, now, all these years later. These were epic days of change and transformation – of nations, of continents, of cultures and of people. There was death and destruction but there was also such happiness, hope and joy.
Further, what her photographs also depict is the rise of an informed Australian social consciousness after the Second World War. Her important historical and personal photographs shine a light on forgotten people, times, places and actions, such as the broad based youth movements opposition to the atomic bomb, associations and friendships which eventually form the basis for the progressive social and political protest movements of the 1960s. The voices raised later in support of feminism, gay liberation, free love and Vietnam anti-war protests did not appear fully formed, for there was a history of activism… a slow build, a groundswell of public opinion that was the basis for such emerging actions. Nothing ever emerges from nothing.
As much as Joyce’s photographs engage the viewer in memory, they also engage in the moment, both past and present. Not only an engagement with the history and nostalgia of the images, but in their present day hope and joy. It is such a pleasure to see these strong images, of people now old, still young, a moving image of humanity. This is the heart of the matter: a moving image of humanity. The photographs represent an understanding of (a) life, well formed and well lived, of a courageous and visionary woman who told it her way, who still tells it her way to this day.
I have a deep sense of gratitude for both our friendship and for Joyce Evans’ prescient vision in recording these remarkable stories so that they can be shared today. At the time they had such high hopes, for their lives and for the future, energy that eventually morphed into something else (as is its want). This leaves these images, written memory, as both poem and testimonial to the uncertainty of human dreams and to the percipience of the artist who embodied and enabled them… in feeling, in love and in spirit. Nothing ever emerges from nothing. Good on ya Bert!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Melbourne, February 2019
Endnotes
Helen Levitt (ed.,). In the Street. Directed by Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb and James Agee. Black and white film, 14 mins. 1948 (VHS) New York: Arthouse, Inc., 1996.
Joyce was ever attentive to the power of the historical for she had been studying the Baroque painters in Paris and on her travels through Italy, evidence of which can be seen in the grouping of human figures in her photographs.
Inge Morath, Sabine Folie and Gerald Matt. Inge Morath, Life as a Photographer. Munich: Gina Kehayoff Verlag, 1999, p. 13.
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Good on yer Bert
1949
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Budapest crowd
1949
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Stalin banner, Budapest
1949
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Farewell to Delegates
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Farewell to Delegates
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Joyce with camera
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Joyce onboard ship
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Joyce with lifeboat
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Faith Bandler
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Edward ‘Woods Lloyd’ Drummond
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
Description
Some think it all happened in the 1960s but Joyce Evans, acclaimed photographer of Australia’s land and its people, goes back to her youth and memories of her many adventures as a student activist. In 1949, aged 19, she set sail for Soviet-occupied Budapest to join the post-war demonstrations at ‘The World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace’. It was a time when young Australians dreamed of change and travelled to war-torn Europe in the hope of peace becoming the new reality. Among them were many who would later become important figures in Australia’s government, legal profession, diplomatic corps and academia. People like Frank Hardy, John Bluthal, Faith Bandler, Clyde Holding, Irving Saulwick and Richard Woolcott appear in Joyce Evans’ photographs of these events.
This story, with its cast of endearing and passionate characters, records voyages across battle-scarred Europe, clashes with draconian authorities, daring escapes, betrayals, lost idealism and a wealth of unlikely friendships. It describes the adventures of a youthful cohort who felt empowered and believed it could fulfil its dream of world-wide peace. Joyce says: ‘If such a dream existed then, such high hopes can be reclaimed by the youth of today!’
The World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) is an international youth organisation, recognised by the United Nations as an international youth non-governmental organisation, and has historically characterised itself as anti-imperialist and left-wing. WFDY was founded in London in 1945 as a broad international youth movement, organised in the context of the end of World War II with the aim of uniting youth from the Allies behind an anti-fascist platform that was broadly pro-peace, anti-nuclear war, expressing friendship between youth of the capitalist and socialist nations. The WFDY Headquarters are in Budapest, Hungary. The main event of WFDY is the World Festival of Youth and Students. The last festival was held in Sochi, Russia, in October 2017. It was one of the first organisations granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
History
On 10 November 1945, the World Youth Conference, organised in London, founded the World Federation of Democratic Youth. This historic conference was convened at the initiative of the World Youth Council which was formed during World War II to encourage the fight against fascism by the youth of the allied nations. The conference brought together, for the first time in the history of the international youth movement, representatives of more than 30,000,000 young people of diverse different political ideologies and religious beliefs from 63 nations. It adopted a pledge for peace.
