SUBLIME SOULS & SYMPHONIES:
Australian PhotoTexts 1926–1966,  Eric Riddler 1993

Introduction to this thesis |   table of contents  |   1926-1966 chronology of photo-books

Chapter 1  |   Chapter 2   |   Chapter 3  |   Chapter 4   |    Chapter 5  |   Chapter 6   |   Chapter 7  |   Chapter 8   |    Conclusion

CHAPTER FOUR: THE NATIONAL IMAGE

4.1 Cazneaux's Australia; or "of rugged mountain ranges"...exclusively

At the end of the Nineteenth Century the Australian landscape had become synonymous with the eucalypt forests on the outskirts of Australian cities. This was because that was the landscape accessible to most Australians, especially the artists. By the 1920s this portrayal had become artistically academic.

Harold Cazneaux actively pursued this as his landscape as an alternative to the British pictorialist ideal landscape. In 1928 Art in Australia Limited published a booklet of his landscapes called Australia.  The selection of images in Cazneaux's Australia is different from later Australia books. Those books are full of photographs of Australia, comprehensively covering the nation, state by state.

In Australia, Cazneaux, or whomever selected the images, presents the viewer with Australian photographs. The photographs are landscapes, with emphasis on Eucalyptus trees. Of the six photographs, only one is identified by its location, Road to Wombeyan Caves, N.S.W. (below)

Harold Cazneaux, Road to Wombeyan Caves 1928		Figure 5: Harold Cazneaux, Noonday Shade 1928

Another photograph has been reproduced elsewhere identifying its location as being near Penrith.

The effect is similar to paintings by the newer generation of landscape artists, especially Hans Heysen and Elioth Gruner. The latter's landscapes of the Penrith region are softer than Cazneaux's image, indicating an early attempt by Cazneaux to move from soft pictorialism to his proto-modeniist aesthetic.

In its selection Australia resembles the earlier views-style anthologies. It can also be linked to much later phototexts, such as Melbourne, a Portrait, by its rejection of the self-explanatory, tourist attracting photographs of most other books of the time. The book is not particularly revolutionary, insofar as its images follow a conservative style of landscape painting.

4.2 Emil Otto Hoppe's The Fifth Continent

After the glitter and pageantry of Ceylon and India you will exhaust the pictorial possibilities in six weeks!¹ 

This was said by one acquaintance of E. O. Hoppe on his departure from England. In 1930 the British based travel photographer visited Australia to take photographs for his book The Fifth Continent.²

Emil Otto Hoppe was bom in Munich in 1878. He studied portrait photography in Paris and Vienna. After military service in Germany he migrated to Britain in 1900, working as a cashier before his portraiture became a successful career.³   After 1913 he began to travel around the world. This became an important part of his photographic output, particularly after 1925 when he began to produce books of travel photography.

Books such as Picturesque Great Britain and Romantic America set the style which was continued by The Fifth Continent⁴.  The format of these books was a full page to each image, regardless of the image's size. The pictorial content followed a simple pattern of urban images, typical landscapes and the occasional character study (although not in Picturesque Great Britain).

Hoppe would start each book in the major city (e.g. London, New York and Sydney) then show each state or county in turn, ending; in the case of the United States and Australia - with pictures of the National Capital.⁵   The familiar dome of Washington's Capitol building is a dramatic contrast to Canberra's sparse Parliament House courtyard, long since altered, yet these are the closing images of Romantic America and The Fifth Continent respectively.

Hoppe's visit to Australia involved more than just the collection of images for The Fifth Continent. He brought with him a selection of photographs which were exhibited at the David Jones department store in Sydney in 1930.⁶   Some of his images also appeared in The Home journal, both his overseas work and some images of Sydney's Harbour Bridge.

( following images are idenitified using H and a number - this indicates the plate numbers in Hoppe's book The Fifth Continent)

H1   St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney	H15   Newcastle Harbour, NSW	H20   Australian Alps, Mount Kosciusko
H27   River Yatta, Melbourne	H28   Collins Street, Melbourne	H30  Flinders Street crossing, Melbourne
H31   Elizabeth Street, Melbourne	H32/Figure 7:   Wharves, Melbourne	H41  Travelling Sheep, Victoria

The pictorial section of The Fifth Continent opens with a photograph of Sydney's St. Mary's Cathedral as seen from Queen's Square. A drinking fountain and tree form a dark frame to the right of the photograph, compensating for the cathedral's lack of spires. The use of foreground silhouettes is a frequent pictorial effect in Hoppe's work, framing the central image. Hoppe used religious buildings, including cathedrals and the ruined church at Port Arthur as well as mission stations as reference points in the book.

The penultimate image incorporates what is described as the site of Canberra's cathedral, bringing an absent centre of religion into the sparse centre of government. As well as Christian religious buildings are an image of an Aboriginal ceremony and a Darwin Joss House. (H153 - further down on this page)

Even in the post war immigration drive, Australian photographers did little more than allude to non-Christian immigration, so Hoppe's image of Chinese spirituality against a corrugated iron wall is unique. Even synagogues are all but incidental in phototexts, only Jack Cato, in Melbourne, features anything other than Christian buildings in sections devoted to ecclesiastical architecture.

Melbourne's photographic section is a little closer in style to Hoppe's Romantic America images. The first photograph shows the River Yarra as it winds through the Domain. A row of palm trees along the foreground road forms a broken triangle through which the river can be seen. Other images show the active urban lifestyle in the crowded city streets. The wharves at Port Melbourne were the most important point of arrival for migrants and visitors to Melbourne.

In The Fifth Continent horse-drawn drays are shown carrying sacks of produce to be loaded onto the cargo ships.(H32 -above)   In the days when primary industry reigned supreme, Hoppe did not produce any especially industrial photographs of Australia like those he took in Sheffield, Pittsburgh and Detroit for Picturesque Great Britain and Romantic America, so The Fifth Continent carries images of primary exports.

H44   Boyd's Bay, South Coast NSW	H58   Salamanca Place, Hobart	H59  Hobart Harbour, Tasmania
H61   Old Church, Port Arthur, Tasmania	H63   Hobart Harbour, Tasmania	H74  Railway Station, Adelaide
H75   Adelaide	H77   Mount Lofty Ranges, Adelaide	H83  Adelaide at Dusk from Mount Lofty Ranges
H89   Timber at Bunbury, WA	H91:   Brother Baker & assistant, New Norcia, WA	H102  Swan river, Perth

Compared with other books on Australia of the period, notably Ziegler's sesqui-centennial volumes, Hoppe maintains the image of the agricultural nation riding on the sheep's back. This was probably, to an experienced travel photographer like Hoppe, what he expected the overseas audience to appreciate. Ziegler, native-bom and working for officialdom, was more concerned with showing the nation's progress.

The nearest Hoppe comes to industrial photography in The Fifth Continent are those showing work on the Hume Weir and the electricity works at Yallourn. There is also an image of Newcastle Harbour which shows the artificial waterfront, crowned by Nobby's Head but this, like the Port Melbourne image, does not depict the industrial side of the city, showing instead the export of natural resources.

By contrast to these photographs, the small sections on Hobart, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane display serenity. Showing images from parkland, deserted streets and harbours, there is none of Sydney's grandeur or Melbourne's hubbub. Hobart is represented by a photograph of Salamanca Place showing a group of people outside the Sailors' Home seen from behind a eucalypt and photographs of the Harbour. In another photograph of Hobart, Hoppe contrasts the horse drawn vehicles in the foreground with a pattern of masts. (H58 - above)

These masts echo the shape of large steamships which form the backdrop. The other Harbour photograph is simpler, showing Hobart's low skyline over ferry wharves, seen from a barge. The angles on the barge and the cloud pattern break the otherwise horizontal pattern of the photograph.