Shortly after, with the onset of the Cold War and Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, the organisation was accused by the US State Department of being a “Moscow front”. Many of the founding organisations quit, leaving mostly youth from socialist nations, national liberation movements, and communist youth. Like the International Union of Students (IUS) and other pro-Soviet organisations, the WFDY became a target and victim of CIA espionage as well as part of active measures conducted by the Soviet state security.
The WFYD’s first General Secretary, Alexander Shelepin, was a former leader of the Young Communist International which had been dissolved in 1943. Shelepin had been a guerilla fighter during World War II (after his work with the WFDY, he was appointed head of Soviet State Security). Both the WFDY and IUS vocally criticised the Marshall Plan, supported the Czechoslovak coup d’état of 1948 and the new People’s Democracies in Europe. They opposed the Korean War.
The main event of the WFDY became the World Festival of Youth and Students, a massive political and cultural celebration for peace and friendship between the youth of the world. Most, but not all, of the early festivals were held in socialist nations in Europe.
The World Festival of Youth and Students is an international event, organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), a United Nations-recognised international youth non-governmental organisation, jointly with the International Union of Students since 1947. Initially pluralist, the event became an outlet for Soviet propaganda for foreign audiences during the Cold War.
The festival has been held regularly since 1947 as an event of global youth solidarity for democracy and against war and imperialism. The largest festival was the 6th, held in 1957 in Moscow, when 34,000 young people from 131 countries attended the event. This festival also marked the international debut of the song “Moscow Nights”, which subsequently went on to become perhaps the most widely recognised Russian song in the world. Until the 19th festival in Sochi, Russia in 2017 (with 185 countries participating), the largest festival by number of countries with participants was the 13th, held in 1989 in Pyongyang when 177 countries attended the event.
The World Federation of Democratic Youth was founded to bring together young people of both the socialist and capitalist countries to promote peaceful cooperation and mutual rejection of war. However, with the onset of the Cold War soon after, the organisation and the festivals became a matter of contention within the rivalry. Because of the enormous expenditure and coordination required to support a youth festival, most of the early festivals were held in cities in the socialist countries of Europe. However, many festivals, both then and more so since, have been held in non-socialist countries, affirming the commitment to peaceful coexistence between the peoples living under the different systems. The most recent festival took place in Sochi, Russia, from 13 to 22 October 2017.
The Second World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) was held in 1949, in Budapest, a city still recuperating from World War II. The 2nd WFYS was one of three major youth events held in Hungary in 1949, along with the World University Summer Games and the World Youth Congress. It was organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students
On August 14, 1949, 20,000 young people from 82 countries, gathered in the Ujpest Stadium, inaugurating the festival. For two weeks, the participants took part in cultural, sport, and political activities. The festival expressed its solidarity for the “anti-colonialist struggle” of the peoples of Indonesia, Malaysia and French Indochina and also for the “anti-fascist struggle” of the Spanish and Greek peoples. It was the first time that a delegation from what would become East Germany took part.
It featured a sports programme, including an athletics competition.
The motto of the festival was: Youth Unite! Forward for Lasting Peace, Democracy, National Independence and a better future for the people!
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) No Coal for War, May Day March
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)
![John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937) '70. [Octopus] Cleansing the Wharves' 1900](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/cleansing-the-wharves.jpg "John Degotardi Jr. (Australian, 1860-1937) '70. [Octopus] Cleansing the Wharves' 1900")
![Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) 'Untitled [Budapest crowd]' 1949](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/joyce-evans-budapest-crowd-1949-web.jpg)