Adelaide's photographs show the railway station emerging over the parkland and a photograph of a not to busy city intersection. Adelaide at Dusk from Mount Lofty Ranges on page eighty three shows the grid pattern of Adelaide's streets picked out in streetlights. In a manner influenced by the Pictorialists, Hoppe has composed around the silhouette of a tree.

Perth is rather poorly displayed. The Swan River is shown twice. The first image, of mooring piers in half light, is placid. The second image, looking across the Narrows from King's Park is rather plain but for the incongruously leaning tree on the left acting as a framing device.

Brisbane fares a little better. Darwin, hardly a capital then, is represented by a hurriedly composed shot of A Typical Darwin Residence and a photograph of the local Joss House in use. In Darwin's isolation lay exoticism compared with the Chinatowns of the larger cities which were of little interest to Hoppe, or any other photographer.

The rural photographs in The Fifth Continent show more of Hoppe's inconsistency, from great images to dull pictures.  The former include images taken during a stay at the Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia. Red Banks Gorge in the MacDonnell Ranges shows the coarse texture of the rock face, broken by the triangle of sky at the top of the image and the water towards the bottom.

On a rock protruding from the water stands an Aboriginal guide, giving an idea of the scale of the gorge. Hoppe's images of Aborigines include a lot of hunting and corroboree scenes, images of picturesque savagery. (H154 - below)

There are also images of missions at Hermannsburg and New Norcia in Western Australia. Among the other rural images are many livestock photographs, vital to the nation's image but rather inconsequential in any aesthetic sense.

Hoppe tried to show Canberra with the same style as he had shown Washington D.C. in Romantic America but the lack of progress on Canberra hindered such grandeur. In both books the nation's capital city was used as the finale but Washington, with over a century's head-start on Canberra, was much more amenable to dramatically lit photographs of official architecture.

H104   Swan River from Kings Park, Perth WA	H112  Hermannsburg Mission church, NT	H116   Red Banks Gorge MacDonnell Ranges NT
H121   Hermannsburg Mission, Central Aus	H129   Brisbane	H132  Sugar Cane, Queensland
H146   Typical Darwin Residence	H153   Joss House, Darwin	H154  A Corroborree, Central Australia
H158 Commonwealth Offices from Parliament House	H159   Site for Catholic Cathedral, Canberra	H160  Courtyard Parliament House, Canberra

The Fifth Continent continued the pattern books of images of Australia which had started in the Nineteenth Century with such works as the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. Cazneaux's Australia had been a small book which dealt with "Australianness" rather than "pictorial coverage" of Australia.⁷

The books that followed, Hurley's Australia, a Camera Study and, to a much lesser extent, Ziegler's national books follow the order of Hoppe's work in their state by state coverage. Australia, a Camera Study and The Fifth Continent both digress where an area of one state has more in common with a neighbouring state. Hoppe, for example, includes the photograph Bay at Boyd's Farm, a photograph of the south coast of New South Wales, among images of Victoria's geographically similar Gippsland district.

Similarly, Hurley included Broken Hill in the South Australian rather than New South Welsh chapter of Australia, a Camera Study because of the city's close economic ties with the neighbouring state. Hoppe, as an outsider, would have been even less concerned than Hurley about offending Australia's delicate state rivalries.

1. E. O. Hoppe, The Fifth Continent, Simpkin Marshall, London, 1931, p VII.
2. ibid. E. O. Hoppe, The Fifth Continent, Simpkin Marshall, London, 1931.
3. Michele and Michel Auer, Photographers Encyclopaedia International 1839 to the Present, Camera Obscura, Geneva, 1985.
4. E. O. Hoppe, Picturesque Great Britain, Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin, 1926 and Romantic America, Picturesque United States, B. Westermann, New York, 1927.
5. It was not possible to show all 48 of the United States, despite the size of Romantic America. Hoppe" does, however, show as much of 'typical' United States scenery as possible.
6. Michele and Michel Auer, Photographers Encyclopaedia International 1839 to the Present, Camera Obscura, Geneva, 1985.
7. Harold Cazneaux, Australia, Art in Australia, Sydney, 1928.

4.3 Ziegler's Australia Tomes

Oswald Ziegler was responsible for a group of thick quarto; and one folio; books on Australian society and industry.  They were published as commemorative volumes. Each of these tomes featured a particular topic which served as the uniting factor behind the text and images. These were mainly anniversaries but the end of the Second World War, the 1956 Olympics and the 1960s mineral boom (as part of the history of planet Earth) were also used as themes.

Ziegler's folio sized Sesqui-centennial publication 150 Years, Australia 1788-1938 show-cased Australia using many photographers including Frank Hurley (most of the colour work is his) and such rising stars as Melbourne's Athol Shmith. It aimed at institutional book collections rather than mainstream sales, being too large for ordinary shelf display.

The design work by Gert Sellheim was based on Aboriginal art. This style had first appeared in Ziegler's Sesqui-centennial celebrations programme, 150 Years in Australia, published for the Government of New South Wales in 1937. Sellheim was among the first designers to allow an Aboriginal influence. Ironically, the text of 150 Years, Australia 1788-1938 perpetuated the concept of the Aborigines as a dying race.

150 Years, Australia 1788-1938 defined the style of Ziegler's tomes devoted to national promotion. Brief chapters were devoted many subjects, including little views of Australian cities and towns, primary and secondary industries, lifestyle and the contemporary event, in this case the Sesqui-centenary.  In the course of attracting migrants after the Second World War, it is the large, nation-wide volumes that did the most to promote the New Australia.

from 150 year, Australia 1788-1938

above: design from This Is Australia               below:pages from This Is Australia

Ziegler's first post war tome, This is Australia, was published in 1946, when the "New Australian" was going to be British. As the immigration scheme began to accept more European migrants the books slowly acknowledged the ethnicity of the New Australians. The Aboriginal influence upon Gert Seilheim's design work was waning, but This is Australia still carries Aboriginal-inspired motifs. Unlike his border designs of 1938, these motifs are large and sparse, with more freedom of shape. The use of Aboriginal design was an identifying aspect of the book's overall "Australianness" rather than an acknowledgment of the Aboriginal people. The colour theme is predominantly russet and black. The photographs are the usual collections of contributions from freelance, corporate and governmental photographers.

This is Australia's contemporary theme commemorates Australia's participation in the Second World War in a large illustrated historical chapter. Australians in action overseas and life on the home front are covered. The attacks against Darwin, Newcastle and Sydney are referred to with forceful foreboding. This was intended to prevent a return to the complacency that led to the severity of the Darwin and Sydney incursions in the first place. The coverage of the Axis surrender was tied in to an emphasis on rebuilding Australia with the newly demobbed workforce. After the failure of previous Governments to properly absorb returned servicemen into the community, this topic was as important as immigration in the future of Australia's population growth.

In 1950, with the help of Angus and Robertson, Ziegler published Commonwealth of Australia Jubilee, 1901-1951. Like Britain's simultaneous Festival, the Golden Jubilee of Federation was an opportunity for Australia to assess the progress of the peacetime economy. Prime Minister Menzies had regained power with the newly organised conservative Liberal Party at the end of 1949 with (among other political issues) a promise to end the rationing system. This was perceived to be the end of post-war austerity.

The subsequent tomes on Australia made it a point to celebrate the prosperity of the era. The contemporary issue, celebrating the anniversary of Federation, was a history of the politics and organisation of the Commonwealth. Unlike Ziegler's Australia 1901-1976, delayed by the machinations of the fall of the Whitlam Government so as to document the whole affair, Commonwealth of Australia Jubilee, 1901-1976 avoids judgement of the actual politics involved in the nation's political history. Instead it shows portraits of all the Prime Ministers and showcases a selection of images from significant moments in the Federation movement such as the celebrations in Sydney's Centennial Park on Federation Day in 1901.

Although Gert Sellheim was again responsible for the design work, the main motifs used for the title pages are bas reliefs by Lyndon Dadswell and Tom Bass. Dadswell and Bass were on the verge of their domination of Sydney's public sculpture and the works are distinctively theirs. Sellheim's contribution to the design work includes the use of colour themes. The political history is decorated by a pale yellow, blue-green is used for the lifestyle section and brown is used for industry. Another feature of Sellheim's design, carried over from the smaller books he designed for Ziegler, is his interest in cropping the photographs with odd borders. Several images are printed in their section's theme colour and are used as background for the text.

The intention behind Commonwealth of Australia Jubilee, 1901-1951 was that it should be...   a combination of creative art, photography and descriptive matter, as a memorial befitting the importance of this fiftieth birthday of Australia as a Commonwealth.¹

The design of the book is its most attractive feature. While the photographs are interesting they are crowded and the printing is of rather poor quality. The authors chosen to contribute to the artistic sections include Laurence Le Guay, photographer and erstwhile editor of the journal Contemporary Photography, writing about Australian photography.

After the Melbourne Olympic Games of 1956, Ziegler produced another version of This is Australia. Menzies's introduction suggests the book was intended for publication immediately after the close of the Games but within the book is a reference to February 1957 as the present. Despite having references to the Olympics, the book has very little to do with the actual Games, besides featuring them heavily in the chapter on Australian sport, which is the book's contemporary theme, contrasting with the earlier Ziegler themes of politics and anniversaries.

This is Australia uses colour images, artists' impressions as well as Gert Sellheim's theme colour backgrounds in the illustrations. The theme colour throughout This is Australia is a pale olive. This is most obvious in the double page chapter headings. His design work is in a pen-sketch format, with a collage influence.

In 1964 Ziegler produced the ambitiously titled Australia From the Dawn of Time to the Present Day [colour plate 3]   This book dealt largely with industry in Australia, examination of the nation's society was incorporated into a celebration of the boom-time mentality of the day. The book had the largest of Ziegler's theme sections, being an opening section, nearly as long as the contemporary text itself, dealing with Australian history from, as the title suggests, the formation of the planet until the 1960s. The minerals boom of the time contributed to the idea of the Australian economy's connection to the continent's geological history. Ziegler continued to produce large tomes on Australia for a decade after 1966, celebrating the World Expo of 1967 (The World and Australia), the Cook Bicentenary of 1970 (Australia 200) and the seventy fifth anniversary of Federation (Australia 1901-1976). As a whole the books follow the changing Australian image from a 1930s outpost of Empire to a 1970s technological growth centre. These books, while not as illustrative as other phototexts, use photographers in the same way, albeit without crediting individual photographer.

Cover Australia from the Dawn of Time to the Present Day

Sometimes images from one of Ziegler's phototexts appear in the Australia tomes. Dupain's photographs from the various versions of Soul of a City appear in most of the post-war volumes. Some of Reg Perrier's photographs of Goulburn from the 1946 book Goulburn, Queen City of the South appear in Commonwealth of Australia Jubilee, 1901-1951 and some of Robert Walker's Life at The Cross images, published in 1965, were used to demonstrate Australia's lifestyle in the 1960s volumes.

1. Oswald L. Ziegler (?) 'Introducing this Book', Commonwealth of Australia Jubilee, 1901-1951, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1950, p. 9.

4.4 The Ektachrome Centre, Hurley's Australia, a Camera Study

In 1955 Frank Hurley's Camera Study series were incorporated into Australia, a Camera Study.  It featured images from previous Camera Studies, the yet-to-be-published Victoria, a Camera Study and from areas that were not to be covered in the series, particularly South Australia and the Territories. It was Hurley's ambition "to realise the cherished dreams of my amateur days to produce a book that would portray something of the glory and life in our homeland."¹

Used to montage and similar effects, he expressed "misgivings at having to drop "art treatment" for straight portrayal - but I felt that those who send the book overseas would wish to present to their relatives and friends scenes that are familiar and are shown as they would normally see them." Only his clouds were enhanced.

Having said that, one of the first images is a creatively ordered map and compass, images of the extreme points of Australia occupy their relative positions on the compass. The compass is drawn across an image of coastline, the design of the compass incorporating the continent's outline. This image sets the scene for a record of Hurley's travels across the nation. It records that he had reached the four extremes of the land which in turn implies the potential comprehensive coverage of the book.

Hurley was a pioneer in Australian colour photography. His colour work was used by Ziegler for the Sesqui-centenary and would later form the basis for his In NaturalColour booklets for John Sands. His colour work was the first to really show the redness of the interior. Australia, A Camera Study was the among first of his books to demonstrate this fully, due to improving standards of colour photography and reproduction.

The interest in Central Australia had been encouraged by both the new found tourist mobility and the work of various popular painters, particularly Albert Namatjira and the other Aranda/Hermannsburg artists. Other artists, from such diverse backgrounds as Sidney Nolan and Hans Heysen, were also producing work based on the Central Australian landscape. The colours of Central Australia were not always portrayed as the deep red now typical of today's imagery.

Ayer's Rock, as Uluru was then widely known, appears in colour in first edition of Australia, A Camera Study. A corner of the monolith at sunset is shown, "like a gigantic mass of red hot slag just poured from a crucible. (above)  Even the outback could not escape the industrial-progress mentality of the age. In later
editions, Uluru is also shown in colour at sunrise and midday. By then there were more visitors to the site and the changeable colours of Uluru were becoming well known.

The actual sequence of colours was not as well known, as different editions of Australia, A Camera Study transpose captions and images.

The 1966 edition of Australia, a Camera Study was compiled as a tribute to Hurley. The idea behind the book was to continue the tradition of showing Australia to the tourist, maintaining as much of Hurley's original content as possible. As some of the images in Australia, a Camera Study had been taken during the forties, by 1966 they were too dated to appear in a book that's purpose had been to display contemporary Australia.

1. Frank Hurley, Australia, a Camera Study, Angus and Robertson, 1955.
   

4.5 The New Australia, as seen in other books on Australia

The threat of Japanese invasion during the Second World War and our industrial isolation from our previous trading partners caused a rethink on the nation's immigration policies. At the same time many people in Europe were preparing to leave behind bad memories of the War and seek new pastures.

The initial reason to produce large nationalistic tomes was for souvenir purposes. Displaying Australia and New Guinea, printed in Chicago in 1945, was obviously intended for American service personnel to take back after the end of the War. There were frequent comparisons between Australia and The United States, Sydney apparently looked just like New York, our fruit stalls had the same variety as America's.

The inclusion of photographs of American servicemen with Australian women could hardly have been intended for returning Australian servicemen to see. Need it be said that the very similar volume, Displaying Australia, did not feature images of G.I.s with Australian women.

Both books were designed by Charles Meere and Freda Robertshaw, the artists responsible for the painting Beach Pattern and other images of the athletic Australian, a figure replacing the bush Australian as the ideal.¹

The books were aimed at two distinct markets, the local market, full of patriotism, and the souvenir market, full of memories. In either case it was prudent to reinforce the image of Australia as a strong and vibrant nation.

Photographs were often included in books produced as a textual promotion of Australia. One example of this is This Land of Ours (above), produced by Angus and Robertson in 1949. The book is full of essays by prominent authors about aspects of Australian life.

The photographic content is similarly concerned with the nation's lifestyle, with city streets, beauty queens, surfers, (British) migrant children, stockmen and a closing image of an elderly New England couple in their horse-drawn buggy on their way to a Glen Innes church.[below]

This image of conservative gentility, which could be in America's as well as Australia's New England district, contrasts with an image of Inner Sydney backyards elsewhere in the book. The latter shares a page with an image of upper middle class Sydney residences, demonstrating the mentality of the era of the County of Cumberland Scheme, with its slum clearance and green belt policies.

This Land of Ours celebrates white Australian culture as it stood in 1949, with little indication that it would change very much. It was a feel-good book written for people who wanted to get an overview of Australia, for overseas friends and relatives or for their own interest.

	New housing - and slum housing	Collins Street, Melbourne

Travelling library, Victoria	figure 16: New England couple new Glenn Innes
City scenes: Brisbane and Adelaide

Around 1951 Colorgravure set about producing Australia books. These were linked to the magazine work of the Colorgravure company. In The Australian Countryside in Pictures viewers are treated to an image of Bellingen, home of the Sara Quads.² These books were full of simple, magazine style images of early 1950s Australia and equally simple articles about particular aspects of the imagery.

These were forerunners of the Women's Weekly's Beautiful Australia series, aimed at the readers of the magazine who were attracted by the pictorial content of the magazine and wanted a more substantial souvenir. The images are more illustrative than they are examples of photo-journalism although there are some images of human interest. An image of Aboriginal servant girls watching their white mistress would have been shown as an example of assimilation at work.

Today, like the movie Jedda, the image serves as a reminder of the oppressive background to the policies of the time.

Figure 17: Country town scenes

Outback scenes

Figure 18: Evening Falls, farming scene, Victoria

The 1956 Olympic Games were held in Melbourne. This gave publishers a chance to promote the nation while it remained in the international spotlight. Melbourne's Australian Publicity Council produced Land of the Southern Cross, Australia prior to the games.

This book resembled the Ziegler products in its design. The Australian Publicity Council published several similar books, which were intended to promote particular aspects of Victoria, such as its Western Districts in The Western Horizon, 1958 and its irrigation schemes in 1960's Liquid Gold in the context of the state's role in Australia's economy.

Another book from the mid 1950s was by a migrant, looking at his new-found home. Czech-born Jaroslav Novak-Niemela wrote the text and apparently chose the images for Australia, the Great South Land, produced by Angus and Robertson in 1956. Although portrayed as the product of the author's experience, the choice of images seems too close to every other book not to have been a product of the Department of Information.³

The book was obviously meant for worldwide distribution, being lightweight in both content and physical form. The pages are littered by platitudes about Australia, "Free men in a free country," "Aboriginal stockmen". In the outback the horse is still a valuable helper", "Irrigation, the great promise for Australia's future" and "Just one among hundreds of ships which after the war brought immigrants to their new country- the country of the future".

These books had initially developed from the need to build up patriotism in the aftermath of the Depression and the Second World War. As time progressed, they leaped onto the Immigration bandwagon, much more so than the larger Australia promoters Frank Hurley and Oswald Ziegler.

All of these books, however, demonstrate the emergence of "The Australian Dream" in its affluent mid century incarnation of freedom versus the red menace.

1. Charles Meere, Beach Pattern, 1938. Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
2. The Sara Quads were the then largest surviving multiple birth in Australia. Womens' magazines of the time engaged in a pitched battle for the story rights, won by The Australian Womens' Weekly.
3. e.g. One image of a surfer recurs in such governmental literature.

NEXT >>> Chapter 5

Introduction to this thesis |   table of contents  |   1926-1966 chronology of photo-books

Chapter 1  |   Chapter 2   |   Chapter 3  |   Chapter 4   |    Chapter 5  |   Chapter 6   |   Chapter 7  |   Chapter 8   |    Conclusion

Based on the original thesis submitted as part of the requirement of the Masters of Arts - University of Sydney.
This is the 2021 online verson of Eric Riddler's 1993 thesis.
For this 2021 version extra images and links have been added to the text that align with photographs/topics being mentioned.